In his journal – one of the best records of the everyday to come out of the 20th century – the writer Arnold Bennett liked to conclude each year with a reckoning.
Sometimes it was of the words he had written: “272,000 words this year, not counting journals … the best book and serial year I have ever had,” he wrote a hundred Decembers ago. Sometimes it was of earnings: “I received (less agents’ commissions) about £16,000 during the year, which may be called success by any worldly-minded author,” was his calculation for 1912. Bennett was then in his 40s and on his way up, so some self-satisfaction is understandable. But he never gave up the habit. On 31 December 1928, he recorded: “This year I have written 304,000 words; 1 play, 2 films, 1 small book on religion, and about 80 or 81 articles. Also I lost [my italics] a full month on rehearsals, and a full month, no, six weeks, on holidays.’
Bennett was 61 and had not much more than two years to live; this remains the last entry in his published journal. In this context, his idea of lost time as “time not spent writing” is instructive. I hate to think of my yearly output compared to Bennett’s – a fifth of it, a sixth? (And not nearly as good.) But it may be that being alive is preferable. Here is my own end-of-year calculation: 10 of the things that gave me most pleasure in 2015, beginning in the Himalayas …
1. Kanchenjunga. I never expected to see it. The Himalayas in the monsoon season are swathed in clouds and mist, and visibility can be near zero. Mark Twain had heard of people who had stayed 22 days in Darjeeling hoping to see it and had left without a glimpse. I didn’t mind too much if I didn’t see it. The bungalow at the Glenburn tea estate was one of the finest places I’ve ever stayed. We ate delicious food on the verandah and watched big black butterflies flit around the garden – under their auspices, black became a beautiful colour. Then one morning I woke up at five and went straight to the window as if under instruction, and there floating pink on the horizon, at a height that didn’t seem reasonable, was the world’s third-tallest mountain – so sacred that out of respect for the gods the first (1955) expedition to climb it stopped a few feet short of the top. An hour or two later, clouds began to roll up the valleys from the plains, and Kanchenjunga disappeared. It was a genuinely numinous moment – a momentous revelation around which a curtain had opened and closed.
2. Ferguson’s yard. The steep decline of Clyde shipbuilding began when I was in my teens, and last year its extinction looked inevitable, apart from the very occasional warship. Then the engineer-entrepreneur Jim McColl bought Ferguson’s in Port Glasgow, saving Britain’s last merchant shipyard from near-certain closure. It now has orders worth £100m and plans to expand its workforce from 140 to 1,300. I feel cheerful when, on a journey down the Clyde, I see its solitary crane.
3. The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. The English National Opera’s production, directed by Richard Jones and conducted by Edward Gardner, deserved all of its five-star reviews. Its unstarry cast sang Wagner’s music beautifully; the orchestra played thrillingly; the set looked good. Almost as important, the director made no attempts at “relevance” – eg by suggesting that a 16th-century singing competition somehow prefigured the Baader-Meinhof gang. My best night at the opera in ages.
4. Eric Ravilious. The Dulwich Picture Gallery’s summer exhibition – the biggest ever of his work – caught the public imagination and became hugely popular. He is an easy painter to enjoy, of course: figurative always, and bright and tender even in his depictions of war. I wrote at the time that his pictures gave the viewer “the permission to like England, and to mourn it”. I don’t exclude myself.
5. An afternoon at the beach. The sun shone on Argyll all day, just as the forecast intended it should. We took the ferry, drove down a little road or two, parked where an enterprising local man had set up a refreshment tent in his garden (no customers) and then walked half-a-mile through the dunes. We swam – sand had warmed the incoming tide and there were only a few jellyfish. A boy on the beach flew a kite. We ate rolls filled with corned beef. Ah, we said, if only every Scottish summer’s day was like this.
6. Apples. Those from Andrew Tann’s orchard in Essex were particularly delicious this year. He posts out boxes from late August until his stock runs out, usually in January: 40 or 45 small dessert apples cost about £19. Laxton’s Fortune, Michaelmas Red, Ribston Pippin: unlike their jumbo cousins in the supermarket, they impress by flavour rather than size.
7. Victorian churches. Driving north to Scotland, I stopped for the first time in Brampton, Cumbria, to look at the beautiful stained glass by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris in St Martin’s church. The Victorian British just couldn’t stop building churches – like Tesco, they overdid the supply for consumers who were on the brink of changing their habits. Magnificent and largely empty buildings stand in unlikely little towns, reproving us for our secularism. There was no limit to the ambition of their architects – or their geographical reach. Gavin Stamp’s recently published (and very good) Gothic for the Steam Age has an impressive picture of the colossal tower designed by George Gilbert Scott for the Nicolaikirche in Hamburg, which, at 483ft, ranked in the 1870s as the tallest structure in the world.
8. Cocoa spiced with rum. We drank it from mugs at a special showing of The Cruel Sea in a church hall just off the Charing Cross Road. Duffel-coat wearers got in free. I was surprised that we forbore to say “Aye aye” or call each other “Number One”.
9. Pentagram. Train companies have a wretched aesthetic record in the years since privatisation. Only the late GNER, with its dark blue and red rolling stock, broke the general rule that, wherever possible, trains should look like ice cream vans or budget airlines. But now, thanks to a makeover by Pentagram, First Great Western is to become the Great Western Railway, with silver insignia on a dark green livery. Two cheers at least.
10. Sailing into London. Every October the paddle steamer Waverley does a fortnight’s season on the Thames. This autumn, not for the first time, we boarded at Southend late on a bright afternoon and sailed upriver into the thickening dusk, passing redundant refineries and the marshes where Pip met Magwitch. Darkness fell after Gravesend, but soon the lights began to accumulate: the red and green of ships under way and at rest, the white lights of factories (Ford, Tilda Rice, Unilever), the yellow of bridges, the red of cranes. The river’s loops took us twice under the green laser beam that marks the Greenwich meridian. At Greenwich itself, Wren’s hospital buildings looked splendid under their floodlights while the Cutty Sark glistened like a ghost ship in silver. Then, after Canary Wharf and its glittering towers, came the grand finale. Tower Bridge opened to let us through and we steamed into the Pool of London, to stare up at the Shard and marvel that everything was so luminous.
We had travelled from the poor estuary mud to the bright, cruel centre of capitalism. Slightly unsteadied by the contrast, we went to look for a taxi.
