Tell the truth and shame the devil.

When I was a child, my grandmother advised me to be truthful, always using the exact words in my title ‘Tell the truth and shame the devil’. It seemed like excellent advice, although I couldn’t follow it at that stage in my life. Now, I not only can. I must. And the truth I must tell and tell as clearly as possible is in answer to a painful question. Is anybody prepared to do anything at all or to put it another way, does anyone have the power to save Blake’s cottage? My sight and ability to walk are now so poor, I can’t tramp about Felpham gathering signed petition forms and encouraging people to take more of them in the way I did last time. And Rachel Searle, the leader of the seven sturdy campaigners, who collected money to help buy the cottage when it was first put up for sale and called themselves The Big Blake Project appeared, when I wrote the first draft of this blog to be distancing her self from it, but she has been in touch with me since and told me a lot more about what happened when the trust was set up which reveals quite another picture and needs an apology, which I hereby give very gladly.

The truth of the matter is she was told by Tim Heath after the cottage had been bought in secret, that there was no room for her or anyone else from the Big Blake Project who should expect to be given a trusteeship. He had taken the money and set up the independent’ Blake Cottage Trust in secret and Rachel Searle tells me, she challenged the accountability and composition of the Trust at the following AGM of the Blake Society. Tim Heath’s answer was very revealing, he said ‘three is the correct number of trustees and when we go we will appoint others in our image.‘

And now the same Tim Heath, the self appointed Chairman of the three man Blake’s Cottage Trust has walked away from it himself. In the last six years the cottage has been more and more in need of repair and NOTHING HAS BEEN DONE. Now he has persuaded the authorities at Charterhouse in Central London to give him a room in which he can live for free with his meals provided and I think he has either moved into it or he is just about to. He made provision of sorts for the cottage by appointing two new Trustees called Johnathan Mullard and Jason Whittaker, ‘so three wasn’t the allotted number. These two seem to be no different from the others. They have told the public the same mish-mash of untruthful information, have a fallen into the habit of saying a lot and meaning very little and have DONE NOTHING at all about the Cottage. So the building goes on visibly deteriorating, so visibly that passers by notice the terrible state of it and write to tell me about it. It breaks my heart, because at the moment there is nothing I can do. Nothing anybody can do, while Tim Heath is still in position as the Chairman of the Blake Cottage Trust. A position I might say, that he awarded himself, just as he awarded himself a similar position as the Chairman of the Blake Society.

This picture of him was taken in the street after a session in the courts, where his brothers, who are two top doctors, were contesting their mothers will. There had been a bitter row with Timothy over their dead mother’s £1.8 million fortune.

According to the Daily Mail “Dominic and Jeremy Heath left their parents’ £1.5million house in leafy Hampstead, as young men, each forging successful careers in medicine.”

Timothy on the other hand went on living in their parent’s house, never flew the nest and never did a day’s work.

And now he is the person who has the power to repair Blake’s Cottage or conversely, very conversely, the power to refuse to do it.

For those to whom all this is new, especially those who live in the Felpham area, I should tell you, that I wrote a booklet detailing all this messy history some time ago, called ‘If Blake’s Cottage had a voice, it would cry help!’ It sold well from Felpham Post office and I still have a few copies in my office, although I no longer have the legs to take me to Felpham and to the post office with further copies.

But the question still remains, WHAT CAN ANYBODY DO?

Suggestions welcomed! Phone me or visit me if it would be helpful.

A most unpleasant anti-hero gets his well deserved comeuppance.

To my annoyance I’ve discovered that the novel that pre-dated my story about the cat is nearly a year old. How could I have neglected it so much?

When I wrote it, we were governed by a Tory government whose leader told so many lies I nicknamed him the ‘Prime Mendacitor’, since then we’ve seen one lying Tory in government after another and although people are sickened by it, there is very little complaint. And there should be an uproar.

So… although you don’t rough very loudly when you’re 91, I’m going to do my level best to at least cause I a stir if I can’t deafen you.

This story is too dangerous to feature an actual politician as the anti-hero, I went to a lot of care to make sure that I established that my liar was fictional in the very first pages of the story. Other bits of the story of course are factually accurate, especially the section concerning Brexit and why it was so important for the rich men in government to get it voted in and how they used the boldest and most open propaganda methods to do it. And the power of the press to ensure that it was. That is virtually reporting. And yes, I know it’s dangerous in these days to tell the truth and somebody’s got to do it.

Photo credit – Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street

I’ve put up this collection of well known politicians who feel it is perfectly in order to tell any untruth they want to, so as to get their own way.

They are the kind of abhorrent politicians that are total anathema to me. I grew up following the honest lives of the men and women who were elected to power in 1945. I watched their three year struggle to get the NHS accepted. It was quite an amazing success, for they were very ordinary men and women and they were up against some of the richest and most powerful men in the Kingdom. And the NHS wasn’t all they achieved. Following the good sense of the Beveridge report, they bought in the Welfare State too and adequate state pensions. Their slogan had always been, that they cared for people from the cradle to the grave. There couldn’t have been a better set of men and women for a teenager to watch and admire.

Like Jeremy Corbyn today, these politicians were committed to serving the ‘many’ not the ‘few’.

And if your appetites are similar to mine, here’s a little tit-bit of information about the Great I Am.

I loathed him so much when I was writing about him, that it was a sheer pleasure to give him a well deserved comeuppance.

Have fun. And do let me know what you think about the book.

Get your copy here.

News from my fictional cat.

My friendly, fictional cat wants you to know that his book – all written in perfect cat, you understand, with an excellent portrait on the cover – is currently on offer on Amazon.

The best and cheapest of a series of offers are today and tomorrow, when it will only cost £0.99.

Get your copy here.

Christmas is coming,

the geese are getting fat,

pleased to put a penny,

on a black cat’s hat!

if you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do

if you haven’t got a ha’penny, God bless you

Please to remember the 5th of November

As the nursery rhyme poem says.

“Please to remember the 5th of November,

Gunpowder, treason and plot,

There is no reason for gunpowder treason,

To ever be forgot.”

As we used to chant, personally I’ve never been over-keen on fireworks, they sound a bit too much like exploding shells and I heard enough of them when I was little!

But a man who is prepared to risk his life – and lose it – as the original Guido Fawkes did, is a man to honour. And I could see a lot of value in a sudden cleansing act that removed the King and the MPs all in one fell, brightly lit swoop. There are quite a few MPs around at the moment who could do with being lit up! In its non alcoholic sense.

But the next anniversary which is now approaching is a very serious and terrible matter indeed and needs to be taken seriously, seriously, seriously. The slaughter of young men and women, is never, ever, anything to make sentimental capital out of, so the best possible poem I could write is here in honour of those slaughtered men and women.

ARMISTICE DAY

Poppies that once bled pity in the Flanders fields
Are ritualised today to paper prettiness.
It’s the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month
The exact poetic time when the war that was to end all wars
That should never, in all conscience, have begun
Dragged its ravaged, shell-shocked, blood-soaked length
To a stunned stop
In the dumb, dead darkness of a corpse-gorged year.

Now it is men and rivers that are gorged
In the greed and thoughtless muddle of our time.
And only winter stirs long-hidden truth,
When furrows fill with water
Whitely reflecting an impassive sky.
Bare branches darken in a north-east wind
And the old cold shrinks a sullen earth,
Smites the caked hides of shivering cattle
Soon to be killed to feed our appetites.
And touches our too sentimental skin.

Yet Folly still stands proud with its paper flower,
To parrot out the politicians’ lie.
‘They died that we might live’.
Not so. Not so. Oh, it was never so.
They died like cattle, herded, scared and young
Because, like cattle, they were sent to die.

Matters concerning Blake’s Cottage in Felpham

Seem to be coming to a head. It appears from his brother that Tim Heath has applied to be a ‘Brother’ of Charterhouse and expects to be given a room of his own to live in there and that fact begs all sorts of questions.

I am now gathering information about how he could have achieved such a thing, given that he had to fill in an application form that claimed that he had no debt – or perhaps in his opinion standing to one side and letting a famous house rot for the last seven years – it was purchased on the 21st of September 2015 – is not a debt. Certainly he has not been telling the truth to the powers that run Charterhouse.

In July 2016, the local press ran a headline and naturally when most people read it they assumed that it meant that half a million pounds was now available to repair the cottage. But they were wrong. It was a con and simply not true. The half million, which didn’t exist at that time and still doesn’t exist now, was what the Blake Cottage Trust estimated it would cost to build their brand new building in the grounds. They were already planning to choose an architect to do the work, even though as they admitted, his fee would be in the region of £50,000 and probably was.

Now, various people – in the national press, among those who have been following the fortunes of the cottage ever since it was bought and from a whole variety of other sources – are wondering what will happen next.

As far as I’m aware from reading the Charity Commission comments on the property, Tim Heath is STILL the Chairman, although two other gentlemen have joined the trustees and at the same time have joined the Blake Society, which Tim Heath also chairs. There is a great deal more to find out what is going to happen next and a great many more people around, who would like to watch it happen and every day brings new information.

I will keep you informed as to what is going on, but please will you inform me too and report anything you have found out and anything you now know that you didn’t know before. Facts are important at this stage, but they must be truthful facts, not the sort of embroidered lies and downright lies that are currently being published on the Blake Cottage Trust website by one of the two new trustees. His name is Jonathan Mullard and you will recognise his style, because one of the first un-truths he brandishes before us is that Blake was put on trial for treason. That it is what Tim Heath himself has frequently said. AND IT IS NOT TRUE, he was put on trial for sedition, as anyone who studies the history will tell you.

And there is still no mention of when and how the much needed repair of the cottage will eventually begin. It has been standing out in the wind and rain now for seven years and the state of it is so noticeable that locals who pass by are commenting on it.

If you have anything to report please contact me and I will give it publicity here. The more you discover, the better. The more you report, the better. I will go on with my investigations as will all the press people who are now alert to it and very interested.

The story may be seven years old but we still haven’t reached the ending.

Photo credit – The Telegraph/Historic England