The Old Un’s Notes

Specs appeal – Marilyn Monroe

Have Oldie-readers who wear glasses ever thought where specs come from?

The answer lies in a new book, Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles, by Travis Elborough.

Elborough, himself bespectacled, traces the history of spectacles back to late-13th-century Florence. In a sermon at Santa Maria Novella church, given between 1303 and 1306, Friar Giordano da Pisa declared that it had been ‘20 years since the art of making spectacles, which have made for good vision, one of the most useful arts on earth, was discovered’.

Elborough takes his history up to Marilyn Monroe, who played the extremely shortsighted Pola Debevoise in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). In real life, Monroe was short-sighted but was rarely seen in specs. When she was offered the part in Millionaire, she was reluctant to wear glasses on screen. Still, she confessed in her autobiography that she had ‘always been attracted to men in glasses’. Indeed, in 1956, she married Arthur Miller.

It turns out that women will make passes at men who wear glasses.

How do you find new love during a pandemic?

The Belgians have the answer. They were granted a knuffelcontact – or ‘hug buddy’. Affection-starved Flemings used the knuffelcontact rule to visit their paramours without having to bubble with them indefinitely. It even became the Flemish word of 2020.

‘Flemings love to cuddle,’ said the Word of the Year competition’s judges.

Health authorities in neighbouring Netherlands advised citizens to arrange a seksbuddy (no translation needed) during its lockdown. Meanwhile, in Italy, visits to congiunti were permitted – congiunti denoting anything from distant relatives to people with whom you have a close relationship.

So while we Brits were left fiddling our thumbs, things were a lot more congenial across the Channel. The hardest part about picking your knuffelcontact, seksbuddy or congiunto? Being sure you make the right choice.

Among this month’s contributors

Sasha Swire (p33) is the daughter of Sir John Nott, MP for St Ives, and wife of Hugo Swire, MP for East Devon. Her book, Diary of an MP’s Wife, is an indiscreet account of life as a political plus-one.

Gareth Neame (p14) is a BAFTA, Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning TV and film producer and executive. His credits include Downton Abbey – the film version was number one in Britain and America.

Graham Little (p24) is a Northern Irish TV producer, writer and presenter. He has worked in television for 20 years. He’s represented Ireland at elephant polo and sumo-wrestling.

Earl Spencer (p10) wrote Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier, Killers of the King and To Catch a King: Charles II’s Great Escape. His new book, The White Ship, is out in paperback now. It is now 60 years since the death, on 2nd July 1961, of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), best known for A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

Not all his works were universally applauded at first. Of The Sun Also Rises (1926), one reviewer said that it ‘begins nowhere and ends in nothing’. The New York Times called To Have and to Have Not (1937) – later a classic wartime film starring Humphrey Bogart – ‘an empty book’, adding that ‘Mr Hemingway’s record as a creative writer would be stronger if it had never been published.’

Of Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), the Saturday Review of Literature said, ‘It is so dreadful … that it begins to have its own morbid fascination.’

Some of his fellow

Important stories you may have missed

Legendary ’80s chocolate bar wrapper found in Fairford Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard

Man found with drugs hidden in intimate area Matlock Mercury

Rejected bike rack is coming to Stamford Stamford Mercury

£15 for published contributions

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Go to the Oldie website; put your email address in the red SIGN UP box. writers were also critical: ‘[Hemingway] has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary’ (William Faulkner); ‘As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it’ (Vladimir Nabokov).

His famous hairy-chested machismo was even called into doubt when he wrote that Scott Fitzgerald had a mouth that, ‘on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty [which] worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more’.

As for his patriotism, recently declassified FBI files revealed that he had once been a Soviet spy, codenamed Argo, though he apparently failed to send any useful information. Perhaps a

His intention was to defuse the situation with a joke: ‘And shall our great Union be broken up because of sausage?’

The answer was a resounding ‘Yes!’

The Union could indeed be broken up over a particular Lithuanian version of the sausage that the locals were and worked for the British Council in four countries. His last novel, Cold Snap (Arcadia 2009), featured German prisoners in postwar Oxford, and a romance between one prisoner, a musician, and an ex-SOE English female student.

His life was derailed in 1970 when, seeing an advance copy of A Domestic Animal (about unrequited, gay love), the man on whom one of the characters was based – despite having been changed into a woman named Dame Winifred Harcourt – recognised himself and sued, using Lord Hailsham as his barrister.

The offended man was former Labour MP Tom Skeffington-Lodge (1905-94). The novel was withdrawn and, because Francis had to pay Hailsham’s legal costs, he lost his house in Brighton. He moved to London where he became the Telegraph’s drama critic for ten years and one of its fiction reviewers.

A Domestic Animal was rewritten, supervised closely by Skeffington-Lodge, and was then hardly ever out of print.

When the Cardiff Singer of the World competition began in June, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, now aged 77, was once again one of the judges.

The Daily Telegraph published an interview with the great diva, in which she talked about her career, her family and her two homes, in New Zealand and Sussex. But there was no mention of one of her favourite pastimes: fishing.

Years ago, The Oldie’s

Not very old man and the sea: Ernest Hemingway

‘Hi, honey. I’m home-workplace hybrid!’

better codename would have been Argonaut.

The Government and the EU have been rowing over the transport of sausages from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.

‘Sausages – British, Irish, French – are no laughing matter,’ says The Oldie’s cookery correspondent, Elisabeth Luard. ‘It’s not the first time politicians have misread the power of sausage.’

In 1991, the year when the Soviet Union crumbled, Mikhail Gorbachev addressed a crowd in Lithuania, where the natives were growing restless. extremely attached to. There are some 3,000 varieties of sausage throughout the world; each one different, each a matter of national honour, each recipe defended to the death.

Francis King, author of 50 novels, died ten years ago on 3rd July 2011, aged 88.

Francis’s novel The Nick of Time (2002) made the Booker Prize long-list. He was president and vice-president of English PEN, chairman of the Society of Authors, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a judge of the Ackerley Prize for memoir,

Francis King (1923-2011), author of A Domestic Animal