Picture: Matumi 2003Tony Hall, Addis Ababa, February 1995
A dedication
"I call it a Hall's and not Tony Hall's way because - while I take responsibility for any of its foibles and bloomers, I owe much to other members of the Hall family (and here I won't go into grandparents, and to all the aunts and uncles and cousins who've made for a rich and full family life).
Most of all, to my father John I owe some of the traits and eccentricities I am particularly pleased to share, with him and my brothers, David, Micheal and John, in their different and special ways:
- Enthusiasm for healthy eating
- Healthy scepticism about the mystifications of the medical profession (though let me add a note of sympathy for those hard -pressed GPs whose patients want them - force them, on pain of everlasting scorn - to act as know it alls),
- Faith in common sense and a try-anything approach as guidelines to physical life, and to the world around us.
- "Moderation in all things.", my father used to say - except moderation, say I, (and I think he would have approved of that rider).
"To my wife Eve, lover, companion and friend of my entire adult life, I owe decades of good example in practice, of the sensible, healthy and fine eating which my father preached. She has also brought to my life and shared with me, the other things it would be hard to be healthy without.: good friends, ideals and dreams, a sense of humour and a delight in celebrating, moving around in, and trying out the intellectual variety of the whole wide world.
"She's been a Hall - a Mrs and a Ms Hall - for almost 40 years, not to mention being a Ms Steinhardt, during the first years she was coming back into her own full identity, after years of primary motherhood and secondary working life. And back to being a Ms Hall again, as she did come more and more completely into her own.
"To her and what we made together, our three sons, Philip, Andrew and Christopher, and their families, I owe the greatest life affirmation of all - in the extraordinary open lovingness of all three, in their beauty, vitality and sense of physical and intellectual adventure, in their chosen wives, Teresa, Kate and Anne, and in the eight wondrous individuals - Natalie, Lucy, Juan Antonio, Myles, Betty, Carmen, Jessica and....[Eve and Bobby Ed.] - that are our grandchildren.
"Not to let you get away without a word about three important women, all beauties, two Halls-by-marriage and a Steinhardt-by-marriage. It is actually the last one, my mother-in-law, Lisa, who has been the most enduring matriarchal influence on our large immediate family. Still a beauty, spry in her mid eighties - not a Hall, she is the living example, against many odds, of the way to health and goodlife - common sense, hard work, good eating, exercise, an openly loving nature, game for a laugh, a zest for life, and not too much moderation in some things.
"Nola, my stepmother, also practiced, with zest and efficiency through most of her life, the healthy lifestyle her husband mostly preached. And they shared and practised with great originality, a capacity for hard work and an appetite for life and adventure.
"My mother Betty. ..she produced my other brother Geoff and my beautiful and loving sister, Joan Mary. What a celebration each of their lives seem to me, after such a difficult start, materially and emotionally.
"My mother also expressed, out of all my forebears, the most unbounded and unconditional love, of the kind that made me feel good about myself as a child, even at those times when there seemed no reason to. She gave me, willy, nilly, something else on the dark side, an awareness of how far people could in how they handled each other emotionally. And so, on the flip side, a kind of vinegary social streetwisdom, to counter the emotional saccharine that might be drip fed elsewhere. So my close brother Micheal, and I, got from her a taste for flippancy, for impropriety.
"I remember how, with a gin in her hand - in later years a cane spirit and luke warm water (yeugh) - saying in a throwaway line of hard Gablese:
"Frankly m' dear, I don't give a damn... "
And then replying as Vivien Leigh:
"I'll cry tomorrow..."
"So as Mike and I might remind each other, in the words of Peter Cook - in those grave moments which call for a balanced, sober word on behalf of a decent cause, like threatened minorities:
"Whales - what did they ever do for us? Where was they during the Blitz, when we was being bombed? Tell me that!
Have you ever heard of a whale making it into the Top Ten? Fucking useless whales - can't even breave under water..."
Cheers Mum! Your good health everyone."
Tony Hall
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