The Oldie January 2024

MY FAVOURITE BEAR – ROGER LEWIS ON SOOTY

PONT

CARTOON

‘The Oldie is an incredible magazine – perhaps the best magazine in the world’ Graydon Carter

January 2024 | £5.25 £4.13 to subscribers | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 434

It’s a Wonderful Life!

By Karolyn Grimes, child star of the best ever Christmas film Angela Rippon, our Oldie of the Year – Gyles Brandreth My dear Dad – Robert Hardy by Justine Hardy Harold Wilson’s lover – Quentin Letts on Lady Falkender

Give for £3 an issue See page 31

It’s a wonderful film page 14

Features 14 Best ever Christmas film Christopher Sandford 16 Oldie of the Year Awards 2023 22 Not mad – just sad Rachel Kelly 24 Matchbox art Michael Foley 28 Robert Hardy, my Dad Justine Hardy 30 Rules of entertainment Lulu Taylor 33 Anne Shelton, the other Forces Sweetheart John Temple 34 My parents were ready to die Matthew Norman 38 The churchwarden’s tale Nick Primmer 52 Jeremy Lewis Prize Robert Parsons

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: Who was Boethius? Lindsay Johns 12 Modern Life: What is heteropessimism?

Richard Godwin

Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA www.theoldie.co.uk

Su b queriess ?

Email th

Angela Rippon, Oldie of the Year page 16

21 Oldie Man of Letters A N Wilson 25 Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips 40 History David Horspool 42 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 43 Country Mouse Giles Wood 44 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 45 Small World Jem Clarke 47 School Days Sophia Waugh 48 God Sister Teresa 48 Memorial Service: Nigel Lawson James Hughes-Onslow 49 The Doctor’s Surgery Dr Theodore Dalrymple 50 Readers’ Letters 52 I Once Met … Arthur Miller Benedict Nightingale 76 Commonplace Corner 76 Rant: On-screen pop-ups Carolyn Whitehead 85 Crossword 87 Bridge Andrew Robson 87 Competition Tessa Castro 94 Ask Virginia Ironside

Books 54 Marcia Williams: The Life and Times of Baroness Falkender, by Linda McDougall Quentin Letts

Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips eoldie@ Art editor Michael Hardaker subscri Editorial assistant Amelia Milne ption. co.uk o Publisher James Pembroke r phone Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer 01858 At large Richard Beatty 438791 Our Old Master David Kowitz

Elegy in a Bucks churchyard page 38

55 Life at Full Tilt: The Selected Writings of Dervla Murphy, edited by Ethel Crowley Dea Birkett 57 Land of Shame and Glory,

by Peter Hennessy Francis Beckett 59 The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens, by Helena Kelly Jasper Rees 61 Humanise, by Thomas Heatherwick Jonathan Meades 63 Went to London, Took the Dog: A Diary, by Nina Stibbe Harry Mount

Arts 64 Film: Napoleon Harry Mount 65 Theatre: The Witches William Cook 65 Radio Valerie Grove 66 Television Frances Wilson 67 Music Richard Osborne 68 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 69 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits

71 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 71 Restaurants James Pembroke 72 Sport Jim White 72 Motoring Alan Judd 73 Drink Bill Knott 74 Digital Life Matthew Webster 74 Money Matters Neil Collins 77 Bird of the Month: Red-Legged Partridge John McEwen

Travel 78 Advent in Aachen William Cook 80 Overlooked Britain: a duke’s mausoleum in South Lanarkshire Lucinda Lambton 82 On the Road: Rebecca Hall Louise Flind 83 Taking a Walk: Slow road to Cheshire Patrick Barkham

Reader Offers

70 Gardening David Wheeler 70 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld

Literary lunch p47 Reader trip to Villa Cetinale, near Siena p75

Oldie subscriptions To order a print subscription, go to https://checkout.theoldie.co.uk/offers, or email theoldie@subscription.co.uk, or call 01858 438791 Print subscription rates for 12 issues: UK £49.50; Europe/Eire £58; USA/Canada £70; rest of world £69.

To buy a digital subscription for £29.99 or single issue for £2.99, go to the App Store on your tablet/mobile and search for ‘The Oldie’.

Advertising For display, contact : Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or Jasper Gibbons on 020 3859 7096 For classified: Monty Martin-Zakheim on 020 3859 7093 News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk Front cover It's a Wonderful Life, 1946.

Landmark Media/Alamy

The Oldie January 2024 3

The Old Un’s Notes A galaxy of vintage stars gathered at the National Liberal Club for the 2023 Oldie of the Year Awards.

Our champion Oldie of the Year, Angela Rippon, 79, said, ‘When I was 50, John Birt, then Director-General of the BBC, said, “You’ve had your day. It’s time to let younger women have a go.” He managed to be both misogynist and sexist at the same time.

‘Well, just recently, someone my age at the supermarket said, “I’m so thrilled you’re on Strictly now. At our age, we just disappear. Hope you make some headlines.” ’

Oldie of the Year 2023: Harry Mount; Don Black; Arlene Phillips; Janet Baker; Patricia Owtram; Angela Rippon; Julian Glover; Sooty and Richard Cadel; Gyles Brandreth

Among this month’s contributors Mark Ellen (p17) played in Ugly Rumours with Tony Blair at Oxford. He edited Q magazine and The Word. He wrote Rock Stars Stole My Life! and does the Word in Your Ear podcast with David Hepworth.

Roger Lewis (p18) wrote Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor; Seasonal Suidice Notes; and Charles Hawtrey: The Man Who Was Private Widdle.

NEIL SPENCE

Rachel Kelly (p22) is author of You'll Never Walk Alone: Poems for Life’s Ups and Downs. She also wrote Black Rainbow: My Journey through Depression. She worked for the Times.

Quentin Letts (p54) is the Daily Mail’s political sketchwriter. He was a theatre critic for the Times. He is author of Patronising Bastards: How the Elites Betrayed Britain.

Angela signed off, saying, ‘Stop writing us off!’

Patricia Owtram, 100 – as she accepted the Oldie Secret Agent award – said, ‘During the war, I worked at listening stations on the east coast, listening to German ships coming out of the harbour. We were trained how to use rifles – and I think I’m the only respectable old lady in Chiswick who knows how to use a Sten gun.’

As Don Black, 85, accepted our Man with the Golden Pen award, he said, ‘How thrilled my parents are to hear I’ve won this.

Over the years, I’ve changed my pin-ups. I began with Jane Russell as a young man, and moved on to Ingrid Bergman. I’m now on to Miriam Margolyes.

‘Just one word to Gyles Brandreth, the Chairman of

the Oldie of the Year Judges – you’re allowed to turn things down.’

Sooty and Richard Cadell received our Oldie Hand-in-Glove Bear Award.

Richard said, ‘I’m used to playing to children of six.

So Oldie of the Year is a different crowd.

‘But it’s OK. Sooty has been taking his CRT – Cliff Richard Tablets. He’s 75 this year but has never had Botox and has never smiled or frowned.’

Arlene Phillips – as she accepted her Oldie Dancing Queen award – said, ‘I’ve just turned 80. For the first time, the morning after, my hand shook. And then my invitation to receive the Oldie award came.

‘You’re as young as you feel, they say. Well, I know I’m not. This award makes The Oldie January 2024 5

Important stories you may have missed Man could not do sentence because of his feet Blackpool Gazette

me realise – I know I’m old.

But it’s a delight to receive it.’

Opera legend Janet Baker acceptedher Oldie Maestra of the Year saying, ‘It’s so lovely to be in a room full of happiness and joy – particularly in the world today.’

And Oldie Movie Titan, Julian Glover, declared, ‘I’ve read every issue of the magazine since the first one in 1992 – so it’s a great honour to get this.

‘One of the few benefits of getting old is your fingertips go smooth. It meant I understood the line in King Lear, “Pray you, undo this button.” He meant he couldn’t actually undo them.

I know because this morning I needed my wife to do my own buttons up.’

Many congrats to all our Oldie champions! Read about them in full, from page 16 onwards, in this issue.

Left: Angela Rippon, Oldie of the Year 2023, and Gyles Brandreth Below: Tim Rice, Rachel Johnson and Maureen Lipman, Oldie of the Year judges

Litter-picker’s shock as poo bag nearly hits her Bolton News Drain cover replaced Henley Standard £15 for published contributions

NEXT ISSUE The February issue is on sale on 10th January 2024.

OLDIE BOOKS The Very Best of The Oldie Cartoons, The Oldie Annual 2023 and other Oldie books are available at: www.theoldie.co.uk/ readers-corner/shop Free p&p.

OLDIE NEWSLETTER Go to the Oldie website; put your email address in the red SIGN UP box.

HOLIDAY WITH THE OLDIE Go to www.theoldie.co. uk/courses-tours 6 The Oldie January 2024

Clockwise from above: Arlene Phillips, Oldie Dancing Queen, and Angela Rippon; Robert Bathurst, who's just been starring in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell; Oldie Secret Agent, Patricia Owtram and Kenneth Cranham; Sheila Hancock, Oldie of the Year Emerita; Sooty, Hand-in-Glove Bear of the Year, and Richard Cadell

NEIL SPENCE

GET THE OLDIE APP Go to App Store or Google Play Store. Search for Oldie Magazine and then pay for app.

‘Keep going – it only got 2½ stars and lots of negative reviews’

What do words such as sisu (Finnish for ‘strength of will in the face of adversity’); utepils (Norwegian for ‘a beer that is enjoyed outside, particularly on the first hot day of the year’) and mbuki-mvuki (Swahili for ‘to shed clothes; to dance uninhibited’) have in common?

None has a direct, or particularly precise, translation in English – and all are now a part of a new online glossary called the Positive Lexicography Project.

It’s an index of hard-totranslate words, started by Dr Tim Lomas, a lecturer in positive psychology, at the University of East London. He scoured the internet and asked friends, colleagues and students for suggestions.

‘Rodin’s twerker’

He then used online dictionaries and academic papers to attempt to define each word and capture its nuances.

The glossary has grown to some 400 terms in 62 languages, while visitors to the website can propose new entries and refine Lomas’s definitions.

A veritable catalogue of life’s many joys, it reveals most profoundly how language, culture and geography are intertwined.

In these troubled times, it's a useful resource when understanding your neighbour is more important than ever.

‘For heaven's sake, David – stop being such a victim’

The woke terrors may have made academic life less congenial than it was, but you can still drink well.

The wine committee at Jesus College, Cambridge, announces proudly that its new cellar has room for 20,000 bottles.

At the moment, it contains a mere 13,000 bottles, more than a third being claret from

‘ ‘You have multiple personality disorder – so I’d like to talk to the personality that will be paying me’

such châteaux as Batailley and Cissac.

Some 1,200 bottles of vintage port (mostly Taylor’s), plus Sauternes, Barsac and Tokai, come in handy on Thursday evenings when dons retire for stickies in the combination room.

The oldest two bottles in the cellar are both Buals (Madeira), from 1872 and 1915, followed by a 1915 Château Clos Haut-Peyraguey.

Jesus’s ten-strong wine committee hoses back the occasional odd-man-out, such as a bottle of 1952 Petrus which needed tidying up.

But wokery is on the horizon. Anthony Bowen, Emeritus Fellow in Classics and upstanding (not that the others are horizontal) member of the wine committee, reports that the long tradition of buying claret may change because, for eco reasons, ‘our diet

contains no red meat except on special occasions’.

Petrus doesn’t go quite as well with beansprout salad or nut loaf as it does with beef Wellington.

Whatever you’re eating on Christmas Day – and whatever you’re washing it down with – a very merry Christmas and the happiest of New Years to Oldie-readers, one and all!

‘I've got a smart meter, smart phone, smart TV – and then there's him’

Charles Wheeler with Nixon, East Berlin, 1963. From the new book Charles Wheeler by Shirin Wheeler, his widow The Oldie January 2024 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

When Lizzie met Maggie

PA IMAGES / ALAMY

Margaret Thatcher was devoted to her Queen but when she curtseyed, it all went wrong The Grim Reaper has been having a high old time of late.

I’ve barely had a moment to keep up with my diary, I have been so busy writing letters of condolence, attending funerals and giving addresses at memorial services.

I was especially saddened by the passing of Prue Penn, 97, a long-standing friend of Elizabeth II and a woman so alive it’s hard to believe she could be dead.

A few years ago, Lady Penn got my address from a mutual acquaintance and, out of the blue, sent me an email. (She was computer-savvy: her grandchildren called her ‘techno-granny’.)

It was a fan letter, really. She told me I was the only writer who seemed to understand the unusual relationship between the Queen and Prince Philip.

She invited me up to Scotland to meet her and we hit it off right away. We were both immediately sorry we hadn’t met years before. Charmingly, she called ours ‘a departure-lounge friendship’.

Inevitably, we swapped our favourite royal stories. There was only one of mine she hadn’t heard before. It was told to me by the equerry who was on duty on the day Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979.

Mrs Thatcher arrived at Buckingham Palace for her first official audience with the Queen. As the equerry walked Mrs T along the Palace corridor to meet Her Majesty, he reminded her gently that it was traditional to curtsey to the Queen, and the new Prime Minister assured him that this wouldn’t be a problem.

She was ready with her curtsey. She had been practising it.

They reached the room where the Queen was waiting. The equerry stepped forward, bowed and said, ‘Your Majesty: the Prime Minister, Your Majesty.’

Margaret Thatcher then executed the most graceful full curtsey, going right down to the ground – where she stayed.

Mrs T then threw a desperate glance towards the equerry, who came beetling over to help – but he couldn’t hoist her up unaided.

So Queen Elizabeth II The Queen and Mrs T, came forward, Claridge’s, 1995 took the other side, and together they returned the Prime Minister to the upright position.

If you like royal stories, please seek out my new podcast.

It’s about first memories. It’s called Rosebud (if you remember Citizen Kane, you will be able to work out why) and it’s simply me in conversation with someone I think is both special and interesting.

Ann Glenconner, 91, recently shared with me wonderful stories of her childhood encounters with the little princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, in the 1930s, when Margaret was already being naughty and Lilibet was already in control. Geri Halliwell of the Spice Girls and Jay Blades of The Repair Shop both came up with entertaining (and unexpected) tales of their close encounters with our new king.

Of course, Rosebud features many oldie favourites (Judi Dench, Joanna Lumley, Sheila Hancock etc), and my New Year resolution is to meet people who though not fabulously famous are certainly very interesting.

For example, I want to talk to the most intelligent person in the land. Who might that be? I have already recorded a conversation with Rowan Williams. So don’t suggest him, but if you have other ideas, please let me know, either by email to hello@rosebudpodcast.com or via a letter to The Oldie.

When I was a student at Oxford in the 1960s, we were encouraged to think that the most intelligent people in the country were Fellows of All Souls, the Oxford college founded by Henry VI in 1438.

All Souls has no undergraduate members (and has had female Fellows since 1979). Each year, recent graduate and postgraduate students can apply for a small number of fellowships through a competitive examination, often described as ‘the hardest exam in the world’.

In 1969, my friend Robert Jackson (later an MP and minister for education and science) had just become a Fellow and quite often took me to dine at the college as his guest.

‘I like the company of clever people,’ I told Robert. ‘In fact, I want the company only of people who are clever, funny or beautiful.’

‘Well,’ said Robert, ‘we should manage two out of three here.’

I especially remember my encounters with the celebrated All Souls Warden John Sparrow. He was gently waspish, but very charming.

Robert explained, ‘He likes young men – and old wine.’

Over the port and dessert, Warden Sparrow showed me the memoirs of one Charles Osman, who became a Fellow in the 1880s and left a memorable account of the fellowship examination.

In the history paper, Osman was able to ‘ramble around all manner of topics’ – the Greek conception of the state, the social conditions of medieval Scotland, the claim of Napoleon to be the successor of Charlemagne, the history of the Crusades and so forth. The account concluded, ‘There remained the paper of translation from five languages, ancient and modern, where I found four of them easy enough.’

In 2024, I want to meet the Charles Osman of our day. If you know who he or she is – or if it’s you! – let me know.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The Oldie January 2024 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

I’m a Farage fan – get me out of here!

Why have I fallen for Nigel? It must be Dad’s old Jag

matthew norman If the question sounded stale from overuse, at least what enticed it was zingily fresh.

‘Have you,’ asked Rebecca, the wife with whom I do not by and large cohabit, ‘gone completely mad?’

I drained the tumbler, refilled it and despairingly cradled my head. ‘Sweet Lord Jesus,’ I murmured, ‘what is wrong with me?’

Becca wearily raised her brows, as if to suggest the question was far too broad and multifaceted to be addressed in the one sitting. Or, come to that, one lifetime.

‘This isn’t good,’ was all she could muster. ‘This is not good at all.’

At first glance, the remark that provoked the above Socratic dialogue may very well seem innocuous. All I had said, immediately before the sanityrelated enquiry, was this: ‘He’s actually not that awful, is he? I mean, you can kinda see why people like him.’

But he is that awful, Nigel Farage, isn’t he? He’s every inch that awful, and then some.

‘What made me say it?’ I whined as the race-baiting horror ingested the scrotum or anus, or whatever, of a kangaroo, or crocodile, or whatever. We were in Becca’s Dorset cottage watching the rancid old scrote, as you will have divined, on I’m A Celebrity…

Theories concerning this latest branch of derangement were duly aired. I posited that it was connected with my having newly turned 60. ‘It’s such a truism that people get more rightwing as they age,’ I conjectured, ‘so maybe it’s that.’

Farage tucks into cow’s teat on I’m a Celebrity 10 The Oldie January 2024

‘Nah,’ she insisted. ‘If anything, you get more left-wing. You still miss Corbyn.’

She had a point. ‘In that case, might I be having a stroke?’

She intently examined my face for drooping features. ‘Nope, you look OK. Mind you, your speech is pretty slurred,’ she added, ‘but then again you have had half a bottle of Scotch.’

We sat there in bamboozled silence for a while. Then she had a eureka moment.

‘I’ve got it,’ she exploded. ‘It’s your father’s Jaguar!’

A month or so ago, I arranged for a charity to collect that 2003 vehicle, which had sat idle and unused for three years since my father stopped driving some months before he died.

But when the guy came to take it away, sentiment intervened. I simply couldn’t tolerate the idea of his beloved car being scrapped. So I spent a small fortune on taxing, insuring, MOTing and servicing it.

And now I’ve fallen head over heels.

It isn’t a raving beauty like Morse’s Mark 2.

It’s one of those slightly bulbous S-Type models, as favoured by the sort of elderly, dithery Faragist who frets about ‘being swamped’ by immigrants in a rural village that hasn’t seen a person of colour since a coach driver dramatically misread a roadmap en route to Leicester in 1983.

My dad, I should add, was by no means a fan of Farage and his poisonous world view. But he did love that car, and I can now appreciate why. The walnut steering wheel, the cream leather seats, the superb engineering, cruise control and the other cute gadgets… It’s such a luxuriant joy to drive that I suddenly feel insulted by my underpowered little Audi.

You’ll probably have read about people who take on the personality traits of previous owners of the hearts transplanted into them. There seems to be a similar phenomenon with cars.

In the Jag, for instance, it takes me 19 seconds (18.97 seconds longer than in

‘Another week of driving it, and you’ll be seeing the upside of Trump’ the Audi) to react to a change of trafficlight colour. I like to maintain a steady 56mph, generally in the fast lane, on motorways. I’ve been contemplating the purchase of a tweed cap.

In a startling neo-Ovidian metamorphosis, to sum up, the Jag is transforming me into a geezer loosely modelled on Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino.

If salvation lies anywhere, it is in the fuel consumption. The car does 4¼ yards to the gallon. By the time you reach the petrol station exit after filling up, the tank is almost empty. You could spend eternity trapped in a forecourt infinity loop, like some Jag-driving Sisyphus.

‘Given that you can’t afford to heat your house, you’ll have to leave it here and take the train home,’ instructed Becca when she caught me grinning indulgently at the chewing Farage.

‘Besides, another week of driving it, and you’ll be seeing the upside of a second term for Donald Trump.’

So there I left the vehicle I am alarmingly tempted to call ‘the old girl’. It – she – is on the drive facing a field in which lives a venerable horse put out to grass. The pair can look at each other and recognise kindred spirits as they see out their days in peaceful seclusion.

How long the detoxification process will take is unclear. But, a week after bidding the Jaguar farewell, if anyone asked me what I want from Santa, I’d have to plump for a Jeremy Clarkson T-shirt, annual membership of the Reform Party and a natty pair of stringback driving gloves.

Boethius?

The philosopher Boethius died 1,500 years ago, in 524 AD – but who was he?

Born in Rome in around 476 AD into a wealthy, patrician family shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire, he was steeped in classical learning from an early age. He duly became a senator, consul, statesman and adviser to Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogothic king of Italy, as well as a theologian and philosopher.

He was instrumental in translating ancient Greek works and sought to reconcile Plato and Aristotle with Christian theology. He also wrote numerous philosophical commentaries and treatises on music, mathematics and theology.

In 522 AD, Boethius was awarded the distinguished administrative position of magister officiorum. But as a result of the machinations of his political rivals, he had a meteoric fall from grace and in 523 AD was imprisoned on a trumped-up charge of treason.

what is heteropessimism?

Heteropessimism is a feeling of despair that has come over a generation of straight people. Well, specifically, straight women.

While men can be heteropessimists – see the incels, the ‘involuntarily celibate’ theta males who complain bitterly about women online – heteropessimism has wider purchase among women.

Many women feel that the dire specimens with whom they keep matching on dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble aren’t isolated examples.

There are simply too many shirtless bros who say ‘Only swipe right if you’re a ten’ or ‘Blowjobs are a must’.

Even beyond the apps, they are finding man-children who ‘either are quite openly damaged and not ready to be in a relationship, or else profess to be and then abandon ship at the first glimmer of intimacy’, as one friend puts it. She adds, ‘I just don’t think men are putting in the same effort.’

12 The Oldie January 2024

While in prison awaiting execution, Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, his masterpiece – a philosophical treatise in a mixture of verse and prose on the role of fortune, the nature of true happiness, the vanity of earthly goods, divine providence and God’s foreknowledge.

In it, Lady Philosophy visits Boethius in prison and, thanks to a Socratic dialogue with the prisoner, provides intellectual succour and spiritual consolation, which enable him to endure his unjust incarceration and impending death.

Boethius died in 524 AD in Pavia, having been tortured, strangled and bludgeoned on the orders of Theodoric.

In death, he was seen as a Catholic martyr and his cult is honoured on 23rd October each year.

The Consolation soon became one of the most influential and widely-read works of the Middle Ages. It was translated by Alfred the Great, Chaucer and Queen Elizabeth.

Dante mentions Boethius with

veneration in Canto X of Paradiso.

Often referred to as ‘the last of the Romans and the first of the Scholastics’, Boethius is a hugely important but nowadays sadly neglected figure.

Even 1,500 years after his untimely death, he still speaks eloquently to existential, philosophical and metaphysical concerns.

The Consolation of Philosophy addresses many of the eternal truths at the heart of the human condition.

Despite his avowed faith, Boethius made his masterpiece conspicuously devoid of Christian theology, preferring to embrace classical philosophy in his hour of need.

Both Neoplatonic and Stoic in tone, The Consolation accepts hardship and misfortune, together with an awareness of life’s ephemerality.

The book poignantly articulates fundamental questions about the life of man and his place in the universe – questions as timely and relevant today as they were 1,500 years ago.

Lindsay Johns

So, perhaps, comes the conclusion: there is something rotten at the heart of all traditional couplings – something that no amount of feminist gains or financial parity can ever eradicate. Thus a generation of heteropessimists seek solace in spinsterdom; in cats; in bitter complaints about men; and in homosexual relationships.

‘Honestly, you would be amazed at the open hostility on the apps,’ says the writer Elle Hunt, 32, who has frequently written about modern dating for the Guardian. ‘I genuinely know women my age who’ve always dated men and considered themselves straight who’ve switched their dating apps to show them women, just because they’re so fatigued and disillusioned by it all.’

The term itself was coined by the writer Asa Seresin in a 2019 essay for The New Inquiry. He described it as ‘performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience’.

After all, ‘compared to the heady

possibilities of the queer world to come, heterosexuality appears unbearably drab and predictable’.

Still, Seresin’s essay was a critique of heteropessimism. Seresin is himself trans and argued that straight people affecting to hate being straight is a bit like white people making jokes about white people – ie a bit cringeworthy. By focusing on heterosexuality as the root of the problem, the heteropessimists not only misdirect their anger but succumb instead to a numbing fatalism.

Perhaps, Seresin hints, ‘heterosexuality is not a terminal diagnosis but a possible site of experiment and change’.

In the meantime, though, there are the apps. If you are not inclined to go gay, says Hunt, there are two options: drastically lower your standards; or continue to hope against hope.

‘I choose to believe that there is a man out there who will take an interest and meet my own terms – but I’m wondering if I have to wait for the first round of divorces, when the men have grown up a bit,’ she says.

Richard Godwin

ANL / SHUTTERSTOCK

who was

At 83, Karolyn Grimes tells Christopher Sandford about the joys of playing James Stewart’s daughter in the Christmas classic

S

everal years ago, while reviewing a biography I’d written of Steve McQueen, an unkind critic said that the book ‘suffers from the inevitable handicaps that beset all authors who don’t personally know their subject, or his working environment’.

He meant I hadn’t yet been called on to star in a Hollywood blockbuster that involved hurling myself down the streets of San Francisco in a soupedup Ford Mustang – or, for that matter, in any other sort of Hollywood film.

To judge from the life story of the American actress Karolyn Grimes, perhaps I should be thanking my lucky stars I was denied the privilege.

Born in Los Angeles in 1940, Karolyn was a showbusiness child. While her father worked as a local supermarket manager, her mother took her blonde, curly-haired daughter on a round of casting calls.

Just before her sixth birthday, Karolyn went into a room on the RKO Pictures lot one warm morning and met Frank Capra, the legendary director responsible for the Oscar-winning It Happened One Night and Mr Smith Goes to Washington, as well as a series of iconic wartime documentaries.

He was auditioning young hopefuls for a new film. ‘There were about a dozen other little girls waiting their turn to go in,’ Grimes tells me, ‘and just as they called my name, one of the mothers walked past and spilled her cup of coffee all over my best frilly dress. This being Hollywood, I always wondered if she did it on purpose.’

Rising above the mishap, Karolyn shook the middle-aged Capra’s hand, treated him to her broadest smile and asked what he would like her to do.

‘Show me how you’d look if your pet dog had just died,’ the director said.

14 The Oldie January 2024

Christmas isn’t Christmas without it

After that, he invited her to pretend it was Christmas morning and she was suddenly the happiest child in the world.

‘I must have done OK,’ Karolyn says with a throaty chuckle, ‘because not long afterwards we got a call to say I had the part.’

The project in question turned out to be a somewhat unusual story about a suicidal small-town banker, played by James Stewart, and his redemption by a guardian angel named Clarence. It was called It’s a Wonderful Life, and was released in 1946.

Unbeknownst to young Karolyn, the film already had a long and troubled backstory. The original tale had been written several years earlier by the American historian Philip Van Doren Stern. After it was rejected by dozens of publishers, Stern had it privately printed and sent it out to

‘It isn’t just a Christmas movie.

It’s about how we all have to face life’

friends as an extended Christmas newsletter.

One of the recipients liked it enough to forward it to a contact at RKO, who then had a 12-picture deal with Capra.

The perfectionist director in turn rejected eight successive draft scripts, until early in 1946 he recruited the husband-andwife writing duo Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich.

Goodrich later called Capra ‘that horrid man’, while Hackett remembered the director as an ‘arrogant son of a bitch’, who in the end ‘basically rewrote the script with his good chum Dorothy Parker’.

Karolyn Grimes plays the part of Stewart’s youngest child, Zuzu (named after a then-popular brand of biscuits), who gets to trill the film’s climactic line: ‘Look, Daddy, every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.’

Yes, it’s utter tosh, but something about the tear welling up in Stewart’s eye as she says it still has the power to move audiences today.

‘It was a great ending to a great film,’ Capra said, for once throwing modesty to the wind. ‘In fact, I thought it was the best movie anybody had ever made.’

Back in 1946, audiences didn’t agree.

For many years, both the press and the public were unconvinced by It’s a Wonderful Life, which failed to break even at the box office. ‘America was just recovering from the war, and people wanted feelgood stories about returning soldiers, not about a middle-aged man contemplating suicide,’ Grimes says.

She never even saw the finished film until she was in her thirties. ‘My mother told me it would go to my head to watch myself on screen. Pride was the big taboo in our family.’

EVERETT COLLECTION INC; ALLSTAR PICTURE LIBRARY LTD / ALAMY

It’s a wonderful film

A few months after finishing It’s a Wonderful Life, Grimes found herself appearing as the winsome child star of another supernatural Hollywood drama. This one was called The Bishop’s Wife (1947), and it starred Cary Grant and David Niven.

‘Cary was very sweet. He had a photographic memory, always knew everyone’s lines, and we had a lot of fun together,’ Karolyn says.

‘Niven was the complete opposite. Very uptight.

I don’t think he liked kids.’

Real-life tragedy then struck the young actress. Grimes’s mother died of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease when Karolyn was just 14; less than a year later, her father died in a car accident.

‘My dad didn’t leave a will, so there was a court hearing in LA about my custody,’ Grimes says. ‘My crazy aunt and uncle came out from the Midwest to take me back with them, and it was awful. I remember I asked the judge if I had a say in my own future, and his exact words were, “What you want is a drop in the bucket, young lady.”’

Karolyn spent the rest of her childhood living in rural Missouri with a family she describes as ‘mean-spirited religious fanatics’, which among other things put paid to her fledgling movie career. She’d appeared in 16 films in six years, and had about $7,000 (just over $100,000 in today’s money) to show for it.

Adult life wasn’t always wonderful for Grimes either. She married young to get away from the Missouri family, had two daughters, and then divorced. One of her sons with her second husband – a fellow divorcee with several children of his own – died by suicide, and then her husband succumbed to cancer.

‘In the last year of his life, he wasn’t making good decisions because of his

Karolyn today, with Z for Zuzu pendant

Karolyn Grimes and James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Inset: The Bishop’s Wife (1947) with Cary Grant, Grimes, Sara Haden, Loretta Young, David Niven

illness. We lost everything and then he died.’

I might add that Grimes says all this with a refreshing lack of self-pity, frequently laughing at herself for being the apparent punchline of some cosmic joke about the tenuous nature of fame.

Several years later, Grimes met a clinical psychologist named Chris Brunell and moved with him to Seattle. This went down poorly with her stepchildren, who sued her for their late father’s life-insurance money.

‘It was only when I was in my forties that I finally came to appreciate the true message of Capra’s film,’ Karolyn says.

‘You need some miles on the clock to realise that we’re all going to suffer at some point, and it’s how we deal with it that counts.’

The more I spoke to the former actress, now 83, the more I found myself warming to her homespun philosophy of life.

After falling out of copyright in the

1970s, It’s a Wonderful Life got a new lease of life when American television channels, grateful for the free content, began airing it every Christmas. It’s since become a seasonal staple around the world – and Grimes has come to act as a roving ambassador for the film.

‘I think I was put on a path to experience certain things to learn about compassion,’ Karolyn says today, still a trim and effervescent figure with a broad smile and a Z (for Zuzu) pendant around her neck, ‘so I could help other people going through their own issues over the years.

‘It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t just a Christmas movie, or even a strictly Christian one,’ she adds. ‘It’s really about how we all have to face life, and how most of us come to ask a higher power to show us the way when things get really hard.’

Christopher Sandford is author of The Rolling Stones: Sixty Years The Oldie January 2024 15

The 2023 Oldie of the Year Awards Our Champion – the Queen of Broadcasting and the Dance Floor

Angela Rippon

A

s the late great Sir Bruce Forsyth would have said, ‘Didn’t she do well?’

She did better than well – she did brilliantly. In November 2023, Angela May Rippon, born in Plymouth on 12th October 1944, waltzed, tangoed, rumba’d and cha-cha-cha’d her way to the Blackpool Tower Ballroom as the oldest-ever contestant in the 20-year history of the BBC’s most popular talent competition, Strictly Come Dancing.

If you follow the show, you will know that, apart from winning, ‘getting to Blackpool’ is what it’s all about. The Tower Ballroom, a late-Victorian Frank Matcham masterpiece, is the Mecca of ballroom dancing. All the ballroom greats have strutted their stuff on its fabulous sprung floor. Every year, the Strictly contenders simply want to survive the early rounds to get themselves to Blackpool.

Angela Rippon did just that – in her 80th year and in some style. With her professional dance partner and coach, choreographer Kai Widdrington, 28, beneath the famous Blackpool chandelier, with apparently effortless grace, she danced her last dance: an American Smooth performed to the Ella Fitzgerald version of Tea for Two. It was a fitting finale to a fabulous two months of Saturday-night telly in which the veteran newsreader wowed us with her high style and high kicks. She’s 79 and still doing the splits.

And, all through her run on Strictly, she kept going with her day job, too: researching, rehearsing and presenting Rip Off Britain, the BBC2 consumer affairs programme she co-hosts with two other golden oldies, Gloria Hunniford, 83, and Julia Somerville, 76.

‘I’ll stop working when the phone stops ringing,’ she says. ‘The splits – that’s nothing. It’s a party trick. It’s not dancing.

It’s just that I’m flexible and strong.’

Angela knew she was never going to win Strictly. She was up against bobby16 The Oldie January 2024

Evergreen – from Morecambe & Wise in 1976 to Strictly in 2023

dazzling Bobby Brazier, aged 20, who beat her in the dance-off, as well as the two most likely eventual winners of the series: actress Ellie Leach, 22, and 29-year-old actor and dancer Layton Williams.

Without question, Angela has to be our Oldie of the Year because the honour goes to an individual deemed to be ‘making a contribution’ in later life while demonstrating that they still have (in the fine phrase of our founder, Richard Ingrams) ‘snap in their celery’. There’s crackle and pop as well as snap in Angela’s celery, I can tell you. And steel, too.

She is a tough cookie and always has been. Her Devonian father was in the Royal Marines. Angela first saw him when he came back from the war in 1947. Her Scottish mother worked for a fine-china company and as a seamstress. Angela left school at 17 and got a job in the photographic department at the Western Morning News.

She had ambition from the start. I first met her 51 years ago. I can tell you the date because I keep a diary: ‘Tuesday 12th September 1972. Last night I took the overnight sleeper to Plymouth. I am here recording Open

House at Westward TV, edited and presented by Angela Rippon. She is alarmingly fierce with everybody, except me. We do the programmes “as live”, but in the middle of one of my pieces today I “dried”. I just came to a standstill. It was halfway through the recording. We had to stop the tape, roll back and start the entire programme all over again. She took it incredibly well.’

She was always lovely to me – but she could be quite frightening. When we filmed the last programme in the series, the floor manager got the final countdown wrong and didn’t give Angela time for a proper sign-off. She was not amused. I could tell that this was a formidable lady who was going places.

As a young woman, you had to be formidable to go places in those days.

In 1974, she became the first woman regularly to read the news on BBC TV. In 1976, she burst out from behind her news desk to make her national dance debut on the Morecambe and Wise Christmas show. Since then, she hasn’t stopped. The Nine O’Clock News, Top Gear, the original Come Dancing, the Eurovision Song Contest – you name it, she’s presented it.

She’s done all sorts of good works, too. She chaired the English National Ballet. She is patron of the Old Time Dance Society.

She is an ambassador for Silver Swans, the Royal Academy of Dance initiative keeping older people fit through dance.

She is a cool customer – literally. She takes ice baths. She regularly survives three-minute sessions in a cryotherapy tank at -120° centigrade. But she is a cool customer with a warm heart.

I love her. I admire her old-school good manners, her matchless staying power and her indomitable work ethic.

She is my kind of role model. Keep dancing – and you too can skip blithely into your ninth decade.

As Brucie would have said, ‘She’s our favourite.’

Gyles Brandreth

SUZAN MOORE / ALAMY

THE OLDIE OF THE YEAR

Dame Janet Baker

PA IMAGES ; WENN RIGHTS LTD / ALAMY

oldie maestra of the year

It was not only the voice that was instantly recognisable; it was the personality, too. Here, one felt, was something altogether special – the genuine article, you might say.

At the age of 28, Janet Baker featured – ‘starred’ is not a word she would ever use – in what remains one of the finest of all recordings of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, her singing of Dido’s celebrated lament youthful, radiant and intense as none before and few since.

The voice was that of a high contralto with a full mezzo-soprano range. It was John Barbirolli who’d steered Kathleen Ferrier away from the dead-end career of the ‘oratorio contralto’. There was no such need with Janet Baker. The ground had been surveyed, the journey planned, the techniques acquired. The recordings of music by Elgar, Mahler, Berlioz and Ravel that she made with Barbirolli before his death in 1970 are a treasury within a treasury.

‘To stand a few feet from that man and be involved with the greatest pieces of music in the world – that marks one’s life,’ she told documentary-maker John Bridcut in 2019. The respect was mutual.

Barbirolli meant no disrespect to his beloved Kathleen when he told Michael Kennedy, ‘Of course, Janet is by far the greater artist.’

Avoiding the fate of the ‘oratorio contralto’ did not absolve her from singing a good deal of Bach, and doing so with something of Ferrier’s own heartstopping intensity. Yet she was equally at home amid the vocal dazzlements and more worldly concerns of Handel’s operas and oratorios.

If many of the protagonists he portrayed – Monteverdi’s Penelope; Gluck’s Orfeo; Donizetti’s Mary, Queen of Scots; Britten’s Lucretia – seem somewhat sober-suited, the characterisations themselves were always richly affirmative, lit from within. Nor was comedy entirely absent. A flirtatious Dorabella in Mozart’s Così lingers in the memory.

Dame Janet’s acid test has always been ‘Do you measure up to the talents you’ve been given?’. Stage director and Baker-admirer Peter Hall noted in his Diaries that her professional talents were never a meal ticket. They were, unambiguously, a serious responsibility requiring serious use.

Music, maestra, please: Dame Janet

Ninety this year, Dame Janet leaves a substantial legacy. As discographer John Hunt has observed, since she performed only works with which she felt a close temperamental affinity, her recorded output is as intriguing as it’s far-reaching – ‘one that will be a model of its kind for future generations’.

Richard Osborne, Oldie music critic

Don Black

oldie man with the golden pen In a deathless scene in Porridge, Ronnie Barker as the twinkle-eyed Fletch leans on a railing and sings his adjustment of a popular song. ‘Born free,’ he warbles knowingly. ‘Til somebody caught me.

Now I’m doin’ solit’ry…’

He lustres on: Don Black

It was a perfect musical reference, one whose ubiquity reached way beyond the Matt Monro hit of the pop charts to the international world of film soundtrack, though unimaginably it had been edited out of the first screening as the producers thought it uncommercial.

Its composers, John Barry and Don Black, complained so vigorously that it was reinstated – and won them an Academy Award.

But Black’s life as a lyricist was already in sharp ascent. He was the co-writer of Thunderball (sung by Tom Jones), and his five Bond theme tunes would soon include The Man with the Golden Gun and Shirley Bassey’s deliciously droll Diamonds Are Forever (‘Sparkling round my little finger/Unlike men the diamonds linger’).

Alongside these he wrote the immortal overture to The Italian Job, where the crimson Lamborghini powers though the Italian Alps to the sublime accompaniment of On Days Like These.

Born Donald Blackstone, the fifth child of Russian/Jewish immigrants in the rag trade and growing up in a council flat in East London, Don had been entranced by the shows and James Cagney movies at the nearby Hackney Empire. He worked as a music publisher, a comic and a song-plugger and embarked on a career of outstanding length, acclaim and diversity, working with Quincy Jones, Henry Mancini and Elmer Bernstein among others.

His work was peppered with copperbottomed classics including the To Sir With Love theme, sung by Lulu, Glen Campbell’s True Grit, the soundtrack to The Pink Panther Strikes Again and, as if to confirm that great writers can make anything sound poetic, the movie hit Ben by the 13-year-old Michael Jackson, a serenade to a pet rat.

And there was a raft of theatrical successes too, lyrics for Billy and Budgie among them, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love and Sunset Boulevard. He also co-wrote with some of the planet’s most fashionable pop acts such as Robbie Williams and Eminem both when he was in his seventies.

Don is now 85. Has he retired his feather quill? He has not. As Long As I Belong, sung by Sophie Ellis-Bextor, is part of an upcoming TV adaptation of Mog’s Christmas, yet another in a magnificent catalogue of songs that are a masterclass in warm and original wordplay.

Like the sparkling subject of Diamonds Are Forever, ‘they’ll lustre on’.

Mark Ellen The Oldie January 2024 17

oldie movie titan of the year Has there ever been a better baddy than Julian Glover?

From James Bond to Indiana Jones, he’s the villain we all love to hate, but there’s more to his career than playing monsters. One of his greatest achievements was adapting and performing the notoriously tricky Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, retaining the poem’s archaic power while making it accessible to a modern audience.

He was born in Hampstead in 1935, the son of two BBC journalists. At school, he was in the same class as his fellow actor Timothy West. It was while he was playing James Boswell to West’s Samuel Johnson in a touring production of Boswell’s Life of Johnson that he met his beloved wife, the actress Isla Blair. ‘I looked across the room and I saw this beautiful creature,’ he remembers. ‘I volunteered to Timothy and Isla that I would arrange our accommodation…’

They’ve been married for 55 years, and they clearly complement each other perfectly. ‘I’m inclined to lose my temper,’ he admits. ‘Isla is very calm and can see every single side of a problem.’

His long list of small-screen credits encompasses the very best in TV drama: The Saint, The Sweeney, The Avengers, Rumpole of the Bailey, Doctor Who, Blake’s Seven… His most memorable TV role was as the cruel, hard-hearted patriarch Paul Dombey in the BBC’s brilliant adaptation of Dickens’s Dombey and Son – a masterclass in sinister understatement. Lately, he’s attracted a

King of the Baddies: Julian Glover 18 The Oldie January 2024

new generation of fans playing Grand Maester Pycelle in Game of Thrones.

He’s featured in some of the world’s biggest movie franchises, from Star Wars to Harry Potter, but the stage remains his greatest love. ‘I’m absolutely besotted with Shakespeare,’ he says. He’s played King Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe, and Henry IV for the RSC, a role that won him an Olivier Award for best supporting actor in 1993 and was singled out by Michael Billington as one of his favourite Shakespearean performances.

In 1996, he directed Hamlet with son Jamie in the title role and Isla as Hamlet’s mother (modestly, Julian confined himself to a cameo as the ghost of Hamlet’s father).

For over 60 years, he’s been a bastion of the acting profession – on stage, on TV, and in the movies. At 88, might he be tempted to tackle Lear one more time?

William Cook

Sooty and Richard Cadell

oldie hand-in-glove bear of the year The place: a penthouse flat in Frognal Lane, Hampstead, sometime in 1963.

Those present include Stanley Kubrick, Sterling Hayden, Thora Hird’s daughter, Janette Scott, and their host, Peter Sellers. ‘Wouldn’t it be funny,’ said the Goon, ‘if Sooty went mad and tried to strangle Harry Corbett?’

Thus was born the idea of Dr Strangelove’s false arm, which has a mind of its own and tries to throw Nazi salutes and throttle its owner. The real Sooty, as I well remember from my childhood viewing, was similarly mischievous. Harry had to endure constant attacks, as Sooty wielded custard pies, watering cans, teapots and oil canisters. Should there be a scene set in a bathroom, it was as inevitable as night following day that Sooty would squeeze toothpaste into Harry’s eye.

I grew up with puppets: Pinky and Perky; Andy Pandy. You could always see the strings or wires glinting in the light, as the figures floated slightly above the ground. Nor were glove puppets any more real – not even Basil Brush, the chortling, vulpine version of TerryThomas. I dreaded the idea that Shari Lewis, who manipulated Lamb Chop, would be revealed as a relative.

Yet children, in my day, and in the name of entertainment, were frequently

Rare bear: Sooty and Richard Cadell

confronted with these non-human figures, which was just as well – when human children’s personalities included Jimmy Savile. And it never crossed my mind that Sooty was fully independent of Harry, who loomed above him.

The semi-make-believe was part of the charm – and the success. There were 403 episodes of The Sooty Show between 1968 and 1992, which is remarkable when you think Harry died in 1989.

Some 91episodes, in black and white, from the fifties, have been lost. But there’s plenty left and to spare in the archives to show that Sooty, as silent as Chaplin, had a gift for gentle mayhem.

When coming across a potter’s wheel or if entering a paint shop or finding himself in a tool-shed, Sooty will without ado take aim at Harry with anything singularly messy. Guest stars making career highlights on the programmes included Gareth Hunt, Jim Bowen and Brian Blessed.

Sooty, a child surrogate armed with a water pistol, was aided by Sweep, the squawking delinquent with flapping ears.

The squeaks were made by Harry’s brother Leslie, a saxophonist. Then there was Soo, anxious-voiced and seemingly menopausal, as if on tranquillisers. I never did fully work out the dynamics of this ménage.

Was Soo a wife, girlfriend, mother-in-law?

It’s like something out of François Truffaut.

Harry himself was born in Bradford in 1918, a scion of the Harry Ramsden fish-and-chip-shop empire. Harry began his career playing the piano in a fish-andchips café but, half deaf, he could not make music his profession. Instead, he tried magic – and (‘Izzy whizzy, let’s get busy!’) Sooty, the custard-yellow glove puppet bought in Blackpool, himself often waves a wand, when not banging a glockenspiel with a rubber hammer.

Today, as masterminded by Richard Cadell, Sooty is a franchise, and turns up

VISAGES CELEBRES / ALAMY

Julian Glover

with Sweep and Soo doing summer shows and pantos, on cruise ships and in circuses. Sooty Land may be found at Crealy Theme Park in Devon.

My son Tristan, the professional clown, was on the bill recently with Sooty. In showbusiness circles, that’s like sharing the bill with Lord Olivier.

Harry Corbett received the OBE. Though the medal was probably intended for Harry H Corbett of Steptoe fame, the Queen declined to rectify the error. And Sooty is still working: he’s just released a single, I’m in the Mood for Christmas.

One final story. Some unnamed star was traumatised by seeing Harry, backstage at Teddington Studios, talking to a producer and absent-mindedly scratching his bollocks with Sooty. Wilful disbelief can stop being suspended at such moments.

The original Sooty puppet sold at auction a few years back for £14,500.

Roger Lewis

Patricia Owtram

oldie secret agent Hush hush!

That’s been Patricia Owtram’s motto for 80 years, ever since she served as a codebreaker and special-duties linguist in the Wrens in the war.

She and her late younger sister, Jean Argles, who died this year, were known as the Codebreaking Sisters.

Planet-brained Patricia, now 100, intercepted radio transmissions in German and encrypted code – when still a teenager.

After transcribing and decoding the messages, she sent them on to Bletchley Park.

Despite all this dashing derring-do,

Patricia never breathed a word, even to her sister. They both signed the Official Secrets Act – and stuck to their promise.

It was only in later life that the sisters opened up and discovered they’d both been top-secret eggheads during the war. In 2020, their book Codebreaking Sisters: Our Secret War became a bestseller.

Brought up in Lancashire near the family’s cotton mill, they befriended their cook, Lilly Getzel, an Austrian-Jewish refugee, who taught them the German that proved so invaluable.

In 1942, Patricia’s father was captured after the fall of Singapore and remained a POW until the end of the war. That same year, Patricia, a petty officer, began working at the coastal Y Stations, the Navy’s signals collection sites. She specialised in decrypting German naval communications between ships.

Later in the war, Patricia worked for General Eisenhower in London at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, searching German documents for evidence of war criminals.

After the war, she took degrees at St Andrews and Oxford and was a Harvard fellow. She became a journalist and a TV producer, developing such hallowed programmes as Coronation Street, University Challenge, Ask the Family and The Sky at Night with Patrick Moore.

In 2017, she and her sister published her father’s war diaries, 100 Days on the River Kwai: The Secret Diary of a British Camp Commandant.

Among her honours are a Victory Medal, the Légion d’honneur – and now an Oldie of the Year Award.

What discretion! And what toughness: she once said, ‘It usually raises a laugh when I tell them I may be the only old lady in Chiswick who knows how to use a Sten gun.’

Harry Mount

Arlene Phillips

WENN RIGHTS LTD / ALAMY

oldie dancing queen of the year

Derring-do: Patricia Owtram

No oldie is likely to forget The Kenny Everett Video Show when Arlene Phillips burst into our consciousness with her 1970s dance troupe Hot Gossip, in which skimpily-clad white girls with teased hair danced sinuously and provocatively alongside bare-chested black boys.

Five decades later, Arlene is a household name as the ‘Queen of Mean’ judge on Strictly Come Dancing and one of the world’s most fêted choreographers.

Numerous awards and honours include a

Mighty dancer: Arlene Phillips

special Olivier Award for inspiring work in dance and choreography (received in April 2023) and a DBE bestowed in the 2021 Honours List for services to dance and charity. This year has also seen her update Starlight Express in Germany, choreograph Grease at the Dominion and win rave reviews for choreographing Guys & Dolls at the Bridge.

Arlene was born in Prestwich 80 years ago and raised in Manchester. After her mother died of leukaemia when Arlene was 15, she left school to study ballet and tap at Manchester’s Muriel Tweedy School. She soon moved to London to teach her own style of American-inspired jazz dance at Pineapple Dance Studios in Covent Garden and the Italia Conti theatre arts school.

Arlene cemented her reputation as a distinctive adventurous force in musical theatre with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rollerskating extravaganza Starlight Express.

She worked on Duran Duran’s video for The Wild Boys, winner of Best British Video at the 1985 Brit Awards; choreographed the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester; and in 2007 was Creative Director and Executive Producer for ITV series Britannia High, set in a performingarts school, with music by Gary Barlow.

Arlene became a judge on So You Think You Can Dance? after the BBC removed her from Strictly after four years in 2009.

Even Harriet Harman became involved in the furore that followed, suggesting Arlene had been replaced by Alesha Dixon as a result of age discrimination.

Since then, Arlene has choreographed more theatrical hits, written a series of children’s books and created a charitable gala for Grenfell Tower.

And in 2021 she was the oldest-ever contestant to appear on I’m a Celebrity…

Get Me Out of Here!

Charlotte Metcalf The Oldie January 2024 19

Oldie Man of Letters

Higher education reaches new lows

MICHAEL BURRELL / ALAMY

Kingsley Amis was right – more universities has meant worse dons a n wilson Even assuming a student is lucky enough to attend a university where they have individual tutorials, or where the lectures are of a high quality, how many students today truly consider it to be worth upwards of £9,000 per annum?

One response to this mercenary question is that it misses the point.

Of course, if all you want from your encounter with a university tutor is information, you could probably get better value from Google or Teach Yourself books.

The educative experience – this is how the argument would go – is found in the encounter between a clever, eager young mind with that of one who is more mature, and better read, whose discourses can expand your mind, and whose capacity to correct, as well as to encourage, is an invaluable preparation for later life.

Well, maybe. I can’t help wondering whether, if I’d had to run up nearly £40,000 worth of debt as a young person, in exchange for this allegedly enlightening experience, I’d have thought my own time at university was worth the money. I know for certain that my own attempts to be a university teacher, for seven years, were definitely NOT worth anything like this sum. I blush to think how badly I performed.

And although money isn’t everything, it is definitely an indication of something.

One of my in-laws was a bigwig in the oil industry at the time Justin Welby became Archbishop of Canterbury. Some awestruck, unworldly clergypersons were pointing out that Welby had given up a salary of £90,000 while working in oil, to follow the Call. My in-law laughed heartily, pointing out that anyone in Welby’s position at that date who was only on £90,000 was obviously a dud.

Dons used to be proportionately much richer than they are today. I’m not thinking just of Dean Gaisford at Oxford

in the 1830s, who ended a Christmas Day sermon in the Cathedral, ‘The study of Greek literature not only elevates above the vulgar herd, but leads not infrequently to positions of considerable emolument.’

A comparable moment happened in Oxford many decades later when the undergraduate J R R Tolkien was being taught by the legendary grammarian Joseph Wright. The old boy had been a coal miner before winning scholarships, and retained the strongest of North Country voices.

‘Eee, lad, ah’ll gie’ ye sum advice. Go into Celtic, lad, that’s my advice. I have a feeling there’s MUNNY in Celtic.’

In a weird way, was this the beginning of The Lord of the Rings and its huge commercial success?

Dons used to be paid well. It was said in 1960 that the Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University earned more than the striker in the Liverpool football team. It may be that you think the present generation of footballers are paid too much, but it’s surely not unfair that the better players are also prodigiously rich, and that today’s professors are not. The professors, most of ’em, simply aren’t worth it.

There always was a high proportion of duds in the academic life, but now academic salaries have sunk so low in the pecking order that very few clever people of any merit would be tempted to follow the arid path of doing a PhD and then ending up with a lectureship at the University of Scunthorpe.

Most academics now are recognisably low-grade; and often, in my experience, ill-read in their own subject and ignorant of everything else.

I recently took out of the London Library The Cambridge History of European Romantic Literature. It consisted of a series of essays by academics written entirely for other academics. Anyone hoping for so much

as a hint of what it was actually like to read Lamartine, Novalis, Pushkin, Byron or Goethe was in for a disappointment.

Why had the authors imagined it was worth putting their boring and badlywritten thoughts to paper? (The majority were American, even though this was a book emanating from Cambridge University Press.) An answer that drifted into my head was found in Larkin’s lines – ‘I wanted to teach school in Tel Aviv,/ But Myra’s folks’ – he makes the money sign –/ ‘Insisted I got tenure.’

How different from some of the comparable books written half a century and more ago. I think of C S Lewis’s wonderful English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, a book you can open at any page to find yourself not merely entranced, but informed, by lively amusing prose.

Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy (however grotesquely unfair to some of the great German idealists) makes a similar impression, as do Isaiah Berlin’s essays such as The Crooked Timber of Humanity.

They are not letters to parole boards offering tenure in the University of Nebraska. They are doing what the academic world should do, surely, sharing knowledge and expertise with a wide audience of non-academics. Give the Devil his due, Richard Dawkins does this in his early science books, such as The Blind Watchmaker.

It’s odd. When higher education became available to an ever-wider audience, you would have expected the academics to become better and better at speaking to a wider audience.

In fact, Kingsley Amis’s famous prophecy was bang on – ‘MORE WILL MEAN WORSE.’ The Oldie January 2024 21

Not mad – just sad

O

uch.

That was my feeling last month, listening to Mel Stride, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, at the Conservative Party conference.

Mr Stride said growing social awareness of mental-health problems is itself contributing to a rise in diagnoses and an increase in unemployment.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics for August this year showed that the number of adults with anxiety or depression who are no longer working jumped by 43 per cent to 1.35 million – 386,000 more than before the pandemic.

We are ‘too readily identifying people’ as having mental-health conditions, Mr Stride said. I wonder if he might be right. We may have become too quick to label people as suffering from mental illnesses. While before we might have felt worried, we could now be diagnosed with ‘generalised anxiety disorder’.

We are prescribed treatments (in 2021 to 2022, some 8.3 million people in the UK were on antidepressants, according to NHS data) when our problems may well have social causes such as loneliness or poor housing.

Sir Simon Wessely, a former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, agrees. Speaking to the Times Health Commission last month, he said ‘a professionalisation of normal emotions’ meant that children were being treated for problems such as exam stress that could be better dealt with by sport or theatre.

Sir Simon added there were ‘unintended consequences to mentalhealth awareness campaigns’ which meant problems with relationships or exams ‘have been translated into mental health’. There are now so many possible mental-health conditions that the Bible listing all possible disorders, the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, runs to 500 pages. The first edition in 1952 was just 100 pages.

This is where it gets personal. I myself have been involved in various mental22 The Oldie January 2024

Sigmund Freud distinguished between misery and ‘ordinary unhappiness’

health awareness campaigns, as an ambassador for SANE and Rethink Mental Illness. In my thirties, I fell so ill with severe depression that I went to a psychiatric hospital. I wrote a book about it in 2014. It felt good at the time to attempt to dispel some of the undoubted stigma around mental health.

I worry that the dial has swung too far. While the empathy and openness with which mental health is now treated should be welcomed, I also agree with Mr Stride. All the talk about mental health creates a risk that what was once everyday ‘ordinary unhappiness’, in Sigmund Freud’s phrase, is now diagnosed as a mental-health condition. In other words, we are overmedicalising the human psyche.

This matters for several reasons. First, the sheer volume of people who believe they are suffering from mental-health problems means the NHS is overwhelmed with some who may be the worried well, rather than those who really need psychiatric help.

Between 2016-17 and 2021-22, the number of people in contact with NHS mental-health services increased from 3.6 million to 4.5 million people, according to a National Audit Report in February this year.

Secondly, being diagnosed with a mental-health condition often leads to stopping work, even though employment can help our mental health. People often find purpose and value in work.

Economic inactivitity also brings the added stress of financial pressure. I found this to be true myself. I cheered up when I returned to work as a journalist for the Times, thanks to the sense of camaraderie and joint purpose.

What is the answer to the challenge of over-labelling and too much diagnosis?

I have resolved to focus less on raising awareness, and more on the need for increased resources for the most unwell.

More importantly, doctors need to have better tools and more time to identify serious mental-health problems. That’s not the same as dismissing the worried well. They are not making up their concerns.

If we are to make sense of who is really suffering, we need to distinguish between mild and more serious conditions, as indeed psychiatrists routinely do when making their diagnoses.

But we don’t have enough psychiatrists to go round for these more nuanced assessments: most of us will have ten minutes with a GP. Figures in 2021 from the Royal College of Psychiatrists show that we have some 4,500 full-time consultant psychiatrists in England for 56.5 million people, or one psychiatrist per 12,567.

Diagnosis should also consider a patient’s circumstances and social situation – what doctors call a ‘psychosocial assessment’, and again something psychiatrists routinely do.

Mental suffering can trace its roots back to our upbringing or current social and personal circumstances.

Understanding those circumstances is more likely to lead a more realistic picture of whether someone really has a mental-health problem, or is simply dealing with life’s everyday ups and downs.

Rachel Kelly’s latest book is You’ll Never Walk Alone: Poems for Life’s Ups and Downs (Yellow Kite)

CHRONICLE / ALAMY

We must draw a distinction between mental-health problems and the ups and downs of everyday life. By Rachel Kelly

Strike a light!

As smoking declines, so does the hobby of collecting matchbox labels.

By Michael Foley, one of the last collectors

C

ompeting match companies once produced the most colourful and imaginative range of labels.

Foreign labels were available, especially from countries such as Sweden and India.

And there was a large domestic match industry. Early match-workers often worked in very poor and dangerous conditions. In the late-19th century, the Salvation Army began to make their own brand, Lights in Darkest England, produced by well-treated workers.

By the early-20th century, many smaller match-manufacturers had been taken over by the big three: Bryant & May, Masters and Morelands.

They went on to form the British Match Corporation.

Early labels were multicoloured with an endless variety of designs, including strange animals and birds.

Patriotic labels were also common, along with naval ships and royalty.

Really keen collectors would soak the labels off in water and put them in improvised albums.

There are few matches on sale in shops now, but there still are a number of label-dealers and specialist books.

There is even a collector’s society, The British Matchbox Label and Booklet Society, which produces a regular magazine for members (pictured).

How sad to think that, one day, collecting matchbox labels may be confined to history – along with matches.

Clockwise from top: Bulldog Brand; Flag label; wax vestas, matches named after Vesta, Roman fire goddess; Cigar Lights – the heads didn’t fall and burn your clothes; Match Label News 24 The Oldie January 2024

Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips

The strange death of the overcoat

WENN RIGHTS LTD / ALAMY

Winter coats were killed off by global warming – and a hatred of cloakrooms Heavy winter coats for social occasions were a staple in yesteryear – ie among Oldie-readers now between 80 and 100.

It was colder outside before global warming, and coats were a matter less of etiquette than of survival.

For smart occasions, mink coats were favoured by grown-up women; dark, woollen knee-length overcoats by men.

For less smart occasions, women wore Loden coats – in traditional dark green with silver or horn buttons. Men would not have been seen dead in a Loden coat in London, but might have donned a fawn-coloured covert coat, with a brown velvet collar, from Cordings.

But, today, other than for weddings, funerals and memorial services, and on the racecourse, winter overcoats have become increasingly unnecessary.

Why? One reason is that we no longer have the same standards of courtesy. As the late Hardy Amies pointed out to me, ‘If you are badly dressed when I have a meeting with you, I am offended because you have obviously not considered me to be important.’

And we also no longer wear winter overcoats because it’s hot in the tube or taxi, and it’s only a short sprint to the building – which is invariably centrally heated. Once you get inside the building, coats are a nuisance. You have to check them in because they are too bulky to carry. You have to hang on to the cloakroom ticket and carry cash to tip the cloakroom person.

In 2008, Nicky Haslam gave a famous party at the neoclassical Palladian villa Parkstead House, in Roehampton.

Friends of mine who attended initially thought it was badly organised as there was no cloakroom. Later, when smoking outside and observing the smarties disgorging from a line of chauffeurdriven limos, they realised why.

You don’t need a coat in a preheated limo and you don’t need one for the short distance between car and party.

In Geordieland, despite gales howling in from the North Sea, all the young women going clubbing at weekends can be seen in little more than a thong even on the coldest wintry nights.

The young in Newcastle go from club to club in beer overcoats – that is, no overcoats. It’s a palaver to keep checking coats in and out. Besides, they don’t have the extra money to pay the charges.

Also, you develop a ‘hide’ if you never wear a coat. The Essex-born sculptor Guy Taplin, born 1939, has a workshop on a bleak sandbar between the mouths of the Blackwater and Colne rivers on the Essex coast – a place he describes as ‘about as wild a place as anywhere you can get in the world’.

Taplin is famous for his carved birds – avocets, plovers and egrets – made from driftwood. While beachcombing, he has never worn more than a thin denim jacket and shirt beneath it.

‘I don’t feel the cold now,’ he boasts.

Parties of yesteryear were ‘private’ – ie they were not ‘launches’ as they usually are today, with someone sponsoring them and paparazzi outside.

In private houses, heaps of coats were bunged indistinguishably on beds, in the absence of an organised hanging system or pop-up clothes rails. The typical man would enrage his wife by seizing any old dark coat when he left the party, rather than the precise expensive one that actually belonged to him.

Talking of clothes rails reminds me of an evening in the Beefsteak Club. A queue was going up the stairs and the arrivers were serially handing their coats to an attendant, who was courteously hanging them in the club wardrobe at the top of the stairs.

Craig Brown noted that the ‘club servant’ performing this function was none other than Sir Tom Stoppard, who had clearly been mistaken for a clothesrail attendant. Seeing him helpfully hanging the coat of a fellow guest who

No overcoat required: Kate Moss on the brief journey from limo to party

had arrived with him, the next guest handed Sir Tom her coat – and then the others swarming up the stairs in her wake followed suit.

So unegotistical is Sir Tom that he was happy to continue to oblige. The coats being hung on this occasion were velvet evening coats, lined with soft silk from designers such as Edina Ronay and Sophie Dundas, cashmere cloaks from Johnstons of Elgin, and for the men everything from a long tweed to a puffer-type lightweight down jacket.

Anoraks, by the way, are never worn by those with any consideration for others. There is no such thing as a chic anorak.

Dry robes – a mac on the outside and a towelling robe on the inside that you zip up – are even more offensive, although just about acceptable at the seaside.

The Oldie January 2024 25

When Justine Hardy watches festive TV, she sees Uncle Robert Morley, Granny Gladys Cooper and Robert Hardy, her father

Family telly at Xmas

Left: Justine Hardy, Robert Hardy and dog Troilus. Above: Robert Hardy in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)

‘D

eath and Christmas, inevitable and ghastly,’ my father, the actor Robert Hardy (1925-2017), used to say.

Around it came, a traditional part of every Christmas Past, as we all jollied about him, pounding the brandy butter and winding tinsel round the ponies’ browbands.

And, just as perennially, when we came to warble at our own front door my father would give an Oscar-worthy dose of Christmas bonhomie.

There would be a bit of Siegfried Farnon, the gravitas of Churchill, and a touch of Harry Potter’s Cornelius Fudge magic in there too, for shimmer.

As the day itself dawned, his ‘Bah humbug’ side returned in force – though Scrooge was one of the few parts he never played. Still, there were times when his versions of Churchill and Siegfried Farnon had a smattering of the Ebenezers, whether it was Churchill persuading Roosevelt of the horrifying costs of war in Casablanca in January 1943, or Siegfried whining about the

28 The Oldie January 2024

household expenses at Skeldale House, Darrowby, usually about the price of marmalade, as he layered it on as thick as his slice of toast.

As with Christmas, that other inevitability came around, though with a rather different script. Half an hour after my father’s death, his frail frame was still in the room with us, though the enormity of him had gone. Yet there he was right behind this rather Victorian gathering of the bereaved, bold as you like, striding across the television screen behind us, as the news was announced.

First, he was there as Henry V in very fetching hose, then as Prince Albert and Toby Belch. On it went, culminating with Cornelius Fudge. On the radio as well: booming out, again as Henry V, ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’.

Then came Siegfried Farnon, barking as well as any dog whose anal glands he was about to drain.

I’m haunted by the ghosts of celluloid and family blood

It was a very immediate haunting and not wholly unpleasant.

There is a rather jollier version of the festive haunting that comes around as reliably as death and pre-Christmas sales. In my mind’s inner ear, one particular voice sets in motion the whole tumble of it, the Guinness and gurglingbelly tones of Peter Bull, the narrator of the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol.

Scene: close-up shot of a library shelf of leather-bound Dickens novels. A hand reaches to pluck out A Christmas Carol. Big brass booms, followed by a heavenly choir’s schmaltzy glide into Hark the Herald as the credits roll, inscribed on the pages of the book being turned by the Hollywood-style, overly ruffed-and-cuffed hand.

‘Old Marley was as dead as a doornail,’ intones Peter, roast-beef vowels to the fore.

Thus Christmas begins with the voice of the man who was Pozzo in the first English version of Waiting for

ALFIO SCISETTI; EVERETT COLLECTION INC; PICTORIAL PRESS LTD / ALAMY

Above: Audrey Hepburn and granny, Gladys Cooper, in My Fair Lady (1964) Right: Gladys Cooper, Aunt Joan Morley and John Buckmaster

Godot, having returned from captaining landing craft in the Mediterranean during the war. He ventured on from there to other waters in The African Queen (1951), with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn – and Robert Morley (1908-92), my uncle.

And this is where this movie bio-pic rundown moves from the big screen back to my little-girl world.

Another scene: a swimming pool, set in the pretty garden of an Arts and Crafts house in Berkshire. Peter Bull, a human haunch of a man, sits beside his great friend Robert Morley, no slouch himself on the roast-beef-belly front.

Both wear voluminous swimming trunks, as they sit on the edge of Robert’s swimming pool, the house, garden and pool bought with his wife, Joan, my aunt, during the war. Joan was a gentle, kind woman of cashmere twinsets and calm, the daughter of another in the round of Christmas ghosts.

So, another big-screen scene, from My Fair Lady: Ascot, designed

by Cecil Beaton – beribboned and bonneted, the women, elegant question marks, wraith-thin, topped off with hats as absurd as any milliner’s fetish fantasy.

Among them is an older woman in grey chiffon, poised, pulling attention and camera focus. A man strides over, unsuitably dressed in tweed amid the grey morning suits.

‘Henry, what a disagreeable surprise,’ says Mrs Higgins, mother of the tricky phonetician, a man who would surely be cancelled now. Mrs Higgins is played by Gladys Cooper, aka G, my grandmother ­– mother of Joan, John and Sally, my mother.

While Peter Bull’s festive call is Guinness and roast beef, my grandmother’s is captured by Dirk Bogarde: ‘She had all the charm of an electric carving knife.’

Yet that voice, cutting through time, sweeps me back to the few Christmases we all had together. G (1888-1971) died when I was five, but still the

Left: Gladys Cooper, Justine Hardy, Uncle Robert Morley, Emma Hardy.

Above: Humphrey Bogart, Uncle Robert Morley and Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen (1951)

orange-pomander scent comes back, the presents under her tree, in her sitting room, looking out over a rolling lawn down to the winter fog on the River Thames, just at the point where the Henley Regatta Course ends.

‘Darling, how absolutely lovely,’ was her reply to most things, from unwanted presents to her deaf mute sister’s giggle every time she farted with glee.

Uncle Robert’s stentorian honk also chimes with the Christmas carolling of family ghosts, his vast eyebrows higher than the jungle trees every time The African Queen chugs onto the schedule.

He is the tutting missionary brother to Hepburn’s Rose. He does not make it far into the tale before getting a terminal whack from a soldier when refusing to take on board that Germany and Britain are at war. And here is a bit of ironic movie trivia: Uncle Robert’s middle name was Adolph – spelled thus, so not quite as awful as it could have been come September 1939.

Around he comes again on the festive menu as the pompous newspaper magnate in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), set in 1910, when young men of wealth and vim took to the air in bits of plywood held together with string and a promise.

All these voices chime together from Advent on, my father, grandmother, uncle and so many others by extension, from Peter Bull to Richard Burton.

Often it is my father who wins the Yuletide airtime challenge, back and back again, waving his Potter wand or with his hand up a cow’s arse – or a dog’s rather smaller one.

No wonder I’m haunted by the ghosts of celluloid and family blood.

The Oldie January 2024 29

Rules of entertainment

Y

ears ago, when I was a poorlypaid editorial assistant, I shared a flat at the far end of Wood Lane – which we optimistically called Ladbroke Grove – with a glamorous starlet living on credit.

She loved parties and wanted us to throw one. Black tie, she decreed, and guests must bring either a bottle of vodka or a bottle of champagne, so they could cram into our tiny sitting room and drink it out of plastic cups while we served crisps. ​I was firm. This broke the host/guest pact. We couldn’t demand so much and offer so little in return. ​She relented and said that she would accept a half-bottle of vodka. ​This was still too much, to my mind.

There is a delicate balance in these particular scales. As I entered the era of attending weddings and house parties, I felt it ever more firmly. ​The host/guest pact is an alchemical mix of the outlay required, distance travelled, dress expected, effort made, time taken up and gifts given, in return for hospitality, convivial company and general enjoyment.

When it works, everyone is happy and all have benefited. When it goes wrong, there can be a bitter aftertaste. The worst example I experienced was a wedding where the happy couple decided to cut costs and have no staff, while laying on a serve-yourself semi-picnic.

The result was that no one had a drink (the drinks table was hidden away in a corridor, and in any case people felt Followed the rules: Kim Kardashian and Kanye West 30 The Oldie January 2024

awkward helping themselves); everyone was nourished only by various iterations of sandwiches they had to make themselves; and there weren’t enough chairs as rain meant the outside element wasn’t possible.

This was all forgivable. Weather can disrupt wonderful plans; inexperienced party-givers can make mistakes. But handing round bin-bags so guests could clear up after themselves was too much.

The pact was irreparably broken. ​My own red line was when the bride and groom also told the guests to wear period dress. Demanding guests wear a specific colour or theme other than a standard dress code – on top of all the other wedding outlay – tips the scales too far. Kim Kardashian asked guests at her wedding to Kanye West to wear black or white, but she had hired a Florentine fort and was flying everyone there for a lavish, star-studded nuptial weekend – so she could. ​The obligations of the host/guest pact grow in proportion to the time and effort from both sides. A fancy-dress party, for example, asks a lot of the guests, and a host must offer a decent experience in return. That doesn’t necessarily require money. Wonderful parties on the cheap may require more time, effort and imagination but be as good if not better than something glitzy – as long as the balance of what is given and received is maintained.​ ​The countryhouse weekend is a very nuanced host/ guest pact. Some guests fulfil their side of the bargain simply by being themselves: celebrated, rich, titled or extremely decorative. Those

guests can be late to meals, mulish and moody, even utterly tedious, and it doesn’t matter.

The rest of us need to make sure we are good guests in return for two or three days of hospitality. That means arriving with the right clothes at the right time, ready with one’s A game: polite, flexible and with a permanent sunny mood.

The good guest must be charming, no matter how tricky others might be (no gravitating towards favourites for the entire stay). They will know the obligations of dinner-party conversation, and rescue anyone looking stranded.

They will be merry or sober to the appropriate level, stay up late if required, sing and dance enthusiastically (also only if required) and still appear – bright-eyed and on time – for breakfast the next day.

They will be ready to take the obligatory tours, walk for freezing miles, play cards, charades or tennis, or eat outdoors and not mention being feasted on by insects.

They will have both amusing stories to tell and a listening ear. They will leave the right tip at the end, and write a two-sided letter of enthusiastic thanks immediately on their return home.

The upside is generally a lovely time of being looked after very well, meeting new and interesting people and enjoying oneself. But the host must be careful to build in rest and recovery time, and not slip into tyranny by taking advantage of the guest’s good nature. They must never throw tantrums. ​The host/guest pact is really an extension of manners (as everything is) – an instinctive if uncodified element of hospitality. But the host or guest can shift the scales in retrospect. My starlet flatmate and I gave our party (once we’d compromised on the black tie) and, to our surprise, the friends who DJd for us went on to become very famous a year later.

So we were able to reset the scales retrospectively to make our party entirely a gain for the guests, and the plastic cups and crisps more than sufficient to satisfy the pact.

ERIK PENDZICH / ALAMY

Ever been invited to dinner – and felt you put more into the evening than the hosts? Lulu Taylor has the solution

PANIC PRESENT-BUYING? HALF-PRICE SPECIAL Give The Oldie for just £31.50 for 12 issues* EITHER go to https://checkout.theoldie.co.uk/ offers and enter code POLD0124 OR call 01858 438 791 quoting POLD0124 M

D, JO Y DA

HN W

ELLS

E CLIV T ASLE ON S IE FOLL edible

‘The Old

Februa

e– magazin

s the best

perhap

13 to sub 95 £4.

3 | £4. ry 202

incr ie is an

– BY

Y WEL D O LL

e in magazin

rs | ww scribe

LS

ydon Car ld’ Gra

the wor

ie.c w.theold

o.uk |

ter

422 Issue

DEADLINE: midday on Tuesday 19th December 2023

90 aine at C l e a Mich oberts

rew R

by And

MA X WA

LL, MY

ndal arnham sex sca vian M rson’s ur – Vi s Patte neighbo d Kipling Sir Le arming dyar my ch on Ru cVicar, anham M Cr hn eth Jo Kenn M CR AN HA KE NN ETH PAL – BY

MATT N CARTOO

BY MATT T PRITCHET

‘The Oldie

ps the best

ine – perha

ible magaz

is an incred

June 2023

| £4.95 £4.13

to subscribers

magazine

in the world

’ Graydon

| Issue die.co.uk | www.theol

Carter

427

from Oz izard The W umphries Barry H esford Bruce Ber land and holas Gar non goes solo Lewis, Nic

by Roger Tommy Can Roberts out Ball – – Andrew Cannon with of The genius

*This offer is for UK addresses only and recipients who have not subscribed for 12 months or more The Oldie is published 13 times a year, which means a 12-issue subscription runs for 48 weeks.

The Oldie collects your data so that we can fulfil your subscription. We may also, from time to time, send you details of Oldie offers, events and competitions; you always have a choice and can opt out by emailing us at theoldie@subscription.co.uk We do not share with, or sell your data to, third parties. Details you share with us will be managed as described in our Privacy Policy here: https://www.theoldie.co.uk/about-us/privacy

The Oldie January 2024 31

The British Lili Marleen Anne Shelton, born a century ago, was once bigger than Vera Lynn.

John Temple salutes the girl with the golden voice

L

ili Marleen was the marching tune of World War Two. Immortalised by Marlene Dietrich, it was originally written as a poem in 1915 by German poet Hans Leip and set to music in 1938

by Norbert Schultze.

During the war, the song became a favourite of servicemen on both sides of the conflict. When Tommie Connor provided an English lyric, the rich contralto voice of Anne Shelton supplied the vocal. Shelton’s rendition was used to counteract a Nazi propaganda campaign targeted at British troops in the North African desert. It sold a million and earned Shelton the title of ‘the British Lili Marleen girl’.

Shelton died on 31st July 1994, aged 70. Had she lived, she would have celebrated her 100th birthday in November.

Shelton was born on 10th November 1923 in Camberwell, London. In 1936, aged 12, she recorded with Jack Hylton and His Orchestra under her real name, Pat Sibley. She didn’t catch on. But when, four years later, she took the name Anne Shelton she became an ‘overnight’ star.

In the dark wartime days of 1940, Shelton came to the attention of the British public. She first appeared on the BBC radio show Monday Night at Eight. Her performance so impressed the bandleader Bert Ambrose that he asked Shelton to audition for him.

Shelton was duly hired and sang with Ambrose throughout the remainder of the war, making several successful records with him.

Such was Shelton’s popularity that in 1942 she was given her own radio show, Introducing Anne. The show became an important link with Blighty for British servicemen in North Africa.

So began Shelton’s association with Lili Marleen.

The British troops were already listening to Lale Andersen’s rendition of the song, transmitted to them by German propagandists. However, the song had a German lyric. Winston Churchill asked for Shelton’s voice to be used to counteract the German version. Shelton’s

Anne Shelton (1923-1994) sang with Glenn Miller

interpretation quickly caught on with the British troops.

She said, ‘We took the show right off them [the German propagandists] and won the war in doing it.’

In 1944, Shelton’s career reached new heights. She sang a duet with Bing Crosby on Variety Bandbox, a popular radio programme of the day. That night, Crosby and Shelton entertained a live audience with a classy rendition of Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade.

Later that year, Shelton was thrilled to sing with Glenn Miller. Miller was in England leading his Army Air Forces Orchestra, and Shelton sang with Miller’s band seven times. She was later invited to accompany Miller on a trip to France to entertain Allied Forces following D-Day. Luckily, she didn’t go. Miller’s plane disappeared over the Channel, with all souls lost.

In 1951, Shelton visited the USA; she stayed there for almost a year and was the first British artist to tour the states coast to coast. In 1956, Shelton topped the British charts with Lay Down Your Arms, another marching song which stayed at the top for four weeks.

Sailor, her last top-ten hit, came in 1961. That song, too, was synonymous

with Shelton’s close association with the armed services and touchingly sentimental – she had married David Reid, her long-term fiancé, a former sailor.

During the remainder of her career, Shelton stoically carried on producing her brand of musical nostalgia. She toured Britain and appeared regularly on television and radio. She was a frequent visitor to Canada, the USA and Holland.

In 1979, Shelton successfully reprised I’ll Be Seeing You, one of her wartime hits, in the movie Yanks. The story goes that the director, John Schlesinger, personally asked for Shelton’s voice to feature in his film.

Shelton’s vocal was used in 1986 in Dennis Potter’s BAFTA-winning television drama The Singing Detective, and in 1993 in Lipstick on Your Collar, another of Potter’s acclaimed television creations.

In 1990, Shelton was awarded the OBE for her work for charities supporting armed-services veterans.

For the remainder of her life, she continued to feature regularly at events commemorating wartime anniversaries.

Noël Coward once waspishly described Shelton as ‘a big girl who performed behind palisades of make-up, meticulously applied’.

The comedy writer Denis Norden was more gallant, describing Shelton as ‘a fillet steak in a wimpy world’. Norden was such an admirer that he playfully claimed that if Shelton recorded the contents of the London telephone directory, ‘I’d buy it.’

Shelton’s popular acclaim – unlike Vera Lynn’s – did not stand the test of time. But there was a period during the war when her fame surpassed that of the Forces Sweetheart. That admiration was rooted in Shelton’s association with Lili Marleen, the marching song that speaks of a shared longing for peace and which resonated with both servicemen and civilians.

It is as ‘the British Lili Marleen girl’ with the golden voice that we fondly remember Anne Shelton in this, her centenary year.

The Oldie January 2024 33

When Matthew Norman’s parents died recently, he was horrified at the NHS’s agonising attempts to extend their lives

The dying of the light

T

he indecently perfect symmetry of human existence has been well-documented ever since Genesis (the Old Testament page-turner, not the band – even Phil Collins has his limitations) observed, ‘for you are dust, and to dust you will return’.

Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man poem, from As You Like It, caught the mood. ‘Last scene of all/ That ends this strange eventful history/ Is second childishness and mere oblivion/ Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.’

Yet, for all the exploration of the subject, one question is widely ignored. In the context of abortion, there is endless, feverish discussion about exactly when – conception/ foetal heartbeat/ at a certain number of weeks? – life can be said to begin.

But we too seldom talk about when it is effectively over.

When, to be more precise, does it become folly to try to extend a life that has plainly run its course?

It is a question with which many of us will have to deal, as patients or as carers, and one that has continually preyed on me since my father’s final days.

In August 2021 came an episode of such tragicomic synchronicity as to have the most devout wondering what kind of talentless celestial quarterwit is writing the script.

At around 7pm one Saturday, my dad expressed his gift for laconically combining stoicism, courtesy and understatement in a single sentence.

‘Chap,’ he murmured from the recliner chair that had become his whole world, ‘I hate to bother you, but I have a slightly alarming pain in my heart.’

34 The Oldie January 2024

Suzanne and Brian Norman marry, 17th March 1962, Marble Arch Synagogue

Within seconds of hearing that – four or five at the outside – I heard a loud gushing noise from upstairs. ‘Sorry, Bronze,’ I said, using his family nickname, ‘could you give me a moment?’

‘Of course, chap,’ he said. ‘No rush.’

It was the most resolutely English conversational exchange of my life.

I nipped up a flight to find a torrent of water cascading through the dining-room ceiling. Way too crude and lousy a scriptwriter, this deity, I thought – even for EastEnders.

I stood there paralysed by uncertainty as to which of the two crises to attend to first, before a chilling clarity descended.

Whatever the running order of emergency action, the one thing it would not include was calling 999. My dad was far too close to death for that. No intervention could usefully extend his life now.

If a blue-light ambulance came, the paramedics would want to take him to hospital.

Despite having lasting power of attorney (LPA), I might well be unable to dissuade them. I would not betray his trust by allowing him to die alone and unvisited, in those hateful days of Covid, and terrified on a ward.

He had already endured three weeks of unimaginable torment in hospital earlier that summer. Fit for discharge after the first, he was lost in that brutal NHS bureaucratic vortex for the following two.

When his mobile slipped down the bed, he had to go on hunger strike for two days before any of the nursing staff bothered to find it.

So, whatever the medical advice, however insistent, however threatening, I would ensure that he died at home as he wanted.

I put a bucket under the leak, and went back down to my dad. Even as I fed him a 300 mg aspirin, I falsely reassured him that it was indigestion.

The following Monday morning, we went by elective ambulance to the

Macmillan Cancer Centre attached to University College Hospital for his fortnightly blood transfusion. He was so weak and frail that he had to be transported to and from the ambulance by stretcher. It was as excruciating for him as it was transparently futile.

But he wanted to go and I didn’t have the heart, or the guts, to prevent it. Just as some eight months earlier, I hadn’t had the heart, or more accurately the courage, to try to talk him out of the chemotherapy that may or may not have extended his life by a couple of months – but cost him his balance, mobility, comfort and every ounce of quality of life. That I will always regret.

When we arrived, I took a very sweet, very young doctor in a hijab to one side, and mentioned the cardiac pain. She performed an ECG, and reciprocally took me to one side. ‘He’s had a pretty major heart attack,’ she said. ‘I’ve called cardiology. We’ll have him taken over to have stents inserted.’

The reflex question that very nearly escaped my lips was ‘Are you completely fucking nuts?’ Narrowly stifling it, I said, ‘Look at him, doctor. For God’s sake, just look at him. How many days do you think he has left? What possible benefit can there be in an invasive procedure that will mean he has to stay, and more than likely die, in hospital?’

Then I started sobbing uncontrollably, in a way I hadn’t since childhood.

The prospect of a battle to stop this lunacy had pierced the thin veneer of self-control.

I apologised to the doctor, citing sleeplessness, and begged her to check his notes. ‘You’ll see he wants to die at home,’ I said, ‘and I won’t allow anything that risks that.’

Half an hour later, she returned.

She’d read the notes and talked to his consultant, and now agreed that such an intervention was inadvisable. I burst into tears again, this time of relief and gratitude.

That doctor was no doubt outstanding at her work (no one who isn’t gets to work at Macmillan), and eager only to help. And, in spite of that, or because of it, she was overlooking her Hippocratic Oath (‘First, do no harm’), and needed forcibly talking out of a monstrous mistake by a deranged man with tears flowing down his face like the leak through the dining-room ceiling.

All over the country today, every day, hundreds of people, thousands upon thousands of us, will be victims of this monumental error of medical judgement.

The very elderly and very sick are

Brian and Suzanne in Cambridge, May 2010

routinely robbed of the deaths they desire by that wholly understandable medical urge to do something, anything, rather than nothing.

Nothing was done. Six days later, my dad died as he had wished, serenely in his chair.

Almost two years later, my mother had become a prisoner of her own recliner, robbed of mobility by the dramatically-broken ankle she was too frail to have surgically fixed.

‘You’ll see he wants to die at home and I won’t allow anything that risks that’

Her mind until almost the very end was as sharp as my dad’s had been until his. She remained reliably hilarious until her final days.

‘Now then, Suzanne,’ asked a nurse, running through the routine dementia/ urinary-tract-infection questions with which we’d both become so fatigued, ‘can you tell me where we are?’

My mother flashed me her trademark sardonic glance, lips a touch pursed, eyebrows minimally raised, and snapped back, ‘New Zealand.’

The nurse momentarily looked alarmed, then guffawed.

But however vibrantly healthy my mother’s sarcastic wit, her body was wrecked beyond repair. A few days after, she took a terminal turn. Despite multiple courses of antibiotics, she was too weak to fight off a chest infection.

One Wednesday in late July, with a carer filling in for me, I went for a couple of stress-busting hours to the steam room at the Turkish baths, almost The Oldie January 2024 35

the last place on earth these days where one is entirely out of contact. I returned to my locker to find a dozen missed calls on the iPhone screen.

A district nurse, making the tri-weekly visit to dress her sores, had found her so unresponsive that she called an ambulance.

I rushed back to find two paramedics in attendance. One, a forceful young man, said they were going to take her to the Royal Free Hospital a few minutes’ drive away. I told him that they would not. That my mother was visibly in her last days, if not hours; that it was too late for intravenous broad-spectrum antibiotics to do more than briefly prolong her life – for no purpose; that she’d be traumatised by the transit; that even if she survived it, she would almost certainly die alone and scared, if she was conscious of her whereabouts, in a strange place.

I added with wonted pomposity that, while of course I appreciated what they were trying to do for her, allowing them to take her would be an unforgivable act of moral cowardice.

Fearful of the consequences of agreeing, naturally eager to cover himself, the paramedic rang my mother’s GP and put her on speakerphone. She too wanted my mother in hospital. Again, l resisted.

For two hours, over multiple calls with the GP, the three of us argued.

Eventually, the paramedic stood over my mother with his clipboard. He would write in his report, he said, that I had kept her from hospital expressly against medical advice.

I reiterated that she was too close to death to be moved; that attempting to transport her down four flights in the stairlift (the only plausible way) would at the very least break limbs.

He pondered this nervously – and changed his mind. He would recommend palliative care in his report instead. My mother died, peacefully, some dozen hours later.

The GP, a highly Right: At Matthew’s wedding, 1991 Top: On holiday in Mallorca, 2007 36 The Oldie January 2024

experienced and excellent physician, rang that afternoon, and spoke the last words you expect to hear from a doctor.

‘I was wrong,’ she said. ‘You were absolutely right.’

Full-time carers, knowing the patient’s state of health so much more intimately than even the best professionals, almost invariably will be right.

Not all will have LPA, however, or if they do they may lack the stubbornness to resist concerted pressure.

Time and time again, from friends who have been through the experience with parents, from nurses who see it all the time, from a rabbi too wellacquainted with the syndrome from visiting his flock, I’ve heard the identical story with a different outcome.

It is a wretched, heart-rending tale of the medical craving to do something – leading to additional pain and distress, and a lonely, petrified hospital death unleavened by the comfort of family or friends.

Modern medicine is startlingly adept at keeping people alive, as we know, and staggeringly poor at knowing when to let them go. We are, as in so many areas, decades behind the Dutch and Scandinavians.

This is not a plea for euthanasia, though in a country less dominated by the trenchant moralists of the right-wing media there would be intense debate about that.

Once upon a time, a private GP told me, fancy doctors like him would administer the Brompton cocktail (equal parts brandy and morphine) to those whose brief remaining span would be filled only with an agonising struggle to breathe through drowning lungs.

The patient would float merrily away.

The GP spoke the last words you expect to hear from a doctor. ‘I was wrong,’ she said Dr Harold Shipman did for that practice along with his untold hundreds of victims. Recalling him, one needs to be exceedingly cautious about sanctioning anyone to play God. Yet playing God is what we are obliged to do, as I was, by preventing aggressive treatment that robs the dying of a decent death for no discernible purpose other than to assuage that medical compulsion to act.

So when is it that a life, though the heart still beats and the pupils react to light, is effectively over? If it isn’t an easy question to pose, it is an infinitely harder one to answer. Amorphously straddling the borderline between medicine and philosophy, it defies the rigid protocols that govern almost every other area of medicine.

But if caring for my parents taught me anything, it is this. You may not be able to define it, as a US Supreme Court Justice almost said of pornography, but you know it when you see it.

You recognise that point in the fading embers of a human life when delaying death is an act not of kindness, but of inadvertent cruelty.

That gruesome moment when insisting on inaction in defiance of medical advice becomes the truest and final expression of love.

On Christmas Eve, St Martin’s, Dunton, is packed.

For the rest of the year, Nick Primmer has a hard time of it

A churchwarden’s lot

L

ike most oldies, our village church, St Martin’s, Dunton, Buckinghamshire, now over 900 years old, looks better by candlelight.

Whether it’s down to the flattering and flickering illumination, or to the potential thrill of the rector’s surplice being singed yet again by a poorly placed candle, our Christmas Eve candlelit carol service draws in worshippers like moths.

Perhaps more accurately described as singers than worshippers – since the strength of their faith is unknown – as many as 120 of them pack out the Georgian box pews every December, while other services sometimes see so small a congregation that we are relegated to the choir stalls in the chancel.

When we sit in the high-backed boxes, we are all but invisible to the rector, who shuns the elevation of the pulpit for a

more inclusive-looking position beneath the chancel arch.

Maybe he chooses this spot for protection from falling debris when the chancel’s outward-leaning walls inevitably reach their angle of no return, and the roof finally falls in.

‘Build it and they will come’ worked for the baseball pitch in the Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams (1989).

‘Let it fall down and they will complain’ is nearer the truth for us.

Every village wants its picturesque church, and the presence of one has been shown to increase house prices. But once contracts have been exchanged and the ‘SOLD’ board has gone up, it’s unlikely anyone attends the church to give thanks or to pop a percentage of their sale’s proceeds onto the collection plate.

People do come for quiz nights and

St Martin’s, Dunton, Buckinghamshire: the Norman nave leading to the 13th-century chancel with its 15th-century roof 38 The Oldie January 2024

harvest suppers but, successful as these are, they barely cover the running costs.

Running costs that we have to meet, even though we are barely standing.

Fortunately, our church is blessed with keen providers of excellent postservice refreshments, and highly talented flower-arrangers. On many Sundays, the flower arrangements outnumber the congregation. We also have a small army of men (they are all men) happy to mow the churchyard grass, even if most of them draw the line at actually stepping inside the building.

And there are the church cleaners who vacuum up the mouse droppings, polish the candlesticks to remove the tarnish caused by bat urine, and do battle with the cobwebs.

The villagers who do attend services are unfailingly generous with what they put into the collection. Some are even young enough still to be working and so their donations are eligible for Gift Aid, meaning HMRC adds a little.

While many churches boost their income with weddings and other ‘life event’ services, in our village of just 25 households these are few and far between. In the past 20 years, there have been four weddings, for which we can charge a fee, and four baptisms, for which we can’t.

We should be grateful there have been no village funerals, though the extra income would have been useful.

There is an offertory box opposite the south door, and sometimes this has as much as £5 inside, left by visitors struck by the charm of a building about which we villagers have become blasé.

The box pews are the most obvious unusual feature. The west gallery is another, adorned with the names of past rectors. Reverends Crosse, Worship and Serman are appropriately named, while Silley and Moody usually raise a laugh.

We have a memorial slab to Dr Blomfield, our rector from 1811 to 1817. He was known for being antihunting, -shooting and -fishing, though not because of progressive views on blood sports.

In his opinion, a hunting ban applied solely to the clergy, who he felt should concentrate instead on hard work.

Sometimes, the offertory box has as much as £5 inside

Box pews: Betjeman, below, said, ‘Many Bucks churches must have been like this’

Perhaps it was his own hard work that powered his impressive progression from a parish of just 72 souls to the post of Bishop of London. Or perhaps it was his networking, as mocked in verse: ‘Hunt not, fish not, shoot not; Dance not, fiddle not, flute not; But before all things, it’s my particular desire; That, once at least in every week, you take Your dinner with the squire.’

The rhyme is too polite to mention that he also found time to father ten children.

As recently as 1950, St Martin’s was described by writer Alison Uttley as ‘a tiny church, whose box pews are high enough to conceal the worshippers during a weary sermon.

‘It is very plain, with whitewashed walls, the simplest church I have seen in the county and almost unknown. There are oil lamps and candles.’

Sir John Betjeman noted that ‘Many Bucks churches must have been like this a century ago.’ It is partly thanks to his support that the church is still – just about – standing.

In 1969, the area was identified as a potential site for London’s third airport, which would have seen the church and village razed to the ground. Sir John was a passionate opponent; almost as passionate as the rector at the time.

Reverend Hubert Sillitoe had seen service in the trenches of the First World War as an army chaplain. One of his favourite hymns was Fight the Good Fight. His brother, Sir Percy Sillitoe, was head of MI5.

It would have taken more than a handful of cabinet ministers to remove

this rector from his parish. He spoke at huge public meetings (some 20,000 attended one local event). He led demonstrations outside Parliament, and tractor cavalcades through surrounding villages. He even hosted a visit to the church by an American TV news network to film one of his fire-and-brimstone – and anti-airport – sermons.

His efforts, and those of thousands of parishioners from his and other local parishes in danger of being blighted, were worth it.

As he recorded in his Vestry Book entry for 26th April 1971, ‘WE ARE DELIVERED!!! … at 3.30pm in the House of Commons, it was announced that the Government has decided that NO “inland site” would be used for … the Third London Airport.’

So St Martin’s avoided a sudden and brutal destruction under the bulldozers.

But unless the funds can be found soon to strengthen and support the walls and repair the spreading cracks, our church risks a slow and lingering death.

As we prepare for our candlelit Christmas Eve service, might it be our very last one?

But, then again, there are still many blank pages in the current Vestry Book.

Will we be able to write ‘WE ARE DELIVERED!!!’ for a second time?

The fee for this article will go towards the St Martin’s Church Restoration Fund The Oldie January 2024 39

History

George Washington’s Christmas present Christmas Day was big news for William the Conqueror – and Washington What do you expect to be doing on the evening of Christmas Day? Some version of sleeping off the turkey in front of the telly, most likely. Setting aside the birth of the Christ child himself (which, yes, probably didn’t happen on Christmas Day anyway), it’s tempting to think that, for one day at least, history might also put its feet up on the sofa.

Not necessarily. Two of the most consequential coronations in European history happened on Christmas Day: Charlemagne’s at Aachen in 800, and William the Conqueror’s at Westminster Abbey in 1066. In both cases, the Christmas crownings set the seal on the defeat of Saxons, though only in Charlemagne’s case was he also proclaimed an emperor.

In time of war, the most famous Christmas episode is the informal truce on the Western Front in 1914, which commanders on both sides made sure was not repeated in subsequent years.

But the most significant Christmas Day moment in world-historical terms happened more than a century before that.

The night of 25th December 1776 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, was a bitterly cold one. It came when the forces of the General of the Continental Army, George Washington, were in a bad way.

In November, the Americans had been chased out of New York by General Howe, and harried through New Jersey before crossing over the Delaware river into Pennsylvania.

The river was barely passable, full of ice. It seemed that campaigning season was over. Howe wintered in New York, leaving a detachment of Hessian mercenaries on the New Jersey side of the river at Trenton, under the command of Colonel Johann Rall.

The British and their German auxiliaries would have been happy to get into winter quarters. It seemed that after the humiliations of Bunker Hill and 40 The Oldie January 2024

Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851

Boston, the war had turned in their favour, and the offer of a general pardon in New Jersey to those who came over to their side was widely taken up.

For his part, Washington was contending with a force reduced by defeat, capture, disease and – the abiding problem of the first part of the war for the colonial side – the shortness of enlistment times, which were only a few months, meaning that turnover in his army was high.

The situation was dire enough that the Continental Congress, the civilian force directing the war against the British, decamped from Philadelphia south to Baltimore – but not before they had conferred upon Washington ‘extraordinary powers for the conduct of the Revolutionary War’, as a plaque on the tavern where the Congress met puts it.

One of his officers wrote to Washington, ‘Our affairs are hastening fast to ruin if we do not retrieve them by some happy event.’ Washington agreed.

Rather than using his power merely to regroup and try again in the new year, he conceived of a daring counter-attack.

He had never lacked self-belief, from the time he had been appointed, at the age of 20, to a command in Virginia, and subsequently led bold – if not always successful – forays against the French.

Those early experiences had also taught him that the British officer class tended to hold their irregular colonial

counterparts in contempt. If Washington was motivated by high ideals of independence, mixed in was a good deal of determination to show his opponents what they had missed.

So it was that on the night of 25th December, Washington mustered his remaining forces, numbering about 2,400 men fit for duty, at McConkey’s Ferry on the west bank of the Delaware.

‘The night was sleety,’ according to the account of one of Washington’s officers.

Hoped-for further reinforcements would not arrive. As night fell, Washington and his men launched their flotilla over the icy river. The crossing lasted hours in total. Landing unopposed, the General divided his forces and marched on the Hessians at Trenton, taking them completely by surprise, capturing 918 and killing 30. Washington’s force suffered only five wounded.

Another victory days later at Princeton confirmed that the Continental Army would not be swept aside. Their positive showing at the end of the year encouraged the French to throw in their lot with the Americans, perhaps the decisive moment in the fight for independence.

In the mid-19th century, a German painter who had spent his formative years in the United States recognised the powerful message of the night when Washington led his army across the freezing river. Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, painted in 1851 at a time when Europe’s own revolutionary moment seemed to have melted away, was eagerly adopted by the Americans, becoming perhaps the nation’s best-known historical image.

We don’t know if Washington really did stand recklessly but gloriously in his boat, but his miraculous ability to avoid injury despite taking great risks makes it perfectly believable. It must be the most memorable way a Christmas present has ever been delivered.

MET/BOT / ALAMY

david horspool

Town Mouse

How to get ahead in advertising? Repetition tom hodgkinson

It may not be the most sophisticated advertising slogan ever invented, but I bet it will work.

‘Taste the tasty taste,’ it reads. And it’s been plastered all over London’s Routemaster buses lately, alongside a picture of a gigantic banana, and the logo of the corporate banana merchant who paid for the ad, Chiquita. I see it a lot as I cycle round town.

The company that sells advertising space on London’s buses and Underground, Global, claims an awful lot of people will see this ad. According to its website: ‘Bus advertising reaches over 48 million adults over a typical two-week period, making it one of the highestreaching marketing mediums available.

Buses are particularly effective when targeting illusive [sic] 15-34-year-old light TV viewers.’

As a cycling mouse, I worry, as London councils have worried in the past, about the effect of these adverts on road safety, especially now that enormous screens can display moving ads.

Ads have exploded in recent decades.

Look at Coca-Cola. They never stop.

42 The Oldie January 2024

Their logo is everywhere, even in deserts and war zones.

Chiquita will not be the first commercial concern to have recognised that cities present fantastic opportunities for promotion. In the ancient polis of Herculaneum, archaeologists have found a misspelt ad in the form of graffiti, which reads: ‘exemta stecora a XI’ meaning: ‘Shit removed for 11 asses’ (an ass was a coin).

Ancient Pompeii, too, was filled with ads. As today, there were professional billposters. They targeted citizens with ads for public spectacles, estate agents and political candidates in black and red letters in the baths, on the walls of large buildings, on theatres and on tombstones.

Next to a billboard painting, advertising an election candidate, archaeologists found the following inscription: ‘Infantio, Florus, Fluctus and Sabinus painted this notice here and everywhere.’ It’s the ancient equivalent of billboards that read ‘To advertise here, call…’

Dr Johnson analysed the art of advertising in 18th-century London.

Writing in 1758, he says that people are so bombarded with messages these days that, in order to stand out, the advertisers must report to ridiculous hyperbole: ‘Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetick.’

Johnson quotes ads for the ‘original Daffy’s elixir’, ‘a fresh parcel of Dublin butter’ and an ad for a duvet which claims ‘it is warmer than four or five blankets, and lighter than one’. He praises one advertiser for their ‘modest sincerity’: the manufacturer of a ‘beautifying lotion’ touchingly confesses that though their lotion will repel pimples, smooth the skin and plump the flesh, it will not ‘restore the bloom of fifteen to a lady of 50’.

Of course advertising in cities exploded in the hyper-commercial 19th century. We’ve all seen those photos of voluminously skirted and top-hatted Victorian ladies and gents perched on buses advertising Sunlight Soap, Lipton Tea, Coffee and Cocoa Planter, Ceylon, Pears’ Soap and the rest.

The first electric sign appeared in Piccadilly Circus in 1908: it advertised ‘Mellin’s Food for Infants and Invalids’, and was quickly followed by lit-up ads for mega-brands Perrier and Bovril.

Like the Pompeiians, Victorian billposters also painted ads on the sides of metropolitan buildings. The legends were painted in oil, and so well done that many are still visible today. Historic England has even named them and started a campaign to conserve them.

It’s called Ghost Signs and the public are being encouraged to send in pics of their discoveries. In Stamford Hill, an empty Victorian building bears the words ‘Yager’s Costumes to Measure. The House of Quality. The House of Value.

Buy Here & Save Money.’

Another wall offers the simple statement ‘Sankeys Soap’ written in white letters on a blue background (you will note the missing apostrophe – clearly this Victorian advertiser had as little regard for spelling and punctuation as their Roman ancestors).

When I was a younger mouse, I spent three lucrative years as a writer of billboard ads. They were just as unsophisticated as banana-seller Chiquita’s ‘Taste the tasty taste’. One ran simply ‘Yum Yum’. It was an ad for Nigella Lawson’s cookery show and was plastered all over town.

When it comes to ads, sadly it’s repetition that works, not wit.

Country Mouse

Mary’s new phobia – my voice giles wood

‘House-hunters, escaping rocketing rents in London, are targeting Wiltshire, as they seek more space for their money, as well as a better work/life balance,’ droned Mary.

She was reading aloud from the local rag, but I was absorbed in the study of Beechcombings, Richard Mabey’s view of woodlands through the exclusive lens of the beech tree, and was only half-listening.

Most of the time when I react to Mary’s voice, it turns out that she has not been talking to me at all but to someone else on the telephone, or dictating a voicemail. Normal social cues are therefore hard to ‘read’ in the echoey, lavatory-sized rooms of the cottage.

Any interruption of her verbal flow actually intended for my own ears has led to accusations of ‘heckling’.

Up until now, the interplay of conversation – or agreeable backchat – has stood us in good stead. It has been one of the compensations of marriage.

Now, I am saddened to report, she has developed a phobia of my speaking at all.

So it wasn’t surprising I misinterpreted her unsolicited newscasting by flinging open the cottage window – inviting a howling wind which blew papers off the table.

‘Why have you opened the window?’

‘To look for house-hunters,’ I replied.

‘I was reading from the Gazette & Herald,’ she snapped, ‘not announcing that house-hunters are standing outside the cottage now.’

Scroll back 35 years and, peeping through that same cottage window, you would have seen two ‘yuppies’ (all incomers from London were dubbed yuppies at that time) excitedly gazing out at the barren acre abutting our cottage, thrown in with the purchase.

It was, according to my mother, ‘a

dickens of a lot of land to manage’. There wasn’t a tree in sight – although a lone holly bush graced the boundary. The craze for self-sufficiency had already peaked and we were not intending to be smallholders. Consequently, in order to screen out the middle-distance monoculture of inferior wheat, fit only for cattle feed, I planted trees.

I learned that grants were available and the Tree Officer, an enlightened bloke from Kennet District Council, a champion of arboreal ‘diversity’, approved my plan, which included species from foreign climes. Acid rain, not climate change, was the eco-worry of the day.

It turned out that my American black walnut is one of the species that scores highly in a warming world, because of its ability to withstand drought.

Like most new ‘landowners’, I wanted one of everything. I modelled some of my planting schemes on the grounds of nearby Bowood House, where they have hundreds of acres, not just one.

I convinced myself that planting trees was a gentlemanly occupation, which trumped any need to attend to gainful employment. I had also been reading a fashionable tome of the time that extolled the virtue of ‘own work’, as opposed to working for someone else.

Where now are my Hungarian oak and my Turkish hazel? They lost the battle against the nettles and brambles. I foolishly introduced dogwood, a suckering menace whose roots invade the most tender of shrubs – even those of my lovely, scented Osmanthus delavayi.

And what possessed me to plant dwarf elder, which even pioneer re-wilder Gertrude Jekyll swore should never be introduced into a garden, owing to its invasive, thong-like roots, which pop up, triffid-like, to strangle choicer plants?

Thanks to these errors, I can never resist the temptation to bore any newcomers, seeking a better work/life balance, with advice about what and what not to plant.

Even if I have had no personal experience of growing it, I recommend the balsam poplar, with its intoxicating scent. A Scots pine might provide a landmark tree, as well as attracting the elusive long-eared owl.

My own efforts were well-intended but, reading historical ecologist Oliver Rackham, I wonder whether I should have simply fenced the acre off and left it. With no human intervention, in a process called ‘natural succession’, almost all land will gradually turn into woodland. Rackham warns would-be virtue-signallers against tree-planting when he writes, ‘A transplanted tree is, inevitably, a damaged tree, like a man shot in the stomach.’

Rackham believed an Englishman should plant only one species – the native black poplar, which struggles to perpetuate itself.

The next time Mary’s voice began droning, I was quick to be more alert – especially as this time it piqued my interest.

‘Wiltshire Council,’ she read from the parish magazine, ‘is set to revive the scheme whereby every village has a tree warden to keep an eye on existing trees and spot suitable locations for new ones.’

I was listening.

‘That would suit you, Giles!’ she enthused. ‘You could plead for clemency when trees you like are about to be felled to open up a view … and you could advise people not to plant copper beech.’

Sadly not. As a way of antagonising local landowners, the role might suit a troublemaker, but certainly not a timid fellow like me.

‘Mr Shoemaker, what’s the password for the password?’

The Oldie January 2024 43

Postcards from the Edge

Best London Mayor? Dick Whittington

The pantomime star was a wool merchant, a banker and the man who financed Henry V at Agincourt. By Mary Kenny

44 The Oldie January 2024

– dying in 1423 at the age of either 70 or 80, birth dates being approximate.

He was religious and endowed many charities – he and Alice had no heirs.

When Dick first came to London, probably in the 1360s, there was a wide variety of English dialects spoken among apprentices.

The story of Dick Whittington is more fable than fact, but, still, terrific performers have appeared in the panto, from Marie Lloyd to Frankie Howerd and the famed clown Joseph Grimaldi (kinsman to Prince Albert of Monaco).

This legend really captured my imagination, and it’s lovely to see Dick Whittington and his cat are still immortalised in pantomime at this year’s end.

A rail passenger walks into her local station at Walmer, near Deal (where Julius Caesar first landed in Britain, by the way).

She faces a complicated train journey, travelling to London and on to Barnstaple in Devon and back by another route. The ticket machine tells her this will cost £185.

Then she goes to the ticket office, where Debbie, the wondrous ticket queen, works out a smarter plan for the journey – and the fare is reduced to £85.

One of the triumphs of 2023 was the successful public campaign to keep rail ticket offices open and staffed by humans, not exclusively by machines.

I wrote about this in The Oldie

in October. I extolled the services of Mrs Debbie Brooker, who runs a local ticket office in Kent, and can figure out a whole matrix of complex train journeys.

I feel sure that Oldie-readers helped to join the public consultation, which ultimately saved the presence of humans in rail ticket offices.

Do oldies take too many medicines, as the Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, has claimed?

When asked what medication I’m on, surprise is expressed when I say, ‘None.’

I sort of believe in putting up with aches and pains.

Then I quizzed a doctor friend with a large surgery of older patients. He said that some oldies may just have unrealistic expectations about health.

One chap in his seventies insisted he needed an antibiotic for a chest infection – he must be ill, he reckoned, because ‘He’d registered a really poor time in the half-marathon he’d just run’!

Jolly optimistic, really.

When the novelist and critic Lee Langley worked in the movie industry, she was taught how to concoct ‘the perfect dry martini’ by the mogul who ran Warner Brothers in London, Arthur Abeles. She has made this perfect martini each Christmas ever since.

Instructions: four parts gin to one part vermouth (or five parts gin for a drier version). Start with the martini glass – an elegant triangle poised on its stem. Chill it in the fridge or freezer.

Measure out the gin and vermouth, add lots of ice and stir gently. Strain the liquid into the chilled glass, with a twist of lemon.

The recipe goes with a recitation from Dorothy Parker: ‘I like to have a martini./ Two at the very most./ After three, I’m under the table./ After four, I’m under the host.’

Dotty sure liked too many martinis, but don’t let that put anyone off!

TOBY MORISON

In the spring of 2024, if the Almighty spares me, I’ll be 80, which is to have gratefully attained the status of a long life.

As is an octogenarian’s wont, I look back on early influences and memories.

One of the most vivid is attending the Christmas pantomime – Dick Whittington in particular.

I was something of a dunce at school. So it seemed inspiring that Dick was portrayed as an orphan and a failure, whose only friend was a cat. I relished the chorus of audience encouragement. It egged him on with the cry of ‘Turn again, Whittington,’ urging him to keep on keeping on. At the age of eight, I remember being drawn to the idea of persistence and not losing heart.

And so, this year, I read a lovingly researched tome about the real Dick Whittington, Paved with Gold, written by an author and former actor, Gregory Holyoake – from Deal, where I live.

It turns out Dick wasn’t an orphan at all, nor did he have a cat. But he did apparently walk to London from Pauntley in Gloucestershire – 100 miles, at the rate of 15 miles a day – and he did eventually become Mayor of London (though not ‘Lord Mayor’) four times.

He was an apprentice mercer, and rose to become a great magnate, banker, wool merchant and the man who financed Henry V at Agincourt. This increased England’s rule over France – and, by way of compensation to our Continental friends, ushered in a craze for French couture fashion.

Dick did marry Alice Fitzwaryn, as in the panto, although rather later in life.

He lived a long life, through five reigns

Small World

The miracle from Hell – I can hear again My new hearing aids mean everyday conversation comes through depressingly loud and clear jem clarke

STEVE WAY

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he shares with his parents…

My morning did not start well.

As I opened a new jar of my favourite brand of chutney, I noticed the label boasted ‘Now with improved taste’. It made me mistrust my tastebuds and wonder what slop they’d been selling this gullible sandwich-gobbler for all these years.

This coincided with my much-delayed hearing-aid appointment at the hospital.

The appointment had been delayed by an audiology nurse. She refused to see me, owing to my continual mistake of referring to the rubber dome part of the hearing aid that fits in your ear as the ‘nipple’. It offended her delicate sensibilities, although she didn’t look delicate, or sensible.

Imagine my surprise when, upon arrival, the self-same audiologist stood lurking in her hearing cupboard, moustache thickened by the two years since we last met, glowering at me, mumbling, ‘You going to behave today?’

I had to ask her to repeat herself.

She shouted, ‘Are you not wearing your hearing aid?’

‘No. I didn’t think you’d want me to.

The lady at Specsavers was furious when I went to my eye test wearing my contact lenses.’

‘Well, the NHS is not part of Specsavers,’ she said.

‘Not yet,’ the futurologist in me smirked.

‘You’re young for this level of hearing loss,’ she observed.

I explained that I was born at the wrong time and became a teenager just as the Sony Walkman craze hit. I spent most of my teens listening to Hall & Oates and Billy Joel on headphones.

The GP three before the current one – (pretends he doesn’t know me if he sees me in the Toby Inn carvery queue) – suggested it was selective deafness, caused by close living arrangements with my mother.

She said, ‘Well, I’d move out sharpish.

Your other ear’s buggered now.’

I left the hospital with two brand-new robotic ears (well, hearing aids). These 21st-century NHS offerings are a long way from those worn by the child we all bullied at school. Slick, tarnished-silver and pairable with a smartphone, these audio angels can be effortlessly switched between listening to my mother and listening to Nicky Campbell.

I strolled along the seafront and gave my new ears a test drive. It was a joy to hear snatches of outdoor conversations.

The first thing my new ears heard was an angry restaurateur kicking his own sandwich board as he attacked some supplier on his phone. The supplier must have been one of his own countrymen as I did not recognise the language. It sounded a beautiful language to be angry in.

The second was a peeved, demipermed pram-pusher. Her phone was perfectly poised in her one free hand at the right screen tilt either for using it as a mobile make-up mirror or for yelling at a partner. She chose the latter option, bollocking her beau, with her vocal delivery perfectly parallel with the rhythm of her rickety pram wheels:

‘You said you’d pump that parrot up for River’s school dress-up book day. School phoned me to collect him early ’cos he was in bits. Without the Long John Silver parrot, they all thought he’d come as Nick Knowles, and that marker pen you so swore wasn’t permanent IS permanent.

‘His pirate beard won’t come off. He doesn’t like showers and he’s just had to have seven of them. Your six-year-old son looks like he’s going through puberty and you’re on the piss!’

After a decade in the valley of the deaf-ish, the world strikes me as a lot angrier and more likely to over-share their business.

When I arrived home, my mother harrumphed, ‘Oh, look at Jack, come back to his mother from the market with his new shiny beans. How come they can’t afford to give your father DVT stockings when his legs are living time bombs, but they can accessorise you in flash colours? You’ve been living quite the high life while I’ve been waiting for a washer-up, and―’ With the subtlest flick of a finger, she faded out.

From now on, I will be parented

by Five Live drivetime.

The Oldie January 2024 45

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Easy to teach

? Humbug!

We have a new, young teacher who is often overwhelmed by the whole business of teaching.

She is a second-year ECT (Early Career Teacher) and is still in many ways finding her feet. She is sweet and gentle – definitely Miss Honey, not Miss Trunchbull – and this is not easy for her.

Sometimes I worry I am a little mean to her; a bit ‘Come on, brace up – it’s all fine’. It’s not that I’m unsympathetic, but sometimes if you’re too kind to people, they cry – and I am just not patient enough for that in the middle of the day.

However, when I found her panicking by the printer first thing one morning, I thought it was time I was a bit more helpful. I was full of good intentions.

She was putting in too many hours working at home, I told her. It is better to stay after school until all the following lessons’ days are planned, then leave and have the evening free, than to leave on time and take the work home.

‘Don’t do what I do, though,’ I added. ‘I’m always setting everything up for the next day and then forgetting to do the printing –

the system forgets instructions overnight, so you have to start again the next day.’

She looked pleased, and I wandered off feeling I’d done some good for once.

So serve me damn well right when a couple of days later I left school without having prepared for the next day. I was meeting a daughter and in a rush. Casting my eye across the next day’s timetable, I thought it would be fine. I’d wing it.

I’ve taught A Christmas Carol often enough. The Year 7s would do as they were told. The Year 9 lessons were more or less planned. So off I went.

Well, however long you’ve been teaching, you have to plan lessons ahead.

‘Winging it’ is not an option. It might work with the top-set GCSE classes, but that is not what I have been handed this year.

I had never before taught A Christmas Carol to pupils who find it very hard to hold a concept in their minds between one lesson and the next; who have to have their hands held at every step of the way; and who genuinely struggle with Dickens’s sentences. They can’t ‘wing it’ – so neither can I.

The Year 7s are indeed willing and keen. I’ve never enjoyed teaching the young ones as much as I have this year; I don’t know whether it’s the contrast or that they just are a singularly engaged class. But the Year 9s? It was a shambles.

The lessons that need most planning are those for students who find work hard, and for those who find behaving well hard. The latter are the worst. Show the slightest hint of disorganisation or fluster and they circle like hyenas.

Never mind not having done the printing – that’s fine, as there are always children desperate for an excuse to leave the room and get it for you, and they’ll behave as long as there is hope of an exit.

But if you know what you are going to teach, only not quite how you are going to teach it, you are dead meat.

I’ve been at this job for years now.

While I can plan much more quickly than an ingénue in the first years of teaching, I must never forget I still need to plan.

Pride comes before a fall, and little Johnny Head-in-Air fell flat on his face that day. Not that I admitted it to Miss Honey.

Literary Lunch

Sponsored by

13th February 2024

At the National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE Ysenda Maxtone Graham on Jobs for the Girls: How We Set Out to Work in the Typewriter Age

David Kynaston

on A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65 The sixth volume of his acclaimed series Tales of a New Jerusalem

Further speaker to be announced on www.theoldie.co.uk TO BOOK TICKETS email reservations@theoldie.co.uk or call Katherine on 01225 427311 (Mon-Fri 9.30am-3pm).

The price is £79 for a three-course lunch including wine or soft drinks l Vegetarian options available on advance request l Meet the speakers from 12 noon; lunch at 1pm l Authors speak 2.30pm

The Oldie January 2024 47

sister teresa

Smug Little Women ‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents…’ is how Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel for girls, written in 1869, begins.

The March family, having been well-off, are now in financial straits for reasons unspecified. The first chapter deals with the four March sisters being ordered by their mother, whom they call Marmee, to take their delicious celebratory Christmas breakfast to a nearby destitute family with many children, starving and living in degrading squalor. The sisters obey with alacrity.

They go home to a dreary breakfast of bread and milk, but feel they have been well-rewarded for their kindness by the pleasure they have had in giving to children so much poorer than themselves.

They are then further rewarded by a rich and benevolent neighbour who, on hearing of their generosity, sends them a delightful supper and four large bunches of hothouse flowers. So far, so good: the Christmas spirit reigns.

In spite of all this admirable his house justified rather charity, I am very glad that than the other man’ is at Marmee was not my mother. one with the infancy I first read Little Women narrative of Luke’s gospel. when I was ten. While I was ‘Justified’ is a complex word; one of its many gripped by the characters and meanings is ‘at peace with the story, the dizzy heights of God’. The tax-collector’s its moral tone fortunately peace comes from his passed me by. Nearly 70 addressing God with years later, on rereading it, I humility. The other man was exasperated.

Marmee comes across informs God of his (the Pharisee’s) many as very self-righteous. She Little charm outstanding qualities, as doesn’t seem to realise that though his creator wasn’t paying Jesus is far from tolerating this attitude: ‘When you give alms, do not let your left enough attention to him. hand know what your right is In Luke 1:79, Zechariah’s hymn of doing.’ (Matthew 6:3) praise, the Benedictus, ends with the For further reading, she would benefit wonderful prophecy that our feet are to be guided into the way of peace. hugely from Luke 18:10-14 – the parable The evangelist reconfirms this peace, of the Pharisee and the tax-collector. with the heavenly host praising God and At first sight, such a bracing story singing, ‘Glory to God in the highest might seem to be an unsuitable one to be heaven, and peace to people of good will.’ putting forward at this time of year.

May we all have a very happy and But at its heart lies the message of peaceful Christmas – Marmee included. peace: ‘The tax-collector went down to

Memorial Service Dominic Lawson, former editor of the Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator, paid tribute to his father, Nigel, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, at St Margaret’s, Westminster.

Dominic Lawson asked his father two years ago if he had any wishes for a memorial service. ‘Why should I? I won’t be there,’ Lord Lawson said.

Dominic continued, ‘The only thing that mattered to him was that he be buried at sea, by the Royal Navy. And he was: his remains were consigned to the deep from HMS Mersey, to the strains of Noël Coward’s song Matelot, which he loved.

The naval officer who organised this sent me details of my father’s service 48 The Oldie January 2024

record. One report had a slight criticism: “Lawson could be more self-assertive.”

Well, he certainly took that on board.

‘He did have something in common with Winston Churchill: a prodigious level of alcohol consumption, with no apparent detriment to lucidity of thought or speech.

When asked by a doctor how much he drank, he replied, “I take two Pernods before lunch, then a few glasses of wine at lunch and Armagnac. I have a few more Pernods in the afternoon, some more red wine with my supper and an Armagnac before bed.” ’ The Archbishop of Canterbury said in his address, ‘Nigel Lawson always claimed

that he was responsible for me becoming Archbishop of Canterbury after a speech in the House of Lords in which I admitted my past in the financial markets. He suggested my name for the Parliamentary Banking Standards Commission and that upped my visibility. I don’t know if he was the cause but, if so, many in the Church and some here might consider it was his greatest service to atheism.’

Daughter Emily Lawson and son Tom Lawson gave readings. Grandchildren Hector and Xanthe said prayers. Former chancellor Lord Lamont said Nigel Lawson was involved in the Thatcher project from the beginning to almost the very end. Piers Lane played a piano arrangement of Bach’s Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring by Dame Myra Hess. She was Nigel’s great-aunt.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

HERITAGE IMAGE PARTNERSHIP LTD / ALAMY

Lord Lawson of Blaby (1932-2023)

The Doctor’s Surgery

The Spanish guide to the siesta A new study shows short daytime sleeps are better than long ones dr theodore dalrymple The vice-president of a small country once came to me to ask my advice about a serious medical problem.

‘Every day after lunch,’ he said, ‘I feel sleepy and fall asleep, even during cabinet meetings.’ during cabinet meetings, I would have added, had he been a British minister. It was not necessary to be Dr Conan Doyle to solve the problem: the vice-president drank eight beers at every lunch.

I suggested gently that this might be the problem and, to do him justice, he saw the point. Whether the country as a whole benefited from his new-found state of post-prandial alertness, I am unable to say.

Drowsiness after a lunch is a problem, even for those who do not drink. I suffer from it myself. To resist the urge to sleep is counter-productive, and only prolongs the agony, whereas

if I sleep for a short time, I wake alert and refreshed.

I have found by experience that, from the point of view of mental acuity, a short sleep, even for a minute or two, is as good as – or better than – a longer one.

I might feel a little peeved if someone wakes me shortly after I have fallen asleep, and be as tetchy as a wakened baby for a few moments. But if I sleep for longer, I feel for a time as if the sandman had not so much put sand in my eyes as sunk lead shot in my skull.

Does it matter whether one’s siestas are short or long? There are other variables to be considered, which make the question difficult to answer: for example, the quantity one has eaten beforehand; what time one has eaten it (a later nap causing more delay in night-time sleeping, which is associated with higher blood pressure

and type 2 diabetes); whether one naps in a chair or lying on the bed; and so on.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, a lot of the siesta research is carried out in Spain.

A recent paper sought to elucidate the health consequences (if any) of long versus short siestas, the latter being defined as lasting under 30 minutes.

The authors recruited 3,275 people, aged between 18 and 65, who were either overweight or obese, 35 per cent of whom took siestas. Interestingly, 70 per cent were university-educated, which I presume means that the sample was not representative of the whole of the Spanish population.

Of those who took siestas, rather more than half took short ones. The researchers found that those who took longer naps had higher systolic blood pressure and a higher body mass index.

Quite a lot of the difference was accounted for by the fact that long nappers smoked more and ate more. In addition, the long nappers were more likely to take their siesta in or on the bed.

Two important questions remain unanswered. The first is whether the association, while statistically significant, points to any clinically deleterious consequences – such as, for example, death. It is always dangerous in medicine to argue that because a is associated with b and b is associated with c, a must be associated with c. It may be, but it requires independent proof.

The second question is the direction of causation, if any. The study cannot tell us. This is important, because long nappers might start fruitlessly to set their alarm clocks on the assumption that if long naps are harmful to health, short naps must be the answer.

I was pleased to see my personal experience vindicated, however. Only eight per cent of short nappers felt bad afterwards, whereas 19 per cent of long nappers did so. That is why I shall continue to take short naps.

The Oldie January 2024 49

The Oldie, 23–31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk To sign up for our e-newsletter, go to www.theoldie.co.uk

Poetic types SIR: I found Dunphy’s cartoon about incompatible typefaces (November issue) most amusing, not least because it reminded me of a verse I wrote during a few moments of boredom in a meeting at which typefaces suitable for exhibition posters were being discussed.

Gill Sans was mentioned, and it occurred to me the name was well suited to the hero of a traditional Scots ballad.

Within a minute or two, the following verse took shape on my note pad: Gill Sans rode up to the castle walls To seek his own true love, And there fair Lucida he espied On the battlements above.

‘Gill Sans,’ she cried, ‘Ye must awa’, Ma father’s called the sheriff.

He says ye may not lie wi’ me Because ye are sans serif!’

Poor chap!

Yours faithfully, Tom Randall, Midsomer Norton, Bath and N E Somerset

Age cannot wither him SIR: At first glance I was sure that your picture editor had mistakenly used a photograph of a young Gore Vidal in place of one of 88-year-old Don McCullin (Old Un’s notes, December issue). All I can say is, I want to look like him when I grow up!

John Moysen (a mere 65), Dulwich, London SE21

Electric-shock therapy SIR: I noted with some amusement the cartoon on the Readers’ Letters page (November issue) depicting an obviously unrousable patient in a hospital bed, surrounded by doctors and various pieces of monitoring apparatus, with the caption ‘Try turning everything off and then turning it back on again’.

This reminded me of my days working in the cardiac theatre of a large London teaching hospital. Inevitably the patients were surrounded by many different bits of medical machinery, most of which were continually producing vital readings and were connected by large numbers of electrical leads all over the floor.

If a concern was raised because of a certain reading, the surgeon usually gave the order for everyone to ‘hop around’, because someone might well be standing on an essential lead.

Elizabeth Sadler, Walton-on-the-Naze, Essex

Nice Italian POWs

Fountain of eternal youth: Don McCullin 50 The Oldie January 2024

SIR: The Duke of Gloucester mentions (‘Parcels from heaven’, November issue) that Italian prisoners of war captured during the Second World War were taken to South Africa and Australia. Some, though, were brought to Britain.

As a six-year-old evacuee I spent some time at Midhurst, Sussex, in 1942. On

Sundays, many Italian prisoners of war could be seen wandering freely around the main streets of the town. They wore their green uniforms, all of which had a large, yellow, diamond-shaped patch sewn onto the front of the left thigh and another one sewn onto the back of the tunic. No one bothered them and they did not bother the local inhabitants.

Peter Lane, London W5

‘Honey, I ate part of your ice cream to teach you about taxes’

Accidental sex SIR: Referring to potential difficulties with backstage visitors in his recent article on the subject (December issue), Simon Williams includes a category of people one might have ‘slept with … once by mistake’. I didn’t know that this was possible. Perhaps the

writer would care to enlighten us with further details.

I would be interested to learn how to acquire the technique, or otherwise how to tell whether I might have already done it without realising.

George Zielinski, Nottingham

‘No, of course I didn’t pack it myself!’

Shakespeare’s weepy SIR: I can’t let Griff Rhys Jones’s excellent article (December issue) on classic tear-producing films, songs, and poems go by without mentioning what is surely the most masterful expression of bereavement to be found anywhere in the arts: it’s by Shakespeare, of course, and it comes in King John when Queen Constance is chided for being ‘too fond of grief’ following the death of her son.

Her reply, beginning ‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child, lies in his bed, walks up and down with me’ is, I find, impossible to read without both understanding that this is Shakespeare’s own lament for his beloved son, Hamnet, and at the same time welling up in empathy.

Let the tears flow!

Yours, Tony Purcell, Sheffield, South Yorkshire

I’m a January robin SIR: I read in December’s Old Un’s Notes that, according to Yvette Brown’s writings, anyone born in January is spiritually a robin.

I was weeding one day, with my garden robin in attendance feeding on disturbed insects. Suddenly a sparrowhawk hurtled past, about 18 inches from my nose, and took my robin, leaving behind a solitary feather. I felt that part of me had been torn away.

I was born in January.

Helen Pitt, Elmsett, Suffolk

Wrong county, Giles

‘Frankincense? They’ve regifted what I gave them last year!’

SIR: In Giles Wood’s Country Mouse in the December issue, he reminisces that, when he lived in a cottage in ‘the flat, unassuming countryside of Essex’, he resented paying the council-tax bill from Babergh District Council.

I am surprised. He must have been in Suffolk rather than Essex, because the Babergh area is just over the county border to the north, which runs along the River Stour.

As it happens, this southern part of Suffolk is rather more rolling than flat, and somewhat more interesting than much of Essex!

Terrence Bramer, Capel St Mary, Suffolk

‘Well, you should have gone before we came’

Agatha Christie’s lost clue SIR: I really thought I’d be safe with The Oldie, as it has the pleasing – and useful – policy of identifying authors of articles with their books. But, on looking at the November issue, I saw that my piece on Agatha Christie had no mention of the book in which the story can be found: Agatha Christie at Home (Pimpernel Press).

Readers might be interested in other revealing exchanges – often to do with managing her houses – between Agatha and Edmund Cork, her literary agent and friend of 40 years.

Hilary Macaskill, Highbury, London N5 The Oldie January 2024 51

I Once Met

Arthur Miller I first met Arthur Miller (1915-2005) when he came to a drama class I was running at his alma mater, the University of Michigan, back in 1987.

Before his arrival, I told my students not to mention the marriage to Marilyn Monroe that Life magazine had called ‘the most unlikely since that of the owl and the pussycat’.

I didn’t yet know the story of the way this athletic six-footer responded to a reporter who asked him if he ever dreamed of the love goddess – he chased him round the buffet at a Miller celebration, punching him so hard he slithered backwards into the smoked salmon – but it seemed tactful to avoid such an intimate subject.

Well, what did the great dramatist almost immediately do? Asked by an undergraduate if there were autobiographical aspects to his plays, he himself talked unaffectedly and at length about Marilyn’s talents and troubles with celebrity ‘with the results you know’. Blow me, I’ve never felt more silly, uptight and English.

I saw Arthur several times after that, once visiting him at his house on the edge of a forest in Connecticut and enjoying lunch with him on a table

Avid carpenter in his 80s: Arthur Miller

and from a chair both of which he had made himself.

Even in his eighties, he was an avid carpenter and still writing for four or five hours each morning. For him, activity was essential. He had, he said, made a trip to Florida where he’d met vigorous but retired 50-year-olds ‘who were doing nothing and looking forward to doing nothing even though they were all going to live into their nineties’.

Chatting to him later at a celebration of his 80th birthday, at the Arthur Miller Centre at the University of East Anglia, and then at a conference in Salzburg, I came to see him as a man at ease in his own skin while profoundly ill at ease in

his own country. Everywhere he saw people fighting for their lives, victims of fear, anxiety and ‘living from sensation to sensation’. Indeed, he thought America was ‘drifting towards some awful abyss’.

He had personal reasons for pessimism: many American critics were rejecting him as old-fashioned.

He believed that Death of a Salesman, which had given him his first success, in 1949, would not have got a première on a late-20th-century Broadway run ‘by real-estate lawyers’. Yet he always came across as resilient. ‘Who do I complain to?’ he asked. ‘The mayor, the governor, the president, God?’ He was resilient, genial, kindly and wryly humorous. There was, he joked, ‘barely a nation whose government hasn’t been overthrown at least once since I was born’. He added that he always knew when a coup was in the offing, because some rebel group would be staging his witches-of-Salem play, The Crucible. He hated directing his own work, though, because it made him feel brain dead, ‘and I’d rather someone else was brain dead’.

He joked and chuckled a lot, cheerfully explaining why. ‘You can’t hit a man when he’s chuckling, can you? Right?’ Right.

Benedict Nightingale

The Jeremy Lewis Prize for New Writing

By Robert Parsons – this year’s winner of the annual award in honour of our late deputy editor

52 The Oldie January 2024

life was the production of children and their proper upbringing. A man was needed for procreation. After that, he had little purpose, other than to bring home the bacon to feed the family. Do that, and the man would be fed as well.

On the outskirts of Trieste, we were slowed by a sharp left turn under a railway bridge before entering an open space. This space was full of angry Italians shouting unfriendly slogans like ‘Abbasso gli inglesi’. The throng slowed us to a halt. My friend and I ran from side to side of the car, fearful of the angry faces and the pounding of fists on windows and doors.

Then they had a better idea – lift one side and overturn the Merc. Bless it, the Merc was too heavy for them. Then an athletic youth jumped onto the bonnet to slide up to the windscreen. Nanny

stared disapprovingly at him. He spat at the glass. This was too much for Nanny.

Bad Manners.

She stood and cracked him on his head with her brolly, saying, ‘Get off my car and behave yourself.’

He replied, ‘Mi scusi, signora,’ as he slid off the car.

Nanny, still standing, glared at the mob. They burst into laughter and applauded. A space opened before us. ‘Drive on,’ commanded Nanny. We did – and we were not late for school.

Jeremy Lewis 1942-2017

DAVID HOCKNEY

It was in Trieste, in 1949, when I, aged 7, and a schoolfriend were protected from the violence of a mob by a tiny woman of indomitable strength. Nanny.

In 1949, the Italian population were not certain that the Allied administration would return Trieste to Italy instead of to Yugoslavia. That is why Italians were rioting. The cause of my adventure.

We lived in Duino Castle, 15 miles from the city. We disregarded or were in ignorance of the risk in the city. So the large, open Mercedes staff car, liberated in 1945, set out on the school run. Nanny, with umbrella, was in the front seat.

Nanny was special. Four foot 11 of iron will, with unbending adherence to the standards of the Plymouth Brethren of her birth, including honesty, cleanliness, good manners and observance of the Ten Commandments. To her, the purpose of

‘A schoolmistress with an errant pupil’: Lady Falkender and Harold Wilson

Queen of spads QUENTIN LETTS Marcia Williams: The Life and Times of Baroness Falkender Linda McDougall Biteback Publishing £25 Fifty-nine years ago, long before Dominic Cummings was even born, there was a political adviser at 10 Downing Street who effed and blinded at the Prime Minister and threatened to topple him unless she had her way.

That aide was Marcia Williams. The Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was beholden to her in part because he and mercurial Marcia had been lovers. Say 54 The Oldie January 2024

what you like about Cummings; he never did that with Boris.

Williams, best remembered for drafting the ‘Lavender List’ of Wilson’s resignation honours, was a speck of stardust in the grimy Wilson years. Much of that era’s politics now looks monochrome: jowly, oily-fringed men who smoked too much and seemed permanently exhausted.

Amid it all stands Marcia, sometimes in the background at campaign events, sometimes looming over Wilson at his desk, a schoolmistress with an errant pupil. With her high blonde hairdo, prune-chinned pout, angular nose and a breathy, poshed-up voice, she was part Myra Hindley, part Margaret Thatcher.

Williams was a prototype Alastair

Campbell, Lord Levy, Carole Caplin and Cummings rolled into one. What a piece of work!

Linda McDougall has written a slim, forgiving portrait that hails her as a pioneering politico who copped more criticism than she deserved, chiefly because she was a woman. That’s fair, up to a point. She undoubtedly endured chauvinism. But gender politics works both ways, and it is unlikely Wilson would have put up with such rudeness and corruption from a male aide.

Williams was already Wilson’s sidekick when the Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, died of lupus in 1963. At his house in Frognal Gardens, Hampstead, Gaitskell had thrown parties for a sleek set on the right of the Labour party.

Wilson, the more left-wing Shadow Foreign Secretary, was never a Frognalite.

He was fat, had a voice like a frog and even at one point entertained a dreadful moustache.

But Marcia, whose initial pursuit of him had about it something of the stalker, believed in him. Marcia, a Northampton girl, whose mother claimed to have been an illegitimate child of Edward VII, propelled him to the Labour leadership. The premiership followed a year later – with the narrowest of election victories.

Wilson entered Downing Street to silence, civil servants not bothering to give him the customary ovation.

Williams feared Wilson was in danger of being overwhelmed by the system – so she had herself appointed Downing Street’s first political secretary. Whitehall tried to resist this innovation.

We fret today about tensions between officials and special advisers; ‘shouty’ Marcia won prizes at it. It was always a bad sign when she started tapping her handbag. Explosions invariably followed.

She infuriated Sir Humphrey by

GARY WING

Books

having her desk placed directly outside the PM’s study. Male grandees patronisingly praised her typing and shorthand skills, little imagining that a woman might have the guile to outsmart them politically.

One mandarin left. Another died of a heart attack, possibly triggered by the stress of dealing with Marcia. A young Robin Butler (later Cabinet Secretary) nearly had his career ruined because Williams thought he was getting too close to Wilson. Parliamentary confidants of the PM such as George Wigg were driven off the road, too.

Williams, whose childhood nickname was Napoleon, would barge into the PM’s meetings and admonish him like a dog. She once pinched his official aeroplane, leaving Harold and his long-suffering wife, Mary, to make their way back to London by train.

Marcia arranged for Wilson to have dinner with schemers such as James Goldsmith, who may have paid for her illegitimate sons’ schooling. Another rum character in the wings was Joe Kagan, the Gannex raincoat millionaire who happily bribed his way into Buckingham Palace.

Williams had a lifestyle way beyond the reach of most people on her salary.

McDougall is disappointingly incurious about her subject’s finances. Nor do we learn much about her policy beliefs.

There is, however, quite a lot about Marcia’s sex life and drug-taking. She once, in a fury, boasted to Mary, ‘I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956 and it wasn’t satisfactory.’

McDougall hints that she may have had an abortion at that time.

It was Wilson’s doctor, Joseph Stone, who gave her amphetamines. Did he do so because she was so needy or because she had shouted, after one row, that she would ‘destroy’ Wilson?

McDougall notes that Stone must have known the purple hearts he slipped Marcia would have made her an unreliable witness in any court.

‘The story of Marcia is an incredibly sad one,’ writes McDougall. She certainly had a long and unproductive retirement.

Wilson sent her to the Lords in 1974.

Lady Falkender (Private Eye called her Forkbender) duly turned up to collect the Upper House’s attendance money, but never spoke there. Not once.

She preferred to smoulder in the shadows, dreaming of the days she and her Harold ran the roost.

Quentin Letts is the Daily Mail’s political sketchwriter

‘It would be faster for you to do this online’

Ireland’s wild rover DEA BIRKETT Life at Full Tilt: The Selected Writings of Dervla Murphy Edited by Ethel Crowley Eland £25 When Dervla Murphy died last year, aged 92, the President of Ireland wrote her eulogy, describing her as ‘Ireland’s most famous travel writer’.

Murphy is one of Ireland’s greatest exports, both for her numerous books and for her extensive travels over half a century. She probably trekked more miles than any of her countrymen, or -women, have before or since. I doubt the record will ever be broken.

Ethel Crowley, an Irish academic, was a friend and follower, and already working on an edited collection of Murphy’s work when she died.

In Life at Full Tilt, Crowley has selected snippets from all 24 travel books, determined to give a thorough overview of Murphy’s work and life. The edited extracts are rarely a page long – short highlights or snippets strung one after the other, some no more than a few sentences.

The content is arranged in chronological order – according to when things happened rather than publication date. When Murphy writes about her childhood in a latterly published book, it still appears at the start of this collection.

The collection opens with Silverland: A Winter Journey beyond the Urals (2007), with a section about riding her bicycle called Cleopatra in 1949 bomb-damaged Cologne. In this way, Life at Full Tilt ends up being not, in fact, a collection of her works. Instead, it reads

like an autobiography, beginning with her girlhood and ending on her late-inlife commitment to the Palestinian cause.

I interviewed Murphy for this magazine for her 80th birthday. I visited her simple home in Lismore, County Waterford, where she literally locked herself in between trips, padlocking the iron gate, to sit down and write undisturbed. When we strolled along the local high street, she refused to acknowledge greetings from passers-by with anything more than a quick nod, eyes down, walking quickly to avoid feeling obliged to pause for an exchange of words.

In an informative introduction, Crowley calls her subject ‘self-taught, self-motivated, self-propelled, selfemployed … not a joiner’.

This solitary, self-absorbed character, at home in Ireland, is in sharp contrast to the outgoing, chatty, inquisitive woman we meet in the extracts in this collection. In these, she grasps the opportunity to have a conversation with each passing stranger.

Often Murphy was looking abroad for something she felt was disappearing at home. She rejected the 21st century (internet, mobile phones, cashless society) and a great deal of the 20th (credit cards, cars, washing machines, hotel chains, television).

She said of herself, ‘Were I a species rather than an individual, I’d be doomed to extinction as a creature unable to adapt to its changing environment.’

She most resembled the 19th-century Victorian lady explorers many of whom, like her, were propelled out into a wide world after spending their young womanhood minding an invalid parent.

And, like them, in movement she found a solace and freedom from constraint that others might find in the quiet uninterrupted calm of home.

She also shared their rejection of anything that hinted at women’s rights, the other great irony in her character.

While breaking the mould of acceptable female behaviour from 1950s onwards, including being an unmarried mother in Catholic Ireland and an inspiration for thousands of Irish women, she openly decried feminism.

Crowley has cleverly included a selection of Murphy’s extensive travel journalism at the end of the book.

It includes the first piece she ever wrote, aged 24, about cycling through Spain in 1956 – published in the Irish Independent newspaper as ‘A Pyrenees Interlude: Irish Girl’s Unusual Holiday Awheel’.

The Oldie January 2024 55

‘I’v s

In a matter-of-fact style that would become her trademark, the article included a thorough account of the irrigation system in the small Spanish town of Maella.

Already her voice was established – clear, unfussy, with a ‘and-then-I-didthis-and-then-I-did-that’ approach to documenting a journey.

I remember being disappointed on opening her The Island That Dared: Journeys in Cuba to find chapter one describing her taking off from Gatwick on a Virgin Air flight, something I wasn’t at all interested in. She might have benefited from having Crowley editing down her words a bit earlier.

Although travel writer Colin Thubron writes a foreword full of praise for her place in the canon of travel writing, Murphy was not a literary giant but a tremendous traveller. And the more she saw, the more concerned she became. Advocacy replaced adventure with what Thubron calls ‘big-hearted outrage’.

But most of all we will remember her bravery, of which numerous examples appear in this collection. From the girl who pedalled through bomb-damaged Cologne, to the woman who cycled around India, to the Castro-supporting grandparent crossing Cuba by bicitaxi, by God, she will always have been the best woman to have a beer with.

Anthem for doomed UK FRANCIS BECKETT Land of Shame and Glory

By Peter Hennessy Haus Publishing £22 Peter Hennessy has no talent for loathing. Even mild dislike does not come naturally to him, though he can manage it occasionally. Expressions of admiration about old friends of this uniquely well-connected historian, such as John Major, abound in his latest book, Land of Shame and Glory.

But one contemporary politician has at last awakened the sleeping hater in Hennessy. That politician is Boris Johnson, and Hennessy can hardly mention the name without unleashing unsuspected powers of angry invective.

On 14th January 2022, he wrote in his diary, ‘Boris Johnson will go noisily … his departure will be low on grace, thin on dignity and heavily freighted with self-justification.’

‘Johnson,’ he writes during the Owen Paterson saga, ‘has a habit of trying to just sweep aside any convention, procedure or institution that gets in his or his government’s way.’

And later: ‘Johnson is without peer in the retail trade of political fibbing. At moments of trouble (for him), he will

James McHaffie, a British climber, on Karimbony, a 1,200-foot granite monolith in Madagascar. The region is known as the Yosemite of Africa. From David Pickford’s Extreme Horizons: The Climbing and Adventure Essays

reach for the shelf laden with deceit and grab whatever comes to hand.’ He is ‘floodlit in hubris and dazzling in his shamelessness – a shamelessness that shamed his country and its political system’.

There is much more like that.

How come Johnson reaches a part of Hennessy that no politician, living or dead, has reached before? It’s this.

Britain is one of the few western democracies without a written constitution, and Hennessy, who knows as much about it as anyone alive, believes this works only because there are a few agreed behavioural norms which senior politicians and top civil servants understand and respect – he calls it the ‘good chap’ theory of British government.

This is partly why the two Prime Ministers he talks of most warmly are John Major and Clement Attlee. It is not just that they were both fanatical about cricket. It is that they were the two Prime Ministers with the greatest care and respect for the unwritten constitution – and its frailties. Hennessy thinks Johnson has placed that respect at risk, and is fearful of the effects of ‘long Johnson’.

Hennessy, now Lord Hennessy, is Britain’s leading contemporary historian.

His health no longer permits him the long, deep dives into the National Archives that helped make him famous.

So he has taken to keeping a diary and intends to produce a book every two years, offering his insights into how things are going to play out. This, the first one, covers September 2021 to September 2022, and is largely concerned with Covid, Ukraine, the death of the Queen (whom he greatly admires), and (especially) Boris Johnson.

Apart from Johnson, he has a good word to say for most people. Michael Gove is ‘the most intellectually interesting of Johnson’s cabinet’. Gillian Shepherd is his ‘old and dear friend’.

Even Jacob Rees-Mogg is his friend, despite Rees-Mogg’s support for Johnson. (He has, however, a barely disguised contempt for Liz Truss’s intellectual equipment.) Where he is critical, he is restrained and polite, for example with the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, who apparently did his PhD under Hennessy’s supervision.

‘I was much saddened,’ he writes, ‘during the week of Sue Gray’s report when my former PhD student Simon Case (to whom I had not talked, quite deliberately, for a long time to avoid embarrassing him) was the centre of a Times story on 27th May 2022 The Oldie January 2024 57

reporting significant disquiet among his senior civil service colleagues due to the fact that he had not resigned in light of the Gray reports (without any inside knowledge, I thought he would have “walked”, like an old-fashioned Test batsman).’

Land of Shame and Glory is short, thoughtful, full of insights and elegantly written. Hennessy was a journalist for the first 20 years of his career, and he has never lost the journalistic practice of writing accessibly for the general reader.

In this book, I felt he was back to his journalistic roots, writing about events as they happen and the issues of today such as Ukraine and climate change (both of which he finds terrifying, as do I).

Hennessy has made instant judgements that may (or may not) stand the test of time, – he predicted the effects of the fall of Kabul five days after it happened. Aren’t historians supposed to follow Zhou Enlai, who, asked about the results of the French revolution, replied, ‘It’s too early to say’?

‘Contemporary history?’ one Oxford don said to Hennessy when he first took an academic post. ‘Isn’t that what we used to call journalism?’

Francis Beckett is the author of Clem Attlee

A tale of two Dickenses JASPER REES The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens

By Helena Kelly Icon Books £25 In the spring of 1851, Charles Dickens spent a month commuting to Malvern.

He did so despite the usual whirlwind of competing demands: he had a magazine to run, a new home to find, prostitutes to save, a father to bury (and, soon after, a baby daughter).

Meanwhile, in Malvern, his wife, Catherine, received specialist treatment for an illness Dickens coyly described to her doctor as ‘a nervous one, and of a peculiar kind’.

What was wrong with her?

Biographers shrug and take Catherine at her word. ‘I have been suffering for some time from a fullness in the head,’ she confided to a friend.

Helena Kelly is not content with such a cloudy diagnosis and, in The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens, she resolves to dig deeper. Scoping for clues in Catherine’s symptoms, in the medical history of her husband and even in

photographs of their children, she arrives at a sensational verdict.

The entire Dickens family was riddled with syphilis. She further contends that Dickens caught it early and spent the rest of his life covering it up, and a great deal else besides.

This latest addition to Dickens academia is neither quite biography nor criticism. What it is is a creative, cagerattling rethink. Reading between the lines of every documentary source she can disinter – along with interrogatively re-reading Dickens’s letters, journalism and fiction – Kelly is on a mission to cast untrusting new light on every truism scholars have passed down, one to the other.

Dickens’s ur-biographer John Forster is at the root of her suspicions. In his Life, published five years after Dickens’s death, he reveals that David Copperfield’s miseries in the bottle-blacking warehouse on the Thames were actually the author’s.

But were they? Kelly wonders if Dickens didn’t strategically plant an exaggerated version of the truth in Forster’s head, and that these distortions have been misdirecting us all ever since.

She calls them what she believes they are: lies. Her technique is to question, doubt and view everything Dickens said about himself as brand management – ‘Instagram filters turned up’. Thus the rank antisemitism in the portrayal of Fagin was in fact a blind designed to kick over the traces of Jews on Dickens’s family tree.

Or take the cruel portrayal of his first love, Maria Beadnell, in Little Dorrit as a fat, garrulous spinster. This now becomes a cover for the affair Kelly reckons they may very well have had on re-meeting in the 1850s.

At the same time, Dickens’s unconscious is hyperactive. Kelly is fascinating on his notorious grief after the death at 17 of his sister-in-law Mary.

He ‘mourned her greedily’, she suggests, as a delayed reaction to the death of his own little sister Harriet.

Previously overlooked, Harriet is brought into focus as a child ‘with additional needs’ and thus becomes the inspiration for all sick little siblings in the fiction.

It’s tremendous fun to watch many such hares being chased, and the way Kelly lays out her research makes for a scintillating spectacle. She lists all the instances that summerhouses appear sinisterly in the fiction, the first illustrator of The Pickwick Papers having shot himself behind one.

‘All I can trace,’ she says as she pushes

the idea that Dickens went more or less mad with sudden success, ‘are suggestions, in several newspapers, that Dickens was unwell.’ And here they all are.

After much dogged rummaging, she even produces what she calls a plausible candidate for ‘the baby we’ve been trying to find for so long’ – a child Dickens possibly had with his mistress Ellen Ternan.

Sometimes she’ll make a show of resisting a concrete interpretation – ‘We remain in the realm of plausible suggestion rather than fact’ – but then she’s off again, and ideas initially written in sand end up set in cement.

The chapter-ending footnotes are densely complete.

If the arguments are convoluted, the style is conversational. ‘You probably know that mercury was used to treat sexually transmitted diseases,’ she’ll say.

Male readers are urged to skip a description of a painful medical procedure, and everywhere there are helpful signposts through the labyrinth: ‘I have previously suggested… You may not be surprised, by now… I’ll talk about her death later on.’

This is scholarship as intellectual parlour game, and Kelly is a brilliant blue-sky conspiracy theorist. But to what extent should we judge Dickens through a 21st-century lens and loftily choose to confer or withhold forgiveness? ‘We might even find it in ourselves to feel a little sorry for him,’ she says at one point.

But ultimately no such luck for Dickens. She seems to respect the work, even if she has a far keener eye for its flaws than its genius. But, fundamentally, while happy to allow for the distorting pressures of a wholly new kind of fame, she despises the man.

Jasper Rees is author of Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood

‘If he says “déjà vu” one more time...’

The Oldie January 2024 59

Design’s enfant terrible JONATHAN MEADES Humanise Thomas Heatherwick Viking Penguin £15.99 Thomas Heatherwick is a self-publicist with a sideline as a designer of buses that overheat; vanity projects such as the Garden Bridge (rules of procurement are for little people); a $200-million viewing platform, borrowed from the Geisel Library in San Diego, which soon became a popular New York suicide facility and was consequently closed; a £2-million sculpture which fell apart, raining steel spikes on hapless Mancunians and was demolished for scrap valued at £17,000; the cracking pews at Worth Abbey chapel – a mere £1 million. Another absurd bridge, in Paddington Basin, which ‘rolls up’ for no discernible reason, is no longer in use.

Prospective patrons might be advised to cut out the gimcrack building or flashy monument and simply hand over a suitcase full of cash to this strange antinomian man-child, ‘a new Leonardo’ according to the late dotard Terence Conran, one of a host of crawling fawners to take him at his own distended estimate: Diane von Furstenberg, Joanna Lumley, Evgeny Lebedev, Larry Park, Boris Johnson, Boris Johnson’s sister-inlaw and George Osborne have all been eager to smother him with praise as though he’s a clever puppy rather than a digital Heath Robinson.

His latest essay in humility is a book.

So he can add ‘writer’ to his gamut of competencies. Though ‘writer’ might not be the apt word. He has a tin ear, mangles language with clumsy insouciance and creates infantile coinages such as ‘blandemic’.

Humanise prompts questions. The first is why did Penguin commission such a dismal farrago? The second is why did they publish it? Did no one read the crock of drivel when it was delivered? They could have paid him off.

As it is, Penguin is complicit in this act of monumental effrontery – 500 pages of whining insolence towards engineers and architects whose work doesn’t collapse under the weight of amour-propre and is therefore declared ‘boring’.

This suggests an idle inability to look: nothing is boring, no place or tree or building or cloud.

And the proposition that ‘boring places contribute to division and war’ is one of hundreds of risible profundities that litter the book.

Heatherwick quotes his idol Antoni Gaudí’s silly dictum ‘The straight line belongs to man, the curved to God’ and seems to believe that the ideal city would be composed of buildings akin to Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia and La Pedrera, which belong more to the history of follies and psychotic art brut than to architecture.

He omits to point out that Gaudí loitered at mortuaries to collect the cadavers of stillbirths to make casts from. Or perhaps he doesn’t know.

His mighty homespun ignorance is matched by a solipsistic conviction, like a deluded politician’s, that he understands ‘the true feelings of the public’ and that the ‘best designers use emotion as a tool’.

He also believes buildings have ‘personalities’. He declares of a building in Vancouver, ‘It feels like the work of human beings who care deeply about human wants and human needs.’ He should be reminded of Thom Gunn’s observation that ‘Deep feeling doesn’t make for good poetry.’ The same applies to architecture.

But Heatherwick wouldn’t get it: he appears untouched by the scepticism and the doubt that make humans complete. Were he not so untouched, he would not have produced a book that lurches from one font to the next, from one sixth-form layout to the next, which

is a 50-year-old rebel’s punk fanzine; a skip to dump juvenile slogans in.

It is as endlessly guileless as Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, another exercise in demonstrating massive bias, minimal knowledge, an absence of nuance and the blatantly moronic notion that modernism is monolithic.

That gormless book also began life as a graceless insult to architects: its germ was the ‘keynote’ lecture Wolfe gave at the 1978 RIBA conference. A less courteous audience would have walked out. And that, mutatis mutandis, is how sentient adults should respond to Heatherwick’s evangelical aberration.

There is, however, a plentiful supply of insentient aspirant patrons and, even better, deep-pocketed philanthropists who will continue to support our twinkly idiot savant (emphasis on the idiot) and be seduced by his gauche clichés.

Fashion prevails, no matter how functionally inept it may be, and Heatherwick’s employment of engineering forms as external decoration is no more than a fashion which happily does not depend on utility.

Jonathan Meades wrote and presented Bunkers, Brutalism, Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry on the BBC

The Oldie January 2024 61

‘Are these wartime revues all remarkably alike, or do we keep on going to the same show by mistake?’ Cartoon by Pont, 21st February 1940. From The Illustrators: The British Art of Illustration 1831-2023 at the Chris Beetles Gallery until 30th December

Diary of a somebody HARRY MOUNT Went to London, Took the Dog: A Diary

By Nina Stibbe Picador £16.99 Nina Stibbe is back in North London!

Stibbe made her name in 2013 with Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life.

They were the letters she’d written home to her sister in the early 1980s, when she was working as a nanny in Camden for Mary-Kay Wilmers, editorowner of the London Review of Books.

Brought up in Leicestershire, she was plunged into literary-lion life in Wilmers’s Gloucester Crescent home, failing to recognise Jonathan Miller and praising Alan Bennett for his bicycle-repair skills.

Now, 40 years after her nanny days, Stibbe is a literary lion herself. She has written four very funny novels; she has also become friends with Nick Hornby, who adapted Love, Nina for telly.

All is not well, though. She is in the process of leaving her husband and her Cornwall home. And she returns to the scene of her original triumph. This time, she is staying in nearby Kentish Town with Deborah Moggach, 75, the author whose novel became The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. And, rather than letters, she keeps a diary for 2022.

Success and the passing years have

not dulled Stibbe’s great comic skill: acute observation, combined with bathos and perfect timing. (I confess here that my sister is Stibbe’s editor.)

Stibbe is the poet of everyday detail.

She notices everything, particularly brand names, and puts highbrow next to lowbrow to spark comedy. Here she is on her old friend Stella: ‘She’s resisting the move into casual wear and apparently takes Sparky to the vet for his anal glands in a Chanel skirt suit.’

She loves a rude detail, delivered not to titillate or to shock but to show the banality of sex. Poor Stella tells Stibbe her Mirena coil has gone missing. The nurse maintains it must have fallen out.

Stella says, ‘I’d know if something fell out of my vagina.’

There’s a sprinkling of stardust, as there was in Love, Nina. But, this time, Stibbe is no longer the blundering ingénue. She has become a close student of north-London literati. So she can give a pitch-perfect pastiche of an Alan Bennett diary entry: ‘He’ll add a quaint thing Ian McEwan said. Say, “Sorry I was late, Alan, I had to run here because someone’s TWOC’d my car.”

‘Bennett will round off with something mischievous or banal involving a royal or a writer from the 1950s. Eg, “And that reminded me of the time Marilyn Monroe put milk in Arthur Miller’s tea and he threw it down the sink, and she went off in a huff and took his car without

consent and popped into the shop. Mam admired her shoes.”

Nothing much happens in Stibbe’s world, besides the odd literary festival and cups of tea with friends and her two children. But that doesn’t matter, because Stibbe can spin gold out of our dreary lives. She notices Nick Hornby has lots of different breakfast cereals: ‘I admire anyone who doesn’t stick to one type and can wake up thinking, “Shall I have Frosties, or Rice Krispies or sugar-free Alpen today?” ’ The story happens to involve a famous person but that isn’t what makes the line funny. It’s a little window into the little habits and choices we all make in our tramlined lives. (She also gets laughs out of the celeb-rich life of north London: ‘Saw Tariq Ali driving a Fiat Panda Eleganza’).

We all have tiny triumphs of the kind Stibbe records: ‘Debby has discovered that the new digital radio doesn’t crackle if you open the dishwasher very slightly.’

And we all have the mini-tragedies, too: ‘What music do other people listen to at a time like this (mid-divorce, at home for Xmas, everything taking on extra significance)?’

Stibbe doesn’t talk much about her disintegrating marriage, except for the odd tragicomic aside about marital rows: ‘Debby mentioned a couple where the husband makes his side of the bed every morning.’

Her antennae are on, even when she’s on Twitter. Just by reporting a tweet, she makes it funny: ‘“Everyone makes mistakes,” says teen who karate-kicked 74-year-old man into the River Mersey.’

The diaries are blissfully free of self-important news commentary, though there is a subtle attack on how London has changed in 40 years. In her funny, sad review of the year, as she leaves for Falmouth, she says, ‘What has it taught me? Mainly that I’m not young or rich enough to start again in London on my own; that mice don’t like cloves.’

Harry Mount is author of How England Made the English

The Oldie January 2024 63

Napoleon branding: vegan Joaquin Phoenix’s hat was made of Ugandan tree bark

FILM HARRY MOUNT NAPOLEON (15) The main criticism of Sir Ridley Scott’s Napoleon has so far been about the historical blunders.

Napoleon’s soldiers didn’t shout ‘Vive la France!’ in an American accent. Marie Antoinette didn’t have gorgeous long hair when her head was chopped off. And Napoleon didn’t bombard the pyramids.

None of that kind of thing matters much if a film is very good. No one gets cross with Russell Crowe speaking in an Australian accent in Scott’s Gladiator, because it’s such a marvellous film.

But Napoleon just doesn’t have the wit and pace of Gladiator – or Scott’s Robin Hood. Those films were witty, moving and thrilling and played around with our expectations of a historical epic.

Napoleon is just a little bit too straight-epic. Writer David Scarpa’s screenplay is flat and uninspired, where there is so much room for turn-of-the64 The Oldie January 2024

19th-century grandiloquence colliding with 21st-century quick-wittedness.

It’s a shame, because so much of it is so good. Joaquin Phoenix is a convincing, understated actor. His Napoleon is jaundiced, dirty and troubled – ­ a master of military tactics, prepared to lose thousands of men with a single weary approval of yet another onslaught.

His American accent doesn’t matter the way it would if he were playing Wellington – in fact played by an entertaining Rupert Everett, screwing up his rubbery lips into a scornful moue as he orchestrates the Waterloo victory.

The best things in the film are the triumphantly gory battle scenes. For all the factual errors, Scott hasn’t dumbed down the history very much. He’s managed to squeeze five mammoth battles – Toulon, Marengo, Austerlitz, Borodino and Waterloo – into 158 minutes, which only occasionally pall.

A full four-hour director’s cut will be released on Apple TV+. What a good idea for all over-long films. Let the director

indulge his ego on the small screen at torturous length – and give us a taut, edited version on the big screen.

The Battle of Austerlitz in particular is a cinematic triumph, with Napoleon’s cannonballs smashing through the ice, drowning the Russian soldiers in their own blood and freezing water.

Scott also has an alluring way with CGI, taking the real sets of great country houses and adding in fantastic, fake frills.

Architectural historians will spot Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor’s baroque Blenheim, topped with Russian onion domes to recreate Moscow. Lincoln Cathedral stands in for Notre-Dame, Boughton for Malmaison, where the divorced Empress Joséphine is exiled to after failing to provide Napoleon with an heir.

Vanessa Kirby, Princess Margaret in The Crown, is strangely convincing as Joséphine, despite playing her as a half-Cockney, half-posh, spiky-haired punk. She is filthily erotic in her comehither dialogue with Napoleon – ‘If you look down, you’ll see a surprise – and you’ll always want it.’

Napoleon never said, ‘Not tonight, Joséphine.’ It was a later fabrication. And Scarpa doesn’t include the line in his script. He should have – given Kirby’s smouldering sex appeal, the line would have assumed extra, crazy, self-denying power.

Scott’s aim is clear and understandable – to lay a tragic love story up against the epic battles.

The battles convince. The love story doesn’t. Where Russell Crowe’s furious quest to avenge his family’s murder in Gladiator was electrically gripping, you just don’t feel engaged with Napoleon and Joséphine, despite the excellent acting.

Given Scott’s decision to play around with the history, he and Scarpa could also have played around with the dreary script to give the love story poignancy and magic. There is neither.

PICTORIAL PRESS LTD / ALAMY

Arts

GARY SMITH

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK THE WITCHES National Theatre, London, until 27th January Earlier this year, when the Telegraph revealed that Roald Dahl’s publishers had made numerous changes to his beloved children’s books, Dahl’s grownup fans were aghast. Salman Rushdie called it ‘absurd censorship’. Even the Prime Minister voiced his disapproval.

Apparently, Dahl’s references to race and gender had been modified to suit modern sensibilities, and even worse – far worse – his savage descriptions of physical deformity had been diluted.

Dahl’s fat and ugly characters are central to his grotesque stories.

As a child, I found them hilarious. A generation later, my own children found them just as funny.

In the face of this furore, Dahl’s publishers said they’d publish unexpurgated versions too. But when I bought a new edition of The Witches, I saw it contained a clunky new line, inserted to reassure today’s youngsters that not every woman who wears a wig is a witch (you don’t say). I wonder what else has been altered.

Thankfully, this new musical takes no liberties with Dahl’s dark, disturbing plot. The young hero, Luke, is orphaned when both his parents die in a car crash, and his grandmother, who adopts him, subsequently keels over with a near fatal heart attack (in Dahl’s macabre tales, death is never far away).

To help her recuperate, Luke takes her to a seaside hotel, which, unfortunately, just so happens to be hosting a convention of witches…

Whereas Nicolas Roeg’s 1990 movie was spoiled by the clumsy introduction of a happy ending, this stage adaptation remains true to Dahl’s bleak conclusion.

Having been turned into a mouse by a witch, Luke must remain a mouse for ever. He will never be a boy again or grow into a man.

Dahl’s malevolent fairy tale is full of fantastic female parts, and the women in this large cast do him proud.

Sally Ann Triplett is riveting as Luke’s eccentric cigar-chomping grandmother, Katherine Kingsley oozes sinister sensuality as the Grand High Witch, and her chorus line of witchy minions are all wonderfully creepy, cunningly disguised as respectable suburban housewives.

The supporting players are just as good, particularly Daniel Rigby as the unctuous hotel manager. So why did this

Gran (Sally Ann Triplett); Luke (Bertie Caplan); Grand High Witch (Katherine Kingsley) seasonal spectacular leave me feeling so impatient and unsated? I thought maybe it was just me, being a Christmas grouch as usual, but my wife felt much the same.

The main problem, we decided, was that this glitzy rendition was far too cheerful, obscuring the gleeful malice at the heart of Dahl’s unsentimental fable.

The songs are too jolly, the design too bright and breezy, and the direction too upbeat. Dahl’s two children – our hero, Luke, and his greedy, obnoxious sidekick, Bruno – are supported by a whole ensemble of child actors, which inevitably makes this show seem rather cute and cuddly. It makes it less of a horror story, more like a pantomime.

In a way, the National has done something similar to Dahl’s publishers.

The writer and/or director have tried to make this story more amenable to contemporary audiences – not by tampering with the words, but by sanitising the presentation. It can’t be done. Dahl’s stories are cruel and that’s why children love them. Deep down, they know the real world isn’t half as nice as we pretend it is, and in Dahl they have an ally who understands their deepest fears.

Despite its mawkish ending, Roeg’s feature film comes a lot closer to evoking the real terror of Dahl’s story, which is fundamentally about a secret sect of monsters masquerading as ordinary women who are plotting to abduct and imprison children. What could be scarier than that?

I had intended to take a couple of children along to see the show (after all, it’s their opinion that really counts) but sadly my two are grown-up now and my nieces couldn’t make it. Perhaps I’m

wrong. Maybe all the children who see it will be terrified.

Or maybe they don’t want to be terrified, and simply would rather see a lively, colourful show with superb production values. If so, they won’t be disappointed. Technically, you can’t fault it.

On the way out, I implored my wife to collar a few random children and ask them what they thought of it.

‘I can’t do that!’ she told me. ‘They’ll think I’m a witch.’

RADIO VALERIE GROVE ‘I’m a person who [ego alert] has always been interested in people and their stories.’

Of course! That’s why you became a novelist, journalist, comedian, psychotherapist, podcaster etc. And yet what comes across is that the speaker is totally self-referential. Those emphatic pronouns –‘I’ll be telling you what I have discovered about this incredible story’ – are a giveaway. The worst trend in 21st-century radio is the encouragement of hyperbolic self-plugging.

But Sian Williams really is interested in people. She took over Jane Garvey’s Radio 4 series Life Changing, in which guests relate life-transforming incidents and misfortunes. It’s edge-of-seat stuff (first tested in the 1980s by Jenni Murray’s Never the Same Again).

Nobody could forget Jane Garvey, in an early episode, meeting Grace Spence Green, junior doctor and mountainclimber. At 25, she was walking The Oldie January 2024 65

66 The Oldie January 2024

system is ‘sclerotic’, MPs don’t know how things work and the public are indifferent, even hostile. (Available via Longford Trust website.)

I skate over the millions of podcasts for Oldie-friendly ones, including Gyles Brandreth’s Rosebud, Rachel Johnson’s Difficult Women – Nadine Dorries jolly difficult – and Dan Snow’s History Hit. The episode where Andrew Roberts, who scorned the Ridley Scott movie, discussed Napoleon, ignoring the fact that Snow’s podcast is sponsored by Scott’s film, was exhilarating.

But no podcast can compete with a rich, revelatory, well-choreographed Archive on 4 like The Art of Silence, on the life of Marcel Marceau.

Peerless mime – and Resistance hero: who knew?

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON Fingers on buzzers: which popular TV word game, first aired in 1988, is returning after 23 years and to be hosted

by Graham Norton? Wheel of Fortune!

‘My first ever TV job was a game show on ITV,’ Norton tells the press, ‘so this feels like coming full circle. You might even call it a wheel!’

Noel Edmonds, who hosted Deal or No Deal, which has also returned to our screens this winter, would call it cosmic ordering. Noel has been replaced as host of Deal or No Deal by Stephen Mulhern, who adopts the persona of the man on the Clapham omnibus rather than the Eastern guru.

The format of Deal or No Deal is both too complex and too simple to explain, which is part of the programme’s dangerous appeal (A A Gill compared its addiction levels to ‘putting heroin in your TV remote’). Very briefly, 22 contestants guard 22 sealed boxes (formally suitcases) containing undisclosed sums of money from £5 to £250,000. In each episode, one contestant selects which

Stephen Mulhern in Deal or No Deal?

boxes to open while the host does business with an imaginary banker on an old-fashioned telephone. The banker, as savage as God in the Book of Job, tries to persuade the contestant to take a cash deal instead of betting on a box.

A gambling game can be dependent entirely on luck; the selection of suitcases was presented in the time of Noel as both strategy-based and mystically controlled.

This is because Edmonds’s own strategy was the aforementioned cosmic ordering (see his book Positively Happy: Cosmic Ways to Change Your Life). So persuaded was he by the ‘positive thinking’ that had controlled his own wheel of fortune, Noel convinced the contestants that, simply by wanting the money enough, they could choose the right suitcase.

When they failed to win the jackpot it was, therefore, their own fault.

I mock, but evidence of cosmic ordering was clearly at work in the second season of the American version of Deal or No Deal, when one of the ‘briefcase girls’, whose job was to open the case selected by the contestant, was none other than Meghan Markle.

After I’d mainlined Deal or No Deal, the Christmas episode of The Weakest Link was cold turkey. The contestants were nine D-list celebrities kitted out in silly costumes. The only one I recognised was Meryl, who won The Traitors in 2022. Mel someone-or-other fell at the first hurdle, not knowing the name, beginning with the letter A, of the cardboard Christmas picture with numbered doors that are opened daily throughout December until the 25th.

Mel also had difficulty with the days of the week.

Meryl worked out that the term for a luminous celestial body of gas visible in the night sky, also an anagram of the word rats, was ‘Milky Way’. Cliff, when asked, ‘What single word meaning “extra” is the title of a 2023 memoir by Prince Harry?’ answered, ‘The Extra.’

Now that Romesh Ranganathan has taken over from Anne Robinson, the show’s sadism has gone, and so too has its high level of public shaming. The dunces who would once have been whipped and dismissed (‘You are the weakest link. Goodbye’), now leave with their heads held high, as though having narrowly lost the Mastermind final.

While The Weakest Link is designed to make us feel like Mycroft Holmes, Only Connect, hosted by Victoria Coren Mitchell, reminds us that we are in fact Dr Watson. The thinking required is lateral rather than factual, despite being presented as entirely elementary. From

ITV

through a Westfield shopping mall, when a large suicidal male, throwing himself off an upper floor, crash-landed on top of her and instantly rendered her paraplegic.

(He survived.) What was almost beyond comprehension was her angelic forgiveness and beatific acceptance of her new, wheelchair-bound life.

More recent episodes prompt mixed feelings. One was about the woman who looked back on the night, 16 years ago, when she drove five friends home in a people-carrier, after a concert. Ecstasy had been taken and all were sleepy. The driver began to feel drowsy. Moments later, as they left the motorway, there was a crash and the car flipped over. Three passengers were dead. The other two, and the driver, were badly injured.

I switched off, finding it unbearable, but later found myself agreeing with a Feedback-listener who pointed out that it was the grieving parents who deserved pity, not the driver, who recovered, did four years in prison for dangerous driving, has since spent her days volunteering – and has never driven again.

My sister, Alison – more forthright and more thoughtful than I – took issue with my harsh judgement. ‘They were all young, foolish and fatally unlucky. They did something stupid, and paid for it. The driver has been tormented by guilt and regret, and is still atoning for it.’ She added, ‘I have got away scot-free in my life with many foolish acts, and so have you.’ (One can always depend on one’s sister for candour.)

Other oldies too may recall those years when, as newly qualified drivers, we merrily drove schoolfriends home from parties in the parents’ car. There were no drugs, of course. Nor were there breathalysers, speed cameras or seatbelt laws. I was still teetotal and there were far fewer cars on the roads. But it made us reckless, and my sister is right: we were lucky.

In the new year’s audio awards, the Dimbleby brothers’ The Bright Side of Life could be a contender: Jonathan talking to his sculptor brother Nicholas, stricken with motor neurone disease, as his life recedes into helplessness. Would he approach Dignitas when unable to speak or swallow?

And here’s another essential subject that’s almost never discussed: prisons.

This talk reached the tiniest audience on National Prison Radio. Former prisons minister Rory Stewart, delivering the 2023 Longford Lecture, spoke with intensity about why governments are helpless to improve prisons: because, in an age of populism, the political

Ed McLachlan

‘Christmas is here, I see’

the outset, the viewer has no idea what is going on. The whole thing is an uncrackable code; even the question labels are in hieroglyphics.

Sometimes, Coren Mitchell wears a carnival mask or a ginger wig for the duration of the show, for which no explanation is given. In the current series, she sports a pink garden party hat.

‘Hello,’ she said in the warm-up routine to the most recent episode. ‘I’ve changed genre again. I’m now writing a lipogrammatic novel, like those experimental French ones – like the one that’s got no “e”s in it.’ Her lipogrammatic novel is in the form of a palindrome which begins, ‘Dr Javinsky emitted an incomprehensible shriek of incandescent erasability.’ I’m still figuring it out.

The teams were the Gunners and the Suncatchers. In round one, the Gunners were asked to find the connection between the following four clues: ‘Iran: six Islamic-law experts’, ‘Italy: up to five for outstanding merits in their field’, ‘Ireland: representative of universities’ and ‘UK: 26 bishops’. The answer, which they failed to get, is that they all sit in parliament in a legislative capacity. By the end of the programme, my brain felt like tumbleweed on an open prairie.

Research suggests that being mentally active is one way of warding off Alzheimer’s.

A diet of television shame-shows should be part of your new-year regime.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE WEXFORD FESTIVAL: WOMEN AND WAR Glyndebourne apart, no music festival has been more important to the operatic ecology of these islands than the one started in the autumn of 1951 in the famously friendly old fishing town of Wexford in southern Ireland.

From the outset, the revival of neglected operas has been its thing. Today, 205 operas on, it continues to astonish and reward.

Little-known Donizetti has long been a speciality – none more important than this year’s staging of Zoraida di Granata, the 24-year-old Donizetti’s first important success, premièred in Rome in 1822.

At the time, Rossini was at the peak of his early fame, and still resident in Italy.

Yet Zoraida is not at all Rossini-like. The action advances in a way that’s not always the case with Rossini’s Italian opere serie. As for the music, it’s calmer, more reflective, longer-breathed.

A new era in bel canto opera was being born. Yet, a pioneering 1998 Opera Rara recording aside, the opera’s neglect these past 200 years has been total.

The libretto draws on the primal tale of a usurper king, whose lust for power has few limits – in this instance, a desire to possess the wife-to-be of his senior general.

The setting also matters. The taking of the Moorish capital of Granada by the Spanish in 1492 was a game-changer in the history of modern Europe, one that had as many resonances in Donizetti’s time as it has today.

Wexford’s beautifully calibrated staging by director Bruno Ravella and designer Gary McCann presented us with a ruined Moorish citadel peopled by a rather more modern ruler and his attendant soldiery. If this reminded us of more recent conflicts, there was equally no doubting the nature of this tyrant king, with his fondness for long tables and smartly tailored Kim Jong Un suits.

The role, in which menace is leavened by a certain discombobulating charm, was superbly realised by South Korean tenor Konu Kim. As was that of his target, Zoraida, a part expertly and lovingly sung by Claudia Boyle – another in today’s enviable procession of gifted young Irish singers.

Here was no pre-programmed singing doll but a flesh-and-blood heroine made human by Donizetti’s music.

‘Zoraida ends on a positive note, but so much has been lost,’ notes Ravella.

The remark could equally apply to the festival’s other notable revival, Marco Tutino’s 2015 opera Two Women – an adaptation of Vittorio de Sica’s 1960 cinema classic La Ciociara, based on Alberto Moravia’s celebrated novel, set in war-ravaged Italy in 1943-44.

The Oldie January 2024 67

I’ve known people who fought there, British and Italian. I remember, too, visiting a war cemetery outside Pesaro while attending a Rossini Opera Festival in the 1980s along with veterans of that Italian campaign. During periods of leave, they’d enjoyed shows in local theatres from which a lifelong love of Italian opera had been born.

With Rome under bombardment, the novel’s widowed shopkeeper Cesira removes herself and her teenage daughter to the imagined safety of her home village of Ciociara, south of Rome.

Moravia himself made a similar journey in 1943, only to find a far more dangerous situation, as rural communities were caught in the crossfire of advancing Allies and retreating Germans, not to mention the nightmare of Italy’s own evolving civil war.

Tutino is a practitioner of what he calls ‘neo-verismo’: his musical idiom unashamedly that of Mascagni, Catalani and Puccini, all of whom would have killed to get their hands on Moravia’s novel had it existed at the time.

The opera is a compelling affair – all but the final 30 minutes. During their attempt to return to Rome, the mother has been assaulted and her daughter raped by French Moroccan troops.

After the traumatised teenager’s brief descent into debauchery, mother and daughter are reconciled, holding out hope of a new and better life – a prize example of what one critic called Moravia’s ‘callous optimism’.

That’s where both film and novel end.

Sadly, Tutino and his librettists have subverted this with an after-war postlude, extending the role of Giovanni, the black marketeer Nazi sympathiser, who once enjoyed a hold over Cesira.

68 The Oldie January 2024

If the opera is to win a more permanent place in the repertory, the end needs urgent surgery.

The young Sophia Loren won an Oscar for playing Cesira in the de Sica film. If there’s an operatic equivalent, it should go to Israeli mezzo Na’ama Goldman for a similarly riveting performance in Rosetta Cucchi’s Wexford staging.

RTÉ’s telecast of that production can be seen on the European cultural channel Arte for the next 12 months; de Sica’s film is available on DVD or online at Amazon Prime.

Next year’s festival promises lighter fare, with behind-the-scenes operas about theatre itself by Donizetti, Mascagni and Charles Villiers Stanford – his Sheridan-derived opera, The Critic.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON WILLIAMS THE CONQUEROR What happens when a boy band becomes a married man, 50 in February, with a litter of kids and an American actress wife, Ayda, having on the way sold more records and picked up more awards than all of us have had hot dinners?

He becomes older, wiser and more reflective. He gets accused of looking like an ancient lesbian by Camilla Long in the Sunday Times (though the subs made her change it to ‘a 90-year-old Chrissie Hynde’ – frankly I’d be flattered to be compared to the lead singer of the Pretenders at any age or with whatever tastes).

As a cheeky teen in Stoke-on-Trent, he’d only ever been on stage to play the Artful Dodger, when his mother spotted

Renaissance Man: Robbie Williams

PHC IMAGES / ALAMY

Cesira (Na’ama Goldman) and Rosetta (Jade Phoenix) in La Ciociara

an ad for a boy band. It became Take That. He was 16.

Mega-sales stadium tours followed and soon, as he says, ‘I was the centre of the pop-culture world.’

But there was a but. There always is.

So he became the subject of a Netflix documentary series as ‘the past has me in a headlock’ – and uses the streamer as an unpaid therapist.

‘I felt I was giving more and more of myself away,’ he tells the camera. He was so famous that he couldn’t trust anyone.

‘The thing that made me successful would destroy me,’ he explains with Nietzschean introspection.

For someone who says he ‘hates revisiting the past and I hate looking at myself’, this could be an exercise in self-loathing. But, as with the Beckham series, you see what Robbie wants you to see, and I am here for it – and this is why.

I was doing Celebrity Apprentice for the BBC. The challenge was to put on a West End stage show in 24 hours and sell out the Café de Paris.

I was on a team with Amanda Holden and Kelly Hoppen and when we were told the task, we three swivelled as one to stare at Ayda, Robbie’s wife, who was also on our team.

She picked up her phone. ‘Baaaabe…’ she said to her husband.

At the Café de Paris, Kelly Hoppen insisted on being MC. Amanda Holden insisted on dressing up as a sexy monkey and singing I Wanna Be Like You with Robbie Williams.

I was relegated to making tuna-fish canapés in a sweaty basement service kitchen.

But when I emerged after the show, Robbie, who had come off stage after singing Angels, grabbed my arm as I passed with a tray. ‘I can’t believe I’m meeting YOU!’ he said, his face very close to mine.

I looked behind me. Who? Me? Surely not.

‘I watched every frame of you in Celebrity Big Brother!’ (I’m afraid I did this reality series in 2018.) ‘Massive fan!’

I’ve had a soft spot for him ever since.

Above: The Triumph of David, 1450, by Pesellino (1422-1457). Right: Pesellino’s The Trinity with Saints (1455-60), oil on canvas

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU PESELLINO

THE NATIONAL GALLERY

National Gallery to the 10th March Despite the shortness of his life, Francesco di Stefano, known as Pesellino (1422-57), was regarded as the equal of now better-remembered Florentine contemporaries such as Andrea del Castagno, Domenico Veneziano and Benozzo Gozzoli.

He was five when his father died, and was adopted by his maternal grandfather, Giuliano d’Arrigo di Gioccolo Giochi.

Known as Pesello, he ran a prosperous business, among other things painting ceremonial banners for processions and battles. Pesello is said to have kept a menagerie to provide models.

It seems that none of his paintings is known to survive (although one was fully attributed by Christie’s New York in 2021, and there is the astronomical fresco in San Lorenzo, Florence), but evidently he had a considerable influence on his grandson, teaching him drawing and design. Despite its meaning ‘little prick’, Francesco took the name Pesellino on inheriting the business.

He may also have trained with the sculptor Ghiberti before working with the painter and Carmelite Fra Filippo Lippi (1406-69). Earlier, Paolo Uccello had been apprenticed to Ghiberti, who also worked with Gozzoli. Pesellino’s work could be seen as a link between Uccello’s Battle of San Romano and Gozzoli’s Processions of the Magi in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi.

One of the studio’s specialities was painting cassoni, wedding coffers, which later generations often disassembled as

panel paintings. The format was perfect for the processional compositions which came naturally to Pesellino.

A cassone (or perhaps a pair of cassoni) is at the centre of this, the first exhibition ever to chart Pesellino’s career. As well as Pesellino’s last work, The Trinity with Saints, completed by Lippi, the National Gallery owns two panels of the story of David and Goliath, which have recently been restored.

The first panel, taking the story from the boy shepherding his father’s flock to the fall of the giant, is essentially a crowded strip cartoon packed with incident, and includes many animals from the family menagerie. David

appears five times and Goliath twice.

The second shows the Triumph of David, and it could almost be a study for the Gozzoli Magi.

Inevitably this is a small show, but major works have been lent by the Louvre and Lyon, the Courtauld, the Clark Art Institute and Worcester Museum, Massachusetts.

Pesellino and his grandfather were confused and conflated by later writers, even Vasari. But at least Vasari saw that ‘if he had lived longer, he would have achieved much more than he did, because he was a diligent student of his art and never stopped drawing by day or night’.

The Oldie January 2024 69

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER THE FLOWER-POWER YEARS I’ve rediscovered my 1967 gardening diary.

I was 21 that year, blessed with all the world’s energy and a garden to spend it on. My father had died in 1964, vacating family, home and garden at the agonisingly early age of 51.

I had gardened beside him throughout my childhood; his tools became mine; his modest stretches of tilled earth passed to me.

That 1967 Boots Scribbling Diary recalls my first visit to Kew Gardens on 20th March, a 140-mile round trip with a friend in her cramped Austin A30.

Admission was thruppence – 2p in new money, with the purchasing power today of 45p. Should I venture thus far now, Kew would relieve me of around £20 for a day’s sojourn.

I was no scribe in those days. I now painfully read (spelling corrected) that ‘I was revealed a world of both European and tropical splendour’. I was seemingly excited by calceolarias, cinerarias and coleus under glass, and a ‘glorious’ forsythia, camellias, rhododendrons ‘and all the species of the Prunus family’ growing outside.

I recorded magnolias with ‘enchanting fragrance’ and swooned over daffodils ‘naturalised on grassy slopes under fine specimens of world-wide trees’.

Youthful exuberance…

That 100-word diary entry, scribbled with a fountain pen, closed with the regret that ‘if only there were time to see all – but I’m sure there will be – on a future occasion’.

Future occasions there were. Many of them. Three years later, newly employed by the Observer newspaper in London, I found lodgings within two miles of Kew and became a frequent Saturday visitor.

70 The Oldie January 2024

Dear diary: cover of David’s 1967 diary

Nowadays I use my phone camera to record plants and horti adventures. Date, time and place are logged automatically, leaving me simply to tap out a short caption for later ID purposes.

My 1967 gardening diary fizzles out in mid-April that year: ‘Tulips coming on fine’; ‘All clarkia seedlings lost owing to lack of attention’ (what, I’d love to know, distracted me?); ‘Attended pansy bed which cats have done their best to destroy’; ‘Fed roses with Rose Sangral at 1 dessert-spoon per gallon of water’.

Last entry (April 8): ‘Put germinated aster [seeds] back under cloche’.

At the back of the diary, on a page headed ‘Memoranda for 1968’, I noted the 41 varieties of fuchsias I was growing and the payment of my membership to the British Fuchsia Society (founded in 1938 and still going strong, without my support).

I was growing seven hybrid tea and floribunda roses, including the fragrant, dark red ‘Chrysler Imperial’, the then ubiquitous ‘Super Star’ and French-bred ‘Tzigane’.

I also grew a few roses as standards all those years ago – a now seemingly passé form of cultivation, last coming my way when I interviewed the late great rosarian Graham Stuart Thomas in the mid-1990s at his home near Woking. (By the way, make a note to see, in June, Thomas’s nonpareil collection of mostly old roses

in the walled gardens at Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire – admission £18 if you’re not a National Trust member.)

I see, too, that in 1967 I bought ‘a hydrangea’ (variety unrecorded). While I’ve turned my back on fuchsias and hybrid tea roses, I revel in hydrangeas, harbouring some 200 different varieties which are settling in happily in this near-coastal garden in South West Wales.

Hydrangeas like it wet– ’nuff said.

I had no idea until a few weeks ago that my 1967 garden diary had survived.

Some 60 years later, I’m still digging, buying plants and scribbling.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD ROOTS AND BEANS The root vegetables that I have grown during the past year have mostly been successful, especially a prolific variety of early potato called Jazzy. The beetroot – red, golden and white – grew well, and the carrots were sown with taped seed, which made thinning unnecessary. In the past I have usually failed to thin carrots, and they have suffered.

One is advised to lift beetroot and carrots in October and store them in sand. But, in my experience, they go limp after a few weeks and are better left in the ground until needed.

The Solent Wight garlic was a great success and should keep well through the winter. And the Jerusalem artichoke plants, having grown eight feet tall with yellow sunflowers during summer, now have roots ready to be dug.

Among the disappointments have been turnips and pak choi, which may have disliked the wet summer, and,

surprisingly, yellow courgettes which too often had gone mushy at the ends before being cut.

The yellow French beans did much better, and a second sowing in August produced beans in late October. The runner beans, having made a slow start, would not stop; we have them frozen in bags as well as cartons of runner-bean and coconut curry.

My broad beans were looking good until a mass attack of blackfly invaded not only the leafy tops but many of the pods too. I planted some more beans in mid-June and we had a reasonable crop less than three months later, with not a blackfly in sight. I was pleased with the borlotti beans grown last year, and intend planting cannellini beans in 2024.

In late autumn, we were still cutting coriander and rocket, both with good flavour. The fig tree produced a huge amount of foliage, and little green bullets which showed no sign of becoming edible; but we did finally pick a dozen ripe fruit on 1st November.

Brussels sprouts and kalettes – my new favourite vegetable – are swelling on their stalks; they will be ready for Christmas and enjoyed for several weeks into the new year.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD MY BIG FAT GREEK CHRISTMAS

ELISABETH LUARD

In the kitchen, as in love and life, little things mean a lot.

With the festive season in full swing, keep a couple of tricks up your sleeve to improve the shining hour.

Greek orange and almond honey cake Appropriately seasonal, the classic Cretan Christmas cake is flavoured with cinnamon and orange zest and made with olive oil rather than butter, which allows it to keep well in a tin. Serves a dozen (some now, more later).

350g plain flour 2 level tsps baking powder 1 heaped tsp ground cinnamon 350g ground almonds 6 eggs, separated 350g light olive oil 175g blossom honey 3 unwaxed oranges, juice and grated zest 1 tbsp flaked almonds Butter for brushing To serve 175g blossom honey 1 tbsp orange-flower water (optional) 1-2 curls finely pared orange peel 1 short length cinnamon stick Thick Greek yoghurt Preheat the oven to 350ºF/180ºC/ gas 4. Sift the flour with the baking powder and cinnamon and mix in the ground almonds. Whisk the egg yolks with the oil and honey until light and fluffy. Fold the egg-yolk mixture into the flour, alternating with the orange juice – the mixture should be soft but not too runny. Stir in the orange zest. Whisk the egg whites until stiff and fold them in.

Line a 20cm-square baking tin with buttered baking parchment.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and sprinkle the top with flaked almonds.

Bake for about an hour, until the cake is well browned, shrunk from the sides of the tin and firm to the touch. Check after 40 minutes and cover with foil if the top looks as if it might burn. Allow to cool a little before transferring to a baking rack.

Cut into squares and serve warm with a jug of melted honey diluted with its own volume of water flavoured with cinnamon and orange-zest and a dollop of thick sheep’s milk yoghurt, as they do in Crete.

New Orleans granola Breakfast magic, and just as good at any other time – it’s sweeter, stickier, lumpier and more delicious than muesli, Dr Bircher’s original rib-sticker. Makes about a kilo.

2 tbsps unsalted butter 3 tbsps runny honey 2 tbsps unrefined brown sugar 250g/8 oz rolled (porridge) oats 3 tbsps shelled unsalted sunflower seeds 3 tbsps grated coconut 3 tbsps shelled unsalted pumpkin seeds 2 tbsps pine nuts 2 tbsps shelled pistachios 4 tbsps slivered almonds Pre-heat the oven to 325ºF/170ºC/ gas 3.

Melt the butter with the honey and sugar in a small saucepan over a low heat, stirring until the sugar crystals have dissolved completely.

Mix all the dry ingredients in a roomy bowl. Stir in the butter-honey mixture, tossing to blend – not too thoroughly – letting it form sticky little lumps.

Spread the mixture in a roasting tin.

Transfer to the oven and bake, stirring occasionally to prevent burning, for about 25 minutes, till golden – don’t wait till it browns as it’ll crisp as it cools. The cooking time depends how dry the ingredients were when you began.

Allow to cool completely before storing in an airtight tin. Eat it by the handful when you’re hungry, or settle down with a bowlful topped with milk or cream or yoghurt and berries straight from the freezer.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE RIP A RESTAURANT GREAT I’ve won an argument. At last. The only way to travel into the West End of an evening is by tube.

For years, I’ve been losing this argument while watching angry high heels clatter down the escalator as if entering purgatory, while ranting that ‘It’s hardly a glamorous start to a Big Night Out’ or ‘Glad I dressed up … for the Northern Line’. I used to try getting away with catching the tube back after dinner, but there were too many tantrums.

Last month, I booked a table at The Portrait, Richard Corrigan’s transformed restaurant up above the National Portrait Gallery. My guest insisted on driving to Trafalgar Square from Clapham, with 40 minutes to spare. I hate being late; she doesn’t. At 55 minutes, we were still stuck in Whitehall, when she asked me, as if choosing from an expansive list of empty car parks strewn around Nelson’s Column, ‘Where shall I park?’

After answering, ‘Outside your house,’ I was ejected from the car to grab the table before we lost it.

I was met by London’s topmost maître d’, Jon Spiteri, who danced me to my table in the window. And, for the first time, I knew what it’s like to be Peter Pan soaring above the rooftops. I sat there alone, at the same height as Big Ben and the pediment of St Martin-in-the-Fields, to whose altar my great-grandfather dragged a soon-to-be-disowned Glaswegian shipping heiress.

I could have given Nelson a haircut on his column. And in among these lit-up landmarks were the red fairy lights of all The Oldie January 2024 71

the cranes. There simply is no better setting for dinner.

And what a dinner, when my parking friend finally arrived: duck hearts with grape, onion and sage, followed by conchigliette with Dorset snails and rosemary – isn’t Corrigan witty? So much less pompous than the other Michelin chefs.

While writing this piece, I was told by his best friend and business partner, Richard Beatty, that the great restaurateur Russell Norman, 57, had died. Best friends since university, they launched Polpo in 2008 and thereby introduced small plates to the London restaurant scene. A day after hearing the tragic news, I received a text from a mutual friend saying he was in Venice, Russell’s second home, and had just passed a tribute to Russell in the window of a bookshop. Even La Serenissima was charmed by his charisma.

I first met Russell when he was London’s best maître d’. He was Operations Director for Caprice Holdings: he oversaw the openings of London landmarks The Ivy Club, J Sheekey’s Oyster Bar and Scott’s.

A former drama teacher, Russell choreographed his devoted staff and coaxed the very best performances out of them, ensuring his punters weren’t neglected for a moment. He had 26 rules for how the perfect service should be conducted: the list, which can be found in Nick Lander’s The Art of the Restaurateur, is military in its precision (‘Always get the customer a drink within two minutes of sitting them down’).

What it really shows is how much Russell cared about people, how he wanted them to feel loved and cherished.

London has lost its best – but his wife, Jules, continues his legacy at Brutto.

Book a table soon.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD DRIVING WITH BIG BROTHER I​ f you buy a new car after 2026, you’ll find that Big Brother is not just watching you but sitting alongside you.

That is the earliest date from which Euro 7, the next round of EU pollution regulations, is planned to take effect. It may be delayed but whenever it comes, it will mark the greatest governmental intervention into automotive freedom of travel since the 19th-century Red Flag acts restricted ‘road locomotives’ to 4mph (2mph in cities). ​Of course, being no longer in the EU, we needn’t apply it. But we very likely will, because Europe is the major market 72 The Oldie January 2024

for cars made here and governments of all stripes are peopled by rule-makers.

Essentially, the new proposals will ensure that your car’s on-board diagnostic systems will record data and send it to the authorities (whoever they may be).

Thus, if emissions are exceeded, ‘methods will be used to induce timely repairs within 2000km’, although you will, thankfully, be allowed to complete your journey. What they call ‘off-board devices’ will periodically monitor your car’s roadworthiness via ‘technical roadside inspection over the air’.

Pollutants generated by tyres and brakes will be subject to new limits; current limits will remain until 2035. ​Times when you’re permitted to recharge your electric car may be subject to demands on the local grid or the levels of available renewable power.

Your car’s battery will be fitted with range or energy monitors set to age- and mileage-performance targets, while other devices will measure fuel and energy consumption to determine your true energy efficiency.

It will be illegal to tamper with odometers and anti-pollution systems.

Vehicles will be expected to have a ‘main lifetime’ of eight years and 100,000 miles, mysteriously supplemented by an ‘additional lifetime’ of ten years and 125,000 miles.

Every vehicle will have a digital environmental passport, specifying its environmental impact, and there will be new vehicle categories. These will include a sub-category for plug-in hybrids that can switch to pure electric when entering city centres defined by ‘geofencing’.

Only electrically powered vehicles will be permitted within those areas and, in the event of batteries running low, each must have a device to ‘stop the vehicle if not charged within 5km from the first warning while on zero-emission mode’.

‘Geofencing’ could also be used to enforce speed limits.

However, from 2035, new combustion-engine vehicles may still be produced, provided they run on typeapproved CO2-free synthetic fuels.

While eco-warriors may be cheered by all this, they will also be dismayed because it represents a significant climb-down – or a welcome acknowledgement of reality, depending on your point of view – from the original Euro 7 proposals.

These comprised a considerable tightening of the existing Euro 6 emission standards; following resistance from major European car-manufacturers and their member states, Euro 6 standards will carry over into Euro 7.

Among the proposals dropped was the electrical pre-heating of catalytic converters. That not only was difficult in engineering terms, but would have meant you had to wait for 30 seconds between switching on and starting your car. This would also have been impossible to implement in many current new vehicles.

Civil libertarians will presumably worry about the degree of monitoring because the electronic architecture sustaining it can easily be adapted to report your every vehicle movement – where, when and how you drive. Although not intended as a wider means of law enforcement, such readily available data is unlikely to be ruled as inadmissible in serious crime cases. It will become as commonplace as CCTV is now.

Does this matter? Like it or not, we’ll need more prisons.

SPORT JIM WHITE FOOTBALL’S BAD OLD DAYS I was at Kenilworth Road the other day to watch Luton Town play a Premier League game. Sandwiched between terraced houses, one of the entrances leading between domestic gardens, it is a wonderfully evocative place.

Barely changed across more than a century, it oozes proper authenticity. It’s a very different experience from the grand environs of our leading football institutions. No wonder it is nicknamed by the club’s supporters the Old Girl.

Yet, beloved as it may be, it is also a singularly terrible place to watch a football match. The corridors are tight and narrow, the seats cramped, the legroom non-existent, the facilities decrepit. In the main stand where I was sitting, much of the action is obscured by the dozens of pillars holding up the roof.

Last year, Preston North End’s Brad Potts scored a goal there, reckoned the second-best strike of the season in the Championship. Television footage revealed he met a corner with a swivelling, swirling, acrobatic leap, smashing a volley into the net.

Not that you could read about it at the time. The trouble was, with a pillar in the way, nobody in the press box could see the part of the pitch where Potts executed his moment of magic. With no screens available to afford a replay, none of the football writers in attendance knew what had happened. We oldies think everything was better back in the day.

With football, such a rose-tinted perspective is hard to maintain. It is only when you visit a place like Kenilworth

Road that you properly appreciate how much things have improved for those attending our national sport. Not so long ago, at a game the spectators were an afterthought, their needs or wishes – or personal safety – rarely considered by those in charge.

Sadly, it took the carnage at Hillsborough to alter such attitudes. In the 30 years since the Premier League’s inception, going to the game has become an entirely different, better experience.

I spoke to Chris Lee, the architect who designed the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, at an exhibition celebrating 30 years of work by his company Populous.

He said from the moment the first drawings were made on the new Spurs development, the priority was to ensure the fans enjoyed their time there.

True, there was a commercial incentive: fans were likely to spend more money if they lingered. But comfort, wellbeing, the view from their seats and access to the bar informed everything.

And he reckoned that the magnificent new building, now easily the best place to watch live sport in Britain, is only the start. His company also designed the Sphere, the extraordinary space-age venue in Las Vegas, which plunges the concertgoer into a virtual world of digital onslaught. That is the direction in which we’re heading, he suggests. New stadiums will embrace a mix of live action and digital enhancement, with everything from sightlines to acoustics engineered for maximum involvement.

Luton too is soon to be at the cutting edge of such development. A mile from Kenilworth Road, a new stadium is under construction, brimming with state-ofthe-art technology. When it opens in three years, it might not have an entrance through the neighbour’s garden. It might not have the historic resonance of the Old Girl. But at least spectators will be able to see the goals going in.

DRINK BILL KNOTT BOX CLEVER A ‘tappit hen’ was an old Scottish drinking jug, made from pewter and featuring a topknot on its domed lid, like the crest on a hen.

The rather evocative name was later appropriated by the whisky and port trade for a bottle of normal height but containing three bottles’ worth of liquid: half a gallon, or 2.25 litres. This squat bottle, also known as a tregnum or a Marie-Jeanne, is now more or less obsolete, joining the piccolo, the snipe,

the chopine, the jennie and the pony in the great cellar in the sky. Modern, highly automated wineries are not geared up for eccentric bottle sizes.

But the measure itself, perversely, is becoming more popular than ever. The bag-in-box (BIB) revolution has ensured it: many, if not most, BIB wines are 2.25 litres in volume. And the good news for wine-lovers is that some of these ‘new wave’ BIBs are excellent, although – as I have – you might need to shed a prejudice or two before you embrace them.

The foremost of these is that a box must, de facto, contain undrinkable swill.

It is a forgivable instinct, I think, for those of us who remember some of the generic, medium-sweet gutrot that was peddled in the 1970s as ‘party wine’. Some of those boxes still haunt supermarket aisles today – but increasingly winemakers and retailers are offering us proper, interesting, well-crafted wines.

Just in a box, not a bottle.

It reminds me of the resistance to screw-cap bottles in the 1990s: these days, it is commonplace, even for very good wines. In New Zealand, for example, which boasts the highest average price per bottle for exported wines in the world, 95 per cent of wines are now bottled under screw-cap. BIBs, I suspect, will follow a similar path.

The advantages of boxes are manifold.

They are much lighter, easier and more space-efficient to transport, and they stay fresh for several weeks in the fridge or on the sideboard. They are also ten times more eco-friendly than bottles, and can be disposed of more discreetly: neighbours have commented on my clankingly full recycling bags on more than one occasion. I fear the local council will soon offer me my own bottle bank.

The places to look for new-wave wine boxes are now legion. The Wine Society offers half a dozen, including their ripe, fragrant, own-label Exhibition Fleurie 2022 (£37/2.25 l) and Tariquet’s Côtes de Gascogne Classic 2022 (£29/2.25 l), an ever reliable dry white.

Bobo (bobowines.co.uk) stocks a clutch of eclectic labels from around France, including a fragrant, spicy, Viognier-based orange wine from Corbières (£54/2.25 l, 2022) and a crisp, peach-scented Saumur white – Blason de Parnay 2022 – for £46/2.25 l. Bib Wine (bibwine.co.uk), meanwhile, has a 17-strong list of 2.25-litre BIBs, most of which work out at between £10 and £15 a bottle.

Should you find a turkey-shaped space in your fridge this Boxing Day, why not fill it with one of the new breed of tappit hens?

Wine This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a (traditionally formatted) 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a Chardonnay with a nice weight to it; a great value organic Spanish red; and a classic claret to banish any January blues. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Montsablé Chardonnay, IGP Haute Vallée de l’Aude 2022, offer price £10.99, case price £131.88 Aged on its lees, with a judicious amount of oak, plenty of fruit and a dry finish.

Te Quiero, Red Field Blend, La Mancha, Tierra de Castilla 2019, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88 A plethora of grape varieties, primarily Tempranillo and Syrah, offering bags of spicy, brambly fruit.

Château Curton La Perrière, Bordeaux 2019, offer price £10.99, case price £131.88 Proper claret from a good vintage with bags of plummy fruit: 100-per-cent Merlot and drinking well now.

Mixed case price £127.88 – a saving of £35.99 (including free delivery) HOW TO ORDER

Call 0117 370 9930

Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk Quote OLDIE to get your special price.

Free delivery to UK mainland.

For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 6th February 2024

The Oldie January 2024 73

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Selling off my golden oldies A while ago, I decided to sell my vinyl record collection. I have about 300 of these landmarks of my life sitting in big boxes; I never play them. So, even though it feels as if I’m betraying them, out they must go.

I decided to shift as many as I could on eBay because I thought it would be easy.

It isn’t.

I tend to think of eBay as a recent invention, but it’s actually 28 years old,

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

White Christmas www.askwebster.co.uk/whitechristmas An annual treat – Father Christmas and his reindeer singing the only version of White Christmas worth listening to. discogs.com If you really are a record nerd (like me), try this site – an astonishing database of all the records you have ever owned.

I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems.

Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk

and currently has an astonishing 1.5 billion listings on it, including mine.

It has matured. There are a lot of perfectly sensible people who make a living, or at least an income, by buying stuff at jumble sales and reselling it on eBay. Frankly, I’m jolly glad that I’m not relying on it to support me. It is hard work.

First, you must photograph the record – both sides of the sleeve, and then both sides of the record itself.

Obviously, double albums and gatefold sleeves need more pictures. I had to wipe the dust off them first.

I’ve rigged up a tripod in a spare bedroom, which speeds up the process, but it still takes a while. Then I must edit the pictures to make them neat and upload them to eBay. Then I have to type in all the details of the record (collectors love detail) and be open about its condition; some of mine have seen heavy service.

Then I must decide what price to ask.

Here eBay can help. You can enter whatever it is you are selling into its search engine and if you tick the right box, it will tell you what prices other people have achieved for the same thing.

I always try to aim a bit lower than the median price, as most of my records are far from pristine.

Should I charge for postage? I almost always do.

Then I press the ‘List’ button and sit back and wait. And wait.

This whole process can easily take 15 minutes for one record. That’s fine if you are selling it for £50, but most of mine go for five or ten quid at best, and at least a third of that will go on eBay fees and postage. Packing them up and posting them takes another five minutes at least.

And, of course, some of them – perhaps most of them – will never sell.

So, if you do the sums, you’ll find that if I listed all 300 of my records (I’ve done 150 so far) and sold half of them at an average price of £7.50 (very optimistic), I would have done over 90 hours’ work for about £1,000 – roughly the minimum wage. And, remember, I had the records sitting here. I didn’t have to go out and find them at charity shops or auctions.

So you can see why I admire those people who make a living this way. Those I have spoken to tell me that the fun is in finding the stuff to sell. The actual selling is the chore, dealing with returns and so on. It’s tedious, repetitive work.

As the man once said, if it wasn’t for the wretched customers, this business would be easy to run.

So why do I bother? Well, £1,000, if I ever get that far, is better than a slap in the face with a wet fish, however long it takes me, and I like the idea of the records going to people who might enjoy them. I’m also having the pleasure of rediscovering music I had completely forgotten about and reliving my teenage years through my ears.

I might even buy a few back.

Neil Collins: Money Matters

The Labour taxman cometh It was a good idea for a long time.

Save regularly in a tax-sheltered fund that you couldn’t touch until you became old, and you would be less of a burden on the state when you finally got there.

Unfortunately, nothing long-term is ever safe from political fiddling, and so it has proved here. Pensions are now a minefield littered with unexploded acronyms. Even the experts struggle to keep track.

The latest rule changes, sprung on the world last March by the rookie 74 The Oldie January 2024

Chancellor, are a case in point. If you have an accumulated pension pot, the system is (relatively) simple, provided you do the decent thing and die before your 75th birthday.

Save so that on that date the pot exceeds £1,073,100, a sum known as the Lifetime Allowance (LTA), and the rules change dramatically, to allow the taxman to stick his shovel into your stores.

Now £1,073,100 sounds like a lot of money, as indeed it is, but use it to buy an index-lined annuity at last week’s rates

and your income would be £68,000 before tax. Not bad, but hardly enough to wallow in luxury.

Retire at 65 with same million, and your index-linked income would be £49,000. Even if you promise to smoke at least 10 cigarettes a day and drink 15 units of alcohol a week, the best buy promises only £52,000. So keep working.

No chancellor can resist fiddling with the rules, and Chancellor Hunt is no exception. In March, he simply scrapped the LTA, along with the age-75 cliff edge.

This bung to the better-off was not so much a pre-election bribe as a way of getting him round an awkward corner.

Consultants in the NHS are in a state scheme where the prospective pension rises with every year of service.

This is a benefit in kind, and is taxed as such, so our well-paid consultant would find himself with a lower takehome pay (and a bigger pension) when he earned more.

Many of them decided to work less instead, further damaging the NHS. Scrapping the 75-year-old rule avoids this unintended consequence.

Those of us who passed this milestone shortly before last April just had to pay up. But before you youngsters start celebrating, be warned: Labour immediately saw the concession for what

it was, and indicated that if they got the chance they would reinstate the LTA. The only consolation is that once you have paid your reverse 75th-birthday present, what’s left can accumulate tax-free in ‘drawdown’. Draw down anything from the sum, and it is taxed as income at your marginal rate.

Leave it undrawndown, so to speak, and it accumulates tax-free. It falls outside your estate for Inheritance Tax purposes, and can be passed down the generations indefinitely. Tax is payable only on anything that is withdrawn from the fund.

So, for you medium-rich oldies, the pension pot is less of a comfort in old age; more of a way of passing assets on, free of IHT. Yet here’s a thing. Another government-sponsored tax-avoidance scheme looks a much better way to

ensure old-age comfort: the Individual Savings Account (ISA). Keep investing the maximum £20,000 a year and, after a decade or three, you could become an ISA millionaire.

Since an ISA falls outside the incometax net, you can sell the bonds, shares or funds to draw as much income as you like – and if you get an unexpected windfall, you can replace the amount you have drawn out of the ISA, provided you put the money back during the same tax year.

Of course, a new government next year will mean changes in the tax rules, not necessarily in the saver’s favour.

Sadly, the urge to fiddle with the rules is not confined to Conservative chancellors.

Neil Collins was City Editor of the Daily Telegraph

Come and stay Doodle.com at Webwatch

Villa Cetinale, near Siena

An online tool for organising meetings with groups – if you can persuade them to use it. webcamtaxi.com Live webcams from around the world.

(after two days in Bologna) with Harry Mount 31st October to 6th November 2024 Last autumn, we rented Villa Cetinale, one of the most famous villas in Italy – the late Lord Lambton's 17th-century palazzo in the hills just south of Siena. It didn’t disappoint, and we have had many requests to hire it again. This is an unmissable opportunity to stay at this absurdly beautiful villa.

On this trip, we are going to be visiting the hidden gems of Tuscany and Romana – those lovely towns Ravenna, Fiesole, Volterra and Monterrigioni.

We will start the trip in Bologna, staying for two nights at the Al Cappello Rosso hotel, near the Piazza Maggiore, from where we will explore glorious Byzantine Ravenna. Then we will have Villa Cetinale to ourselves for four nights.

Limited to 21 guests.

Thursday 31st October – arrival in Bologna Check in at our hotel. Then afternoon tour of the city’s highlights including the Basilica di San Petronio, the Two Towers, the university and Santo Stefano, before dinner at nearby Trattoria Leonida.

Friday 1st November – Ravenna A guided tour of this extraordinary city which boasts the greatest collection of

Sunday 3rd November – Villa Cetinale and the Abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore A day at the villa with a morning tour of the villa and grounds, followed by lunch.

At 5pm, we will depart for the abbey to hear the Gregorian chant sung by the monks at vespers, before dinner at nearby La Torre.

Oldie reader trip to Cetinale, October 2022; Ravenna

5th-century mosaics in Christendom, with a heavy Byzantine influence. Lunch at the glorious fin-de-siècle Trattoria del Gallo. Afternoon shopping and exploring in Bologna. Dinner at Grassilli.

Saturday 2nd November – Fiesole We set off for Villa Cetinale, stopping at Fiesole for a morning tour of the city, led by Harry Mount. Founded by the Etruscans in the 6th century BC, Fiesole has magnificent views of its upstart rival, Florence. It remained important under the Romans, whose ruined walls, baths and theatre survive. Lunch in Fiesole before driving on for dinner at Cetinale.

Monday 4th November – Monteriggioni Dante wrote of its 13th-century walls, surrounded by towers, and they are still there. Just 50 people live in this tiny medieval masterpiece.

Lunch at Osteria Antico Travaglio in the main square. Dinner at Cetinale.

Tuesday 5th November – San Gimignano and Volterra Morning tour of Volterra including the duomo and Palazzo dei Priori, followed by lunch at Bel Soggiorno, which has fabulous views of the hills around San Gimignano. In the afternoon, a tour of the city and its 14 towers.

Wednesday 6th November – depart for Pisa Airport

HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 or please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Double/twin/single: £3,495 per person.

Two doubles with shared access: £2,495 per person. Prices include all meals, wine with meals, transport and entrances. You need to book and pay for your own flights. A non-refundable deposit of £750 will be required, with the full balance due on 1st July, 2024.

The Oldie January 2024 75

Commonplace Corner named after the city of Condom, which gives title to a bishop.

James Dixon, a retired surgeon, offering a definition to the first edition (1884) of the Oxford English Dictionary. He later thought condom might derive from quondam – Latin for former. The origin of the word remains uncertain

My neighbour asked if he could use my lawnmower and I told him of course he could, so long as he didn’t take it out of my garden.

Eric Morecambe Minds are like parachutes. They function only when they are open.

Sir James Dewar (1842-1923), Scottish physicist

Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with 60 diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone for ever.

Horace Mann (1796-1859)

The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit.

Try, if you can, to belong to the first class.

There’s far less competition.

Dwight Morrow (1873-1931), American lawyer From birth to 18, a girl needs good parents. From 18 to 35, she needs good looks. From 35 to 55, good personality. From 55 on, she needs good cash.

Sophie Tucker (1884-1966), RussianAmerican vaudeville artist Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it’s a simple

Pop-ups I’m angry at the endless pop-up intrusions that keep appearing on my computer screen.These can barge in at any time and ruin my concentration and I often have to spend ages trying to get rid of them.

I was reading a news story when ‘Dashboard. Just One 76 The Oldie January 2024

King of Comedy: Eric Morecambe

adventure story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe.

Lex Luthor in Superman (1978), screenplay by Mario Puzo I am writing on a very obscene subject.

There is an article called Cundum – a contrivance used by fornicators, to save themselves from a well-deserved clap; also by others who wish to enjoy copulation without the possibility of impregnation.

Everything obscene comes from France and I had supposed this affair was

Second’ popped up, supposedly to make my data ‘customizable’, whatever that meant.

Later, when I was typing, up came ‘Hello, this is Bing.

I’m the new AI-powered chat mode that can help you quickly get summarized answers.’

Oh dear – those irritating Americanised zs. Luckily, I managed to shut down its ridiculous suggestions. No way did I want to write a story about a cute puppy.

Here’s another: autocorrection, where my computer changed my typing into typo horrors.

I wrote ‘misleading’ and up came ‘mustard’ – who knows why. So I replaced it with ‘deluding’.

Another infuriating problem happens when I’m

The Labour Party owes more to Methodism than to Marxism.

Morgan Phillips, Labour politician (1902-63) There is no greater sorrow Than to be mindful of the happy time In misery Dante, Inferno The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

Peter de Vries Speech happens not to be his language.

Madame de Staël (1766-1817), on being asked what she talked about with her new lover

writing in cafés or trains. I wear good-quality, noisecancelling headphones to play songs to block out loud conversations, traffic or ghastly background rap.

Suddenly my music stops and a stern message appears across my tablet screen. ‘Did

SMALL DELIGHTS Successfully locating the end of a refuse sack in its roll first time, and opening it without tearing it.

KEITH WADE, SEVENOAKS WEALD, KENT

Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

you know that playing music loudly can damage your ears?’ Get away.

In my carefree youth in the 1960s, I went to live concerts, being deafened by Led Zeppelin and many others. My eardrums rattled for weeks, but I had no permanent damage. So how dare they? Growling with rage, I turned off my player, switched it on again and turned the volume right up.

I realise that computers have improved our lives by providing accessible information, but, please, software producers, don’t shove it down our throats.

For Pete’s sake, stop butting in every few minutes and let us find out what we need to know for ourselves.

CAROLYN WHITEHEAD

TOM PLANT; STUDIO ANJOU / ALAMY

Time wounds every heel.

The comic epitaph Ian Fleming wanted on his tombstone. In fact, his wife, Ann Fleming, chose a line from Lucretius: ‘Omnia perfunctus vitae praemia marces’ – ‘Having enjoyed all life’s prizes, you now decay’

Red-Legged Partridge

CARRY AKROYD

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd ​ he partridge one thinks of at Christmas T ‘in a pear tree’ is the red-legged or ‘French’ partridge (Alectoris rufa). Its cousin is the Grey or English Partridge. ​A ‘red-leg’ appears in St Jerome in His Study, by Antonello da Messina (c 1430-1479) in the National Gallery.

A stone arch frames the entrance and on the threshold stand in profile a red-leg and a peacock. They and Jerome, inside at his desk, form a triangle of dominant living beings.

Seeking online explanation from ​ Caroline Campbell, the National’s former Director of Collections and Research, is in vain. She tells us that the study invites entry but to enter we must ‘pass a couple of obstacles, a partridge and a peacock, but let’s expect they’re not ​ going to provide too much difficulty to us’ – and they do not. It is the only mention they get.

Further research ​(The Art Bulletin) arrived at the following conclusion: ​‘Jerome’s partridge is yet another reference to the miraculous Incarnation of Christ within Mary’s womb.’ ​As for verse one of The Twelve Days of Christmas: ​On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me A partridge in a pear tree ​… ‘true love’ stands for Christ: ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’ (Matthew: 3:17) Both partridge ​species are known for familial concern. The male red-leg even incubates and rears the second clutch the ​ female sometimes lays.

Thus the bird represents Christ the Saviour: ‘He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under ​his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.’ (Psalm 91:4) The tree is the cross: ‘Who his own s​ elf bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness.’ (1 Peter 2 ​ :24) The carol is French. Both species of partridge were introduced from

France, the grey (Perdix perdix) by the Normans, the red-leg in the 17th century.

Old French pertriz (modern French perdrix) became Middle English pertriche, modern ‘partridge’. Through some misapplication of the French, perdrix, pronounced ‘peardree’, became ‘pear tree’. ​Only the red-leg perches occasionally in a tree. ​Perdix in Greek mythology was the nephew of Daedalus. His ingenious uncle, envious of Perdix’s i​ nventions (potter’s wheel etc), pushed him off the roof of Athena’s temple. But as Perdix fell, the goddess turned him into a ​

partridge – hence the bird’s preference for ground rather than sky. ​That Charles II tried to introduce the handsome and larger red-leg from France may explain why it is also called ‘French’. It is a bird of dry, rugged, country, its inferiority to the ‘English’ partridge passionately contested b ​y David Bannerman (The Birds of the British Isles) on all counts.

Four to ten million partridges are reared annually ​in the UK for shooting, most of the red-legged Alectoris rufa variety.

The 2024 Oldie Bird of the Month calendar is available now: carryakroyd.co.uk The Oldie January 2024 77

Travel Advent in Aachen

The Celts, the Romans and Charlemagne loved the city – and William Cook adores its Christmas market

I

78 The Oldie January 2024

Not such a silent night: Christmas market and Aachen Cathedral

borders, it’s barely an hour by train from Brussels, the first stop in Germany on the eastbound express towards Cologne.

And now that Eurostar has extended its network to Aachen and Cologne, the journey has become even easier. You still have to change in Brussels, but the onbound Eurostar departs from an adjacent platform, and you can buy a single ticket for the entire journey, which takes as little as four and a half hours, including an hour or so between trains in Brussels.

Arriving at Aachen Hauptbahnhof (central station), you could be forgiven

for thinking you’d been lured here under false pretences. The bland modern buildings around the station are uninspiring, with the underwhelming ambience of a typical commuter town.

But it’s only a short walk to the antique Altstadt, where workaday Aachen takes on an entirely different air.

The elegant entrance to the Altstadt is the Elisenbrunnen – a neoclassical pavilion built to house the city’s thermal springs.

The Celts knew all about this hot and smelly mineral water. When the Romans conquered the Rhineland, they built a

REBAIXFOTOGRAFIE / ALAMY

n a cobbled square in Aachen, beside Germany’s most beautiful cathedral, those industrious Rhinelanders are making the final preparations for my favourite Christmas market.

I’ve been coming here for 30 years, and I never tire of it. Back in Britain, I’m Ebenezeer Scrooge but, wandering around Aachen’s Weihnachtsmarkt, I feel like a child at Christmas again.

During Advent, these clusters of homely wooden huts spring up all over Germany, selling the same Germanic food and drink and the same handmade wooden trinkets. There’s not much to choose between them – so why do I like this one best of all? Partly because it’s so accessible, only a few hours by train from London, but above all because it’s in such an archaic and attractive setting.

No wonder it welcomes well over a million visitors every year.

Aachen is a popular weekend getaway for Germans, and for Dutch and Belgian visitors too (Maastricht and Liege are both just a short drive away), yet for most Britons it remains unfamiliar. They don’t know what they’re missing. Aachen’s outskirts are nondescript, but its quaint, compact Altstadt (old town) is delightful, an ideal destination for a Yuletide city break.

Ever since 1994, when Eurostar started their service from London to Brussels, Aachen has been easy to reach by train from Britain. Only a few miles from both the Dutch and the Belgian

DESIGN PICS INC; SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO; MAURITIUS IMAGES GMBH; BILDARCHIV MONHEIM GMBH; IMAGEBROKER / ALAMY

huge spa resort here, called Aquae Granni.

There are impressive remnants of its sturdy foundations in the adjacent gardens.

With the fall of the Roman Empire, Aquae Granni fell into decay. But when Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor, in 800 AD, he chose Aachen as his capital (like the Romans, he was partial to a hot soak). He built a palace and a church here and, remarkably, parts of both buildings have survived.

The robust, medieval Rathaus is built on the foundations of his palace. His octagonal chapel forms the core of Aachen’s ornate cathedral – a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Inside is Charlemagne’s austere throne, and his bones in an intricate golden casket.

A place of worship and pilgrimage for 1,200 years, the cathedral is Aachen’s main attraction, but the Rathaus is also a must-see.

The literal translation – ‘town hall’ – doesn’t do it justice. It’s like a Charlemagne statue cross between a mansion and a in the Rathaus castle, lavishly decorated over several centuries in a wide array of styles.

Oddly, the boundaries of Charlemagne’s empire were almost the same as those of the founder members of the EEC. So he’s become a kind of poster boy for the European Union, the socalled ‘Father of Europe’. Every year, the Charlemagne Prize is awarded here at the Rathaus, to an individual or an institution, to reward their work ‘in the service of European unification’.

I suppose whether you find this inspiring or rather irritating probably depends on which way you swung on Brexit. Whatever your view, it’s interesting to note that there have been five British recipients: Winston Churchill, Edward Heath, Roy Jenkins, Tony Blair and latterly the writer Timothy Garton Ash. The streets around the Rathaus are picturesque, a tangle of winding alleys lined with chic boutiques and cosy cafés. You’d never guess that as much as threequarters of the city, including a great deal of the Altstadt, was

destroyed during the Second World War – first by British bombers, and then during a fierce street battle between the Wehrmacht and the US Army.

Like a discreet piece of dental bridgework, the Altstadt has been painstakingly restored – a subtle blend of original and unobtrusive modern buildings, many built from the same mottled, mudbrown brick. Elsewhere, the reconstruction has been more perfunctory; beyond the Altstadt the style is drab.

One exception is the palatial Parkhotel Quellenhof, Aachen’s poshest hotel – good value for somewhere so grandiose.

Built during the First World War, a bombastic monument to Prussian hubris, it’s where in 1944 the Wehrmacht made their last stand against the US Army.

Today you’d never know it. Immaculately renovated, it’s an atmospheric relic of the Second Reich – smart and stylish yet slightly spooky, like all the best grand hotels.

A brief stroll across the adjoining park brings you to the Carolus Thermen, Aachen’s sumptuous public spa. From the outside, it looks like ordinary modern swimming baths, but within you find a range of pools, all fed by the same piping-hot springs that lured the Romans here. It feels wonderful to swim in such warm water, especially in the outdoor pool, in the cold, crisp winter air.

Walking back through the Stadtpark, I felt ten years younger.

Aachen is still scarred by wartime damage, and some parts of it are rather shabby, but the pleasure of coming here is that it’s a living, working place, rather than a touristic theme park. Germans come here to go shopping, buying their freshly roasted coffee beans from Plum’s, a local institution since 1820; and Printen, the spicy gingerbread, renowned throughout Germany. Do end up at Café

Left: Churchill in Aachen, 1956.

Above: Couven Museum

Top: The Rathaus. Above: Spitzgässchen

Didier for Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cake), the Teutonic equivalent of high tea.

The jolly bars and restaurants are full of locals rather than foreign sightseers.

Try Zum Goldenen Einhorn or the Brauerei Goldener Schwan, side by side, opposite the Rathaus, on the bustling market square.

I finished my latest trip in the Couven Museum, a handsome baroque townhouse filled with 18th-century ceramics and furniture (the collection was originally located in an even grander house, reduced to rubble during the war).

The museum encapsulates the poignant appeal of this battered but lively little city – where so much has been lost, yet so much salvaged and preserved.

As I returned to the station, I saw a wedding party spilling out of the Rathaus: a young bride, beautiful and bashful in her flowing white dress; a young groom, proud and awkward in his new suit. This tender scene summed up the historic, humdrum charm of Aachen.

Its Rathaus may be built on the foundations of Charlemagne’s ancient palace, the spiritual centre of the EU. But, for this shy, happy couple, setting out on life’s strange journey, this friendly and familiar place is simply their local town hall.

Aachen’s Christmas market runs from 24th November to 23rd December (www.aachenweihnachtsmarkt.de).

Eurostar from London to Aachen from £78 return (www.eurostar.com). Doubles at the Parkhotel Quellenhof from €150 (www.parkhotel-quellenhof.de) The Oldie January 2024 79

Overlooked Britain

Fit for the King of Scotland

lucinda lambton The Duke of Hamilton thought he was the rightful heir to the Scottish throne – and had his legs broken to fit inside his sarcophagus

Hail to the 10th Duke of Hamilton (1767-1852), a man of startling vanity and self-glorification.

Alexander Hamilton thought that, as his ancestor had married the daughter of James II, he should rightfully be the King of Scotland. He was a figure of great renown as a dandy.

He also felt a somewhat over-intimate connection with Napoleon and in 1811 commissioned no less an artist than Jacques-Louis David to paint The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries.

This was just one of his treasures – a mere tip of the iceberg of his sensational acquisitions of art and artefacts of 80 The Oldie January 2024

remarkable importance, with a collection that was famed worldwide.

Having inherited a gigantic fortune from their Lanarkshire coalfields, he was as rich a man as could be found on this earth. He was determined to aggrandise his neoclassical pile on an epic scale.

Hamilton Palace was to become famed for its outrageous opulence. It was considered the wonder of Scotland, as well indeed of the world.

With its abundance of rare marbles, mosaics and intricate wood-carving, the general effect was ‘of a most massive and princely splendour’, wrote one visitor.

There was a black marble double staircase and a multitude of huge black

marble fireplaces. The floors were a multiplicity of marble hexagons. The ceilings groaned with gilded decoration, while the walls were smothered with all manner of fanciful delights, including great waving palm fronds and baskets of fruit.

The final chapters of this great building were the strangest chapters, with three of the rooms being demolished and one being reconstructed in – wait for it – Dallas, and another in Boston.

A third has recently been returned to Scotland from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where it was discovered after years of having been abandoned in packing cases.

The Duke was determined to reign

HERITAGE IMAGE PARTNERSHIP LTD / ALAMY

The duke’s mausoleum (1852) by David Bryce: its 123ft-high dome produces a 15-second echo, one of the longest in the world

resplendent after his death. He commissioned a mausoleum of maximum size and splendour. Its vast stone dome was designed by the able architect David Bryce, along with the sculptor Alexander Handyside.

Together they used the minimum of mortar and with such maximum success that – despite having a coal seam mined beneath the building – when it collapsed, as it was prone to do, the mausoleum swayed and sank but never fell down.

Started in 1842 and finished in 1858, it is 118 feet tall, with great bronze doors modelled on those at Florence’s Baptistery. It was built with 10,000 slabs of stone sourced from all over the world.

You could enter it though one of three arches, crowned with sculptures of Life, Death and Immortality. Only death allows admittance to the tomb.

When the Duke died in 1852, his funeral was glorified by the mausoleum, with the Times saying it was ‘the most costly and magnificent temple for the reception for the dead in the world – always excepting the pyramids’.

Inside, a marble, granite porphyry and jasper floor reflected the architecture that soars overhead. Its centrepiece of a radiant star was lit directly by the cupola – ‘the Eye of God’ – shining from above. Although the Duke died before it was finished, enough progress had been made for him to lie in his megalomaniacal monument as his funeral service reverberated around him.

Hamilton commissioned The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries (1812)

Hamilton’s legs were broken to squeeze into an Egyptian court-jester’s sarcophagus

Unfortunately, a disastrous 15-second echo had been discovered, rendering the service incomprehensible!

The Duke was a man of note, with a multitude of important roles. To be the Ambassador to the Russian Court of St Peterburg was no mean feat.

Lord Lamington wrote of meeting him when he was ambassador, ‘He was very old but held himself straight as any grenadier. He was always dressed in a military, laced undress coat, tights and hessian boots.’

He was eventually laid to rest in a sarcophagus of ‘utmost rarity’, which he had originally bought on his travels on behalf of the British Museum. It was thought to have contained the body of Queen Amasis. When the remains were revealed, they turned out instead to be those of a mere court jester.

On his last journey abroad, the Duke procured Eastern spices for his own embalming.

He would often try the sarcophagus ‘out for size’, albeit with singular lack of success. Since he failed to take account of the obligatory lining, his measurements were wrong. His legs had to be broken to crush him into his treasure!

There are no longer any Hamiltons in the crypt. When later mining set the mausoleum a-trembling in the 1920s, all the bodies were hauled off in coal carts to the cemetery nearby. The great singer and comedian Sir Harry Lauder lies but a stone’s throw away.

Following the death of his father, Alexander became the 10th Duke of Hamilton in 1819. He and his wife continued to expand their art collection which included works by Rubens,

He would often try the sarcophagus ‘out for size’, albeit with singular lack of success Leonardo da Vinci, Tintoretto and Titian.

Hamilton Palace was claimed to be the largest royal residence, larger even than Buckingham Palace. The Duke felt it was a fitting building for ‘the legitimate King of Scotland’.

A wretched matter in the Hamilton saga was the inevitable collapse of this great palace. It was said to be as fine a house as ever existed in the British Isles.

Because of the subsidence, in 1921 it had to be destroyed in its entirety. Many say that this was the greatest loss of any house in the country.

Henry Avray Tipping, the architectural editor of Country Life, saw it as a grim disaster, lamenting, ‘It is a thousand pities that so great and historic a house should disappear.’

It had originally been built in 1643 for the first Dukes of Hamilton, the premier peers of Scotland – a family of kingmakers and king-breakers.

There were massive bronze doors at every turn and busts of basalt to relish.

Hamilton Palace and its mausoleum had no equal.

We can still delight in the splendour of the mausoleum, though, trumpeting out the very great grandeur of ‘El Magnifico’ – the 10th Duke of Hamilton – to this day.

The Oldie January 2024 81

On the Road

All my world was a stage Rebecca Hall’s parents were director Peter Hall and opera singer Maria Ewing. She tells Louise Flind about growing up in a theatrical world

Is there something you really miss?

My art studio. That sounds very grand. I have an area in my house that’s dedicated to holding all my paints and it’s my happy place. That and my garden. I’m still religiously putting my dahlias in but I’m never seeing them bloom – my mother-in-law sends me pictures.

What’s your favourite destination?

I always want to go back to Greece. When I was younger, with my father, Peter Hall, and Nicki [Frei – her stepmother], we’d go to Epidaurus [home to the greatest Ancient Greek theatre], where he’d often be putting on plays. And later I toured there in The Winter’s Tale.

You were in The Camomile Lawn when you were ten. Did you always want to be an actress?

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t.

Did your mother, the late opera singer Maria Ewing, teach you to sing?

No, she never did.

Did you ever want to be an opera singer?

Funnily enough, yeah. I was always aware that I had a really big voice and I could sing, and when no one was listening, I’d let it rip.

82 The Oldie January 2024

Did you go to drama school?

I went to Cambridge and did English literature, and no one was asking me to sing during that.

Why did you drop out of Cambridge?

I felt that I knew what I wanted to do.

I’d done my due diligence and got into a very good university that I didn’t think I would get into. And then I found myself there just doing theatre. I needed to do something rebellious.

What was your first big break?

Not long after I left Cambridge, my dad said, ‘Actually, you’re quite good at acting’ – and started leaving plays for me in places. In the end, I just gave in and we did Mrs Warren’s Profession with Brenda Blethyn. That was the big break.

How did the play go?

The performance went well and, after opening night, my dad and Nicki and I were having bowl of soup in the kitchen.

We were sat there and Dad went to lift the spoon – and then he just stopped, the blood drained out of his face and he said, ‘Oh my God, I’ve just realised what I’ve done. If the reviews come out tomorrow and it doesn’t work for you, it’s over.’

Was it a help or a hindrance having such a famous dad?

It gave me enormous opportunity and access to people that I wouldn’t have had, but it also came with some baggage that you had to be pretty strong-willed about.

What was it like being directed by him?

My strongest memory is that it just was very special to have that time with him.

What’s the most exotic place you’ve ever filmed in?

Last year, on Godzilla vs Kong 2, the northern tip of Queensland – the Daintree Rainforest with these very old plants. Cassowaries would be roaming around. The leaves were almost the size of my entire torso and head.

And the least exotic?

Albany was not very exotic.

Do you prefer film and television to theatre?

I think that my great love is film, and film acting is the discovery moment.

It’s rehearsal with the camera rolling, and what I love about theatre is the rehearsal room.

Where did you go on your honeymoon with your husband [American actor Morgan Spector]?

We didn’t take one because we’re hopeless workaholics.

Do you like being/working away from home?

When I’m at home, I’m sort of restless to go travelling – and if I’m away too long, then I’m just angry that I’m not at home…

Do you go on holiday?

Increasingly, yes, because of the fiveyear-old.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

Roasted badger beets.

What’s the strangest place you’ve ever slept in?

On a felucca sailing down the Nile.

Do you have any travelling tips?

Take comfortable shoes and dry shampoo.

Godzilla vs Kong 2 is out in April

DPA PICTURE ALLIANCE ARCHIVE / ALAMY

Is there anything you can’t leave home without?

A candle with a comforting smell.

And a sketchbook.

I doodle a lot, and it makes me feel calm. And I’ll take my iPad and draw on that with my Apple Pencil. I sit on set and do drawings and little sketches of people at work and then at the end of the job I’ll give them as a card to cast and crew as a present.

Taking a Walk

Take the slow road to Cheshire

GARY WING

patrick barkham

A 17-mile stroll in the rain between towns in Staffordshire and Cheshire did not sound very alluring.

But this walk came with a prize. If I could defy the wet and gloom between Kidsgrove and Macclesfield, I would link Birmingham to Manchester on the Slow Ways walking network.

Slow Ways came to keen walker and all-round ideas factory Daniel RavenEllison when he took a hike from Winchester to Salisbury and realised his destination did not feature on any footpath signs.

‘It’s almost like it’s the Second World War and footpath signs have been removed to baffle people,’ he said, when we met at Kidsgrove station at the dank and grisly hour of 7.30am.

Of course we have wonderful Ordnance Survey maps, but many people can’t read maps. And OS doesn’t tell us whether a footpath across a field has been ploughed over by a farmer. Apps show us optimum routes for cars and trains and these also work for pedestrians in cities.

But everywhere else, there is no clear and simple way for walkers to know the best route from A to B. So, during lockdown, map geeks planned more than 9,000 potential routes across Britain. Since then, volunteers for (not-for-profit) Slow Ways have verified the routes by walking them – ensuring they are safe, accessible and enjoyable.

So far, more than 9,000 miles have been ‘peer reviewed’ by at least three walkers – guaranteeing that a path won’t end, for instance, in a need to cross a busy dual carriageway. There are 45,000 miles to go.

We were verifying 17 miles. Dan showed me the route on the Slow Ways app, which is easy to use. It directed us from the railway car park onto the towpath of the Trent and Mersey canal and we headed north.

As the trees dripped, the light lifted on a sodden world. The canal was swollen with lurid brown water after days of rain.

It was so wet that blackbirds sheltered under bridges.

Gradually the rain eased and, as we

walked through busy Britain, it seemed a miracle to have the world to ourselves.

Canal boaties were hunkered down against the weather, chimneys smoking, as we turned onto the Macclesfield Canal.

This marvellous Thomas Telforddesigned waterway, blessed with beautifully curvaceous stone bridges, hugged the contours of hills, giving us unexpectedly expansive views of the green pastures of Staffordshire and Cheshire. Herons got up stiffly from the bulrushes, and every hour or so the quiet air was broken by the canal-hogging peep-peep of a kingfisher, dashing low over the water, exploding the grey and brown with iridescent rust and turquoise.

The Slow Ways route diverted us away from the canal and into Congleton, weaving through quiet streets, a splendid Victorian park and the well-tended privet hedges of a 1950s council estate.

The estate’s rundown shopping precinct was brightened by a very 2020s phenomenon: an artisan bakehouse.

Then we rejoined the towpath, with its ingenious locks, lock-keepers’ pretty cottages and always-interesting narrowboats. Here, truly, was a slower

way. ‘Slow – sorry: cat on lead’ said a sign beside one moored barge. Another narrowboat was called Why Hurry?

The amorous grey squirrels chasing through the boughs beside the water disagreed, but the rest of this world was at peace. The canal climbed into the hills, past the Fools Nook pub (sadly closed and requiring a brave publican to take on that name) and into pretty Macc, as the locals call it.

Astonishingly, by the end of the sixhour walk, we had seen more kingfishers than fellow walkers without dogs, and even the dog-walkers numbered barely a dozen.

Arise and reawaken, our walking nation!

By reviewing our walk on the Slow Ways map, I’d helped link Birmingham to Manchester in a free network that other people can follow. ‘Verifying’ can become quite addictive, according to Raven-Ellison, but the simple physical pleasure of a steady, full day’s walk was more than enough: I quietly glowed for the whole train ride home.

I walked KidCon Two and ConMac Two on the Slow Ways network: www. slowways.org The Oldie January 2024 83

Genius crossword 434 EL SERENO Three clues have no definition. Hints to 16d may be seen in other clues and solutions Across 1 Fancied hotel client in audition (7) 5 Shouting about missing one report (7) 9 Exercises in pitch gradually tail off (5) 10 16 - I’m not sure after seeing old flame taken in by a state (9) 11 People arguing case, putting fences across street (10) 12 Millions put on main vein (4) 14 Tight social unit on for shots (12) 18 Shock second Democrat enveloped in suspicion getting tiny margin (5-7) 21 Sources of grief are those expecting attendance money (4) 22 State of mind after 16’s economic failure (10) 25 Is tea sure to be served where flowers go? (9) 26 Short picture - origin of only adult version (5) 27 Call it English for a bug! (7) 28 Talk about quiet mother’s face-covering (7)

Down 1 Good at times hugging son after 16 (6) 2 Old wine trade overseas (6) 3 The sleaze of one wearing poor don’s dress (10) 4 King interrupting silly sketch (5) 5 Fighter, one seen in the African jungle, reportedly (9) 6 Patriarch showing evident lack of surprise? (4) 7 Restrict dangerous driver - he’s often flat out on the road (8) 8 It is cooked with butter in - superior sort of sweet (8) 13 They’re often viewed as vital for data analysis (10) 15 Order dodgy article about yours truly (9) 16 &17. Film one’s used to ordering? (3,5) (8) 17 see 16 (8) 19 Charm underworld member (6) 20 Find the key to a French rugby player (6) 23 Out of practice, though strong and healthy if changing sides (5) 24 Expedition dropping a fine outfit (4)

1

2

3

4

9

5

6

2

3

4

5

6

8

7 9 10

11

12

13 14

15

17 19 22

24

18

20

21 23

25

16

8

19

20

10

11

12 13 14

16

15

17

18

22

21

23

24 25

26

27

28

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. Deadline: 10th January 2024.

We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25.

Two runners-up will receive £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 434 1

7

Across 7 Smile affectedly (6) 8 Upper parts of legs (6) 10 Support; keep up (7) 11 Lid; insure (5) 12 Matured (4) 13 The land of nod (5) 17 Drab, gloomy (5) 18 Thin, svelte (4) 22 Torso (5) 23 Hindu state of bliss (7) 24 Ticking over (6) 25 Emphasise (6)

Genius 432 solution Down 1 In the normal way (2,5) 2 Broke into pieces (7) 3 Olympic award (5) 4 Astounded (7) 5 Rib of a domed vault (5) 6 Money-lending extortion (5) 9 Graceless (9) 14 Like a time bomb! (7) 15 Swollen (7) 16 Stalemate (7) 19 Garret (5) 20 Bird’s feather (5) 21 Soup (5)

1

9

C

2

3

R O W B

Y

P

G R

I

N

A

11

E

N

T P I

S

N

C

L

U

C O

L

H

L

21

25

R D

L

L

D

P

24

Y

D

22

R

Y

15

S

C

D

E

B

A M

E

C

H O O

L

S

T 23

P 12

F

T

N

A

D

P

R L

L

E E

A W N T

T I

I

20

O

O N

G P

H

P

O

E A

19

R

T

N A

8

N G

S E

B

26

P T

A

I

N L

R I

E 28

13

7

M

N A

N L

L

C

O I

M

E

S

V

U M B

A

6

H

P

C

A

G E

R

U A

E

N

E

G O R

C

F

S

R R

C

O A T

A M E

27

14

O

17

5

R

10

L Y

4

E

L R

E

16 18

L

T

A

E

E I

T

D G

L

E

Winner: Paul Carter, Westonsuper-Mare, Somerset Runners-up: John and Hilary Fowles, Bristol; Sonny Waight, Olveston, South Gloucestershire

Moron 432 answers: Across: 1 1 Seize, 4 Horse (Seesaws), 10 Eyeball, 11 Mulch, 12 Gusto, 13 Adhered, 15 Urea, 17 Lasso, 19 Wiles, 22 Bang, 25 Moisten, 27 Niche, 29 Spear, 30 Embrace, 31 Idiot, 32 Meant. Down: 2 Ewers, 3 Zealous, 5 Oomph, 6 Splurge, 7 Feign, 8 Algae, 9 Shade, 14 Dawn, 16 Robe, 18 Aniseed, 20 Ignoble, 21 Smash, 23 Anger, 24 Jewel, 26 Torso, 28 Chain.

The Oldie January 2024 85

Competition TESSA CASTRO On this month’s deal from the US Fall Nationals, East’s exuberant defensive jump to Six Hearts catapulted South into a highly optimistic grand slam. Nineteen times out of 20, he’d be congratulating himself for his fine barrage bid. This, however, was the 20th.

Dealer South

Neither Vulnerable North ♠ KJ53 ♥ J86 ♦ J984 ♣ A7

West ♠ Q9 ♥ K7532 ♦ Q ♣ KQJ52

South ♠ A862 ♥♦ AK7532 ♣ 863

East ♠ 10 7 4 ♥ A Q 10 9 4 ♦ 10 6 ♣ 10 9 4

The bidding South 1 ♦ 6 ♠ (4)

West North 2NT (1) Dbl (2) Pass 7 ♠ (5)

East 6 ♥ (3) end

1. Unusual, showing five-five in the two lowest unbid suits. 2. Negative double, showing the other major, ie spades. 3. Huge heart fit, and even 10-9-low of clubs looks very offensive; East bids immediately to his limit (some would say beyond). 4. Must show his as-yet-undisclosed spade fit. As far as South is concerned, both sides could be making slam on what appears likely to be a huge double-fit deal. 5. ‘You bid six, and I have two trump pictures and the ace of clubs…’ Also, North’s three hearts strongly suggest South is void, plus there is the bolstering J-9-8-low of partner’s diamonds.

Declarer won West’s king of clubs lead with dummy’s ace (ducking never seems to work in a grand slam). Assuming all six diamond tricks (as well as the ace of clubs), he would need six spade tricks – which meant two heart ruffs in hand.

At trick two, declarer ruffed a heart.

He then cashed the ace of spades and crossed to the (queen and) ace. He then ruffed a second heart with his last spade. Still far from out of the woods, declarer needed to return to dummy to draw East’s remaining spade. There was only one hope – West had to have the bare queen of diamonds.

At trick six, declarer cashed the ace of diamonds and observed with a thrill West’s queen appearing. Unblocking the eight from dummy, declarer could now cross to the knave of diamonds, cash the knave of spades, drawing East’s ten, then run his remaining diamonds.

Thirteen tricks and grand slam made.

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 300 you were invited to write a poem called Three Tons. Your creativity varied a lot in register, which makes the winning entries below read almost shockingly together.

Anne Drysdale threw three tons of stuff into a skip but then reflected, ‘To see the back of it should bring relief / And not this synthesis of guilt and grief.’ Frank McDonald celebrated the annual household ‘Three tons of coal converted into flames / Far kinder than cold electricity’. Terry Baldock asked, ‘Should you weigh your heart / Before you give it away?’ He concluded that you should. Basil Ransome-Davies’s narrator bought three tons of Northern Lights cannabis and ended up living ‘in a lonely tent, / A lifestyle choice indeed’.

Commiserations to them and to Gail White, Sue Smalley, Helen Pugh, Ian Nalder, John McTavish, Paul Holland, Paul Elmhirst, Frank Annable, Phil Revell and Dorothy Pope, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Bob Morrow.

‘Three tons?’ grandson replied, midst groans, ‘Four eighty of your ancient stones; Six thou, seven twenty pounds,’ he moans.

‘Three tons?’ replied my States friend, Ness, ‘That’s sixty hundredweights, I guess.

Like yours, but weighing one ninth less!’

‘Three tonnes? Trois tons metric,’ dit Giles.

‘In pounds? Oui! Environs sept mille – Mais trois mille kilos, très facile!’

‘Three tuns?’ rejoined my barman chum.

‘Seven fifty-six galls, wine or rum, ’Twill see you drunk till kingdom come.’

Three tons! A poem! A simple task?

But weight or mass, or size of cask?

I really wish you’d never asked.

Bob Morrow No, it was not the will of God, or fate That killed my children. It was hate.

It was inhuman humankind, War’s rival poisons of the heart and mind.

No, they are not at peace in heaven.

They were alive, sir, nine, and seven.

Until they tumbled to indifferent guns They were my sons.

No, do not offer me a bomb, a bullet.

Here is revenge, sir: look at it.

I cannot dig their graves deep in this ground, Nor raise a gentle mound.

The soil is thin, and packed with grit and stones, Hard guardians of young bones.

But if I buried them beneath three tons, Still they would cry, ‘We were your sons.’

Peter Hollindale Three tons he trundled up the dale From when the morning star grew pale, A donkey cart with heavy stone, While early fishing boats set sail.

So many journeys made alone, With straining joints and aching bones, Cementing bricks with patient care, A cottage for his love to own.

Her form was frail, her face was fair, A blossom wreath placed on her hair, Her wedding journey up the hill, The kitchen hearth set glowing there.

When winter came, the wind was chill, In icy draughts with power to kill.

They laid her body in the earth.

The cottage lies deserted still.

Fiona Clark My husband bought a red sports car.

A friend told me ‘Take care, Men are having an affair When they buy a new red sports car.’

Such a pretty new red sports car, I thought and I thought about it, Then went and bought three tons of shit And dumped it on his little red car.

Annette Shelford COMPETITION No 302 It gets trodden on but also welcomes the post, such as it is. A poem, please, called The Doormat. Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 302’, by Thursday 11th January.

The Oldie January 2024 87

Mobility

88 The Oldie January 2024

To advertise, contact Monty on 0203 8597093 or via email MontyZakheim@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £45+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 18th December 2023 UK Travel

For Sale

The Oldie January 2024 89

Overseas Travel

UK Travel

Books & Publishing

Jewellery

90 The Oldie January 2024

To advertise, contact Monty on 0203 8597093 or via email MontyZakheim@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £45+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 18th December 2023 Books & Publishing

Festivals

Gifts

The Oldie January 2024 91

Gifts

Heating

Clothes & Bedding

Genealogy

YOUR ANCESTORS FOUND Retired school inspector, Cambridge history graduate, genealogist for 40 years, researches and writes your family’s history. No task too big or small.

Phone 01730 812232 for brochure, sample report and free estimate.

Video

Health

MATURE AUSTRIAN LADY Offers relaxation Therapy Private-Kind-Caring,Sloane Avenue SW3 Tel: 07742634425 PETITE ORIENTAL BEAUTY Stunning Young Slim Classy Elegant and Friendly Lady. 2 mins from South Kensington.

Call 020 7581 2144 IN/OUT calls.

Personal

UNDERSTANDING ATTRACTIVE CONTINENTAL LADY Offers memorable massage to discerning gentlemen in discreet Marylebone surroundings. 07932644459 BEAUTIFUL, BUSTY, MATURE BLONDE, University Graduate, unhurried massage in discreet surroundings.

Call 07854 748 760

92 The Oldie January 2024

To advertise, contact Monty on 0203 8597093 or via email MontyZakheim@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £45+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 18th December 2023 Health

To advertise, contact Monty Zakheim on: 0203 859 7093 or via email: MontyZakheim@ theoldie.co.uk Care

Wanted

Societies

OLD POSTCARDS WANTED by private collector.

Contact Grenville Collins.

Tel: 020 7834 1852. Email: grenvillejcollins@gmail.com

Genealogy

The Oldie January 2024 93

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside I don’t want any presents

Q

I’m over 80 this year and I know that on my birthday everyone will ply me with presents – I’m so lucky! But I’m in the business of throwing everything away, not hoarding more stuff. So how can I insist that no one give me anything? Do you think I should suggest they give money to a specified charity? It seems rather presumptuous – but do you have any other ideas?

Mrs S Jameson, Wirral

A

Certainly don’t ask friends to give to charity! They might not have been thinking of giving you a present anyway, but perhaps have thought of making you a cake or a card.

And who knows whether they would approve of the charity you suggest anyway? There are a couple of big charities I know rather too much about and would never want to give a penny to.

And other charities I just wouldn’t want to support because I don’t like their aims.

If you’re asking friends over, write ‘NO PRESENTS!!!’ in red, with lots of exclamation marks. And maybe add something like ‘I only want to see you, my dear friends!’

Q

A friend’s suicide

My friends and I are so upset because a lovely mutual friend, and a committed Christian, who’s been suffering depression all her life, killed herself three months ago.

We’d all tried to help her and thought she was happier on a new antidepressant – but she never told us quite how bad she felt. Her 90-year-old mother is

devastated. How could she have done this to us?

Name and address supplied

A

First off, she didn’t do this to you: she did it to herself. It’s obvious that you have never suffered from depression. It really is the cruellest illness there is. My feeling is that you should be glad that she is finally out of the agony she must have been experiencing. She is free from the self-loathing, hopelessness and horror she’s been living with for years. An interminable agony. Be strong and try to give thanks that it’s now finally over.

Daughter drives me nuts

Q

Waiting to move into a new house, my daughter and her husband and two sons came to stay with us for six weeks. But sadly the house purchase fell through and, though they’re looking for another property, it’s all getting too much for me. The children wear me out and the cooking and ironing and clearing-up are quite draining. We can’t kick them out because we love them, but what can we do?

Name and address supplied

A

Don’t suffer in silence! Tell them how difficult you’re finding it all.

They’re saving a lot of money by staying with you – food, heating and all household bills – so surely they could give you a little for you to employ a bit of help a couple of times a week. And ironing? Is that really necessary?

Couldn’t they do their own? Couldn’t they provide a takeaway a couple of times a week for you all? I’m sure they simply don’t understand how exhausting it all is

Distribution Ltd, 2 East Poultry Avenue, London EC1A 9PT; www.seymour.co.uk

The Oldie is published by Oldie Publications Ltd, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA ISSN 0965-2507. Printed in England by Walstead Group. Distributed by Seymour

94 The Oldie January 2024

To order a print subscription, email theoldie@subscription.co.uk, or call 01858 438791, or write to The Oldie, Tower House, Sovereign Park, Market Harborough LE16 9EF. Print subscription rates for 12 issues: UK £49.50; Europe/Eire £58; USA/Canada £70; rest of world £69.

for you. If you don’t want to ask them directly, get your husband to speak to them on your behalf – and get him to do a bit of work while he’s about it!

Two tips from readers The problem that one of your readers had in getting out of bed in the mornings (she had Parkinson’s) can be rectified by the use of ‘slide sheets’. I have Parkinson’s also, and they were recommended to me by the occupational therapist at my local Parkinson’s clinic.

They’ve made all the difference. You can find them on Google or Amazon.

Barbara P, by email For the lady who feared she’d die before her cat and leave it homeless: Blue Cross operate a care plan called Pet Peace of Mind. A pet registered with them will be taken in, free of charge, should the owner die. I am 87 and my two cats are registered and I feel very reassured.

Deborah V, Cornwall And the Cinnamon Trust writes explaining that for only £5 a year for pensioners, they will find a safe home for your pet, should you die. It has a nationwide community of 18,000 volunteers to provide practical help when any aspect of day-to-day care poses a problem – for example, walking the dog for a housebound owner. Sometimes bereaved pet-owners can be put in touch with bereaved pets and everyone’s happy. www.cinnamon.org.uk; 01736 757900.

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.

To buy a digital subscription for £29.99 or a single issue for £2.99, go to the App Store on your tablet or mobile and search for ‘The Oldie’.

All rights of reproduction are reserved in respect of all articles, drawings, sketches etc published in The Oldie in all parts of the world. Reproduction or imitation of any of these without the express prior written consent of the publisher is forbidden.

The Oldie is available in audio and e-text format for the benefit of blind and partially sighted readers through RNIB Newsagent.

Telephone 0303 123 9999 or visit www.rnib. org.uk/newsagent for further details.