FraserWords

Here’s Frankly Fraser for the week beginning May 9, 2011. This column was due to be the last to appear in the Cornish Guardian in the issue of May 11th, but was temporarily delayed.  An edited version appears in the paper of May 18th 2011.

YOU find me this week in a field where few go, on the banks of the Lynher, scented by bluebells and wild garlic. The low waters rush past; above me a heron flees.

As we walked down the hill, a fox crossed our path. I can hear the snigger of a buzzard far off. Belle the collie, mad as Mad Mike McMad, lies panting nearby. Somewhere the children are playing as small boys do. I’ve sat here in snow and ice, wind and rain, alone and with my dogs, with all my family. Today, Cornish sun is our reward for the walk through the shady woods.

This evening I’ll have an early pint with friends, come home and read Dinosaur Cove to the boys and sit down to dinner with Management. Tomorrow, the three of them will go to school to earn and learn and I shall make coffee, choose music and walk to the desk by the window to try to wrestle words onto a blank page again.

We have terrible times, of course we do, sadnesses and disappointments and arguments like everybody, but on the whole it is a very good life, and I am grateful to the fates.

But there is melancholy in the air, for this week I must take my leave of you. Here endeth Frankly Fraser in the Cornish Guardian.

After 12 years, 400,000-odd words (more than Anna Karenina, less than Gone With The Wind) and a lot of fun and debate, I am to become another cast-off in the austerity Britain against which I’ve been raging so fiercely these past months. Ironic, eh?

In our 12 years together we have seen in a new Millennium and stood up for Cornwall – for example, the rural housing crisis was being talked about in this column long before it reached news pages or MPs’ in trays.

I have tried to be consistent – to stand for fairness and decency regardless of what political colour they wear – and I have tried to remember to laugh. Sometimes my view has dismayed you, sometimes you’ve agreed.

I’m very grateful to all of you who have made this column a channel of such interesting communication and debate, especially those of you who have on occasions helped write it. You know who you are, and you’re still not getting a penny.

But although this is goodbye from the Guardian, it needn’t be goodbye from me. Please tune into my website www.fraserwords.co.uk and you’ll find a new edition of this column every Monday.

I hope to see you there, though of course I’ll miss the magic of ink on paper. Newspapers were my first love: vibrant, important, fun, the place where we all took part in the life of our community. That first love has never faded, even after she ran off with a sharp-eyed accountant in a suit.

So let the record show what a fabulous, fabulous time I’ve had, and how much I’ve enjoyed working with talented, principled, committed journalists like the Guardian’s Alan Cooper, Nick Knight and Kevin Marriott, for example. Most of all, my beloved friend Arthur Kay, the photographer with whom I’ve travelled more miles than either of us cares to calculate, laughing all the way.

Last words?

On newspapers, I refer you to a book called ‘Flat Earth News’ by Nick Davies, and the thoughts on commerce and journalism therein by James Cameron, writing in the 1960s.

On life, the godlike Leonard Cohen reminds us this: There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

But after much deliberation, the most useful parting thought I can come up with is one arrived at by Arthur and I after much careful spiritual reflection over many years, and it is this:

There is always time for toast.