h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Thomas

Point of detail-- but key to so much I suspect...I refused the chance to study formally at Oxford University for various reasons...my life in Oxford had turned from Heaven to Hell--- a little poetic... Because I had detached myself from the Hell to some extent, but was still very much armoured against it, and determined Goethe-like to make my own way up and out... Which is why I went back into Hell in the inner city to try to teach others to do the same.. It is something that I thought I could teach, or at least help others to work out.

But it is probably why there is a smell of Lucifer about what I write which puts publishers off.

Cheers

Melvyn

Thanks for your reply Melvyn and also for the short remarks on your time at Oxford University. Makes you look rather like an unconvencional Student with some own ideas.

I´ve made it into the first chapter of the Tombs book and I´m not sure whether I like to continue to read it now. From the first chapter, it´s different to the style of your essays and he tells the story the way historians tell it. It is probably to early and therefore would be a bit premature to tell whether this book was a mistake on my part for the review sounded rather interesting. But that´s the Problem for someone like me who has to order such literature from abroad without having the opportunity to go into a bookshop and have a look into it by myself.

The advantage of Amazon, although I never bought anything from there (and I rather won´t) is, that they have, sometimes, books on their website with a "look inside" link where some extracts of the pages are on display. I´ve used that facility in search of literature to make up my mind and it was helping me in my decision of whether to buy it elsewhere of not buying it at all. But I have to admit that since a certain time, I find it rather hard to find something that keeps me going in reading it from front to back without laying it down to put up another book. Seems as if the literature I´ve got in recent times isn´t that compelling. Even some books I´ve bught a couple of years ago and started to read it further appear to be of no more interest to me. Strange as that is.

As I know that your leave for France is approaching I´ll leave it at that with Tombs book. It might be a bit helpful to know when you´re back from France and maybe rather having a chat about your correspondence with Tombs and your new essay.

In case you are too busy with your preparations for your leave to place a message here, I whish you a safe journey there and back again.

Cheers,
Thomas

Morning Thomas

We just got back from Burgundy on Wednesday evening, having had quite an eventful trip which was complicated enough already without the first few days featuring both a broken windscreen and a puncture.. Still the Alps were worth it and time spent "en famille" in a much loved environment.. And once we got back home I had just about enough time to plan and build the caravan shelter that I have always envisaged building there... One or two improvements on the initial prototype to make when we go back in October, but doing such heavy physical work did me good.

It was interspersed however by writing initially with Professor Tombs in mind, but now "back in the real world" I can see that (as usual) it is getting too big and perhaps too ambitious... but that may be what you don't like about your reading material.

In fact it was anger and frustration at a book that sent me off on this latest piece of writing. For I was looking for new input for my "Millennial Thoughts" and in my favourite place for finding books I came across "The Story of an Illusion. The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century" by Francois Furet, a French professor of History teaching at the University of Chicago.. And in his introduction he said that when the Soviet Empire collapsed it showed a strange and unique character in having been a Superpower that had never been a Civilization- something that could leave a real legacy of traditions, structures, personnel etc on which a future could be built...It seemed that he could not see that this is true of all three "Superpowers".. Nazi Germany, the USSR and the USA... So what I have been writing is not the conclusion or extension of my existing Millennial Thoughts but an "Introduction. Superpower and Civilization"...

Superpowers are more or less defined by their capacity to reduce the world to massive "brownfield sites".. Nazi Germany did this. The Soviet Empire did this, and now that the USA can act with more gay abandon in its deployment of "Overwhelming Force" it is doing this once again.

Hope life is treating you well.

Cheers

Melvyn

Good Morning Melvyn,

Thanks for your post. I´ve just spotted it on Friday shortly before my weekend leave so, I couldn´t respond earlier.

“We just got back from Burgundy on Wednesday evening, having had quite an eventful trip which was complicated enough already …”

I had that in mind when I was following the developments on the Calais crisis via the BBC News website. You said before you got off to France that would rather try to avoid that place and I guess it´s been better so. The situation was getting worse day by day.

“It was interspersed however by writing initially with Professor Tombs in mind, but now "back in the real world" I can see that (as usual) it is getting too big and perhaps too ambitious... but that may be what you don't like about your reading material.”

I wouldn´t say that it is ambition or length writings that I don´t like about my reading material. It´s more the author´s style that makes the difference. But more to the point, and that in re-gards to Tombs book, the printing is in small letters which makes it a bit unpleasant for me to read for a long time in books like that. That´s probably because it is the paperback edition. Hardback editions may have larger letters and are easier to read, but on the other hand, they are heavier in weight.

I´ve put that book aside for the time being and may get back to it another time.

“In fact it was anger and frustration at a book that sent me off on this latest piece of writing. For I was looking for new input for my "Millennial Thoughts" and in my favourite place for finding books I came across "The Story of an Illusion. The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century" by Francois Furet, a French professor of History teaching at the University of Chicago.. And in his introduction he said that when the Soviet Empire collapsed it showed a strange and unique character in having been a Superpower that had never been a Civilization- something that could leave a real legacy of traditions, structures, personnel etc on which a future could be built...It seemed that he could not see that this is true of all three "Superpowers".. Nazi Germany, the USSR and the USA... So what I have been writing is not the conclusion or extension of my existing Millennial Thoughts but an "Introduction. Super-power and Civilization"... “

Such things can happen and it´s not about the author itself as probably the subject he/she is writing about. This shouldn´t put you off from writing your piece.

“Hope life is treating you well.”

It´s currently not so bad, we´re looking forward to our holiday and I´m just this week online, then offline for 14 days.

You may haven´t read my entry about the Marching Bands in Northern Ireland. But that´s not that important anyway. I´ve just noticed some time ago that moderators on this site were hav-ing a short exchange of views about the shape of my essay and some suggested that I should edit it, but I declined and leave it as it stands there. In the end of the day, I don´t know how many people even have seen or read it (there is no facility that counts the views) and the links I´ve provided for further explanation should do.

Too much editing makes one think that one follows the requests of others more than to stand by the intention of oneself when writing it. My intention was just to give a reader an overview with selected quotations from the book I´ve read and I selected the parts from it I found more of interest. I´ve noticed the exchanges you had with moderators on your essays and I took the same stance to leave it as it is written, just making minor alterations.

I hope you´re well and that we might have some chat this week while I´m still here.

Kind Regards,

Thomas

Hi Thomas

I have to say that what you write about Professor Tombs' book sadly does not surprise me...There is a photo of him which makes me feel that he will not really be very interested in my ideas.. He may well have invested too heavily in the Establishment..

As had perhaps someone I met at our daughter's on Saturday.. poor girl. I hope it has not ruined her relationship.. It was someone (as it turned out) that I had hoped to meet, and realised that I had when he finally turned around in some exasperation and said "You know I work as an Economist in the Economics section of the BBC?"... I think it rankled rather that I was constantly pointing out how ignorant he was of the facts of English Economic History, for he was making the normal kind of cliché statements that one tends to get from modern mass journalism and what purports to be "historical writing"... I am just writing the concluding bit about M. Furet, who, having finally survived the Communist illusion of historical inevitability ends up asserting that the 20th has been "unpredictable".. But that is the tragedy of the recent decades and underpins the immigrant crisis-- we are living at the end of a positive Historical world vision that everyone can work towards, as German people have done several times in the last 160 years. And the global system we have is really based on trying to at least maintain the status quo and hold on to the prosperity of the prosperous places.

Cheers for now

Melvyn

Hi Melvyn,

“I have to say that what you write about Professor Tombs' book sadly does not surprise me...There is a photo of him which makes me feel that he will not really be very interested in my ideas.. He may well have invested too heavily in the Establishment…”

Well, you might save yourself all the bother in that case. It´s probably more often the case than one might think, that some authors are rather inclined to serve them than to bring forth their own angles. I see that as some part of the problems you faced with your efforts to get published. It´s rather hard to be successful against them, unless you take the alternative that the internet provides and that is – again – self-publishing where you can reach a different audience and even if it might turn out that they are just a few, well, so be it.

I´ve learned to be more careful about the reviews of some books and their authors. There is more positive announced at the back of the book than it might turn out to be. But that is left on the judgement of the reader. I´ve been disappointed by some books in the past and when they turned out to be not worthy the whole praise, I´ve given them away.

As you know about my admiration on Sir Winston S. Churchill, I´ve a small collection of books about him but also some reprints of books he has written himself. Although there are some length passages in some chapters, I like his style of writing and storytelling. From the first pages I´ve read in Tombs book I can just say that his style is one in which he´s taking the reader with him in the storytelling, but much of it is what many people who have a basic knowledge of history already know. Some details in there of which I didn´t know before. But I´m a reader who worked up his own basic knowledge on British history in a period of about roughly ten years. That includes my readings about Irish history too.

Your essays and your approach on history are rather uncommon, and it was something of a challenge to me when I started reading them, for they were different. Therefore I was en-couraging you to continue with your efforts because I think that there should be a different angle to look at history that goes apart from the standards.

“As had perhaps someone I met at our daughter's on Saturday.. poor girl. I hope it has not ruined her relationship.. It was someone (as it turned out) that I had hoped to meet, and real-ised that I had when he finally turned around in some exasperation and said "You know I work as an Economist in the Economics section of the BBC?"... I think it rankled rather that I was constantly pointing out how ignorant he was of the facts of English Economic History, for he was making the normal kind of cliché statements that one tends to get from modern mass journalism and what purports to be "historical writing"...”

I´m sorry to hear that and I trust that you´ve been challenged by this man in his apparently rather arrogant behaviour. I do have my high regards for the BBC, but they´re not the temple of all wisdom, they are just a broadcast and news operator, journalist business more like.

“I am just writing the concluding bit about M. Furet, who, having finally survived the Communist illusion of historical inevitability ends up asserting that the 20th has been "unpredictable".. But that is the tragedy of the recent decades and underpins the immigrant crisis-- we are living at the end of a positive Historical world vision that everyone can work towards, as German people have done several times in the last 160 years. And the global system we have is really based on trying to at least maintain the status quo and hold on to the prosperity of the prosperous places.”

Yes, there´s surely some truth in it and I wonder how this all will continue.

Have a nice evening, despite the things that trouble you.

Cheers,
Thomas

Hi Thomas

I have just posted this to Professor Tombs. Should still be on "copy and paste"

Dear Professor Tombs
A few weeks ago my German web-friend Thomas B wrote that he had received a copy of your book on the English that he had ordered because it seemed to deal with many of the themes that have come up in our exchanges over the years, much of it based around his reading of my own historical writing, which makes him somewhat unique.
Indeed looking at the web-link that he provided I was interested to see that in addition to this work on the English, that put me in mind of my “English Peace” that I was trying to interest publishers and literary agents in 17-18 years ago, you have written a collaborative piece on the relations between the English and the French, which put me in mind of my “Cock and Bull Stories” on that theme that I wrote some ten years ago.
So, acting on the principle that some minds (whether “great” or not) think alike, I thought that I would write to you about a project that I have been currently working on that I have called “Millennial Thoughts”.
The most recent piece of ‘input’ that I have come across is Francois Furet’s book,” The Story of an Illusion. An essay on the notion of Communism during the twentieth century” (1995), which I had hoped might help me to bring my Millennial Thoughts” to a conclusion. But, in fact, it has seemed more appropriate to use it as a basis for an Introduction that has now grown too long for me to impose on you. But here is at least a “taster”.

Yours Sincerely
Melvyn Smart
******************************************************

INTRODUCTION: CIVILIZATION AND SUPERPOWER
In his 1995 work - ” The Story of an Illusion. An essay on the notion of Communism during the twentieth century”- Francois Furet stated in his Preface that “When it fell apart, the Soviet Empire demonstrated a most unusual character in having been a superpower without ever having been the incarnation of a Civilization”.
But, while the statement in itself is fair enough as a comment upon the state of the world at the time, it only tells half of the story: for the other half of that story is that, when the Soviet Empire fell apart, the USA too revealed the same “most unusual character” in having been a superpower without ever having been “the incarnation of a Civilization” either.
And this is a real problem facing the world in the Third Millennium because for the second half of the Twentieth Century it was these two superpowers that contested the right to shape the future: and, in spite of works like, Nial Ferguson’s “Colossus. The Rise and Fall of the American Empire” there is still a tendency to look to the USA for world leadership merely on the basis of the historical importance of American power at a crucial moment in world History.
“OVERWHELMING FORCE” OR “MORAL AUTHORITY”
But, perhaps we touch here upon an Anglo-French difference of philosophy and history, for, in describing this failure of the “Soviet Empire” to leave any kind of legacy, Professor Furet contrasted void that it left behind with the legacy of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Empires that, he said, left a raft of dreams, aspirations, models and other projects that have fired the Human imagination ever since: though perhaps especially in France and perhaps also in Tsarist Russia with its francophone ‘elite’ and intelligentsia.
Within the “English-speaking” world there may well have been people from among what Feargus O’Connor like to call “warlike Scots” and “warlike Irish”, who could associate with the story of this young man, Napoleon, brought up as the heir to the Corsican Revolution, one of the first truly explosive expressions of the “Enlightenment”, and, therefore already “one jump ahead” of his French peers in terms of grasping the practicalities of “inventing a new world” once “physical force” had destroyed the old.
One of O’Connor’s uncles was even a high-ranking general in Napoleons army, and, of course the Duke of Wellington was “made in Ireland”. But the cult of the “Hero” in History within British culture is particularly associated with Thomas Carlyle a Scottish Borderer, who achieved fame, status and some notoriety in Victorian Britain, until by 1914 his championing of the “Hunnish” side of the modern German character caused his reputation to plummet, only to fall even further since the tone and content of much of his later writing was by then so evidently at least “protoNazi”. Being one of Hitler’s favourite authors was scarcely a recommendation to the “English-speaking” world.
One of Carlyle’s ‘breakthrough’ works was his very sympathetic treatment of the French Revolution, which was well-received in the 1830s, when another French Revolution had brought the “Bourgeois Monarchy” to power and friendship with Great Britain, but, in general, the English had fought the Revolution when it became violent and went to war to spread the creed and methods. And Great Britain fought the imperialistic dreams and the dictatorial style of government of Napoleon: for surely, to an Englishman, any society that counts as its main virtue its capacity to act as a “Superpower” capable of overpowering others thereby renounces its right to be considered as a Civilization.
The term “Superpower” itself only emerged with a new and exceptionally monstrous capacity to deploy “Overwhelming Force” as an ultimate argument, the one unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: and may well derive from the Science Fiction ‘Superheroes’ of American popular culture, whereas a Civilization bases its power on a “moral authority” that attracts others into a collective “pride of association”.
In fact, as a lecturer in the University of Chicago, M. Furet might be expected to have known that in the 1940s the Chicago School of Archaeology did remarkable work on some of the very oldest written evidence then available including ideas about the way Humanity should regard “Overwhelming Force”.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, and especially of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it must have seemed very appropriate for the “Chicago School” to tell the world about Mesopotamian attitudes to Enlil, the God of force, power and storm. A visitation from Enlil could destroy everything, as in one ancient poem about one of the visitation of Enlil that devastated Ur of Chaldea leaving a scene of charred wreckage much like those A-bomb sites inspected and mathematically assessed by Dr. Jacob Bronowski.
Humankind, however, has the will and greater purpose that it takes to survive the storm and rebuild bigger and better than before, as in the Gilgamesh Epic that seems to have come down to us as Noah’s Flood.
So in the light of these Mesopotamian wisdoms it was dismaying to see the American ignorance of their enemy and his values, when the USA had deployed “Overwhelming Force” against Iraq with devastating effect, and yet Saddam Hussein claimed the victory because he had survived the storm. The Americans poked fun at him as if he was a clown, for in their eyes they clearly they had “won” because they had turned Iraq into a vast “Brownfield site”.
And tragically in the years since the Fall of Communism the world has become accustomed to seeing the USA deploying Overwhelming Force to various parts of the world, leaving behind more “Brownfield sites” that are every bit as devoid of any real legacy of dreams, aspirations, and projects to fire the Human imagination as the Soviet legacy in the former lands of “the Soviet Empire”.
“THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING TRADITION”
But to be fair to the USA, it has almost always tended to reject the idea that it is or should be an “Imperialist” power: and it makes no claim to have better over-arching and universally applicable structure or Civilization to impose like Professor Furet’s Revolutionary and Napoleonic adventure, merely perhaps (a) a better system for making and managing the money that seems to be so useful, and indeed essential these days, when people wish to realise their dreams, and (b) the historical example of a land that has embraced its own particular “Manifest Destiny” and that is ever-ready to assist other peoples, who also wish to stand on their own two feet as independent and self-reliant nations.
It could be argued, however, that the American “rebels” who founded the USA suffered from a weakness inherent within the “Era of Civilized Security” as Steven Watson summed up the spirit of the years 1760-1790 in his “Oxford History of the Reign of George III”.
In the 1760s and 1770s, when “The Enlightenment” was producing seminal British writers and thinkers like Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and Edward Gibbon, there was a rather naïve tendency to believe that Science was now revealing the perfection of God’s Creation and that, almost as the Puritan Faith in the Second Coming had always argued, it would be enough for Humankind to start to pass “Godly laws” that would be in line with those of the Creator. Then “Heaven on Earth” would reveal itself.
That “Era of Civilized Security” was brought to a “gothic” end in 1791, when the French Revolution “turned nasty” triggering the “English-speaking” traditional reaction towards the idea of any merely mortal “Superpower”. It is a tradition that Lord Acton referred to in his Cambridge Lecture on “The Beginning of the Modern State” in the 1890s, in which he picked out the moment in 1530, when Charles V forced the Pope to come to Bologna to crown him Holy Roman Emperor, as the moment when the dream of ‘world dominion’ entered into Modern History. It was a ‘dream’, Acton said, that had shaped the movement of Modern History, as successive “great powers” had sought to achieve world dominion, only to be resisted by the combined efforts of the weak, who had joined together with others in order to defend their rights and liberty.
It was, in fact, in this very English tradition, in the wake of the ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ campaigns in England in the 1760s, that the American colonies had claimed their “inalienable rights” of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” in their famous Declaration of Independence from the British Crown. And in the subsequent framing of the American Constitution great care was taken to make sure that the powers of the President could be shackled, though the US President is now frequently referred to as “the most powerful man in the world”.
And the late 1890s Cambridge Lord Acton was lecturing to students who were very familiar with English History and the capacity of this little ‘fortress isle’ to defy the might of states like Spain and France in order to preserve English rights and liberties. But he himself was more acutely aware than most people of the danger of the times that the world was passing through, times of massive geopolitical change that was going to have massive implications for the young men of “The Lost Generation” sat before him.
THE THREE POTENTIAL SUPERPOWERS
Lord Acton had spent most of his adult life in Germany working for his “master”, the great German historian von Ranke, and both had been dismayed and alarmed at the new militaristic and militant culture that dominated the new German Empire. And the new powers and ambitions that had galvanised the German region of Europe were all possible because the ‘railway revolution’ had shifted the balance of power away from the control over the seas, that had served England and Great Britain so well, towards control over vast continental land masses. And by the 1890s three states were fast developing the potential to claim ‘world dominion’ if they so wished- Germany, the USA and Russia.
But of these three the USA and Russia had ‘more than enough on their hands’ in adjusting to the domestic challenges involved in building economic, social, and political systems of a continental scale that would weld together their people of different races, cultures, religions, traditions etc. Both, in fact, were great “Melting Pots”.
And, while the USA was far enough away across the oceans to be able to operate on the basis of its own version of British “splendid isolation”, from the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 onwards, Tsarist Russia had been the leading advocate of the setting up of Courts of Arbitration based on the Hague so that international disputes could be settled in future without the need for wars and other Malthusian horrors.
And when the world wars broke out both the USA and the USSR could justifiably claim that they had been triggered by German aggression, and that their own involvement in those conflicts had been defensive. Indisputably they were both attacked in pre-emptive strikes by the Axis Powers in the Second World War, and, thus thrust into a Darwinian “struggle for the survival of the fittest” in which they were forced to ‘fast-track” their own economic “great leaps forward”, especially in all matters military, in order to more than match Germany. And, in both cases, they had been forced into the war in the midst of massive “brave new world” economic experiments.
Faced with a world emerging from Great War and Revolution and descending into World Chaos, (a) the Soviet Union had isolated itself from the danger posed by the adverse changes in the global market for its primary products in the late 1920s by adopting “Socialism in One Country” and the Stalinist Five Year Plans. And (b)a few years later, in the World Chaos of 1932-3, the USA had adopted Roosevelt’s “New Deal” to try to put an end to the vicious downward spiral of the Great Depression.
THE EXPERTS IN MAKING BROWNFIELD SITES AND REBUILDING AGAIN
Both of these great experiments, however, pre-prepared the way for the tremendous war efforts that transformed the USA and the USSR into superpowers: and, in 1945, it came quite naturally to them both to survey the vast brownfield sites left in the aftermath of war and see the challenge that they posed as logical extensions of their existing domestic experiments: these were new fields where they could deploy the expertise that they had been acquiring in just how to build a new world from scratch.
Revolutionary ‘Nihilism’, the idea “Let’s wipe out all our existing culture and civilization and start again”, had been a powerful trend within Russian thought from the time that Russia had started to ‘modernise’ in the 1860s: and, on either side of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, first the Revolution and the Civil War and then the Stalinist Planning had treated little or nothing as sacrosanct that ‘got in its way’.
“America”, on the other hand, had long been the land of ‘starting out all over again’ with a clean slate, both individually and collectively. So in the 1950s Curtis le May, the man still in charge of the US Bomber Command, could say, perhaps in jest, perhaps not, that he would count a “Third World War” to have been a success if every “Commie” on Earth was destroyed, and just one Capitalist ‘Adam and Eve’ survived to start the world all over again.
With such attitudes and circumstances it is not really surprising that the two superpowers regarded each other with mutual suspicion once the Axis Powers were defeated, especially when one and then the other acquired the A-Bomb in a world still at war.
By 1955, however, the USSR , adjusting to a ‘post-Stalinist’ era, was finally prepared to accept that the Second World War was over, and it was quite rational for “East” and “West” to accept that each had by then more than “enough on its hands” in having taken over responsibility for reconstructing vast swathes of world’s brownfield sites and traumatised populations.

There we go.

Cheers

Melvyn

Hi Melvyn,

Thanks for your reply with the extract from your recent essay. It´s a good summary on a certain period with some insights. I´m curious on whether and what Mr Tombs might tell you in reply.

There´s nothing I would criticize in your extract, brings it all to the point and was an interesting read.

As there is just tomorrow to go until I have my fortnight leave, I wish you good luck with your essay and I´d be interested to read it when you´ve finished and posted it on this site.

I´ll be back around mid-September.

Best wishes,

Thomas

Hi Thomas

Glad you like it.. Actually the personal email did not work, so I sent it to his college, hoping that it will be passed on... I have to say that looking at some of the Cambridge site I was reminded of the "Blessing and Curse" of Oxford and suspect that my work will be far too much like New Wine in Old Skins...Just looking at some of the ongoing work, they are obviously on their own trajectory and will not know what to make of my "stuff"-- I am not sure whether it is that which has got me really tired and listless at the moment, or just the cumulative effect of a tiring few months plus days of solid rain when it has been impossible to get on... Still it is our granddaughters birthday today. Hopefully the first of many which will light up our future-- and as no-one else reads our correspondence perhaps I can share the secret that our daughter is already expecting her second..

I hope you enjoy your fortnight's break.

Cheers for now

Melvyn

Hi Melvyn,

“Glad you like it…”

As I said, it´s been an interesting read.

“… I was reminded of the "Blessing and Curse" of Oxford and suspect that my work will be far too much like New Wine in Old Skins...Just looking at some of the ongoing work, they are obviously on their own trajectory and will not know what to make of my "stuff" …”

Just wait and see what turns up. Maybe there´s someone who takes the time to read it and further it to him.

“I am not sure whether it is that which has got me really tired and listless at the moment, or just the cumulative effect of a tiring few months plus days of solid rain when it has been impossible to get on...”

You´re not alone by having such times. I had that myself and couldn´t stick to one book to read, for example. There are days when everything seems too heavy to take on or when you simply have no much interest in anything. But that is more temporary and passes by.

“Still it is our granddaughters birthday today. Hopefully the first of many which will light up our future-- and as no-one else reads our correspondence perhaps I can share the secret that our daughter is already expecting her second…”

Nice to hear that and best wishes for your daughter, as well as to yourself.

“I hope you enjoy your fortnight's break.”

I hope so too and I´ll tell you about when I´m back.

Have a good time,

Yours friend

Thomas

Hi Thomas

You are right.. Things are very "trying" at the moment.. Perhaps "hotting up" in more ways than one.. But I am feeling a bit more "up for the fight" today.. Yesterday was almost a start.. But it looks like today I can get back up on my roof to finish off the current stage of my roof repair.. I do try to be a little bit sensible.. Most people are horrified at the thought of a 71 year old climbing so far up a ladder to work on a roof, but it is really not as dangerous as it sounds- as long as I am "up for it".. But all of a sudden it seems like an achievable target.. The planning is always the most crucial-- working out how you can do it. Just have come up with the most simple way, and will be off after a cup of tea..

I hope you find nice things to tackle and accomplish while you are off..

As for Professor Tombs, as you say I presume people pass on things that are addressed to him, and it may wait in his "in tray" for ages.. He may not get it until the Cambridge academic year begins, and then he will have masses of 'must do' things...

So in the meantime, I am finishing off that "Introduction" and will have to think of other people and places to approach.

Have a good break

Melvyn