This blog - as I believe it's called - is not really by me. It is by Arnold Appleforth. The late great Arnold Appleforth, of whom, sad to say, hardly any of you will have heard.

I am honoured to act merely as his conduit, and to introduce his golden words to you, blog by blog - or chapter by chapter, as he would have preferred to think of it - through this delightful new medium that he never even began to master.

Because my dear departed friend and colleague was one of the old school. A writer who learned his craft the hard way, not from soft-option media studies courses and MAs in journalism but from years of sweating over Middle English at Peterborough Poly, then more years reviewing amateur productions of Peer Gynt and Private Lives for the Market Harborough Gazette and finally, when London at last came calling, from those endless, incomparably productive hours in El Vino’s and the various bars of the BBC – in the days when the BBC had such things. (Remember that in those far-off halcyon days no writer worth his salt ever wrote anything even halfway decent without a very serious hangover).

As I re-read this brilliantly witty and incisive little guide – tragically his last completed work – I quietly rejoice because it is sparklingly clear in every blog - or chapter, I hear him shout - that those years of struggle really did pay off.

His musings on the suburban childhood he so loathed are particularly fine, as is his rugged - some would say perverse - refusal to give in to the ageing process in any way at all. In every erudite, fun-packed blog - or chapter, sorry! - it is joyfully clear that he still had his sixty-plus finger firmly on the pulse of contemporary culture in all its forms. (Well almost all). Not even his famous travel guides to countries he never visited have quite the breadth, insight, freshness and sheer originality that we see here.

As I raise a metaphorical glass to his talent, I find the tears well up as I recall what is lost. How grand it was to be alive then and to know Arnold Appleforth! What innocent fun we had in those golden far-off days!

Let’s not get sentimental. Arnold hated sentimentality. I still smile as I fondly recall his oft-repeated words, “Sentimental fucking wanker” - invariably hissed at me as the tears welled up as I took in the latest disastrous news about his roller-coaster personal life.

Fortunately there was always the work. The work was his salvation, and in those glorious golden far-off halcyon days when we were bosom buddies he would happily turn his hand to virtually anything – from second-string theatre reviews in The Guardian to drily witty op-ed pieces about the broken society for The Daily Telegraph, to a not entirely successful episode of All Creatures Great And Small in which Christopher Timothy (or was it Peter Davison?) toyed with becoming a Marxist.

Because there was always a touch of the leftie in Arnold.

It is there in his journalism, and in his famously anti-travel travel guides, and you can just about see it in his occasional, invariably heavily censored contributions to popular television drama after the All Creatures Great And Small debacle made him for too many years persona non grata at the BBC. I remember with particularly fondness an episode of Miss Marple he wrote, in the first draft of which Joan Hickson railed against the vicar’s decision to send his son to private school and fingered him as the murderer purely for that reason. When I subsequently agreed to rewrite it for the BBC with the correct murderer and the correct motive back in place, just as Miss Christie had intended, he attacked me furiously for being a craven lickspittle and lacking all integrity.

Which was fair comment, of course. I never quite had his fire.

All the same, I was never entirely sure if it was really politics that motivated him or just a perverse desire to get up people’s noses.

Many were the liquid lunch we shared where we argued fiercely about this very point. I fondly remember how Arnold would get ruder by the glass until by the second bottle he was hurling abuse at me, my loved ones, his loved ones and of course the great and the good who were stopping him reaching the creative heights where he somehow instinctively knew he belonged.

When he had his first heart attack some unkind people put it down to alcohol.

It was more complicated than that.

As I said earlier, for many years he happily turned his hand to virtually anything. How fortunate that he was so happy because in later years he sadly had no choice in the matter. After his first marriage failed he philosophically paid both for the alimony and for the love nest he had already set up with Cynthia in Golders Green. After Cynthia left him for their little boy’s deputy headmistress he seemed quite resigned to paying for their support too.

When ten years later his third wife took their three girls off to live with her tennis coach in Eastbourne and promised that her solicitor would take him for every penny he had ever earned, I did discern the first tiny hint of bitterness.

And why not?

By this time he was well into his fifties but still had seven dependents and could not afford to turn down anything.

What made it even worse for a man as proud as Arnold was that he could no longer afford to argue the toss with editors, sub-editors, producers or “any of the other adolescent fucking arseholes” who - as he wittily put it - made the BBC bigwigs during the All Creatures Great And Small debacle “seem like Father fucking Christmas”.

Fortunately his gift for the telling phrase never deserted him, even in these difficult times. Beneath the unself-pitying Wildean façade I sensed an increasingly broken man. I have no doubt that it was the stress of constantly having to hide his true opinions that brought on the fatal second heart attack.

I remember a particularly poignant occasion only weeks before his death. What, he asked me, is the point? Where is my fucking raison d’etre if I can no longer get up in the morning and meet you for lunch and look at you pityingly over the vino reddo and think to myself, well at least I’m not a total fucking cop-out like him?

Goodness, how I miss him. The dry subversive humour. The starkly unsentimental ability to see right through the phoneyness, even his own. “I’m not just a hack,” he used to say to me, “I’m a pseudo-fucking-intellectual hack, and don’t you forget it!”

He was - and I don’t.

Despite not being allowed to read any book at his beloved Peterborough Poly that was written after 1470, he was still one of the best read men I have ever met. Even when he had not read something he was such a brilliant liar you hardly ever realized.

When he was first asked to write this little guide, he was I am sure aware it was his last chance to make his grand statement to the world. Intimations of mortality were already crowding in on him, and he eagerly grasped the opportunity to put down once and for all his uniquely witty, sprightly, comic yet still somehow tragic vision of life.

Should we take his advice on getting older seriously?

Should we regard it as a last irreverent jeu d’esprit, a last attempt to laugh in the face of the biggest joke of all, death itself?

Maybe a bit of both?

Whatever posterity decides, I personally have no doubt that in one way or another - and probably, knowing Arnold, both - he meant it to be no more but definitely no less than a final distillation of one man’s heroically defiant “up yours” philosophy.

Sad to say even this modest ambition was to be frustrated, as the ever-growing interference in his work by “adolescent fucking arseholes” reached its painful pinnacle here.

After Arnold’s second heart attack I visited him regularly in hospital. On my final visit, he shakily put the manuscript into my hands and asked me to look after his last baby for him - at which point I confess the tears did not so much well up in my eyes as spurt all over what tragically turned out to be his deathbed.

On the bus home I had a quick flick through the manuscript to try to find out why it had been so callously rejected by the uncaring conglomerate who had commissioned it. I was shocked to see it was covered with crass editorial comments in red ink and far too many exclamation marks. I angrily planned to delete them all, but after much agonising - and with the enthusiastic help of a young friend who is, I confess, far more expert at such arcane matters as posting and blogging than myself - I kept them in, precisely as written, not just to show the intolerable pressure he was under but also to celebrate the fact that, somehow, his voice defiantly survives even so.

Because defiance really was Arnold’s middle name. In this his last work I think he finally won his lifelong battle to meld the stylistic purity of his two great heroes, F Scott Fitzgerald and Oscar Wilde - “the hetero version,” I hear him say - with a dash of middle-period Bob Monkhouse.

Insightful, epigramatic, ever ready with the smart one-liner and the acidly accurate put-down. Rest in peace, Arnie, closet Sudoku fan and quiz fiend - literary Jack of all trades – and master of quite a lot of them, too. Let this posthumous online publication serve as your memorial.


William Humble, Cap Ferrat, 2009