Tomato Bombs and Ed McBain

The elder brother, American Jim 1 and I head North tomorrow for the 134th Open Championship at St Andrews and so this might be my last chance to “blog” for a few days (I doubt that Internet Café culture has moved north of Edinburgh yet).

American Jim 2 has been in Scotland for a few days already and is reported to have experienced difficulties with his back drinking whisky in the Outer Isles; but we hear that he is about to leave Dornoch (being driven by new-found friends) and is safely on his journey to St Andrews. We hope to rendezvous there on Wednesday.

Yesterday was an action-packed but disappointing day at Lords (from the cricket point-of-view). However I relished the company of my Welsh friend who entertained me wonderfully with anecdotes, sushi and a mysterious fizzy rosé. It was also good to use the London Underground again so quickly after the horrors of last week (well done, Bakerloo and Jubilee lines – a great service for a Sunday).

You see, my Welsh friend and I share a birthday (nearly) and next Sunday he’ll be giving a party in North London while I’ll be sitting at the eighteenth green at St Andrews. Now my Welsh friend gives good parties and he has promised “Tomato Bombs” which sound absolutely marvellous. “Take small cherry tomatoes and insert (clean) hypodermic syringe loaded with vodka and Tabasco sauce; fill and chill” – see what I mean, stupendous! I report this as a warning to Tiger Woods and Marteen Lefeber who will doubtless be chasing Retief Goosen for the Claret Jug: it had better be good or I’ll be bemoaning the fact that I missed the tomato bombs in NW5 until the end of time.

And so to Salvatore Lombini who died last week. He was latterly known as Evan Hunter and he wrote most of his novels under the nom-de-plume of Ed McBain. His obituary in the Telegraph made marvellous reading - his only vices were “cigarettes, women and Claridges”. You have to start every novel with a corpse. The fact that for many decades he would work eight hours a day to produce a regular ten pages of tautly written prose, and he finished with a canon of over 100 novels, to say nothing of screenplays and other writing. A splendid man. I intend to re-visit my faded collection of “Last Precinct” paperbacks in Penguin Crime green.