HALF AN HOUR WITH A GREAT OBSERVER OF BRITISH LIFE

 As if you need me to ration half an hour of your time, but you could be doing yourself and your awareness of recent history – late-British Empire days in particular - a real boost by tuning into the most recent thoughts of that extraordinary writer, Jan Morris.

Her latest thoughts are offered as an iPlayer chat on Radio 4, a recording of the talk she gave this morning about her view of the Brit Empire.

Like her books, the views are balanced, but it’s certainly not the right-wing opinion most often to be heard of matters British from bigoted bores.

KICKED OUT OF THE WAY

She tells of an incident while travelling long ago in British governed Palestine. She was walking through a train with an English colonel. A carriage was blocked by an Arab in conversation.

The officer kicked the fellow out of his way. Jan Morris imagines the colonel considered the fellow merely ‘a bloody wog.’

I remember a not dissimilar happening, although I was just eight at the time. Our emigrating family docked at Port Said and the ship was all but mobbed by struggling Egyptians who used several wizardry tricks to relieve visitors of the tiny sums of money Brit families carried.

An uncle, an officer in the British army based there at the time, was never troubled by the semi-beggars for he simply shoved them out of the way. For the product of a school for young gentlemen, it was a very unpleasant eye-opener.

A British gentleman striking a beggar – and many beggars at that! I wouldn’t have been more shocked had he pulled out his pistol and shot them, one after another, which he often seemed about to do.

Jan Morris, now 90, has an astonishing collection of anecdotes to relate, 27 minutes of them, just a moment away on the BBC iPlayer. It's an excellent production, and congratulations to Ms Morris, with full marks, too, to producer Gareth Jones of BBC Wales.

Continues on the blogs for my ocean adventure book, Sailing to Purgatory, at SailingToPurgatory.com