BLOGGING FROM HALLOWE'EN TO THE 1ST OF NOVEMBER: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

 In the blink of a wink, I find I’ve been blogging for a decade. Initially, I blogged weekly. Occasionally, I’d blog more than once a week if something came up. Then something else came up, and I switched to blogging monthly.
   Here we are at the start of another month, and I am still blogging. Last night, Hallowe’en, saw light misty rain fall upon the scene. This was not always the case. A decade back, with a self-imposed blogging deadline, I marched through torrential rain to reach the interwebs.
   In those far-off days, I didn’t have much use for the internet. If I really had to use it for something, I would gain access at a friend’s house for the vital whatever-it-was. The internet strangely rose in importance, and more and more services became almost exclusive online.
   My intermediate solution was to travel to a hub of anti-social activity: the library. There I endured the hopped-up persona of a drug-user who had the zero presence of mind required to conduct his business in a way that involved opening his mouth when he didn’t have to.
   I hope he was convicted of cruelty to his dog. He was defending that very case from the public library and proclaiming this to us. We were not fellow-users of the library. No. We were passengers on the same electronic raft, surviving a shipwreck of this buffoon’s making.
   It seemed important to the prick to let us all know he was defending this case. I hadn’t seen any wanted posters up on public buildings. We wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t mentioned it. People who loudly proclaim their presence in libraries had better be dressed to fight fires in libraries.
   Otherwise, shut the fuck up and keep your business to yourselves.
   He disappeared to the toilet and came back far more animated, shall we say. This was the guy who decided he didn’t like the Polish woman, so I was caught in the middle of that unfathomable minor disagreement.
   Flaked-out druggie started swearing at her in Italian. She had the decency to stick to English, though she could have sworn back in Polish. His patience wore thin as the drugs kicked in, and his instinct for survival told this prince that he’d better quit the scene, stage-right. Or stage-right-now.
   Off he went. The Polish woman commiserated with me. Here’s the score so far. Number of Scottish arseholes I’ve met: too vast to list. I have never met a bad Polish person. Record still stands. All the Polish people I’ve met have been absolutely fine. May that state of affairs long-continue.
   I’ve told that story in many different ways. Trying to soften it, I suppose. I wonder if the drugged-out ninja superspy was a dealer who got high on his own supply. All names haven’t been changed to protect the guy. I didn’t care who he was, is, or will be in the future.
   Upshot. I left the library thanks to the charmless encounters I had in there. On the Hallowe’en night in question, a decade ago, things were a lot easier to take. My main obstacle? As ever, when blogging, the barrier was the blogging platform itself. The library’s customers that night were not the worst I’d encounter.
   All changed, now. The interwebs are piped straight through the electrical hose and up the wall to a handy outlet in my office. Of all the office layouts I’ve had, this much-refined latest version is the best. No dog-bashing drug-users here, thank fuck. Just me in an alcove, off to one side. And all is right with the world.
   What changed for the better, over ten years? Internet is harvested and delivered straight to me. The nearest restaurant, my kitchen, isn’t too far away. Sadly, Twitter slowly died a death over the past decade. It’s on life-support now, and has been for too long to pin down to an exact date.
   Twitter became more like Facebook, while Facebook transformed itself into a data mining operation that can only have one possible goal: artificial intelligence. They are almost there now, given that the plastic robot running the operation is, er, a plastic robot.
   Blogger made improvements. I suppose. It is a little bit better and a little bit worse. When I type this entry up, I know I must transfer my text to the platform itself. There, I must adjust every last rat-bastard motherfucker of a paragraph for reasons of…
   Improvement.
   This is a quick fix, but it was something I never had to fix at all in the Golden Age that never was. A decade on, the template is still broadly the same: borrow a radio format from Alistair Cooke, and write at least 1,500 words on a topic.
   Not golf.
   If I want to write more than 1,500 words, I will. And if I have to write less than that, I’ll have my reasons. I’ve since transferred the format over to writing scripts for game-related videos. It works pretty well.
   I just spent a few moments staring at Cooke’s old apartment building on Fifth Avenue, in New York, courtesy Doctor Google. With all the golf Cooke played, how he found the time to pen his near-infinite list of weekly radio scripts is a mystery.
   His Letter from America truly was from there. Not a gimmick. Nearer the end, Cooke didn’t have the option. He was housebound. A brief politically-themed talk framed as a letter about America simply wouldn’t fly as a series being commissioned today. Cooke made his own job, and was captain of that radio ship from the dawn of time until his retirement.
   Retirement was a thing Cooke put off on the basis that…as soon as you retire, you drop dead. Health failing, relying on three pillows in bed, sounding frail but still firing on all cylinders, Cooke covered the politics of the day.
   He could just as easily have covered golf. I endured his golf talks. And I am quite sure many listeners endured his talks on American politics. In the case of his last broadcast, politics of the day meant a day in February, 2004.
   Cooke, being Cooke, ranged across politics from 2004 back to the early 1990s in that final chat, and veered off into talk of Napoleon by way of several American presidents…and Miss Lewinsky. Cooke talked of many things. American cabbages and American kings…
   The telling point in his last broadcast came at the very end and not in the political chatter that made up the bulk of his final weekly broadcast. Except, that, for reasons of the plot, I couldn’t find that point when I went looking for it. His last talk, his farewell letter, is preserved on the BBC archive…
   And yet, it isn’t.
   Cooke’s recorded letter would be made mid-week and sent from America to London. For the Friday night broadcast, he’d record good evening and good night. And for the Sunday morning repeat broadcast, Cooke would record good morning with no farewell at the end.
   News of his retirement was expected. Leaked. Announced. I tuned in for the Friday night farewell. He offered us good morning. Then he talked politics instead of reflecting on his long-running radio show. The archived version, with good morning preceding the letter, was from the Sunday repeat.
   On the initial Friday broadcast, at the end, instead of hearing his saying good night, I may have misremembered the man saying goodbye. It was no surprise that his death came a little over a month later.
   Cooke was a journalist who observed and reported and observed some more and reported again. He was the sort of journalist who knew that the journalist is never the story. When Robert Kennedy was shot dead, Cooke, nearby through an act of coincidence, found himself reporting on the unreportable. As time passed, he would find the unreportable turning to reportable with disquieting rapidity.
   And then, in death, cremated, Cooke had one last story – this time, about himself. His bones were illegally harvested for anti-cancer treatment, despite having died of cancer himself. The scam uncovered, perpetrators were brought to justice.
   Cooke was not always to my taste. And concerning golf, his obsession was insufferable. I suspect this marks me out as a non-golfer. It seems Mark Twain never made the comment about golf being the spoiling of a good walk. I’ll go with Dorothy Parker’s view, and assume that anything witty was coined by Oscar Wilde.
   That itself sounds witty enough not to have been stated by Dorothy Parker, but by Oscar.
   Would you like Alistair Cooke’s writing? I suspect not. You pretty much had to be there, listening to his weekly radio talks, to get what he was about in the moment. He was topical. That now makes him deeply historical.
   From him I learned the arcane wonders of the Electoral College. He dredged that topic up when elections loomed large. Aside from being topical and historical, Cooke was repetitive. The nature of his show made repetition an inevitability. God was a pup and the Devil wore short trousers and neither of those entities had beards at the time of Cooke’s ascension to radio immortality.
   Of course he repeated himself down the decades. Sometimes that’s the point of keeping going. You must make it a matter of deliberate policy to repeat certain and uncertain things. He died in 2004. His coverage of American politics couldn’t quite take in Obama’s run for the Oval Office. Cooke was 95 when he retired. He gets a pass on that score. It’s difficult to take the man to task for not lasting another half-decade so that he could see in Obama.
   Occasionally I think of Cooke when I pen this blog. I reached high in this cubby-hole for a copy of Cooke’s collected radio letters. He wrote in freedom and he found that pleasing. Cooke wrote with the freedom of a man who wasn’t sure what he’d write about for that week’s radio talk.
   When everyone else was being extraordinary topical that week, he’d find a worm wriggling in the patch of mud revealed by an upturned stone and he’d waffle away about that.
   I don’t know what I will write about when I sit to tackle a blog post. As a writer, I feel that level of freedom easy enough to deal with. Some find the level of choice terrifying. But to me the only true horror is to run out of coffee. In a decade of blogging, that has never been an issue. So. It’s a horror I never worry over. I buy in bulk, of course.

ALISTAIR COOKE.

Good evening.

   For years, I’d tune to BBC Radio 4 on a Friday night and listen to Alistair Cooke utter those two words. If I missed a broadcast, there was always the slightly jarring good morning of the Sunday repeat.

   Cooke more or less invented the job of telling worldwide listeners what was going on in America. He may have stolen the idea from H.L. Mencken. Only David Niven seemed more English than Cooke. I hesitate to add other names to that shortlist – readers would just end up Googling the hell out of every paragraph.

   Blogging? Didn’t exist in Cooke’s day. Podcasting? Narrowcasting? Internet? Ah. Broadcasting. Now you’re talking. Cooke gave steam-radio talks and called them letters. With each broadcast running just shy of fifteen minutes, he’d explain aspects of American life on a weekly basis.

   When he wasn’t talking about golf.

   Those familiar with Cooke’s radio broadcasts would see that I paid nodding tribute to him with my obituary of Missy Biozarre. In Cooke’s case, he was talking about the death of Edward Kennedy Ellington – that rare commodity, an American Duke.

   Cooke paraphrased the novelist John O’Hara, and I capered along the same well-worn path.

   When it came time to start blogging, I thought of Alistair Cooke. In particular, I thought of his repetitive manner down the years. He was bound to repeat himself – and did in a way his listeners forgave him for.

   After all, every decade or so he would find himself having to explain the finer points of American politics to new generations and half-generations of listeners. He decoded the Electoral College. Someone had to.

   I decided to repeat myself deliberately. Maybe Cooke did, too. My advice to writers won’t change much with time. Read. Write. Have a think. Write some more. Experience things beyond writing and apply them to writing.

   Never give up.

   Tedious, I know. And saying tedious, I know is tedious…

   I know.

   Good pause night. The clock swung around to 9.00 o’clock and Alistair faded from the airwaves for another week. He was a fixture whose illusory permanency ended only with that fatal move – retirement.

   I used Cooke’s weekly broadcast as a writing exercise, summarising his latest theme as best I could. Over fifteen minutes I’d dash down around 600 words retelling his tale. From this ritual’s archival footprint I know that I stopped the exercise by Friday the 8^th of September, 2000.

Decided it’s time to let Alistair Cooke go. I’ll keep listening in until he really is gone, but, as the weeks go by and the probability increases, it seems morbid to copy out the gist of what he says in his letters from America. Good night.

   Who the hell was I writing for when I wrote that down? Well, who the hell am I writing for now? I always write for myself. If I don’t like writing, who will care for reading? Everything you do as a writer leads to everything you do as a writer.

   Why terminate the outlining of Cooke’s broadcasts? His voice was going. Slowing. Gaining in breathy tones. Showing that tremulous weakness of great age. Cooke was born in 1908, and had what was known as a good run. I wanted to listen to what he had to say, rather than type my impression of it. So I gave the man more of my attention.

   By 2004, he missed a few transmissions. A fall forced him to skip a recording. He was grateful to his loyal listeners for the barrage of letters he received. People the world over wished him well. The show went on without him – repeats were easy to come by. There was no question of asking anyone to fill in for him during a break. David Niven was long-gone.

   I’d suspected (for three-and-a-half years) that Cooke wouldn’t continue the show much longer. Speaking sounded burdensome to him – except when he laughed.

   Flashback.

   Now 8.45 is coming around again, in the week when Cooke announces his retirement. He’s spoken on this before. Never retire – you drop dead as soon as you do. I figured he’d drop dead in the job, going out mid-week, but no. He doesn’t end with good night. Cooke says thank you for your loyalty, and goodbye. Loyalty, for some listeners, that lasted 58 years.

   We had him on air for a few weeks after he said goodbye. Vintage selection of broadcasts. Quite sad. But not that sad. He had more than a good run – the longest talk-based show on radio. Goodbye, Alistair Cooke.

   By Tuesday the 30^th of March, 2004, Cooke’s belief that you should never retire – it leads almost immediately to demise – was proved with the announcement of his death. He was 95.

   “If you retire, you keel over.”

   The BBC repeats generated artificial acceleration of frailty in his voice toward the end. Those repeats were from various decades, aiming to display certain themes, and revealed a strong voice quite a long way in. His regular show still had that intellectual strength to it, but he was obviously struggling uphill at times near the finish. Cooke recorded 2,869 shows, and had very little time off.

   Argue all you like over whether he was prim. Was Alistair Cooke a proper journalist? Very. He certainly disliked the notion of a journalist’s becoming the story, and downplayed his part in observing the events surrounding Senator Robert Kennedy’s shooting in the Ambassador Hotel. Journalists tend to cover the trial, rather than the commission of the crime. For once, Cooke was in the right wrong place at the historic moment.

   I really liked Letter from America – even if the narrator did spend too much time discussing golf. To my mind, any amount of time spent discussing golf is too much time. Better that, though, than no Cooke at all.

   The pale watered-down excuses for journalists who parade around now…just don’t compare. Comparison is difficult. Cooke’s origins were not of the Digital Age, though he lived long enough to puzzle his way through it.

   There must have been something extraordinary about a man who was supposed to stay on air for a mere thirteen weeks, and who ended up doing the job for over half a century.

   Cooke became the story again with the tale of the theft of his bones in a scandal that he’d have labelled scandal from the off. In fairness, he didn’t have much say over the journalist’s becoming the story by that point.

   Journalism would be a step down for me – I’d have to start dealing in fact.

   For a writer of fiction, that sort of factual nonsense will never do. My authorly advice is not to approach the factual. You may catch a disease. Journalitis. Possibly Journalismus. If you must turn to journalism, never become the story.

   My thoughts on publishing are not always thoughts on publishing fiction. For those writers considering journalism, research the name Stephen Glass. Watch the movie Shattered Glass. Stephen thought it good form to invent stories.

   There’s nothing wrong in that. Unless you attempt to pass fictional adventures as news. In the pages of a newspaper. While you draw pay as a journalist. Stephen Glass became the story. Ouch.

   The theft of Cooke’s bones for sale as transplant grafts knocked a few years off his age and transformed his cause of death. I marvel at that. A man so famous in his field suddenly has two widely-differing ages upon death.

   That’s a phenomenon Cooke would cheerfully have ascribed to most actresses. I can hear his chuckle as he says the words I’ve placed in his mouth. There was a hint of Scheherazade to Cooke, as he broke off each weekly tale of Americana. He’d always return to explain Federalism to us, or the First Amendment.

   Presidents were favoured items considered worthy of explanation, or, upon death, of reappraisal. I found his political talks interesting. His golf chatter left me cold.

   Cooke’s radio show was a blog before blogs existed. Somewhere in his mind he may have thought of his show as a Letter from an American – for he took on American citizenship with the zeal of the convert. A convert who did his best to retain that accent. I am afraid I must use a cliché.

   That urbane accent.

   I did my best to make it through a post about Alistair Cooke without describing the man as urbane. Cosmic Law insists upon the label. Ah, I was so close to the tape.

   Cooke was an English-sounding speaker of English throughout his life, though accepted the rubber-stamp of Yankeedom after what would prove to be just about the first third of his time on the planet. I say Yankeedom, for he could never be labelled a Southerner.

   With that accent, it’s still hard to label him American. Can you imagine David Niven as an American? (I find it difficult to imagine David Niven as a Scotsman. Is the Encyclopaedia Britannica still peddling that lie?)

   Why talk about Alistair Cooke? Karen Woodward told me to blog. Alistair Cooke showed me how.

   Good night.

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