The Old Un’s Notes

There’ll be Spitfires over the White Cliffs of Dover

Were you one of those schoolboys who in 1973 salivated about the new range of ‘pocket money’ model kits of tanks, warplanes and ships?

The Matchbox kits were cheap and simple to make, with tremendous, nostalgic power for Second World War buffs.

Fans will love The Golden Years of Matchbox Art, a new book by Roy Huxley, now in his eighties.

Huxley painted the pictures for practically all the boxes over nearly 20 years.

Here is his stirring picture of the Supermarine Spitfire Mk IX, Britain’s most famous short-range, high-performance Second World War aircraft, with its Merlin engine and its distinctive roar.

More than 20,000 of them were built between 1938 and 1948. The Mk IX was the most-produced version after it entered service in 1942.

Chocks away, chaps! Fran Lebowitz, the New York writer, is only 70 but she’s long since established herself as an oldie deity – as the goddess of grumbling.

She’s been famous in New York for over half a century, since Andy Warhol hired her as a columnist on his Interview magazine.

But she’s only just beginning to be appreciated this side of the pond, thanks to the series of interviews she gave to Martin Scorsese this year in the Netflix series Pretend It’s a City.

Now oldies can luxuriate in her heavenly grumbles in The Fran Lebowitz Reader (Virago), published this September.

Here is her golden advice to teenagers: ‘Think before you speak. Read before you think. This will give you something to think about that you didn’t make up yourself – a wise move at any age, but most especially at 17, when you are in danger

Among this month’s contributors

David Bailey took our front-cover picture of the Kray twins in 1965. Bailey says, ‘I quite liked Reg even though, when he was 19, he slashed my father’s face with a razor. Ron was a basket full of rattlesnakes.’

Mary Beard (p18) is Professor of Classics at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Newnham College. Her latest book is Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern.

Nemone Lethbridge (p14) is one of Britain’s earliest female barristers, called to the Bar in 1956. She is author of Nemone: A young woman barrister’s battle against prejudice, class and misogyny.

Henry Blofeld (p16) began writing about cricket, for the Times, in 1962. In 1972, he first appeared on Test Match Special. His new book is Ten to Win ... and the Last Man In: My Pick of Test Match Cliffhangers.

Queen of the grumblers: Fran Lebowitz

of coming to annoying conclusions.’

Another of her wise suggestions to the young is ‘Remember that as a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy that the phone is for you.’

Best of all, though, is her eternal wisdom on why we all get annoyed but shouldn’t try to destroy the person who annoys us. She wrote it long before Cancel Culture became a thing, but it has never been so true:

‘I would be the very last to criticise the annoyed. I myself find many – even most – things objectionable. Being offended is the natural consequence of leaving one’s home. I do not like aftershave lotion, adults who roller-skate, children who speak French or anyone who is unduly tan. I do not, however, go around

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‘As it turned out, dog heaven was also cat hell’

enacting legislation and putting up signs.’

Oh, and what’s more, the immaculately dressed Lebowitz loves Savile Row clothes and hates leisurewear with inane sentences printed all over it. You’re always welcome at Oldie Towers for a good old grumble with the Old Un, Fran!

The architectural historian and herald John Martin Robinson proudly trumpets himself as an ‘Archetypal Young Fogey of the 1970s’ in his new memoir, Holland Blind Twilight.

Robinson contributed to the Spectator in the 1980s when, as he puts it, the magazine rejoiced in ‘the dominance of fogeydom’.

AN Wilson was the literary editor. Charles Moore was the editor and James Knox was the publisher – and biographer of Robinson’s fogey heroes Robert Byron and Osbert Lancaster.

The Spectator cook was Jennifer Paterson (1928-99), later famous as one of the Two Fat Ladies in the cookery programme of that name.

When Paterson died, she left her emerald ring – which so mesmerised hygiene-obsessed viewers when she was mixing dough – to Clare Asquith, deputy literary editor at the Spectator. She left Robinson a Victorian silver Stilton scoop.

Robinson gives Paterson his ultimate accolade – as ‘an honorary Young Fogey’. It sparks the question – can women be fogeys? Any suggestions for candidates gratefully received by the Old Un. most of his time bonking Petronella Wyatt on the seat of a car in the garage in Brownlow Mews’.

Surely time for a blue plaque – but should it be over the garage or on the car seat?

The story of the survival of St Melangell’s Shrine, hidden away for 400 years in the walls of an isolated church in the Berwyn Mountains of mid-Wales, is enough to make the most hardened cynic believe in miracles.

It’s told in Peter Stanford’s If These Stones Could Talk: A History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland Told Through Twenty Buildings (Hodder). Pictured is a line drawing of the church by architect Stephen Tsang.

The shrine’s richly carved casing was originally part of a Norman church that recalled a community of independentminded seventh-century holy women. Judged too ‘popish’ by Henry VIII’s reforming lieutenants, it was condemned to be smashed to smithereens.

The locals, though, were no pushover and quietly resisted the central diktat by dismantling it section by section and hiding it in the thick north wall of the church until the madness passed.

That took a while, and it was only in the 1980s when a new vicar, Paul Davies, and his wife, Evelyn, rescued it from eternal entombment in the walls and rebuilt it piece by piece.

Today, standing on the

Fogey AGM: Martin Robinson and Jennifer Paterson after Mass

There is only a brief mention of a succeeding editor of the Spectator, one Boris Johnson. Robinson declares him to be ‘lazy, amoral, ambitious, selfcentred’. He adds that Johnson ‘seemed to spend

A welcome in the hillside: St Melangell’s Church, Pennant Melangell, by Stephen Tsang