William Boyd: ‘April is the cruellest month (and hayfever doesn’t help)’

The dark side of spring: 25%
“April is the cruellest month,” wrote TS Eliot in The Waste Land. I wonder if he suffered from hayfever. I do and would extend the cruelty season into the first half of May. It happens every spring. In my case the trigger is tree pollen and in particular the pollen from London’s many thousands of plane trees. The symptoms are classic – itchy eyes, sneezing fits, a form of catarrh that has me hacking and coughing like a consumptive and, new this year, a muffled semi-deafness that lasts a couple of hours. The side effects begin to ease as the day progresses and the antihistamine medication kicks in, but dusk often brings another minor attack. You can see the golden dust of the pollen spores on the cars parked in the street – a powdery fall thick enough to write your name in. No wonder I’m poleaxed. Gratifyingly, I don’t seem to be allergic to grass or flower pollen so the summer sees me functioning pretty much as normal. I love spring – who doesn’t? – but it has its dark side.

Sounds of the underground: 39%
Christopher Reid, acknowledged master of long-form poetry, once wrote a brilliant multi-paged poem called Smells of London. I was thinking that he could easily do a follow-up entitled Sounds of London. The idea was prompted by the fact that our street had two gas leaks in it a few days ago, both adjacent to our house. Consequently, the massive reverberations of a huge yellow JCB Backhoe Loader, as it tore up the road surface, have been dominating the aural landscape and made me hyper-aware of the irritating sonic presences in our everyday urban life.

Zero degrees of separation: 24%
Of course, in London there is the near constant sound of building work. Within a 100-yard radius of our home three other houses are having iceberg basements dug out. The monotone rip of the so-called scaffolding-spanner, as the couplers are attached to the scaffolding tubes, is a new form of dawn chorus. Throw in car alarms and burglar alarms – always reliably activated on a quiet Sunday – and the whooping sirens of police cars, ambulances and fire engines and the daily cacophony is significantly augmented. Other irritants: car-valets’ generators, idling taxis, leaf-blowers and high-pressure water-jetters, thumping music from delivery vans and the auditory tapestry of your typical London day is almost complete. Natural, non-mechanical additions mustn’t be overlooked. Noisy neighbours barbecuing, a barking dog abandoned in a basement well and the harsh shrieks of the new avian invasion, the ring-necked parakeet (surely the most unpleasant bird-call ever) and the acoustic mash-up of your average day is complete. Trappist monasticism seems suddenly appealing.

I found myself oddly captivated a few weeks ago by news of the arrest of a 93-year-old Belgian man called Etienne Davignon. Davignon is a retired former diplomat and was arrested for his complicity in the arrest and assassination, in 1961, of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I was intrigued because I had used the almost-forgotten assassination as the narrative drive in my Cold War espionage novel, Gabriel’s Moon. To the west, the USA in particular, Lumumba was seen as a threat. He was inviting Russian military aid to help end the country’s civil war; his politics were left-leaning and, crucially, the Congo had the world’s richest supply of uranium. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs were made with Congolese uranium. President Eisenhower had fears that the Congo would become a communist African Cuba and so authorised Lumumba’s “decapitation”, as we now call it, and regime change. With Lumumba gone, a more pro-Western government would be established and the uranium supply secured.

Sound familiar? The plot against Lumumba was named Operation Viking and the CIA, with the help of the Belgian secret service, the SGR, and MI6 set about arranging his downfall. The British involvement came in the shape of an MI6 controller named Daphne Park who was working out of the British embassy in Léopoldville. It was she who alerted the CIA to Lumumba’s escape from house arrest and his cross-country flight to his support base in Stanleyville. Thanks to her prompt warning, Lumumba was intercepted en route. He was badly beaten, imprisoned and then shot by firing squad. Then his body was dissolved in a vat of sulphuric acid.

Daphne Park was, reputedly, quietly proud of her role in the Congo’s regime change. After she retired from MI6 she became principal of Somerville College, Oxford. As a curious footnote to this whole story I taught English Literature for a year, in 1982, at Somerville, and regularly saw Daphne Park about the place and met her once or twice. I used her as the template for my fictional controller, Faith Green, in Gabriel’s Moon. Little did I know at the time. Not even one degree of separation.

A sea view: 12%
I bought a painting the other day. A small watercolour of the seascape off Malibu in California. The difference being that it was en grisaille – monochrome. It looks uncannily like a black-and-white photograph – astonishing hyper-realistic technique. The next challenge will be to find free wall space. Still, having too many paintings (like too many books) is not the most grievous sin in the world.