considered rather inferior behaviour. But our servants at our houses came to us and said, âWeâre sorry youâre leaving. Youâve been quite square with us and on the level, but this ice cream, you know, you canât pass that out.â And itâs very difficult in those sort of countries to find some way of countering that kind of idiocy. We came across it all the time, all over the place. And it was no good buying an indignant priest to say,ânot ice cream but bully beef.â We couldnât do that either. So I had a great deal of trouble with that.
And then there was my statistical planâIâm warned forever against the reliability of statistics ⦠When I was in Rhodes I had to run 3 newspapers, an English daily for the army, and an Italian daily for the Italian community and a little Turkish one. And I started a Greek one called âKronosâ which I believe is still going on, which was quite pleasant and had a little literary corner which the English thought was highly untrustworthy. Then I received my annual reports. My agent said the sales on a small island called Micronesium (one of the Dodecanse group), itâs so tiny that it really hasnât got a name, was buying 400 copies of this newspaper. This was a bit of a puzzle. We were printing 5,000-10,000 copies, but 400! The total inhabitants of that island struck me as around 25. I couldnât understand why each man was reading my paper so often. I knew it was a good paper, I was putting my back into it, it was excellent stuff, but I didnât see why they would keep buying extra copies just to reread the same things? So I thought this merited a trip, and I got the navy to ship me out in a corvette and I went ashore. I was met as though I was a sort of Henderson the Rain King. And only two people on the island read, the schoolmaster and the priest, and the others were all peasants. I said, âOf course, you read the news to them.â They said yes. I said, âWhere in the hell do these other 385 copies go then?â He said, âWhat a godsend, we use them to wrap fish. You know I canât tell you how much they mean to us.â The whole of this little fishing industry was based on my journalism. Itâs a very salutory thought when you think statistically to remember that sort of thing because its puts you in your place. Donât ever trust statisticsâeven your own sales. They are really wrapping fish in your work.
Well, the great curse of diplomacy is, I think, national days. A great horror, particularly in peace time, because everyone has to have a national day birthday party and everybody has to go for fear of offending the Israelis, offending the Arabs, offending somebody, so you donât dare to offend somebody and so spend the entire time drinking yourself insensible at parties out of sheer depression. And that I think is a great curse. But from the point of view of an English diplomat the real curse is paper games because, as you know, the English have nothing whatsoever to say to each other but theyâre forced to entertain each other because itâs supposed to promote morale. Actually, it used to drive my morale right down to rock bottom. You simply had to go; you couldnât refuse anybody senior to youâmy head of chancery, my oriental counselor, my ambassador. As they didnât have much to say we used to sit and play âconsequencesâ all evening with paper and pencilâthese long long intellectual evenings became absolutely burnt into my memory. And even now I often awake screaming in the night playing a paper game with a British Dip.
The bad faith and secrecy have been very well done by Compton McKenzie in his five books which analyse the situation in Athens during the first world war because in every country you have a divided optic on any given topic and itâs amusing, exciting, and sometimes a tiny bit dangerous to try to find out exactly
And then there was my statistical planâIâm warned forever against the reliability of statistics ⦠When I was in Rhodes I had to run 3 newspapers, an English daily for the army, and an Italian daily for the Italian community and a little Turkish one. And I started a Greek one called âKronosâ which I believe is still going on, which was quite pleasant and had a little literary corner which the English thought was highly untrustworthy. Then I received my annual reports. My agent said the sales on a small island called Micronesium (one of the Dodecanse group), itâs so tiny that it really hasnât got a name, was buying 400 copies of this newspaper. This was a bit of a puzzle. We were printing 5,000-10,000 copies, but 400! The total inhabitants of that island struck me as around 25. I couldnât understand why each man was reading my paper so often. I knew it was a good paper, I was putting my back into it, it was excellent stuff, but I didnât see why they would keep buying extra copies just to reread the same things? So I thought this merited a trip, and I got the navy to ship me out in a corvette and I went ashore. I was met as though I was a sort of Henderson the Rain King. And only two people on the island read, the schoolmaster and the priest, and the others were all peasants. I said, âOf course, you read the news to them.â They said yes. I said, âWhere in the hell do these other 385 copies go then?â He said, âWhat a godsend, we use them to wrap fish. You know I canât tell you how much they mean to us.â The whole of this little fishing industry was based on my journalism. Itâs a very salutory thought when you think statistically to remember that sort of thing because its puts you in your place. Donât ever trust statisticsâeven your own sales. They are really wrapping fish in your work.
Well, the great curse of diplomacy is, I think, national days. A great horror, particularly in peace time, because everyone has to have a national day birthday party and everybody has to go for fear of offending the Israelis, offending the Arabs, offending somebody, so you donât dare to offend somebody and so spend the entire time drinking yourself insensible at parties out of sheer depression. And that I think is a great curse. But from the point of view of an English diplomat the real curse is paper games because, as you know, the English have nothing whatsoever to say to each other but theyâre forced to entertain each other because itâs supposed to promote morale. Actually, it used to drive my morale right down to rock bottom. You simply had to go; you couldnât refuse anybody senior to youâmy head of chancery, my oriental counselor, my ambassador. As they didnât have much to say we used to sit and play âconsequencesâ all evening with paper and pencilâthese long long intellectual evenings became absolutely burnt into my memory. And even now I often awake screaming in the night playing a paper game with a British Dip.
The bad faith and secrecy have been very well done by Compton McKenzie in his five books which analyse the situation in Athens during the first world war because in every country you have a divided optic on any given topic and itâs amusing, exciting, and sometimes a tiny bit dangerous to try to find out exactly
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