Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Is there honey still for tea at Grantchester?

Yes – and it was served by Rupert Brooke superfan Mary Archer

‘I love him – I really do.’

I am taking tea with Mary Archer at the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, and she is not talking about her husband, Jeffrey. She is talking about the other man in her life: Rupert Brooke.

Dame Mary, 76, a chemist of distinction and chair of the Science Museum, is noted as a cool customer, but get her onto the subject of her favourite poet, who once lodged in the house where the Archers now live, and she throws caution to the wind.

WB Yeats described Brooke as the handsomest young man in England – ‘And he was,’ cries Mary with shining eyes. ‘And bisexual?’ I ask.

‘Irresistible,’ says Mary happily. She is infectiously passionate about Brooke – his looks, his personality, his letters, his diaries, his prose and travel writing as much as his poetry – and reckons he is underrated because people compare him with the other Great War poets, forgetting that Brooke died towards the beginning of the war, in April 1915, and did not write of its horrors but of the old England that was vanishing as the war took hold.

I have not read Mary’s last published book – Nanostructured and Photoelectrochemical Systems for Solar Photon Conversion – but I have suggested to her (seriously) what her next should be: Rupert Brooke: A Posthumous Autobiography, his own story told in his own words, edited and linked by his most devoted admirer.

I owe Dame Mary a favour because, along with Mr Motivator, she has changed my life. While he is transforming my posture (see below), she has transformed my productivity. After tea at the Old Vicarage (and, yes, there was still honey on the table, as well as cucumber sandwiches and home-made coffee cake) and before we go outside to admire the life-size statue of Brooke the Archers have put in pride of place on a plinth in the driveway (onto which Mary jumps to tenderly put her arms around the effigy of her hero), she mentions, in passing, that she is now managing her time using the Pomodoro Technique.

Do you know it? I didn’t. It was developed by an Italian, Francesco Cirillo, in the late 1980s to help improve your work focus and stop you from needlessly ploughing on past the point of optimal productivity.

The technique uses a timer to break down work into 25-minute modules, separated by short breaks. Each module is known as a pomodoro, named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that Cirillo used as a university student. After every pomodoro you take a five-minute break. After four, you break for half an hour.

Following Mary’s lead, I’m doing it now and achieving twice as much in half the time. I kid you not.

Mr Motivator is a Jamaican-born TV fitness guru and I bumped into him the other day recording an episode of Michael McIntyre’s Saturday night gameshow, The Wheel. Mr Motivator (aka known as actor Derrick Evans), 68, moves (truly) like a man half that age.

He noticed my stooped back and was not impressed. ‘I can do something about that,’ he said.

‘Really?’ I asked. ‘My wife would be grateful.’

‘Imagine,’ he said, ‘that you are holding an orange between your shoulder blades. Hold it tight. Tighter! Now squeeze that orange as hard as you can until the juice is running down your spine. Do it every hour on the hour and you’ll have a straight back within a month.’ I’m doing better than that. I’m squeezing that orange every 25 minutes, in between my pomodori. I am now an inch taller than I was when you last saw me. Again, I kid you not.

As if my month hadn’t been extraordinary enough already, on 10th June, on what would have been the 100th birthday of the Duke of Edinburgh, I found myself raising a glass to the great man’s memory, seated at the very table on which, 100 years before, he first came into this world.

Prince Philip was born on a table because his mother’s doctor wanted her on a solid surface and not a bed for the birth. He was born on the island of Corfu because his mother, Alice, a greatgranddaughter of Queen Victoria, had married Prince Andrew, a son of the King of Greece. Prince Philip told me he had no sentimental feelings about either his birthing table or, to be frank, Greece. As he reminded me when I first began writing his biography, his Greek grandfather was assassinated and his father was driven into exile soon after Philip’s birth.

In exile, needing to raise money, Prince Andrew sold the contents of Mon Repos to an English buyer. The table (price 7,000 drachmas) ended up in the City boardroom of shipping brokers Howe Robinson, which is where I found it – in good nick: a handsome traditional dining table which, with extensions, could seat 24.

Prince Philip was always irritated by reports that said he’d been born on the kitchen table at Mon Repos. It was a line repeated by the BBC at the time of his death. ‘Journalists!’ snorted the Duke. ‘Why can’t they get anything right?’

Mary is passionate about Brooke – his looks, personality, prose and poetry

Philip: The Final Portrait by Gyles Brandreth is out now (Coronet)