Ruth Dudley Edwards: Sometimes you can forget what a privilege it is to love what you do
One of the many pleasures I take from friendship is learning about other people's lives. As a child, I enjoyed visiting a farm in County Cork, but it wasn't until I was getting to know the Orange Order in the 1990s that I acquired a close friend who made me aware of the challenges and hardships of earning a living from the land and has kept me in touch with it ever since.
To this day, when there is extreme weather, I check on what's going on in County Tyrone.
And along with millions I continue to learn through the brilliant Clarkson’s Farm.
I have good friends in academia, but what most expanded my horizons was branching out into crime writing and becoming part of a much wider world.
Like me, most crime writers had other occupations before they tentatively tried criminalising their experience.
Unlike many literary novelists, they tend to be humble.
I had been a civil servant until I became a full-time writer of history, and it gave me much enjoyment in the early 1990s to have a go writing about murder in among senior officials.
Since then I’ve written satirical crime stories set in many different places and groups loosely connected with the establishment, including the Church of England, the House of Lords and Anglo-Irish peace-processing diplomats.
I’m still learning about different universes.
Last week, I spent a few days with a longtime friend who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of crime writing and who founded and runs Mystery People, a website that brings vast numbers of readers up-to-date with new books.
She barely covers her expenses, as she loves the genre and lives to encourage newcomers.
My most recent learning experience, however, was about traditional jazz, for Lizzie’s husband, who also became a great friend — although his living was earned in the City — has played his double bass devotedly since he was 11.
He drives hundreds of miles a week to play in New Orleans Revival Style ensembles usually with the septuagenarian San Jacinto Stompers.
It is not a profit-making pursuit, for this form of jazz is out of fashion and fees are tiny.
But the “old troupers” go on honouring great musicians of the past till they can’t play any more.
The music was wonderful, the elderly audience were full of enthusiasm, and watching the years drop away from John and his bandmates and the expression of sheer joy on his face was an inspiration.
Last Thursday, the drive to the venue took about two hours, the band played from 8pm to 10.30pm. We were home at about midnight, when we drank a bottle of champagne.
We forget what a privilege it is to love what you do.
People like Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and indeed, the Stompers, are an example to us all.
Ruth Dudley Edwards’s non-fiction books include The Faithful Tribe: an intimate portrait of the loyal institutions. Her twelfth crime novel, Killing the Emperors, was a satire on conceptual art