Venice in the Valleys: The Strange Life of Horatio Evans, #4
By RAY NOYES
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The Fogle family, the rich landowners of Abertump has a strange son, Marmaduke Wellington Fogle, who has returned penniless from his grand tour of Europe. He spent most of his time and their money tobogganing in Austria and lazing around Venice, where he fell in love with gondolas. Horatio had already tried using the canal for boating, but failed. So here is another chance for him to try again, this time using Fogle money.
That Marmaduke insists on having gondolas, which Horatio has never heard of (he also thinks Venice is near Wrexham), causes him genuine problems. Where will he get them? Since he always refuses help, he decides to make them - rather special, and very Welsh, ones.
Luckily for Horatio, Marmaduke, like his father, always adopts the philosophy of never actually doing anything but 'leaving it up to the chaps' to sort out. This provides space and time for Horatio to manage the construction of the gondolas himself with disastrous and rather comic results.
Venice is not in imminent danger of facing stiff competition from Abertump!
RAY NOYES
They say that to be a good scientist one has to have a good imagination. I would like to think that my time spent at CERN, the home of the Large Hadron Collider, and at other research sites, so exercised my imagination as to prepare it for its most unexpected task, that of writing satirical books about a certain Horatio Evans. The real Horatio was actually an uncle of mine, the memory of whose peculiar, somewhat quixotic, antics in a small town in the Swansea Valley remains with me and the family to this day. An amateur communist, his confidence, unfortunately, knew no bounds so that the political and material collateral damage he caused was sometimes stunning and always amusing. But Horatio’s stories were not my first entry into writing. As a scientist I was used to, and actually enjoyed, writing reports and papers; it was only when I retired that I realised just how enjoyable the very act of writing could be. At first, I stuck to non-fiction and produced a number of books on management and leadership. These were based on the many lectures I gave on what I termed Slow Leadership, taking the name from Slow Food. The theme of the talks was the application of Zen discipline to management, leadership and one’s personal life. I studied under a Zen master for some twenty years or so and eventually was given permission to teach basic Zen, which I did at our Buddhist retreat centre in the hills of mid-Wales, near Llandovery. Those of us who have lived in a Welsh community know that in spite of the hardship that the Industrial Revolution brought to the country, people not only survived but thrived by developing a secret weapon - humour. Humour is, and was, a shared culture that encircled communities like a protective cloak, keeping out the dirt, the exploitation and the sickness that the coal industry brought with it. I therefore count myself privileged to have married a Swansea Valley girl who introduced me not only to Horatio but also to his colleagues and neighbours, all of whom could cock a snoot at life with a humour that is unique to Wales.
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