Recently I lost my mother, my job and nearly my wife in quick succession (she was diagnosed with breast cancer). My son now needles me by asking what I do all day. ‘Son, I have seen things you wouldn’t believe. I have dark thoughts.’ That is what I want to say, but I don’t have the courage. It is hard to explain to an 11-year-old that the black dog can be as demanding as any full-time employer. Besides he wouldn’t get the Blade Runner reference. But his niggling question makes me realise I am a man in need of an alibi, or another alias.
My old headmaster once described me as the opposite of a whited sepulchre. I think he intended this as a compliment
My grandfather S.P.B. Mais earned his keep as a novelist, broadcaster, gossip columnist and schoolteacher. As ‘the first travel journalist of the airwaves’, he was one of the most famous BBC voices of the 1930s and pioneered the ‘Letter from America’ format a decade before Alistair Cooke.
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