The Oldie April 2024

Nancy

Johnson

Features

11 I love my Teasmade Peter York

14 Bill Wyman, writer and squire Christopher Sandford

16 Brighton’s golden years

Adam Trimingham

17 Watch out for narcissists

Lulu Taylor

18 Biba – the glory years

Philippa Stockley

21 An ode to O-levels

Charlotte Metcalf

24 My extreme fasting

Neville Hodgkinson

27 In praise of the siesta

Rachel Kelly

29 Stone of Scone comes home

William Cook

30 Riding the African death train Griff Rhys Jones

33 Plea for more foster parents

Katie Waldegrave

34 Nancy Mitford in Venice

Gill Johnson

37 Dad taught me strip poker

Sarah Brydon

38 Brush up your classics Guy de la Bédoyère

39 Don’t move to the country

Andrew Gimson

Regulars

5 The Old Un’s Notes

Moray House, 23/31

Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA www.theoldie.co.uk

9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary: My party for the Queen

12 Olden Life: Who was Simon Dee? Andrew Roberts

12 Modern Life: What is microflirting? Richard Godwin

40 Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips

41 Prue’s News

43 Oldie Man of Letters A N Wilson

45 Small World Jem Clarke

46 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson

47 Country Mouse Giles Wood

48 Postcards from the Edge

Mary Kenny

50 School Days Sophia Waugh

52 God Sister Teresa

52 Memorial Service: Betty Boothroyd

James Hughes-Onslow

53 The Doctor’s Surgery Dr Theodore Dalrymple

54 Readers’ Letters

56 I Once Met … Tommy Trinder

Louise Dumas

56 Memory Lane

George Courtauld

69 Commonplace

69

71

97

99

99

Editor Harry Mount

Sub-editor Penny Phillips

Art editor Michael Hardaker

Supplements editor Charlotte Metcalf

Editorial assistant Amelia Milne

Publisher James Pembroke

Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer

At large Richard Beatty

Our Old Master David Kowitz

Books

58 The English Soul: The Faith of a Nation, by Peter Ackroyd Christopher Howse

59 Love From Venice: A Golden Summer on the Grand Canal, by Gill Johnson Hugo Vickers

61 The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the Middle East, by Steve Coll Ivo Dawnay

61 Melting Point: Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land, by Rachel Cockerell Nicholas Lezard

63 I Am Not Afraid of Looking into the Rifles: Women of the Resistance in World War One, by Rick Stroud Alan Judd

65 Burma Sahib, by Paul Theroux A N Wilson

67 Shylock’s Venice: The Remarkable Story of Venice’s Jews and the Ghetto, by Harry Freedman Tanya Gold Arts

72 Film: Wicked Little Letters Harry Mount

73 Theatre: The Hills of California William Cook

73 Radio Valerie Grove

74 Television Frances Wilson

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75 Music Richard Osborne

76 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson

77 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits

79 Gardening David Wheeler

79 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld

80 Cookery Elisabeth Luard

80 Restaurants James Pembroke

81 Drink Bill Knott

82 Sport Jim White

82 Motoring Alan Judd

84 Digital Life Matthew Webster

84 Money Matters Neil Collins

87 Bird of the Month: Crane John McEwen

Travel

88 Walking the Camino de Santiago at 70 Nigel Summerley

90 Overlooked Britain: Brighton Pavilion’s royal stables Lucinda Lambton

92 On the Road: Maureen Lipman Louise Flind

95 Taking a Walk: Chatting at Chatsworth Patrick Barkham

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Front cover: Ullstein bild/Getty

Rubber lovers page 40

Joy of the Teasmade page 11

Bill Wyman, country squire page 14

The Old Un’s Notes

Oldie-readers will have a favourite screen role among the 40 or so played by Marlon Brando (1924-2004). Brando would have been 100 on 3rd April.

There was the brutal New Orleans redneck Stanley Kowalski (pictured), bellowing ‘Stella-a-a-a-a-!’ up the tenement steps to his wife in 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire.

What about the ex-boxer and longshoreman mumbling his iconic ‘I coulda been a contender…’ speech three years later in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront?

Or, ushering in the second act to Brando’s career, his inimitable turn as the mob patriarch Don Corleone in 1972’s The Godfather?

Then there’s the ageing lothario who finds an unusual use for a dab of fridge-cold butter in the following year’s Last Tango in Paris

Or perhaps the extraordinary cameo Brando

played in 1979’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now, with his chillingly whispered

monologue about tribes cutting off their children’s arms rather than submit to inoculation. Brando had shown up on the film’s set late, hugely overweight, and then refused to learn his lines. The ten minutes he’s actually on screen is a masterpiece of controlled craziness.

But if it’s the immortal one-liner you’re after, it would be hard to top Brando’s performance as a leatherclad biker in 1953’s The Wild One. ‘Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?’ a girl enquires.

‘Whaddya got?’ he shrugs, summarising the whole

Among this month’s contributors

Peter York (p11) wrote The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook with Ann Barr. He also wrote Dictators’ Homes and co-founded the management consultancy group, SRU.

Griff Rhys Jones (p30) starred with Mel Smith in Alas Smith and Jones and Not the Nine O’Clock News. With Mel Smith, he founded Talkback, the TV production company.

A N Wilson (p43 and p65) is author of Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises He’s just written a minuscule book for Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House at Windsor Castle.

Hugo Vickers (p59) has written biographies of Queen Mary, the Duchess of Windsor and the Queen Mother. His biography of Clarissa Avon, Anthony Eden’s wife, comes out in November.

rock-and-roll generation’s attitude in an instant.

The line epitomised the man.

Sir Keir Starmer may be playing his cards close to his chest on his vague plans to scrap the House of Lords.

The suggestion has been around for quite some time, without the matter’s ever coming to a head. The Old Un, who avoids taking party positions, was nonetheless struck by a sentence in W Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale

During a passage about the aristocracy’s facility for writing fiction, the novelist-narrator Ashenden muses, ‘I have indeed sometimes thought that now that the House of Lords must inevitably in a short while be abolished.’

Maugham wrote Cakes and Ale a mere 94 years ago.

Surgical tourism is a growing trend. British women now travel to Turkey for boob jobs – sometimes with tragic results – and, more successfully, to Bulgaria for dental treatment.

Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire

Important stories you may have missed

Councillor accused of sewing hat at meeting Courier and Advertiser

Businessman threw sausage rolls at wife in cocaine row Times

Public toilets closed in cost-cutting trial reopen Argus

£15 for published contributions

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Every Friday, we will send you the very latest stories and features – the more timely stuff which doesn’t make it into the magazine. And a joke from the late great Barry Cryer. Plus you get advance notice of our literary lunches, reader trips and courses.

But the traffic is not all in one direction. The Old Un has an acquaintance who lives in the West Indies, who was told he needed open-heart surgery. Local surgeons were not confident they could manage the procedure, and getting it done in the United States was going to cost $300,000. He ended up travelling to the UK to have it done at a private hospital in London, where the cost was £60,000.

A snip, as they say in operating theatres.

In 1932, the great artist Eric Ravilious (1903-42) illustrated a new edition of Twelfth Night for the Golden Cockerel Press.

Only 325 copies of the limited edition were made.

Ravilious was unsure even they would be sold, saying, ‘I do not think there is more than a dog’s chance of selling more than 250 copies at three guineas and we’ll be lucky if we do this.’

Shakespeare by Ravilious

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Left: Raphael’s The Marriage of the Virgin (1504).

Right: Bramante’s Tempietto (c 1502), Raphael’s inspiration

Well, now the Bodleian Library is bringing out a new, charming edition (frontispiece below left) for only £25 – a lot less than three guineas in 1932.

Still today, the classical style is everywhere, from the façade of Selfridges to the letterhead of the Times

Now Edward McParland, the Irish architectural historian and Oldie contributor, has brought all these strands together in a new book, The Language of Architectural Classicism.

The book includes this lovely Raphael painting of The Marriage of the Virgin (1504) from the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan (above).

Renaissance painters were cheerfully anachronistic about borrowing Renaissance buildings for Biblical pictures. When Mary married Joseph,

‘I’m sick of all your bullshit, Colin’

there was nothing in the ancient world like the temple in the background.

Instead, Raphael happily adapted his own version of Bramante’s lovely Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio, Rome, begun in 1502, two years before Raphael painted his picture.

Bramante’s little temple was one of the most influential in history. The idea of a colonnade wrapped round a high-domed room went on to inspire Michelangelo’s dome at St Peter’s and Christopher Wren’s dome at St Paul’s.

Edward McParland is the heir to these great figures – the modern Renaissance man.

‘Wow! Haven’t even got through the appetiser and already you’re checking your sundial’

Serving on a club committee was once regarded as something between a penance and duty, and members with any common sense would avoid being dragooned into it.

Contrast that with events at Lord’s Cricket Ground, NW8, where the Marylebone Cricket

Club employs a swanky online democracy company to run committee elections.

A vacancy on its nominations committee (a management-consultant innovation which facilitates executive power) attracted seven applicants. Mere names and a quick biographical note were deemed insufficient.

The poor souls had to film politician-style campaign videos – uniformly excruciating, with much darting of eyes and reliance on cliché.

The candidates resorted to boasting about their ‘core skills’ and ‘personal qualities’.

One chap bragged of his ‘honesty and integrity’. Another skilfully suggested she was one of the ‘brightest and the best’. A third begged members to ‘lend me your vote’. And yet another old buffer, with MCC tie and walrus-style front teeth, banged on worthily about gay rights and diversity.

Not a single candidate had the gumption to say, ‘Crumbs, what a ridiculous palaver all this is.’ Had they done so, they might have romped home.

The planners of this summer’s Olympics in Paris could do worse than emulate Lord Desborough (1855-1945), the President of the first Olympic Games to be held in London, in 1908.

Desborough is the subject of a new biography, Titan of the Thames, by Sandy Nairne and Peter Williams. He led an extraordinarily sporty life: climbing the Matterhorn, swimming in the treacherous

basin below the Niagara Falls, fencing for Britain and winning the Amateur Punting Championship. He won an Olympic épée silver, aged 50, at the 1906 Athens Games.

He stroked an eight from Dover to Calais. The crew used jam jars to bail out water. When Desborough was the Telegraph’s war correspondent in the Sudan, he outran some angry warriors in his tennis shoes, armed only with his trusty umbrella.

Desborough had to set up the London Games at the last minute. They were going to be in Rome, but a Vesuvius eruption in 1906 led to their cancellation. Desborough pulled off the London Games with only two years’ planning, and with no funding, stadium or government money when he started the project.

It was under Desborough that many of today’s Olympic rules were instituted: the length of the marathon, the opening ceremony, preliminary heats, national teams and amateur status.

But then came the First World War. Desborough’s eldest son, Julian Grenfell, the war poet best known for Into Battle, was killed by a shell in 1915, near Boulogne. His brother Billy was killed two months later near Ypres.

life: Lord

Desborough’s last son, Ivo, died in a 1926 car crash.

At Taplow Court, their Buckinghamshire pile, Desborough’s wife, Ettie Desborough, had once entertained the Souls – the witty intellectual group that included Prime Minister Arthur Balfour and Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India.

But the life went out of Taplow when Desborough’s sons were killed. Nina Grenfell, his cousin, remembered Ettie Desborough chatting away with guests at the Taplow dining room in the early 1930s –while poor, bereft Desborough sat alone in the hall, casting a fly across its spreading floor.

‘We’re cutting out the middleman’

Sporting

Desborough, Vanity Fair, 1890

‘Can I be completely honest tomorrow?’

'The wife would kill me if she knew I'd started smoking again'

A right royal party for Shakespeare

The Queen and a dozen dames came to my Valentine’s Day party. But did Leslie Caron make it?

Where was Leslie Caron? Was she there?

On 14th February, I hosted a Valentine’s Day party at the Grosvenor House Hotel on London’s Park Lane.

Walt Disney stayed at Grosvenor House on his honeymoon. As girls, the future Elizabeth II and her sister, Princess Margaret Rose, learned to skate on the hotel’s ice rink. The rink is still there, under the floorboards in the Great Room, the largest function room in Europe.

More recently, Mrs Biden stayed at Grosvenor House when she came to Charles III’s coronation. The White House booked out 200 rooms at the hotel to ensure the First Lady’s security.

My party was to celebrate William Shakespeare and the King and the Queen. William Shakespeare couldn’t make it, but David Mitchell, star of Upstart Crow, was there. The King couldn’t make it, either, but we had a host of actors who had played every king in the canon, from Lear to Richard III.

We had 17 Hamlets, from Sir Tom Courtenay (who played the part in 1969) to Freddie Fox (2022). We had a dozen dames, from Twiggy (the youngest, at 74), to the indomitable Patricia Routledge (on cracking form at 95).

I invited all my favourites actresses, including the two I have worshipped since I was a boy: Hayley Mills (whom I first fell for when I saw her in Tiger Bay when I was 11 and she was 12) and Leslie Caron, the beautiful star of the favourite film of my childhood, Gigi

Our guest of honour was Queen Camilla, and we gave her a Get Well Soon card we had all signed for her to take home to the King. The Queen wanted to say hello to Leslie Caron, too, but we could not see her. Leslie is not very tall, of course, so she may have got lost in the crowd. That said, Judi Dench and Bonnie Langford are quite small and we saw them. And Richard Osman is 6’ 7” and we missed him, though I know he was there, because my grandson, Rory (who was

helping collect the signatures for the Get Well Soon card), was excited to see him.

Was Leslie Caron there? I don’t know – and I don’t feel I can phone her to ask, ‘Were you there?’, in case she was.

There was a serious purpose to the party.

We were there to salute Shakespeare and his contribution to our language, culture and standing in the world. We also wanted to thank the King and Queen for their deep-rooted commitment to and support for literature and the arts.

If you believed everything you read in the media, you’d be forgiven for thinking the country is going to the dogs. Yet when it comes to books and theatre, film and television, podcasting and poetry, what we create in the UK is world class.

That said, the most exciting show in the West End this spring was made in Australia.

The Sydney Theatre Company has brought their high-octane, high-tech adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket.

It stars Succession star Sarah Snook playing all 26 characters in the story. She’s wonderful, and the show is a must-see because of the wizardry of Kip Williams’s joyously inventive production.

The audience was full of young people, but it was we oldies in the stalls who felt the full horror of Dorian Gray. One line

Camilla and her Dames: (back L-R) Joanna Lumley, Floella Benjamin, Twiggy, Harriet Walter, Penelope Wilton, Maureen Lipman; (front L-R) Virginia McKenna, Siân Phillips, the Queen, Vanessa Redgrave, Penelope Keith, Patricia Routledge

haunts me: ‘The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.’

I come from a family of funeral directors.

My father’s grandfather’s first cousin married Etta Kenyon, granddaughter of the founder of the famous firm of undertakers who supervised Queen Victoria’s obsequies. Kenyon’s are still in business, but when it comes to my own arrangements I am ‘shopping local’. I’ve instructed my wife to book T H Sanders when the time comes.

They looked after my mother when she went, and did a good job at a fair price. They are keen – possibly a bit too keen at times. On 14th February, elderly residents at a care home near me were excited to receive individual Valentine’s cards. The cards, each of which had a pink bow and a heart on the front, opened up to read ‘Sent with love from T H Sanders & Sons’.

I’ve just checked my junk mail. There is an email from Leslie Caron regretting she couldn’t make it and another from Matthew Parris telling me he couldn’t either. He added, ‘I’ve had great fun on Times Radio, saying how I was served champagne throughout a wedding reception by a guest who thought I was Gyles Brandreth.

‘

“Oh, that voice! I can recognise it, even in a crowded room! You have been with me, Gyles, on my car radio all the way from Wales.”

‘I didn’t disabuse him.’

Just my cup of tea!

The Teasmade has been much mocked over the years, but Peter York absolutely adores his

There it was, in a cardboard box behind the brown furniture in my West London lock-up, absolutely packed with meaning and promise. The Goblin Teasmade of 1979.

Insanely British – what other nation could devote a whole household shrine to morning tea-making, or could build in so much technical ingenuity to prolong the magic moment?

I should explain, in the interest of clarity for the tiny minority of Oldie-readers who don’t know the Teasmade’s role in our national life and its astonishing list of competencies.

Basically, the Teasmade, launched on the waiting world in 1936, is a bedside device that makes you a pot of tea whenever you set it to. It’s also an alarm clock, bedside light and, in some cases, a radio.

In its most familiar form – the 870 model – it’s vaguely Art Deco, filtered by the 1970s and rendered in a cream plastic housing with nice big easy rocker switches for each function. In no sense is it born of the age we live in. It’s retro –even slightly risible for the modern person, who might just buy one as a joke.

It’s chock-full of meaning for any mature Brits, because it offers a unique combination of modest luxury and Empire resonances. It allowed people to start the day with the tea ceremony, to solve the 1930s servant problem and stay in bed for several lovely minutes more. When it woke the user up –tremendously loud buzzer – it put on the light and, in some models, the wireless, set to the Home Service and, later, Radio 4. It could persuade anyone, against all the evidence, that things were all right in the world.

Nothing that contains a kettle and a teapot can be miniaturised. Nor could it be rendered in matt black and stainless steel without looking silly. It’s fine as it is.

The great social shift that marginalised the Teasmade isn’t about curious design or its association with everyone’s grandparents but rather that, according to the Times, coffee has beaten tea as Britain’s best beverage. The magic coffee rituals don’t include the Teasmade. There’s no reason you couldn’t slip Taylors of Harrogate’s clever coffee bags into the Goblin teapot, but it doesn’t really look the part for the baby barista group.

From vintage dealers to film-set dressers, old small appliances and iconic objects live a half-life, stripped of meaning by changes in the market or the technology.

Just think of the hard-travelledEuropean-correspondent or novelist message in the Olivetti portable typewriter. Lightweight and tough, it conjured up the world of Orwell in the Spanish Civil War or Graham Greene, adrift in ’30s Britain. A piece of kit that announced your job. A piece of kit that showed you were serious and travelled, smoked Gitanes and drank coffee small and strong. And it was Italian design, cousin somehow to the marvellous Gio Ponti or the marvellous Carlo Mollino – all sur le continent

The charmless, modern, global anonymity of the early laptops – a bit heavy at first – started the rot, and the 21st-century smartphone-and-tablet combination finished off that classic style. You’d expect to see it in those Euro

films of the ’50s and ’60s, but not on the table in the Eurostar.

Journalists and writers more generally had a fair few ‘positional goods’ to show what kinds of people they were. The Rolodex on your desk at home, stuffed to near immobility with the co-ordinates of important people, displayed how very connected you were. The Rolodex said its owner knew everyone and was about to get out there, anywhere from Munich to Moscow, at a moment’s notice. And, of course, it was fun to play with.

But now you’ve got the world – as many thousands as you like – literally at a fingertip drag away, and the phone set up to call.

When the New People joined the new Groucho Club in Dean Street, Soho, in 1985, absolutely everyone had a Filofax, the premier positional tool of the emerging ‘creative industry’ types. These were people who were somewhere between traditional media/bookpublishing roles and new industries, such as promo video producers or stand-ups on the new comedy circuit.

The Filofax said not only that you were travelled and out there but also that you networked like mad – like those yuppies everybody had been reading about.

In the exciting love-you-till-Tuesday world of people who were building personal brands and setting up production companies, the Filofax was where it was all noted and quoted. The cover materials, and the deployment of the sections, were the subject of constant fetishistic comparisons.

It was a Rolodex in your pocket and so much more (rather more easily carried in those nice unisex canvas-and-leather fishing bags everyone sported then).

A whole world of engaging kit has vanished into the Cloud. How much of it remains in cardboard boxes and as potential material for a next generation of biographers?

In the meantime I’ve installed my aunt’s Teasmade on a bedside table. It’ll see me out.

The Goblin Teasmade in the 60s (left) and 70s (above)

Peter York co-wrote The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982)

who was Simon Dee?

Sixty years ago, on 28th March 1964, the first broadcast was made from Radio Caroline on Britain’s first pirate radio ship.

Simon Dee (1935-2009), aka Cyril Nicholas Henty-Dodd, made the initial announcement: ‘Hello, everybody. This is Radio Caroline, broadcasting on 199; your all-day music station.’

The Observer stated that Caroline planned ‘to broadcast modern light music records every day from 6am to 6pm’. Dee left his £45-per-week (plus commission) estate-agency job for £15 per week as a DJ.

Caroline broadcast from a former Danish passenger ferry anchored off the coast of Felixstowe, outside UK territorial waters. Its founder, Ronan O’Rahilly, responded to the demand for an all-day music channel, which the BBC’s Chairman reputedly compared to ‘having the pubs open all day’. The ‘needle time’ agreement had also restricted the number of records played by the Corporation.

Caroline’s DJs played the actual disc, instead of an interpretation by Bob Miller and the Millermen or any other BBC Light Programme band. While some Corporation presenters had the demeanour of youth-club leaders forced

to play pop music, Dee had a friendly manner and was only 28. Within three weeks, Caroline had 6,840,000 listeners.

The BBC responded with ‘The Caroline Phenomenon’, a report with what sounds like a B-film title. One MP warned, ‘There is nothing to prevent their pouring out Communist or Fascist propaganda.’

Within four years, Dee had 18 million viewers a week as the host of BBC1’s Dee Time chat show. He issued the ‘Dee Code’ of moral guidance to his younger fans – and could be seen, off-duty, speeding along King’s Road in his Aston Martin DB5 convertible.

Dee appeared to be a middle-aged Establishment idea of a clean-cut young person. A 1966 Smith’s Crisps commercial featured a respectably short-haired DJ urging viewers to send 1/6d for their Crunch disc in the crisp tones of a head prefect.

This advertisement led to his presenting Dee Time the following year. In 1969, London Weekend Television offered Dee considerable financial inducements to move to ITV.

what is microflirting?

Microflirting is when you flirt with someone in an extremely subtle way, with plausible deniability.

It’s a flick of the hair. A narrowing of the eyes. A focusing of interest. In a digital context, it might involve liking the occasional post or lingering too long over a reply.

It is not flirting, exactly, but it is a necessary prelude to flirting, a way of testing the water, so that when you accelerate to, for example, licking your lips and saying, ‘How about it, big boy?’, you can be reasonably sure you haven’t got the wrong end of the stick.

Semantically speaking, microflirting is part of the same family as microaggression, which is a way of describing those small

acts of unpleasantness, intentional or not, that can really ruin a person’s day.

Just as the microaggressor is sometimes entirely unaware that they’re causing hurt, so the microflirter will often remain blithely ignorant of the signals they’re sending. A microflirtation might leave the microflirtee feeling confused, manipulated or even gas-lit.

Sometimes the microflirter is not even consciously aware they’re microflirting – at least until their partner brings them up on it in the taxi home. ‘You were totally microflirting with Charlotte just now!’ ‘No, I wasn’t! I just … complimented her on her dress.’ ‘And when was the last time you complimented me on my dress?’

Microflirting has its detractors. Back in January, @MNateShyamalan complained on X: ‘Already sick of whatever microflirting is. It’s time for

Within a year, his narrative became ‘the Simon Dee story’. Milton Shulman derided Dee’s ‘hitherto unplumbed quality of inanity’ and London Weekend poorly scheduled his short-lived show. Furthermore, as management at Caroline and the BBC could attest, the DJ was known to be ‘difficult’.

Dee claimed, ‘It was perfectly obvious that the CIA, who controlled our media and still do, would be on my case.’

After 1970, his fate, as sympathetically described by Richard Wiseman in Whatever Happened to Simon Dee? (2005), was to be for ever referred to in the past tense.

The following years until his death in 2009 saw a dispiriting saga of unemployment, a prison sentence for non-payment of rates and various short-lived comebacks. Mental turmoil was little understood in the 1960s and 70s.

The surviving footage of Dee Time – only two complete editions exist – now appears utterly quaint, with the Jaguar E-Type in the closing credits and self-conscious ‘Swinging London’ trappings, like a real Austin Powers.

Dee seems to belong in a black-andwhite, pre-decimal money era. But six decades ago, he represented freedom to young listeners with a transistor radio.

Andrew Roberts

macroflirting. When will somebody write my name on the moon?’

There is a lot to be said for macroflirting – that is, signalling your intent by saying ‘Hubba hubba’ as your eyes turn to hearts, train whistles blast from your ears and your tongue hits the floor. Sometimes a person just wants to feel wanted, you know?

But, then again, microflirting is fun. Two people might enjoy a bit of eye-toeye foreplay without necessarily wanting to go all the way. Microflirtations, when employed responsibly by consenting adults, can be a rich and fertile source of pleasure.

There is a much lovelier word for this than microflirting. It’s sphallolalia, which means ‘flirtatious talk that leads nowhere’. It captures, in its sonorous lilt, both the melancholy of romantic paths not taken and the pleasures of the chase.

Richard Godwin

Difficult Dee, 1966

Time is on his side

Bill Wyman, 87, is a happily married country squire, writing books and playing on the Rolling Stones’ new album. By Christopher Sandford

While the unstoppable Rolling Stones launch their latest US-stadium tour in April, the band’s founding bass-player and archivist Bill Wyman, 87, will be enjoying the more sedate charms of his 15th-century manor house near Bury St Edmunds.

In 1993, Wyman had the good grace to leave the Stones voluntarily – one of only two men to do so in the group’s history.

He had forged a 30-year partnership with Charlie Watts as the most unobtrusive but reliably solid rhythm section in rock-music history.

With his Buster Keaton stoneface, Bill fell into the comically deadpan school of rockers. By his own admission, he was also the Stone who did the fewest drugs and had the most sex. Wyman’s love life attracted some harrumphing tabloid coverage later in the 1980s when, aged 52, he married 18-year-old Mandy Smith, whom he had ‘fallen in love with’ when she was 13.

Compounding the story, Wyman’s son Stephen, who was 30, in turn announced his own engagement to 47-year-old Patsy Smith, who was none other than Mandy’s mother. Had both romantic partnerships flourished, Bill would have become his son’s son-in-law, while Mandy would have become both Stephen’s stepmother and his stepdaughter. And Patsy would have become Mandy’s daughter-in-law as well as her mother – clearly a ticklish situation for all parties.

In the event, Bill and Mandy separated two years later, and in 1993 he married the American-born model Suzanne Accosta, with whom he has three daughters.

‘I loved what I achieved with the Stones,’ Wyman has remarked of his decision to walk away from the world’s most lucrative musical corporation. ‘But I needed to sort out my personal life – and my future.’

He has stayed in touch with the Stones, though. On their album Hackney Diamonds, released last year, he played bass on one track, Live by the Sword.

Proving that he was the least wellknown but also the most eclectic member of the group, Wyman has written a series of well-received memoirs. He has also published books on everything from his friend Marc Chagall to the history of

Chelsea. He has marketed a line of metal-detectors, formed his own rhythm-and-blues band, opened a London restaurant and hosted an exhibition of his photography.

And he has continued to collect, obsessively, memorabilia on the Stones and just about everyone else he’s ever met. Keith Richards once told me that he thought Bill was a great bass-player, but that he was really born to be a librarian.

Wyman’s latest venture is a slim but well-produced memoir, Billy in the Wars, a winningly unsentimental account of his growing up in south London under the

shadow of the Luftwaffe. Although there are gripping moments recalling the Blitz, what comes through most is a sense of English stoicism in the face of sacrifice and adversity.

It’s extraordinary to think that the child who largely existed on a diet of whale meat and tinned spam would go on to enjoy a 30-year tenure in the famously debauched rock group.

Bill does think, though, that rationing was responsible for his short height – five foot six, the same as his fellow Rolling Stone Brian Jones. He thinks it accounts for the short height, too, of other rock

stars, Ringo Starr, Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriott – all under five foot six.

He says, ‘Although the war ended in 1945, we were all on rationing until eight years later. That is why we are all small.’

The book’s publication gave me the opportunity to ask Wyman what lessons he’d drawn from growing up in the way he did.

‘Being without electricity and living with food-rationing until I was 17 says it all,’ Bill told me. ‘But we managed, even though the toilet was in the garden and there were no facilities like a bathroom, heating, or hot running water. It made you really appreciate everything in later life.

‘I think the whole war experience gave me the capacity to enjoy the simple things in life, like nature, history and friends and family,’ he adds. ‘It also created a work ethic in me that borders on the excessive, which probably came from growing up

where death was all around. I have a deep respect for the time I have on this planet, and it’s important for me to be as productive as I can.’

Wyman – then going under the name William Perks – spent most of the war years with his grandmother, whom he adored. He says his father, a bricklayer, took him out of school at 15, ‘and I think he did it out of spite’. Presumably, Mr Perks Snr wasn’t thrilled when Bill eventually announced that he was quitting his day job to join the Rolling Stones in 1962.

‘It would be fair to say that neither my mother nor my father was too pleased about it, no,’ Bill confirms.

Wyman has always insisted that he left the Stones on good terms. Twenty years later, however, that relationship was tested when he joined the band onstage for part of their 50th-anniversary shows at London’s O2 Arena.

Born in 1936, Wyman was one of the postwar generation who did compulsory national service. His three years in the RAF not only taught him the merits of punctuality and neatness (neither of them qualities immediately associated with his colleagues in the Stones), but also exposed him to the alluring sounds of early rock and roll.

‘When I was a child, I went to see my first big dance band performing live,’ Wyman tells me. ‘I was mesmerised, and it was there that the seed was planted that I’d like to be in a band when I grew up.

‘A few years later, when I was stationed in Germany, I heard the beginnings of rock ’n’ roll on American Services Radio, as the British and American zones were close. I was so inspired that I bought a leather pilot jacket, drew a picture of Elvis Presley on the back, and walked around the camp with my new guitar that I’d bought in the local town. Everyone on the base started to call me Elvis!’

You could have got long odds at the time Wyman joined the Stones in late 1962 that the band would still be in business more than 60 years later.

‘Music just wasn’t a career option,’ he tells me. ‘We always thought it would last only a couple of years.

Left: Bill Wyman today

At the beginning, I still had a day job and I would play in the clubs at night. I was always knackered, but I did it because I loved it.’

‘The nice thing was that my kids saw me on stage with the Stones,’ he says. ‘The band asked me to rehearse with them for three

days. I was under the impression I was going to get really involved, but when it came to it, they wanted me to do only two songs, which was very disappointing.’

Wyman declined to join his old colleagues for their subsequent shows in New York, in part because the former RAF man had developed a fear of flying, but in larger part because, as he puts it, ‘I have better things to do.’

The latest of those things is Billy in the Wars, which I heartily recommend. One of the attractions – as well as one of the flaws – of Wyman the author is that he leaves little unresearched or unexplained. As a fount of detail about Luftwaffe-planespotting, rationing allocations and south-London street topography, the book matches many encyclopedias.

But its real charm comes when Bill abandons the lists and lets the spotlight fall on the physically unprepossessing child from the materially and perhaps emotionally starved background.

That child later enjoyed fame and fortune as a member of the most flamboyant combo in rock history.

He then went on to a third act as a happily married country squire, with an impressive variety of interests and the ability to look back with a certain amount of pride, and with gentle humour, on the whole journey.

Now that’s a story.

Bill Wyman’s Billy in the Wars (Pegasus, £16.99) is out now

Christopher Sandford is author of 1964: The Year the Swinging Sixties Began

Below: the Stones in 1964 – Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts and Brian Jones

Young Wyman in Billy in the Wars

When Brighton rocked

Adam Trimingham recalls a golden age, when Laurence Olivier, Max Miller and Terence Rattigan flocked to the seaside town

London has always been the capital of culture in Britain. But during the fifties and sixties, there was a concerted move by actors to move to the Sussex coast.

It was started and largely led by Laurence Olivier. Olivier decamped to Brighton after marrying his third wife, Joan Plowright, in 1961. The tabloids were waiting for him and he made headline news.

Olivier had hoped, far away from Fleet Street, to escape from unwelcome press attention – and that there would be little professional bitchiness from less talented rivals. But he was doomed to disappointment.

He had known Brighton well from an early age. His first theatrical appearance was at the Brighton Hippodrome in August 1925 in The Unfailing Instinct – he fell flat on his face while walking on to the stage.

Brighton had magnificent seafront architecture and good restaurants. It was also nicely placed for Olivier’s latest job as Director of the Festival Theatre in Chichester.

much loved by all who knew her in Brighton. A big name in the theatrical world, she never declined a charity call or refused to open a fête.

End-of-the-pier show: Max Miller and Laurence Olivier

Brighton was fortunate to have the Theatre Royal, used to try out new plays before they went to the West End. Not only did Brighton see many of the best modern dramas, but also London actors were enabled to meet South Coast colleagues.

The best way to get into town was on Brighton Belle, a handsome electric train which started running in 1933. The departure time of 11am for the main morning service might have been made for actors. The waiters wore smart uniforms and the extra cost of using this luxury line was well worth paying as it discouraged hoi polloi.

Gradually the Brighton theatre community declined in size and joviality. For every newcomer, such as the versatile Alan Melville, there seemed to be at least one death or departure.

Only Dora Bryan bucked the trend. She bought a seafront hotel and ran it with her husband, cricketer Bill Lawton. The indefatigable Dora remained active well into old age.

But the people of Brighton were not impressed. They were angered at Olivier’s purchase of two neighbouring houses sporting mathematical tiles in salubrious Royal Crescent, with commanding unbroken views of the sea and Kemp Town.

Even more galling was his successful application for grants to improve the buildings, which had suffered regular damage during storms. He was entitled to the grants but they reinforced his impression as a wealthy outsider coming down from London and sucking the place dry. He also refused to attend all but a handful of local events.

In the early 1970s, it was my misfortune to interview him about this toxic feud for the respectable Brighton and Hove Herald. The great actor was in a foul mood when I mentioned the grants. He was unpleasant, even rude, and didn’t answer questions.

By contrast, Dame Flora Robson was

Suddenly there were actors everywhere. Sir John Clements even moved next door to Olivier, while Dame Anna Neagle was a couple of blocks away. Not everyone was enamoured with her husband, film director Herbert Wilcox, who exerted a baleful influence over her although she did not complain.

Why did so many showbiz types settle in Brighton? Partly because the town already had a lot of people from that profession.

Comedian Max Miller was born in Brighton and died there. His contracts for London shows said he had to be back in Brighton on the last train to get home to his formidable wife – even though he cheated on her.

Another reason was homosexuality, illegal until 1967. Brighton was a tolerant town and many gay people appreciated that. Among them was the radio and TV personality Gilbert Harding, a Brighton resident. Playwright Terence Rattigan, also gay, was a great Brighton enthusiast.

This was in sharp contrast to Olivier, who suffered from ill health in later years. It was hard to say whether he or the Brighton Belle was in the worse condition. He was also still angered by the hostile attitude of many people towards him.

The last straw was the decision to take kippers off the breakfast menu on the Belle. It was only a minor matter, but it caught the public imagination. For once, Olivier was on the same side as the protesters. After a vigorous campaign the kippers were restored, but the railway authorities still had the last laugh. They abolished the train.

Olivier abandoned Brighton and moved to the rural seclusion of Steyning, West Sussex – no nosy neighbours there.

Brighton still has plenty of big names, ranging from Fatboy Slim to Steve Coogan. But they do not have the glamour or grandeur of the golden years.

Adam Trimingham wrote for the Argus newspaper in Brighton for over 50 years

Narcissistic, moi?

Watch out, there’s a show-off about! Lulu Taylor guides you through the different breeds of self-obsessed monsters

Narcissism is, apparently, the next big thing.

The word is being bandied about frequently at the moment to describe a certain personality. Boris Johnson is an obvious example. Perceived as an arrogant, pushy womaniser, he often attracts the tag. But is he a narcissist?

He might be – he certainly appears to have the characteristic inner well of neediness. But a true narcissist is much more than someone who simply seems full of him- or herself.

Everyone has a streak of narcissism. We need self-interest and self-confidence to survive, and all of us can behave selfishly and unkindly. Most of us, though, have our narcissistic traits tempered by our empathetic ones. We know we’ve behaved badly, experience regret and remorse, consider how others feel, and apologise (sincerely). And we can act against our own interests for the good of others we care or feel for. That makes us normal.

As a novelist, I’m intrigued by character, and my investigation into narcissism has changed everything I thought I knew about people. Narcissism, with other personality disorders such as sociopathy and psychopathy, explains a whole raft of previously bewildering behaviours. It makes sense of callous people, who use others, who show no regret for the suffering they cause, and who consider their own needs and feelings above all else.

Narcissism is essentially a self-defence mechanism that forms very early in life. The key narcissistic trait is a lack of emotional empathy, although some narcissists can fake it pretty well by demonstrating cognitive empathy, ie acting (they don’t know this, by the way).

They are extremely touchy and sensitive to criticism, even if they hide this brilliantly. They feel entitled – to love, attention, money, sex, food … everything. They are deeply self-centred and their needs are paramount. If they act in a selfless or kind way, they are still doing it to benefit themselves, for what they will get in return.

They are manipulative and critical, some out loud and some

silently – but even in silence they are always judging and you are always found wanting. They blame others for everything and take responsibility for nothing – again, they might hide this very well. They are chronic liars and easily rewrite history to suit themselves. They are expert at deflection and blameshifting. They are prone to withdrawal if they don’t like what’s happening, whether by silent treatment, stomping sulkily away or leaving for good.

What makes narcissism particularly pernicious is that – usually – the sufferer has no idea that he or she has this disorder. A narcissist cannot change, and there is no cure.

This is not a comprehensive guide (and there are fascinating books, podcasts and YouTube videos available if you want to know more). But if any of these types sounds familiar, then you might be involved with a narcissist – whether it’s a friend, co-worker, family member or, worst of all, your intimate partner.

The Show-Off Narcissist is the easiest to spot. Loud and attentiongrabbing, this narc is also childish, preening and deeply sensitive. Able to hand out insults and criticism, this narc wilts briefly when wounded, but bounces back to punish you with belittlement and loud insults and accusations.

need for money/sex/ the finer things in life. Their luxurious lifestyle and circle of friends hides the empty exploiter inside.

The Angel Narcissist maintains a façade of being practically perfect and saintly. Often devoted to charity work, they keep their claws in until they’re alone with their partner or family. They have no true empathy; they help people only so far as to get them what they want and to enhance their caring reputation.

They are shameless in moving on from their mistakes, criticising and blaming others for everything, but hold grudges for ever. Think Meghan Markle.

The Thug Narcissist is the kind who simply punches you in the face when they don’t like what you say or do. Utterly entitled and with no conception of others as people having thoughts and feelings, they can be physically callous and cruel without a shred of regret.

The Covert Narcissist is the most dangerous kind. Often clever, educated, attractive and charming, they adopt an affable exterior that hides the cold, unfeeling and spiteful child inside.

The Charismatic good-looking, successful

This narcissist often plays victim. Nothing is their fault – in fact, they are suffering much worse than anyone. They use silent criticism, lies and transactions to manipulate and invalidate, particularly their partner. Life with the covert might seem happy at first, but eventually the misery of being their emotional slave is too much.

If any of this rings a bell, beware. Watch out for explaining away narcissistic behaviour because you are naturally kind and forgiving. Trust your instinct, and value actions over words. If you do finally see that something is very wrong, do not waste your time trying to cure the narcissist. Attempting communication is futile. The only way is to have as little to do with them as possible – ideally cut them

As narcissism expert G Tudor says, ‘Once you

The Forgotten Tower (Macmillan) is out now

Biba fever

A new show salutes the clothes shop that, 60 years ago, took London by storm. By Philippa Stockley

Teenagers who came up to London in the early ’seventies headed straight for Big Biba – in the former Derry & Toms Art Deco department store in Kensington.

It was an inviting Aladdin’s cave. Bentwood hatstands groaned with slinky maxi- and mini-dresses, many slitheringly bias-cut, in black, plum; rust, aubergine; bottle green. Feather boas, once preferred by prostitutes, fluttered on top. Biba’s swirling black-and-gold Mucha-esque logo (inspired by a nearby undertaker’s) increased the raffish allure.

The seventies Biba Dolly combined moon-faced innocence with bravura and an appealing hint of sleaze. Sizes were aimed at the young and skinny, who’d never seen anything like it – and wanted it. Their mothers would be appalled: what bliss. And what affordable prices. Twiggy said girls could afford something new each week.

Other departments were panelled or mirrored; all sensuous. There were cosmetics: panda shades and metallics for eyes; brown or purple lipstick. Biba

sold the first full makeup range for black skin. Cosmetics became its most successful line. Long, zippered suede boots … knickers and bras cascading from china bowls. It was all very Great Gatsby

Girls roamed Big Biba all day, not always buying. They tried on make-up without being told off. They twirled in communal changing rooms – introduced by Biba in 1964 in its first, cramped Kensington shop, where even Brigitte Bardot pranced about in knickers.

Pilfering thrived in the sultry gloom. Those who walked in emerged changed. Most still remember that experience.

Through much of the fifties, Christian Dior’s New Look had looked stunning on shapely women. By 1960, teen girls still dressed like their mothers, stuck in a prawn-cocktail-hour time warp of corsets, huge skirts, matching hats, coats, gloves and handbags; tidy hair and morals. They tottered about in winkle-

Above: Twiggy in leopard-print Biba, 1971, and Biba crêpe, 1972. Below: floral-print dress with matching tote bag by Biba, 1966

picker slingbacks in the complicated and uncomfortable look.

During the sixties, tired British fashion remade itself and influenced the world. The women’s-rights movement was growing. American fashion editor Diana Vreeland called the youth movement a Youthquake. In Britain, many called it Biba. The postwar generation were now wispy teenagers, earning, and young women wanted young, easy clothes.

In autumn 1964, following recession and rising unemployment, Harold Wilson broke a 13-year Conservative run. His reforms would include decriminalising homosexuality and abortion. Social change was afoot, including how women dressed.

Barbara Hulanicki, now 87, opened her first Biba shop in September 1964. She’d been born in Warsaw in 1936 and raised in Palestine. In 1948, her Polish father, diplomat Witold Hulanicki, was shot by the Stern Gang. With her English mother and two younger sisters, one nicknamed Biba, clever Hulanicki moved to Hove in Sussex, to be raised by her mother and ’thirties-loving, rich, widowed aunt Sophie, who paid the bills. Sophie’s nostalgic, glamorous style and sludgy ‘Auntie’ colours

fascinated her. Hulanicki trained at Brighton School of Art. She quickly became a successful freelance fashion illustrator and went up to London.

In 1961, she married advertising executive Stephen ‘Fitz’

Fitz-Simon. After illustrating big French fashion shows (and forging relationships with fashion editors), Hulanicki and then Fitz quit their jobs, and set about designing innovative, fresh, often mini clothes aimed at teens.

They transformed British fashion. Yes, Mary Quant (credited by Hulanicki for the first miniskirts) and other designers made simplycut, striking clothes for teens and young women. But uniquely Hulanicki insisted on rock-bottom prices, even eschewing labels to save money. Compared with salary and rent,

clothes were costly then, and Quant’s –for richer, older ‘Chelsea girls’ – cost much more.

In the meteoric decade from 1964 to 1974, Hulanicki hurtled from running a start-up mail-order company – Biba’s Postal Boutique (1963) – to four London shops, each bigger than the last, culminating in Big Biba.

Her breakthrough was in May 1964. Mirror fashion editor Felicity Green ran a feature on young working women, offering a Biba mailorder gingham dress and headscarf for 25 shillings. The sweet, cheap outfit got 17,000 orders, whose unexpected fabric demand almost broke the fledgling brand. A quickly-opened first shop attracted everyone from Julie Christie to Mick Jagger.

Hulanicki designed new items most

Above & below: Twiggy at the Biba shop, 1973. Left: in the Rainbow Room, 1971

days, and they sold fast. Cilla Black and Cathy McGowan, of teen TV show sensation Ready, Steady, Go! wore Biba.

Biba broke many traditions, including the concept of seasonal fashion shows. Instead of these, it constantly presented new ideas in short runs. Dark, dusty colours (black nappies, later on) and historical inspiration and reinvention matched the era’s look and sound, echoed in the vibes of customer Freddie Mercury and Roxy Music.

Biba’s end was as spectacular as its rise. Hulanicki was bought out. By winter 1974, new managers were changing things. Hulanicki quit.

In 1975, forbidden to open a shop within 50 miles of London or to use the Biba name, Hulanicki and Fitz moved to Brazil. Big Biba closed.

The Biba Story: 1964-1975 is at the Fashion and Textile Museum, London, 22nd March to 8th September

FASHION MUSEUM BATH / BRIDGEMAN; JUSTIN DE VILLENEUVE / ICONIC IMAGES

The great exam failure

The dumbing down of British exams began with the first GCSEs in 1987.

Charlotte Metcalf mourns the end of O-levels

Whenever my daughters say, ‘I was sat’ (which is frequently), I ask them who exactly plonked them there.

I am becoming a dreary, Canute-like pedant, fighting a long-lost battle, given there is hardly a broadcaster on Radio 4 who seems to know the difference between ‘sitting’ and ‘sat’.

Plenty of oldies moan about deteriorating grammar standards, but sloppy grammar is a symptom of a far more serious decline in general knowledge, literacy and conversational and written fluency. The first GCSEs were taken in 1987. From then on, teenagers were required to do far less writing.

From 2025, the Edexcel exam board will allow English Language and English Literature GCSEs to be typed in full.

Thus the yawning intellectual divide between the over-50s who did O-levels and the under-50s restricted to GCSEs. With GCSEs, multiple choice became the norm in maths. It crept in fast to English comprehension and other subjects.

Recently, a client for whom I’d done some copywriting asked me why I could write. ‘Because I’m old,’ I answered.

Being able to write was a given in our generation. From a young age, we wrote letters, and all school work and exams were hand-written.

How many fountain pens are bought for children nowadays? I received a glossy Parker as a prize and sourced a bottle of turquoise Quink with great excitement. And I’ve never given up on fountain pens, though I now use disposable ones, because of the speed with which they glide across the page –essential in a written exam, a godsend for a note-taking journalist.

Perhaps it is fanciful to equate children’s no longer putting pen to paper with the relentless erosion of articulacy. But ordering one’s thoughts before committing them to paper helped you learn to construct an argument.

We mostly blame the phone and internet for a decline in academic standards, general knowledge and the ability to concentrate. Yet schools and

universities have done little to adapt the curriculum to a digital age other than just shove everything online and drastically cut down on the face-to-face time pupils have with their teachers and university tutors.

My younger daughter’s university bedroom seems bare, certainly not of mess, but of the basics of academic study – books, notebooks, writing materials. Everything is done digitally, from delivering work to receiving a grade for it.

Since O-levels were scrapped, schools seem to have adopted a patronising attitude towards children, as if striving for academic excellence and being competitive might exclude or ‘trigger’ children from disadvantaged backgrounds. When seeking schools for my daughters, I attended an open day at a well-known, highly rated London state secondary school. We were ushered into a newly built hall where the headmaster stood beneath a huge screen. On it was projected the first page of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities

I cheered up but, minutes later, the headmaster was berating the then Education Secretary, Michael Gove, for widely distributing the novel to schools to encourage reading. Words categorised as difficult – such as ‘epoch’, ‘incredulity’, ‘conceded’ and ‘prophetic’ – were highlighted on the screen, as the headmaster thundered on about how unrealistic it was to expect children to understand such archaic language.

Why shouldn’t we push our children to higher levels of attainment? We don’t see athletics coaches suggesting it might induce anxiety to go the extra mile to compete for an Olympic medal.

Ferocious competition pushes champions to the edge of their endurance, but competitiveness in schools is now frowned on. Streaming, once the norm, is seen to disadvantage those less able or with learning difficulties. Schools avoid it in favour of inclusivity. But since when was life fair?

People weren’t in top streams across all subjects. The point of streaming was to allow those who were showing

From 2025, pupils can type their GCSEs

aptitude to be among a group of equally talented and competitive peers who would challenge any complacency.

Since Tony Blair’s major push for near-universal further education, universities have also dumbed down. A degree, though insisted on by most professions, is no longer proof of ability.

There will always be genius exceptions to the rule, but most parents have noticed a dramatic decline in general knowledge (thanks to a decline in fact-based teaching) and the ability to concentrate and read.

It’s too simple just to blame this on phones or TikTok. Blame our tired curriculum, failing to equip children for today’s workplace.

Employers are seeking imaginative, original, enquiring minds, capable of engagement to help find solutions for the mess our world finds itself in.

I showed my daughter the TED talk the late Sir Ken Robinson gave in 2006 on schools killing creativity. It resonated with her so heartily that she thought it had been recorded this year.

After she had to choose between drama and art at school, I’d watched her artistic tendencies and curiosity dwindling. Yet we need creativity, imagination and a thirst for exploration more than ever, because the workplace and the jobs within it are changing at an exponential rate.

Unless it undergoes a major overhaul, our education system is going to continue churning out generations woefully unprepared for the unprecedented challenges of the contemporary world.

The fast show

Rishi Sunak fasts for only 36 hours.

Neville Hodgkinson, 80, decided to go ten days without food

To celebrate turning 80, I went on my first fast.

No food, tea or coffee. Just water. For the first few days it was hell, but the after-effects have been very positive. It’s said that fasting can help with diabetes and Alzheimer’s.

Rishi Sunak fasts for only 36 hours a week. My fast was meant to last for ten days, but my naturopath (or natural-health practitioner) saw that, after four days, I was in such discomfort and so weak that he weaned me back on to food earlier than planned.

My appetite had already shrunk, so it was a slow process. First, the water of one fresh coconut (absolute ambrosia – it felt as if the nourishment was reaching every cell in my body). Carrot juice with fresh curcumin, and a few nibbles of coconut flesh, on the sixth day; stewed apple, grated carrot and pomelo (like a giant grapefruit) on days seven and eight; and finally fruit salad, date juice and a glorious hot soup on days nine and ten.

I was advised that, in preparation, I should fast for one day a week in the three weeks before we left. I cheated, managing 23 and a half hours –which meant that I missed only dinner and breakfast.

The effects of the fully-fledged water fast took me by surprise. I felt braindead. I could hardly think. My gait became wobbly. I slept deeply at night and during the day. When I wasn’t sleeping, I sat like a zombie.

Lack of food also made me constipated, but our naturopath friend had that in hand – a castor-oil purge, to shift impacted waste. It worked well: three trips to the loo the next day, passing some stuff that looked as if it might have been there for decades.

I declined the offer of a coffee enema, said to facilitate the removal of toxins by dilating a conduit between the liver and the intestine.

Fasting gives them a chance to catch up. The body’s five ‘doors’ for elimination –lungs, skin, colon, kidneys and, in women, the uterus – are given a chance to return to healthier function.

A month has passed since the fast ended, and there are persistent benefits. I rapidly lost a stone. Although I was ravenous in the wake of it and have put some of that weight back on, I am more conscious of the need not to stuff myself. I can bend to tie my shoelaces more easily, without squeezing my liver – the liver becomes enlarged when overburdened.

My bowel movements are markedly easier and more regular. I am breathing more fully, aware of the need to inflate both lungs and abdomen. I certainly don’t have a six-pack, but my ‘man boobs’ – common curse of a poorly exercised 80-year-old body – are less noticeable.

The greatest benefit has been the mental refreshment: a result of temporarily liberating the diencephalon, a central region of the brain involved in many crucial bodily functions. When I came out of that uncomfortable ‘braindead’ experience, it was as though I could see more clearly some of my habitual patterns of thought – and let them go.

You may ask, ‘Why bother?’ One friend – a 60-year-old – commented, ‘I’d rather shave ten years off my life, and continue to eat every four hours.’ Another said, ‘Can it be beer only, rather than water?’

Previously, that echoed my own mindset. There is a lot of mileage in the health adage ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ You may have noticed that not just an apple but a mildly pleasurable life keeps the doctor away, whereas people who constantly worry about their health tend to lose it.

But when a colleague at the retreat centre where I live asked if I would like to join her on a fasting trip at a rural setting north-west of Paris, it seemed an interesting challenge.

‘Never again,’ I wrote to friends in the middle of all this, feeling miserably drained of energy.

But, as my strength returned, our guide explained that there were good reasons for all these symptoms: ‘Your being very tired while doing nothing means the body is working a lot inside. It tries to regulate all that is wrong – both what you may know, and what you don’t know,’ he said.

Addictive eating interferes with the body’s natural cleansing mechanisms.

I certainly don’t have a six-pack, but my ‘man boobs’ are less noticeable

The naturopath’s training has roots in ancient healing practices, developed in India, China and ancient Greece. Naturopathy emphasises the body’s intrinsic ability to heal itself.

It seems crazy that most modern medical systems, including Britain’s National Health Service, do not encourage such practices but instead spend billions marketing pharmaceutical interventions that are often of unproven value.

Despite the discomfort, I will probably embrace another fast – though I am in no hurry to do so. I am enjoying life, and would like to prolong it. I am grateful for an experience that has unquestionably improved both my mental and my physical health.

Neville Hodgkinson is a former journalist who joined the Brahma Kumaris, an Indian spiritual movement

Neville and his fast friends

Sleeping beauty

Rachel Kelly loves her daily siesta. But is it good for her?

Are siestas good for us?

The question has dogged nap-takers like me for many years, even though I always feel better for an afternoon kip – and am in good company.

Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill and Thomas Edison all believed in the power of the snooze. But until now, it’s been difficult to know with certainty the health benefits of a spot of shut-eye. And so I’ve always felt a bit shifty about my siesta habit.

One problem is that napping has historically received scant attention from researchers. A second is that those with chronic health conditions often become sleepier in the day, making it hard to know whether having a siesta made them worse or they were already unwell. Finally, the research is contradictory. Some studies are in favour of napping, concluding it boosts our memory and brainpower; others not.

In particular, long naps of more than an hour may worsen our health, increasing hypertension (though mainly just in women, it seems), as well as leading to inflammation and night-time insomnia for both genders.

However, a new bit of data in favour of naps has emerged. It has gladdened the hearts of siesta enthusiasts like me. The American researcher Dan Buettner has for the last 20 years or so been identifying the salient characteristics of longevity in the five communities around the world with the highest proportion of centenarians – and taking a siesta is among them.

Inhabitants of five so called Blue Zones – the islands of Okinawa (Japan), Ikaria (Greece) and Sardinia (Italy), and the cities of Nicoya (Costa Rica) and Loma Linda (California) – all get sufficient sleep. In two of these Blue Zones – Ikaria and Sardinia – a daytime siesta is common.

Of course, these communities exhibit other characteristics that contribute to longevity, so we can’t credit snoozing alone. The people are physically active,

tend to favour a plant-based diet with a high intake of vegetables, drink alcohol moderately (apart from the teetotal Adventists in Loma Linda), are religiously observant, have close family ties and have a sense of purpose in their lives.

Why, then, might siestas be helpful to our longevity and health? One study, made a decade ago, of 25,000 healthy middle-aged Greeks found that those who took a regular daytime nap were about 30 per cent less likely to suffer fatal coronary heart disease than non-nappers.

Blood pressure is reduced and heart rates slow when we are asleep. At the same time, the immune system shores itself up. Increasingly, researchers are recognising the role the immune system plays in heart disease. A siesta will defuse the physical and psychological effects of work-related stress that may predispose a person to heart disease – which remains the number-one killer in the developed world.

Our bodies have a natural rhythm, which we do well to respect. The human biological clock has two cycles each day, with two dips, one of which for most people occurs shortly after lunch.

Sleep of reason:

Einstein takes 40 winks

‘Siesta’ is a mid-17thcentury Spanish word. It derives from the Latin sexta hora – meaning ‘sixth hour’ – because the Romans counted the hours from sunrise. The practice began in Ancient Rome and used to be common in Spain and the Mediterranean, where the siesta was a much-needed escape from agricultural work in the punishing heat of the summer afternoon.

After a kip, I feel recharged and can attack my work with renewed vigour. Without one, I find myself becoming drowsy around four o’clock and reaching for the biscuit tin in search of a sugar boost. So in my case siestas help with the waistline too.

Now that many of us are working from home, and able to pop upstairs for a quick snooze on our own bed, the siesta has come into its own. I’m a big believer in earplugs to speed my way to the land of nod; I’m keen on Quies Boules earplugs.

Another trick is not to rest for too long. This helps to stop a siesta from contributing to night-time insomnia. It also deals with any possible ‘sleep inertia’ – the grogginess and disorientation that can be felt after one wakes up from a deep sleep. Thirty minutes is about right for me; I use an old-fashioned alarm clock to limit my naps.

But what of those in offices? While taking a nap is obviously more difficult, it should be possible to close one’s eyes for 15 minutes during the lunch break.

Some companies are taking the research to heart. At a New England metal-processing company, Yarde Metals, there are even nap rooms full of easy chairs and sofas. Now we know that siestas can help us live longer, there should be no stigma about being ‘caught napping’.

In fact, it’s now time for my own guilt-free snooze.

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

Rock of Ages

For over 700 years, the Stone of Scone has shuttled between Scotland and England. Now it’s returning home to Perthshire. By William Cook

In Perth City Hall, a neoclassical landmark in one of Scotland’s most attractive cities, curators are preparing for the homecoming of the most iconic lump of rock in Scottish – and British – history.

During the 20th century, Perth City Hall was a venue for everything from political rallies to pop concerts, from Margaret Thatcher to the Bay City Rollers. Since 2005, it’s been empty. Now it’s reopening, after a £27 million refit, as the sleek new premises of Perth Museum.

Perth Museum boasts half a million precious objects, spanning several millennia of world history, from Māori costume to ancient Egyptian statuary – but its principal attraction hails from just up the road. From 30th March, the centrepiece of its revamped display will be the legendary Stone of Scone.

SNP offices. The fragment was given to Alex Salmond, the former SNP leader, in 2008 by Professor Sir Neil MacCormick, son of John MacCormick, SNP founder who funded the 1950 stunt.

The Stone of Scone, aka the Stone of Destiny, doesn’t look like much – a roughlyhewn sandstone block, with iron rings embedded in each end – yet its ceremonial significance is immense. During the Middle Ages, Scotland’s kings were crowned on it, at Scone Abbey, a few miles away.

In 1296, Edward I invaded Perth and took the stone back to England, where it was built into the English Coronation Chair. The symbolism of this seizure was clear. Henceforth, every English monarch at his or her coronation would simultaneously be crowned King or Queen of Scotland. Without the Stone, Scotland could no longer crown a legitimate monarch of its own.

The Stone’s origins are shrouded in mystery. Some say it was brought to Scotland from Ireland by Fergus, the first King of the Scots, 1,500 years ago. Others claim it originated in the Holy Land.

Prosaically, geologists have concluded it was quarried here in Perthshire. But fanciful romantics claim this Stone of Scone is an impostor, switched for the real stone by Scots patriots when it first left Scotland, or maybe sometime later.

This Caledonian conspiracy theory is unlikely, yet seductive. In 1819, excavations of an ancient hillfort in

Dunsinane (as in Macbeth) unearthed a meteoric rock far more striking than the plain hunk of sandstone now returning home to Perth.

Might that meteorite be the real Stone of Scone? Probably not, but it’s a colourful story all the same.

The rise of Scottish Nationalism in the 20th century gave the Stone of Scone a new lease of life. On Christmas Day 1950, four Scottish Nationalist students broke into Westminster Abbey and took the Stone back to Scotland, where they left it on the altar of Arbroath Abbey (the Declaration of Arbroath, written in 1320, is a sacred rallying cry for nationalistic Scots).

During this dramatic escapade, the Stone was revealed to be badly cracked. It seems the damage was done not in 1950 but back in 1914, when a bomb let off by suffragettes in Westminster Abbey damaged the Coronation Chair.

In 1996, the Stone finally returned to Scotland, to Edinburgh Castle – though it remained the property of the Crown. It travelled to England, briefly, for Charles III’s coronation.

Last November, environmental activists defaced the glass casing (though not the Stone itself) with the Gaelic slogan ‘Is Treasa Tuath Na Tighearna’ (‘The People Are Mightier Than a Lord’).

And then, this January, in an incident straight out of a Carry On film or an Ealing Comedy, a lost fragment of the Stone was found in a cupboard in the

There are lots of other things to see in the city. Perth Art Gallery has a fine collection of Scottish paintings, including a superb selection by the brilliant Scottish Colourist J D Fergusson.

A short walk away, across North Inch, Perth’s large and lovely public park, is Perth Castle, home of the colourful and insightful Black Watch Museum. The highlight of any trip is Scone Palace, amid the ruins of Scone Abbey. There’s a realistic replica of the Stone in the palace grounds, on the spot where Macbeth and Robert the Bruce were crowned. There are many more treasures in the palace, a handsome Gothic Revival mansion, built in 1807.

Still a family home today, the seat of the Earl of Mansfield, the house is crammed with Meissen porcelain, furniture by Robert Adam and Thomas Chippendale, and pictures by Joshua Reynolds and Scotland’s greatest portrait-painter, Allan Ramsay.

It’s a shame the Stone of Destiny isn’t returning to Scone, from where it was seized in 1296. But its smart new berth in Perth Museum is the next best thing. Whether you’re a Unionist or a Nationalist, whether you see it as a symbol of the marriage of the English and Scottish Crowns, or a symbol of Scotland’s quest for independence, it’s thrilling to see it back in its native Perthshire for the first time in 730 years.

Perth Museum opens on 30th March

Left: Coronation Chair, containing the Stone of Scone. Above: Scone Palace, 1900

ALPHA STOCK / ALAMY

All aboard the Train of Death!

Griff Rhys Jones put his life on the line when he hitched a ride on the most dangerous railway on earth

Iwas looking mournful.

‘What’s the trouble?’ Ahmed said as I sat down.

‘I can’t find anyone to interview.’

‘That will be difficult on this train,’ he said.

‘Why’s that?’

‘Well, this is the Train of Death.’

He said it as if it were an official title. Like Shanghai Express or The Six Ten to Paddington

‘Why would it be called that, then?’

‘Well, I don’t know if you are aware, Griff, but we had a terrible civil war here in Algeria…’

‘Right. Yes.’

‘And this particular train, this route, was often targeted by the Jihadi.’

‘In the mountains?’

‘No, no, just here, before it left the suburbs.’ A disguised Mujahideen would pull the communication cord at a set place. The other terrorists would jump aboard. ‘They would then cut the throat of anyone wearing western clothes.’

I nodded and examined my jeans.

‘Don’t look so worried, Griff. Honestly, it hasn’t happened for nearly nine months.’

Algeria is a curious place. We may think we know this North African nation shoved between Morocco and Tunisia and Libya, but, unless you do pub quizzes (and, who knows, perhaps you do), you are probably not aware that Algeria is the biggest country in the whole of Africa.

It contains an awful lot of the Sahara. It drops way down south to the romantic Hoggar Mountains – home to the traditionalist, slave-owning, banditintent, blue-clad desert warriors called the Tuareg.

So fierce were these Tuareg, in the past, that nobody really visited them, except victims. I wonder if that forbidding former desert rigour is still largely the reason why not many people visit Algeria today.

I was there, in 2015, exploring the trains for an ITV programme, Slow Train to Africa. The annual number of all

outside foreign visitors to Algeria –including diplomats, oil workers, arms dealers and TV presenters – was then around 200,000 in total. This was only a short time after a ‘state of emergency’ in the country ended in 2011.

Al-Qaeda came out of those romantic Hoggar Mountains, and still follow the established desert tradition of bloodletting, assassination and executing the secular.

By the time our film crew arrived, we

had already ‘done’ Morocco (cute donkeys and naughty camels), but we couldn’t get across the border. Morocco and Algeria were locked in a border dispute about the Western Sahara – and they still are. (Only a few weeks ago, a couple of lost jet-skiers were shot dead by Algerian border guards.)

We had to fly to Spain and then fly back to Oran, from where we took a smart train into the city of Algiers. I interviewed a successful biologist and her daughters en route, in a relaxed and westernised Pullman environment. But on arrival,

GRIFF RHYS JONES; INKRET; NARVIKK / GETTY

Appointment with the Grim Reaper: Griff goes loco in Algeria

things took on a grittier turn when we went off to make couscous in a carefully preserved old merchant’s house in the northern kasbah.

Before approaching the entrance, I hid behind a corner ten yards distant, and on a shouted signal from camera walked the final steps.

Our guide jumped up and shook his head. ‘Don’t do that again!’ he said.

‘I have to. They didn’t get it.’ I explained and turned to skip away again.

‘No. No.’ He stopped me. ‘Don’t ever go out of sight.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘This is the kasbah.’ And they sent a man and a machine-gun with me for the second take.

‘The kasbah is the centre of all revolution,’ the fixer explained to me later. ‘And you, my friend, you are very white.’

He had a point. The favoured filming trope of the entire series was to stick a long lens on a street corner and send me 200 yards off into the local crowd. I was always utterly conspicuous.

In Nairobi, when I finally got back to my camera crew, I said, ‘Have you seen those guys about six feet away from us, armed with polished AK-47s?’

‘Yes, they’re with us,’ the director said.

‘I see. Not with me, then, because I am the one who is walking miles away.’

‘No, no. You don’t need them.’

Apparently, in Nairobi, gangs liked to identify camera crews, reverse up in a van and demand all the camera equipment at gunpoint. Now, of course, we were on course to enjoy an entertaining firefight.

And then, as I walked through downtown Algiers, I noticed a car slowing. It drew up alongside. The window wound down. A young, bearded face loomed out. ‘What you doing here?’ said the face.

‘Filming.’ I replied.

‘One of your travel programmes?’

‘Er yes.’ I nodded. ‘That’s right.’

‘We love them.’

I discovered Said worked half the year at his

brother’s repair shop in Edmonton.

A day later, we took the train to Constantine – named for the Roman emperor who used it as a military base.

The director got busy filming through the window. The assistant cameraman, Ben, had been sent on ahead. His job was to film us from a bridge and get the sort of shots that any rail-travel series needs – the train rattling past in ‘wide’.

‘Why don’t I just interview Ahmed here?’ I said.

‘The fixer?’ Paul went on shooting out of the window.

It was then, off camera, that Ahmed told me about the Train of Death. He went on to explain. ‘This is the place where they took that French hitchhiker.’

‘Caliphate soldiers’ executed Hervé Gourdel on camera in 2014. It was the year before our visit.

‘He was captured here?’ I said. ‘I thought it was in the desert?’

‘No, no. It was on the bridge where your friend Ben is waiting.’

Ben didn’t film us passing under him. He was arrested for trying to.

Luckily, the local police were shouted at by the general in Algiers who had given us permission, and Ben was sent to overtake us again. He set up on another bridge – where he was promptly arrested again.

We arrived in the astounding city of Constantine without any wide-angle footage. Ahmed explained that we had to take care, because both sides

This particular train was often targeted by the Jihadi

had turned on the media during the war.

Secretaries in TV companies were routinely murdered when they stopped to fill up with petrol.

None of this was allowed in our programme.

‘We are making a series where we want to encourage people to travel themselves,’ I was told by a senior ITV figure. ‘No politics!’

So there was no footage, later, in Kenya, of the armed soldier outside my fourth-floor room. Or of the time we ran from the train station when a group of terrorists started randomly throwing grenades into mammy wagons at the bus terminal not far away.

Our security advisers, secure around a table in Glasgow, ordered us out of the quiet, unused railway station, with its antique toy-train Hornby Dublo fitments, back into our own mammy wagon – to drive into a gridlock. There we sat, with our largely blond and very white camera crew, designer bush shirts and flash sunglasses, advertising our target status, trying to get back to that other wellknown city terrorist magnet – the Hilton Hotel.

Later in the series, the plan was to travel through southern Egypt and central Sudan, with what amounted to a neon sign hanging over us saying, ‘Look, some useful hostages for you.’ It was the Egyptian authorities themselves who finally pointed out that it just wasn’t safe.

We didn’t feel frightened. Terrorism is a lottery. If you hold the wrong ticket for the wrong place, well…

This wasn’t war. It was an ‘incident’ – and anyway, by far the most genuinely dangerous thing we ever did in Africa was driving at night. Don’t do that. That really is reckless.

In the end, ITV stuck the finished series out in the wrong order. So we began in Kenya and went backwards to Marrakesh, with me explaining in episode two that I was ‘going on a long journey across the whole of Africa’. This wasn’t deliberate. It was an error. What was rather more considered was the network’s decision to sack both me and the commissioning editor, for being a bit too bland.

TV, eh?

How to solve fostering crisis? Only connect

Katie Waldegrave’s charity aims to cure the shortage of foster parents

If we judge ourselves by how we treat our most vulnerable citizens, then ours is a failing nation.

There are 82,000 children in care in England. These are children the state has taken from parents deemed unable or unfit to care for them. They are now under the care of a corporate parent – the local authority, the state, you and I. And, as parents, we are doing a terrible job.

It’s not just that these children don’t go to good universities or earn as much as their peers. These children die young; they are likely to be homeless after they are 16, and experience poor physical and mental health. They are far more likely to have kids who are also taken into care, and so the bleak statistics go on.

Children in care are our collective responsibility and yet, as a collective, we do not step up. We do not have nearly enough foster carers in our country, for the simple reason that most of us simply do not think about it. As a result, we rely on a very small slice of the population, mostly recruited through word of mouth.

Local authorities are desperately struggling to recruit more foster carers. In 2021, one in eight foster-care families left the system; they are not being replaced.

When there are not enough carers, we send children far from their communities. We send them to children’s homes. We separate them from siblings because there aren’t carers with spare rooms.

When they reach 16, we often put them in independent accommodation to fend for themselves, and – too often –see them fall into homelessness.

As a result of the shortage of foster carers, a booming profitable industry has grown up, with private-equity funds benefiting. Two years ago, the

We are lucky to have many wonderful carers in the country, but we are wearing them out

Competition and Markets Authority called for an overhaul of the £6.5bn UK market for children’s residential and foster care, saying it had found ‘significant problems’ with the provision of the privately dominated services.

In a system with so little money and so much need, it can be hard to think about how to break out of firefighting and into making long-term change for a more suitable future.

Now Foster is a new not-for-profit organisation trying to do this. We believe in two key principles. First, that all children need as many loving adults in their life for the long term as possible.

My children have aunts, uncles, grandparents and other relations who will love them for as long as they live –and who would step up if something happened to my husband or me.

The second founding belief is that it is imperative that more of us get involved in fostering. We need something akin to our reaction to the Ukrainian refugee crisis, when more than 100,000 people registered interest to host refugees across the UK.

We need older people with empty nests; we need younger people with as yet unfilled nests. We need working people, busy people, those with families of their own and those without.

But this will not happen with things as they are. Fostering, as a ‘product’, encompasses too many wildly different types of care. It includes everything from you taking one child for 24 hours to three siblings living with you for the next ten years.

At the moment, if you have never had any engagement with children in care and you are not a saint (and do not need the money), it is unlikely that you will opt in. We are lucky to have many committed and wonderful carers in the country, but we are wearing them out, treating them poorly and overly reliant on their goodwill.

To increase awareness, understanding and advocacy for children in care, fostering needs to be an easier choice for more people. We need to provide more

routes into fostering, as early as possible in people’s lives.

This is why Now Foster is launching Weekenders. We are seeking people to build a long-term relationship with a child on a monthly basis. The children involved will have, as it were, a foster aunt or uncle.

Weekenders will typically take the children for a weekend per month, giving the primary carers a break and building a loving, extended family for the child.

If Now Foster is successful, placement stability will improve. If we are successful, more children will leave care with loving, long-term relationships with supportive adults, who will be there when they face any challenges. And if we are successful, we will build a pipeline of foster carers for the future.

My husband, Indro, and I – and our three young children – hope to become Weekenders this year. I hope that once we understand the system and are not intimidated by social workers or our misconceptions about children in care, we might be able to support a child more permanently – perhaps once our own leave home.

And I hope that, one day, my birth children will be more likely to think about becoming foster carers themselves.

Now Foster launches its London pilot campaign in April. Katie Waldegrave is co-founder of Now Foster and Now Teach

Foster child made good: Bruce Oldfield

Nancy Mitford, Queen of the Adriatic

In 1957, Gill Johnson, 25, left London for a Venetian palazzo to teach English to the children of the Brandolini family. One day, at the Venice Lido, she spotted a familiar figure…

She seemed unattached and sitting in pointed isolation, as if the tide had brought her in and plonked her on the beach. She clearly wasn’t Italian.

It was mid-morning, pre-season. No Italian woman would be seen dead on the beach before 12.30, even in high season.

I walked past her a couple of times. I recognised her but couldn’t put my finger on why. She was about my mother’s age, early fifties: clear, smooth, pale skin, high forehead, sad emerald eyes with eyelids that draped like curtains, making her look intelligent and difficult.

Her scimitar-shaped eyebrows and elegantly angular bone structure fashioned a face that seemed both of its day and timeless. She looked like an eternal type of beauty that I’d seen in paintings. She wore a tight pearl necklace, a pale blue, sleeveless, knee-length dress and a narrow-brimmed straw hat. On her lap was a book.

The next day, she was there again, this time talking to an overweight man.

Instead of the short Os and As of Italian, I picked up the elongated and elevated eewhs and urrhs of cut-glass gold-standard upper-class receivedpronunciation English, the accent of the ruling classes, the intonation of my parents’ era, such as a female cherecter in an Oscar Wilde play might have.

‘So we ended up winning the waaaar,’ she was saying to her companion, ‘but losing the Empiiiire and finding ourselves in hock to Ameeeerica. That’s civilisation for you! So never mind the Bright Young Thiiiings. This is a time of pulling in, dressing down and not looking rich…’ She spoke with an up-and-down cadence, as if singing a recitative.

It was then that I realised I was eavesdropping on Nancy Mitford.

I walked a few paces out on to the beach and called to the two boys I was looking after.

I happened to turn. Nancy was eyeing me. ‘Are you the new girl, or are you [my predecessor as nanny] Miss Payne’s understudy?’ she said, from her deckchair.

‘I’m the new girl. Miss Payne has left.’

‘Good for you.’ Nancy placed her forearms on the armrests of her deckchair. ‘So you’re superintending Ruy and Leonello, are you?’

‘If you can call it that. My official job is to teach them English, but they already speak it perfectly.’

Nancy raised a hand in a slightly dismissive gesture. ‘Clearly your real job is not to teach them English but to do something else,’ she said, sitting still like a graven image. ‘Have you worked out what that something is yet?’

‘Erm, no. Keep them company while the Contessa is away? Raise their game? Solve the riddle to unlocking their potential? Turn them into young gentlemen of the world?’

Nancy gave me a shrewd look that I could have sworn meant, ‘Really? Why have they employed you, then?’

‘Or perhaps just add the common touch,’ I added pre-emptively.

Nancy smiled. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Teach them to organise state occasions, that sort of thing. I’m surprised they haven’t gone to boarding school in England, somewhere cherecter-building. I’m Nancy.’ She made no indication she wanted to shake hands, but simply sat back and stretched out her legs.

Her accent! Her intonation! Her speech had a singsong, high-low pitch, but the final word of each sentence came out as a long, slow drawl. There had been no vowel shift in her diction since I should think the early-19th century.

‘I’m Giulietta or Gill. My job description seems to be understood but not spelt out or even stated.’

‘Keeping things as vague as possible is

Deb in Venice: Nancy Mitford at the Hotel Cipriani, 1957

precisely how they should be,’ she said. She hung her hands limply over the armrests of her deckchair, her fingertips pointing towards the beach. Far from using her hands to articulate her speech, Nancy made only the occasional cavilling gesture.

As I sat down, her eyes fixed on the Georgette Heyer novel that I held, still bookmarked with a finger.

‘What do you like about her?’

‘I’m hoping that someone can tell me! That’s why I keep reading them – to try to find out. I was introduced to her novels in 1949, my last year at school. I’ve been addicted ever since.’

‘How marvellous.’ Nancy laughed, her shoulders shaking. Her laugh took 15 years off her. It was also, I thought, a nervous laugh.

‘I think every woman should read Georgette Heyer before being allowed to vote, marry or open a bank account,’ Nancy continued.

‘Or look after other people’s children,’ I chimed in.

Nancy’s emerald gaze rested on me briefly. ‘How did you get the job?’ she asked.

‘I was working at the National Gallery when my fiancé decided to move to Paris.’

A wariness stole into Nancy’s eyes. ‘Odd thing for a fiancé to do. Trying to escape?’

‘No, no.’ I laughed. ‘We weren’t engaged then. We are now, I think. Instead of festering in London,’ I said, turning my body slightly towards Nancy, ‘I thought I’d better show some initiative and go abroad too.’

‘Where in Paris?’

‘Rue Jacob. Hôtel Danube.’

Once again, I felt emeralds X-raying me. Nancy had been living in Paris for 11 years. Her address, rue Monsieur, was a tenminute walk from rue Jacob. I suspect that as soon as she learnt that ‘my fiancé’ was living in Paris, she became cautious. ‘What were you doing at the National Gallery?’

‘Selling postcards, posters, calendars, things like that.’

‘Endless Hay Wains and Fighting Temeraires.’

‘Ha! Yes. I think a lot of people went to the gallery just to say they’d seen The Hay Wain.’

Her emerald eyes gave nothing away.

I realised this wasn’t a friendly chat but a trial of strength. ‘Promotion meant I had to behave,’ I said, ‘be responsible and try to take things seriously.’

‘Frightful thought!’

‘It wasn’t me. I didn’t want to risk becoming part of the furniture. But obviously I’ve no idea what I really want to do, except…’ I tailed off, unsure of what to say.

‘So you took a different turning in the

labyrinth of life,’ said Nancy, helping me along. ‘Understandable. Delusional happiness and confidence based on almost complete ignorance are far more useful, effective and persuasive forces, and have achieved far more in history, than doubt based on knowledge ever will. Congratulations.’

‘I saw you yesterday,’ I said. ‘Do you spend much time on the Lido?’

Nancy took a deep breath and stared down at the beach for slightly longer than seemed comfortable. ‘Only most of the time, but not intentionally so. I come here every year for a holiday. It’s lovely to see friends, swim, drift about, take in the architecture, that sort of thing. But this is pre-season.

Her laugh took 15 years off her. It was a nervous laugh

‘The stampeding hordes arrive in late August. Not me at all. Know-nothing tourists over for the party. “Super-sewerage and a ball every night,” as my father [Lord Redesdale, aka “Farve”] would say. But I love the place to bits at other times of the year. It’s a better class of gutter, slightly falling to pieces – but aren’t we all?’

A blue-shirted waiter, who was doing the rounds with a silver tray, stopped and asked us if we would like iced water with lemon.

‘Thenk you.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I expect you know Venice quite well,’ said Nancy, holding a glass of iced water to her lips.

‘A little. I like the churches and the art.’

‘Hate Titian and loathe Tintoretto,’ she said, taking a sip, putting her glass down, sitting back and crossing her feet.

‘Palette scrapings and paint samples. Just can’t get interested. It’s probably a psychological defect. I’ll bet that a lot of Venetian painting was a way of

Very Grand Canal: Gill Johnson on the balcony of Palazzo Brandolini, 1957

promoting Venetian merchandise. All those gorgeous silks, brocades and damasks were early soft-furnishings catalogues with a bit of fashion show thrown in. Clever, really. By the time Canaletto arrived, the perspective broadened out to Venice itself, rather than what Venice sold.’

‘I’m with you on Titian.’ I felt relieved to be able to talk about something I knew.

‘Although Titian was head, shoulders and torso above Tintoretto,’ said Nancy.

I ate into my stock of small talk simply to prolong the conversation, while trying not to bore her or sound over-curious. The food here is awfully good, isn’t it? … How do you find Venetian coffee?

‘You mentioned “school”,’ said Nancy, clutching her hands at chest height.

‘Yes. St Mary’s Calne,’ I said. ‘Before that I was herded around, dodging bombs and doodlebugs.’

‘You obviously survived the bombs and doodlebugs, but what about school?

President of the debating society? Captain of hockey?’

‘Strangely, I wasn’t picked for the hockey team,’ I said. I sensed a Mitford tease. In The Pursuit of Love, Uncle Matthew, a portrayal of Nancy’s father, dismissed hockey girls as having ‘legs like gateposts’. ‘Anyway,’ I continued, crossing my legs, ‘I was too busy being naughty – and I haven’t finished yet.’

Nancy’s body shook with laughter, which seemed genuine as well as nervous, as if she were laughing to relieve tension. She rested

‘Without artists, Venice would be a fishing village on stilts’

her forearms on the armrests of her chair. ‘Thet sounds promising.’

‘The most important things I learnt at school,’ I added, ‘were strategic thinking and resourcefulness, not what I was taught.’

‘Quite. Quite,’ said Nancy. ‘Why bother to be good at something when you can pretend?’ She closed her eyes and held her face towards the sun. ‘Still, it probably doesn’t pay to show too much strategic thinking and resourcefulness. People might get strange ideas, especially in Italy. La bella figura means playing dumb, to a certain extent. They don’t have the same freedoms here as in England.

‘Venice,’ she continued, ‘is bewildering enough even in broad daylight. Didn’t Shakespeare write something about indirections and misdirections in The Merchant of Venice? You need a prayer book to get around, not a map.

‘Whose barmy idea was it to build palaces and churches on bits of wood in a lagoon? Close your eyes for a moment and imagine the planning meetings that came up with the idea of building palazzi on wooden piles driven into the sand. The more one thinks about it, the madder Venice seems.’

Not an iota of Parisian-ness seemed to have rubbed off on Nancy. Besides her habit of occasionally dropping French words for that mot juste, her dress, speech and attitude came across as an improbable satire of an Englishwoman abroad.

Take her attitude to seaside holidays. She regarded a seaside holiday as literally a holiday by the sea. She wanted to get to the beach early, not to beat the crowds (there weren’t any) but because getting to the beach early was what any sensible English person would do on a seaside

holiday. Why stay in bed when there were beaches to be sat on? Mitford genes would never have tolerated dolce far niente

Neither highbrow nor voluptuous, Nancy came across as vereh well-bred and intelligent. Women then were naïve by default, suppressed into a state of emotional and intellectual deprivation. We weren’t supposed to talk about anything worth talking about. Of course, I didn’t fully grasp the extent of this syndrome. But I sensed it, and so did Nancy.

At the Lido, I said to her, ‘You mentioned that the Venetian aversion to selfaggrandisement and personality cults was built into the political system, but the opposite applied in the world of art…’

‘Yes, thank goodness!’ she said. ‘They built a political system that was so complicated that only a Venetian would be able to understand it, but the brilliance of Venetian art was immediately obvious to everyone who saw it. Artists were celebrated and venerated, as Emperor Charles V did when Titian allowed him to pick up his paintbrush. Dynasties of artists reigned supreme, Bellini, Vivarini, Tintoretto, Bassano, Longhi, Tiepolo, Palma Vecchia, Palma Giovane, Canaletto … complete inverse to the political system.

‘Without that lot, Venice would be a fishing village on stilts. So the moral of my story is... Actually – haha – I forgot.’ Once again, laughter took years off her. ‘But I still prefer the Florentines, Raphael, Botticelli and especially Andrea del Sarto.’

The waiter handed round bowls full of mint ice cream.

‘Ah, the ultimate toothpaste,’ said Nancy. Turning to me, she asked, ‘How long are you staying in Venice?’

‘At least until the end of the year.’

‘How do you find the palazzo?’

‘It’s so beautiful, especially the Palma Vecchio frescos.’

‘It’s beyond reach of any estate agent’s glossary, isn’t it? But one could never accuse it of being troppo cosy,’ Nancy said.

‘You wouldn’t want to pass out in there, not with all that marble.’

‘The palazzo needs about 20 years of being lived in. I do like a bit of shabbiness.’

As the sun dipped, the shadows lozenged. It was time to go.

‘Thank you for letting me join you,’ said Nancy.

‘It’s not my beach to prevent you.’ I smiled. ‘Same time tomorrow?’

Once again, a wistful look filled her eyes. ‘I should be delighted. Thenk you.’

Love from Venice: A Golden Summer on the Grand Canal by Gill Johnson is out now (Hodder & Stoughton). Read Hugo Vickers’s review on page 53

Maria Poppins: Ruy Brandolini d’Adda and Gill Johnson at the Venice Lido

House of cards

Sarah Brydon loved her 1950s childhood – and her daring father, who taught her billiards, roulette and strip poker

When I was eight, we often played strip poker and roulette at the billiard table after dinner.

My brother, then aged 11, my father, 68, and I began the game heavily clothed in layers of tops, hats, scarves and socks.

So nothing untoward happened. But the poker games were always serious and fiercely competitive, interspersed with screeches and guffaws of silliness.

This would attract the attention of our mother, who would peer round the door, raise her eyes heavenwards and

tut while clutching a tea towel, a book of poetry or a cat. This of course set us off once again.

Playing roulette was also a big favourite. My father spluttered ‘Rien ne va plus’ and ‘Faites vos jeux’ as we possessively protected our chips and shouted at the wheel. The clatter of the ball focused my attention and I would cross my fingers tightly to influence the outcome.

Best of all was when the top of the billiard table was carefully and almost reverently removed, in preparation for the majestic game of games.

Time for the chalking of cues and the crack of the balls to electrify the atmosphere.

My height did not spoil my aim, and I recall the thrill

Reader Course

of potting the shots; sometimes with the extension cue, which added to the pretence that we were playing in a championship competition.

My father often brought home eagerly anticipated large blocks of salt for my brother and me to carve with the bluntest of knives. What a thrill to sculpt creatures that would bite us when they found a secret scratch or sore. Where on earth the blocks came from is anyone’s guess, but it occupied us for hours.

Pastimes in our house in the 1950s were always exciting and never boring.

My father was exemplary in his inexhaustible search for ways to keep our minds active and questioning. He was a physicist, a pianist, a poet and an all-round amazing chap.

And what of my mother? Well, that’s a story for another day!

British Architectural History with Harry Mount

Following the success of the five-day course in 2020, The Oldie’s editor, Harry Mount, has now reduced the course to two days for those of you who still want to learn the difference between Doric and Ionic. Britain’s country houses and high streets will come alive as you learn the enthralling history of our buildings, from simple Anglo-Saxon churches, via Norman cathedrals, to the glorious stone poetry of the Gothic.

After an immersion in Classicism, the course takes you through the Gothic Revival, on into Art Nouveau and Art Deco, and finishes with the Second World War.

The venue is the Commitee Room of Pratt’s – itself a splendid example of the English terraced house, inspired by the Palladian palazzo. Between the two one-hour talks, we will serve an excellent two-course lunch with a glass of wine and coffee.

Session I 26th June, 1–3pm

History of British architecture from the Romans to Inigo Jones

Session II 3rd July, 12–3pm

History of British architecture from Christopher Wren to the Second World War

Harry Mount

What the Romans did – for science

If you want to be a scientist, learn classics. By Guy de la Bédoyère

On 30th July 1763, James Boswell took a boat down the Thames with Samuel Johnson.

Boswell asked the great man if knowing Greek and Latin was ‘necessary’. Johnson had no doubt, replying, ‘By all means; for they who know them have a very great advantage over those who do not.’

Late in life I became a history teacher and found myself in a girls’ grammar school, where I lasted for nine years.

I was once standing in a classroom while two girls were puzzling over the knotty word ‘osmosis’ in their GCSE biology homework.

They’d completely forgotten what it meant, probably because they had never understood in the first place why it means what it does.

So I told them. Incredulous, one said, ‘How could you possibly know that? You’re a history teacher.’

It was my first lesson in discovering the totally fragmented curriculum. It has the extraordinary power to prevent children from having the slightest awareness that their subjects might be connected, or what the words they are taught mean.

understand one another. Now those languages have disappeared from school, the words might as well be Chinese, even though the vast majority have fabulously basic meanings.

I bought my own copy of the chemistry A-level textbook (in which the etymology is wholly omitted) and started annotating it. Not one student knew what a single term literally meant. They tussled with ‘isotopes’ – the word merely means ‘same (or equal) place’ (from isos and topos). Differentiating isotopes from one another is simply a way of distinguishing atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons. Consequently, they end up in the ‘same place’ on the periodic table.

The pupils might, just possibly, transfer their new-found wisdom to ‘topography’ – writing about places – while studying ‘geography’ – writing about the Earth.

Osmosis is the spontaneous movement of molecules through a membrane. It comes from the Greek ōsmós – ‘push’.

Unfortunately, denied a classical education in any form, students like them tramp through long school days bombarded with words containing syllables and structures they do not recognise or understand. No wonder they spend half their time in a disconnected daze.

Back in the days of the Enlightenment, scholars across Europe coined scientific terms mainly from Latin and Greek, creating a lingua franca so they could all

A student could make a stab at ‘isomers’. Isomers (‘equal shares’ from isos and meros, ‘a share’) are molecules that have the same formula –but the atoms of which they have an equal share are in a different arrangement. ‘Molecule’ is the diminutive of the Latin moles ‘mass’ –therefore ‘a very small mass’. An atom (a-temein, something that is ‘not divisible’), has the same number of protons as electrons and is therefore electrically neutral. An ion of the same element has one or more additional electrons, giving it a negative charge,

Denied a classical education, no wonder students are in a disconnected daze

which means it’s attracted to protons which are positively charged. Origin? The Greek iōn, which just means ‘going’ –literally it is in a state of motion.

‘Proton’ was taken from the Greek prōtos (‘first’) by Ernest Rutherford. He had identified these subatomic particles in the nucleus (from the Latin nux for a little nut) of an atom of hydrogen (from two Greek words meaning ‘produces water’) – and therefore they were a primary building block of matter.

My favourite is stoichiometry –measuring the ratios of reactants (ie elements) reacting and what they produce. Stoikeion is the Greek for an element, and -metry comes from metrēs, ‘a measurer’.

It’s handy to know, too, about the Roman provinces of Transalpine and Cisalpine Gaul. Trans- means simply ‘on the other side of’, and cis- ‘on this side of’: Cisalpine was ‘on this [ie the Italian] side of Gaul’ and Transalpine Gaul was on the other side. By some tortuous route, ‘cis-’ has now come to mean still going by one’s gender at birth and ‘trans-’ the opposite.

The point is not to have children laboriously translating Homer or Virgil, but to give them half a chance of understanding what they’re doing. Spending their days confronted with terminology based on what were and still are foreign and ancient languages, they’re bound to be disengaged.

Most teachers are now young enough to have missed out on a classical education. Not only did none of my students’ science teachers know what these words mean, but also they had never even contemplated finding out.

Even Wackford Squeers, the wicked schoolmaster in Nicholas Nickleby, was an improvement: ‘A horse is a quadruped, and quadruped’s Latin for beast [actually quadrupes], as everybody that’s gone through the grammar knows, or else where’s the use of having grammars at all?’

Guy de la Bédoyère is author of The Real Lives of Roman Britain (Yale University Press)

Latin lover: teacher Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers

A moving dilemma

Divorcé Andrew Gimson had a choice: town or country

James Boswell once wondered whether, if he lived in London all the time, the ‘exquisite zest’ with which he relished it on occasional visits ‘might go off, and I might grow tired of it’.

Dr Johnson gave his famous answer: ‘Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’

Yet many Londoners do decide to leave, boldly defying not only Dr Johnson but the Rule of Moving to the Country established by James Pembroke, publisher of The Oldie, according to which one invariably returns after three years.

For the first year, it is so exciting to have all that rural space and gaze at the sea or the fields. In the second year, country life becomes a bit boring, but what about that sea and those fields! In the third year, it is so boring, and you couldn’t care less about the sea or the fields.

My wife and I split up in October 2020, during the Covid pandemic. In September 2022, we sold our house in Gospel Oak, London NW5, where we had lived since 2002.

At this point, various friends urged me to move to the country. They said that, for the money I got from the house – £600,000 – I could get a lovely place in the country where I could have them all to stay. To prove their point, they sent me the particulars of picturesque cottages surrounded by idyllic gardens.

I was not keen to take on an idyllic garden, which would remain idyllic only if I worked in it even at those times when I would rather read a good book, or try to write one.

I detest driving. But in the country, it is pretty much impossible to get by without a car. I earn my living by writing about politics, and from Gospel Oak could reach the Palace of Westminster in half an hour on my bike.

And what about the parties in London? Worth going to if you’re already in town – but would it be worth catching an afternoon train and wondering how to get home afterwards?

Still, the price of property in London is ludicrous. Things were bad enough 24 years ago, when we returned from the then quite cheap city of Berlin. After renting a couple of appallingly expensive flats in north London, we managed to buy

In the third year, it’s so boring you couldn’t care less about the sea or fields

that scruffy house in Gospel Oak – or, in fact, to induce the Portman Building Society to buy it on our behalf. The situation now is about three times worse.

It has long been conventional to move further out into the London suburbs, to find a cheaper and larger place. On my bike, I went to look at about 25 different properties in increasingly distant districts. One day, I was excited to learn of some small streets just north of Finsbury Park named after the novels of my hero, Benjamin Disraeli.

Let me end my days, I thought, in Lothair, Endymion, Tancred or Coningsby Road. But others had already had the same idea, and those nondescript

streets had become prohibitively expensive. I could bicycle many miles from central London – so far that you might wonder whether you were really still in London – and still not get much more in the way of space.

What do you really care about? That is the question the prospective buyer must answer. To me what matters more than space is the windows. The trouble with the ‘purpose-built block’, the euphemism used by estate agents to indicate a former council estate, is not that it used to be in public ownership, but that it was built at the wrong time to have good windows. The last people who could be relied on to make proper windows were the Georgians.

London is fortunate enough to have a lot of Georgian houses, standing unobtrusively amid vast structures of later date. I looked in Bloomsbury, found it was too expensive. So I walked north and, in an estate agent’s window in Camden, I had my eye caught by a small first-floor Georgian flat with three beautiful windows. Alas, it had already gone but, some months later, the agent rang me and said the flat below it in the same house had come on the market for £550,000. I was enchanted by its two plain Georgian windows looking straight down Prowse Place, which runs through a great brick railway arch.

At the age of 65, I have decided I would far rather have a small flat in Camden, in a jumble of buildings between the railway and the canal, than a rose-girt cottage in Devon.

Gimson’s Kings and Queens: Brief Lives of the Monarchs since 1066 is out now in a new edition, including the life of Charles III

Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips My rubber fetish

Rubberwear isn’t just for perverts – it’s now fashionable

Rubber, a fabric once considered the preserve of perverts, has now become almost mainstream.

And it’s not just the predictable attentionseekers – Cher, Madonna, Kim Kardashian – who flaunt it, looking like giant human sex toys at Met Galas and the Oscars.

Its more demure iterations are now favoured in high society as well. Think junior influencers such as Lady Amelia Windsor, Lady Lola Bute and Princess Olympia of Greece.

The wholesome actor Timothée Chalamet wore a green latex trench coat to kick off the Wonka film press tour.

‘Rubber fetishists’, as they were known when I was junior, were a secret society. We used to chuckle, in the 1970s, about the incongruous factory run by a (distinguished intellectual) acquaintance out of an old watermill in Dorset.

There he knocked up rubber mackintoshes, bras and pants, and posted them out under plain cover to his quietly recruited network of enthusiasts.

But early rubber enthusiasts were not all fetishists, by any means. It was poignant to learn that our Dorset intellectual friend’s customers were almost all veterans, as he was, of a 1930s childhood, when rubber sheets were used in cots to prevent bio spillage. Babies’ first experience of sensuality was lying against the rubber, and hence they came to associate it with reassurance and cosiness.

People usually make rubber by tapping the rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) tree, making a hole in the bark and collecting into cups the liquid latex sap which oozes out. The latex is then synthesised into rubber.

Rubber was not always considered pervy. In 1824, Mr Charles Mackintosh, a Scottish inventor and chemist, came up with the eponymous mac, which was more successful than any other overcoat in repelling water.

But it was not until the early-20th century that rubber became a component of underwear.

Corsets were boned and agony to wear. They also restricted movement. Then it became known that the famous ballroom dancer Irene Castle (1893-1965), the toast of Paris café society, known for the grace and fluidity of her stage performances, had moved from boned corsets to wearing rubber sheaths below her costumes.

Rubber is stretchy and can move with the body while highlighting its natural curves. Even if your natural curves are not what you would hope for, rubber renders them taut rather than semolinalike and wobbly.

Ordinary women in England copied Irene Castle and were soon switching from boned corsets to the more

pliable rubber girdles and long pants of Dr Jeanne Walters, advertised as ‘reducing garments’. Walters announced that ‘waist, hips and thighs can be reduced by 1-3 inches with live perforated rubber’.

Possibly true, as the rubber

promoted intense perspiration. Could the fat perhaps drain out of the body via the perforations?

Rubber was a popular component of military uniforms. Its unique qualities made it ideal for protective clothing, particularly in medicine and warfare. It improved the functionality of overcoats, caps and gaiters. Most serious fishermen had a rubber apron.

Still, after the Second World War, a wave of social conservatism forced rubberwear underground. The English designer Daniel James dared to resurrect it in 1983. He even opened a club in Soho for enthusiasts, called Skin Two, and designed for Ronnie Wood of the Stones. Models in rubberwear squeaked down the autumn winter catwalks of Gucci, Vivienne Westwood, Balmain and

Another junior influencer, Sammi Jefcoate, who has 3.8 million followers across social media, is a proponent of the look. She is rather wholesome in her rubberised way.

Why wouldn’t people be wearing it? Rubber has ultimate feel appeal. It’s waterproof, sustainable and vegan. It needs maintenance, though –and there are many products on the market that build shine on latex. The main types are silicone serums, ‘blue milk’ silicone polish, and silicone aerosol sprays.

The New York-based latexdesigner known as the Baroness claims that ‘rubber is the most sensual fabric there is – it has a unique look, smell taste, sound

And the subtext of rubber’s being associated with fetishists for so many years delivers an extra thrill to the rebellious young people now wearing rubber in London’s smartest venues.

Kim Kardashian and Princess Olympia of Greece

Prue’s News RIP Magnificat, my greatest feline friend

Whenever I show signs of doolallyness –getting the day wrong, or calling my son by the dog’s name – my husband asks, ‘Vet?’

It’s partly my fault because I bang on about how much better off pets are than their owners. When they are long past it, they get a kindly jab from the vet.

Well, last month I sat on the sofa with my ancient and much-loved Magnificat on my lap, waiting for the vet to arrive. Mags was asleep and purring, occasionally halfheartedly kneading my leg. His coat felt silky soft and clean, and he was obviously content.

I started to have second thoughts, becoming tearful and anxious. Surely, he was still enjoying some of his life, between the bouts of vomiting and yowling?

Yes, he was a bag of bones and he’d obviously lost his mind, mistaking the front doormat (and any corner) for his litter tray. But he ate like a horse and loved to be petted. He particularly liked our Cavalier Spaniel to lick his ears, inside and out.

The vet was due at noon. When a smartly suited man arrived, I was surprised – I’d expected one of the

Top cat: the late Magnificat & Prue Leith

female vets I knew. But this guy looked vaguely familiar, and kind. He sat on the sofa opposite me and asked how I was.

I’d been weepy before he came, and now I found myself blurting out all my anxieties, desperate for reassurance that I was doing the right thing. I blathered on, jumping from Mag’s yowling and his weak back legs to his shiny coat and purring.

On and on I went, while he looked increasingly concerned.

Finally, I said, ‘What would you do? Do you think I’m right? Should I be putting him down?’

He frowned, shaking his head. ‘No,

no! Don’t land this on me! I can’t make that decision. I’m your accountant! I’ve come to help you with your tax form.’

When we’d stopped laughing, he went into my office to look at invoices. He was replaced by a female vet and her assistant, who did the deed most sympathetically and gently. Mags went from purring doze to that deeper sleep from which no kitty-cat returns, without waking.

They left me a pile of literature about memorial pet caskets, tombstones, ceremonial burials and grief counselling.

I’m afraid we just dug a hole for Magnificat in the garden under a tree planted in memory of my brother. I wonder if it would be legal for me to go in there too one day? I think you have to be six feet deep and 50 metres from a water course.

What a strange day. A lot of sadness and a lot of somewhat hysterical hilarity. When regaling my mistaken identity blunder to John, he just said, ‘Vet?’

Prue Leith presents The Great British Bake Off

A short book for Camilla

What a delight to write a tiny volume for Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House a n wilson

There is a dear little exhibition in the London Library at the moment.

Tiny books are displayed in a glass case – dolls’-size Bibles printed in the 16th century, minuscule books illustrated by Kate Greenaway, etc.

This comes at a time when Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House at Windsor Castle is replenishing its library. When I go to Windsor, which I sometimes do to research in the archives, it occurs to me that the castle itself, as remodelled by Wyatville, is really a child’s toy fort – and the only grown-up-looking thing about the place is the famous Dolls’ House there.

This was built a century ago, in 1924, as a present to Queen Mary from a grateful nation after the Second World War. She liked tiny things – but the house is gigantic. The architect was the great Lutyens.

Every single thing in the Dolls’ House is functioning. The piano can really be played, with a pin on its tiny keys. The wind-up gramophone plays the record – God Save the King, naturally. The Rolls-Royces are early battery-driven cars. And in the library there are rows of miniature books, actually written by the hand of the authors. Of course, there were proper authors in those days – Thomas Hardy, Conan Doyle, Chesterton and Belloc.

Only four authors refused the request to supply the tiny book – including Yeats and Shaw, because it was all happening when the Irish Free State was being set up. Elgar said he was tired of being a monkey on a stick.

And – guess who? – D H Lawrence! It is amazing that they asked Lawrence, who was being prosecuted by the police for his lewd oil paintings. It’s rather sad that he said no.

I like the thought of Queen Mary’s cigaretty fingers turning the pages of his contribution, perhaps a short early draft of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

The brilliant Elizabeth Ashby, a Royal

Librarian, has written the history of the Dolls’ House. She asked contemporary writers to write 20 more volumes for the dolls’ library, to be beautifully bound by the best contemporary binders.

That friend of The Oldie HM the Queen responded with enthusiasm, and wrote one of the volumes herself. On the Feast of the Royal Martyr (30th January), most of the 19 others – Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett, Philippa Gregory, Jacqueline Wilson et al – trooped up to the castle.

For some reason, I was one of them. I was impressed that Queen Camilla, as she greeted each author, could remember the title of every single one of their little contributions.

Mine was a poem, based on Browning’s dramatic monologues. A pair of dolls from St John’s Wood (where Lutyens designed the house and had it built) stow away in it and have a secret friendship with Queen Mary.

Looking round the castle’s Waterloo Chamber, I tried to suppress cynicism, and more or less succeeded. I was trying NOT to think, ‘OK, Ben Okri, Tom Stoppard et al, you are all pretty impressive, but are you in the same league as Thomas Hardy?’

Luckily, I did succeed in suppressing this thought, as we ate our dolls’-sized (delicious) canapés. But then another thought came: ‘I wonder if any of the writers in this room have ever written anything better than what they chose to squeeze into this tiny form?’

Alan Bennett had copied out ‘The Mantelpiece’, a speech from his 1980 play Enjoy. My ever-lamented friend

Since the invention of laptops, nearly all books have become FAR TOO LONG

Hugh Massingberd used to know it by heart, and it is a masterpiece. It will survive in anthologies long after the complete works of Bennett, and of all of us, have been forgotten.

I know I’m a prime offender – but the truth is, most writers write too much. Since the invention of laptops, which enable them to rattle off thousands of words a day, nearly all books have become FAR TOO LONG. Nearly all the books I read for review could be halved in length and thereby improved. The research goes in undigested, with no heed paid to Mrs David’s useful advice to cooks – ‘Reduce!’

All too few of us scribblers take a leaf out of Lytton Strachey’s book. His Eminent Victorians was a protest against the three-volume Victorian doorstoppers in which the great figures of the 19th century were immortalised. He told the story of four of them in succinct, hilarious, essays which could be read in one afternoon.

I treasure the short masterpieces – the Sherlock Holmes stories, rather than Doyle’s long-winded historical romances. I will go to my grave admiring Sir Walter Scott but, great man though he was, he could be a windbag. His greatest masterpiece is a short story called The Two Drovers.

Belloc wrote even more books than I’ve done, and most of them are unreadable. But he lives, surely, for his immortal Cautionary Tales –‘Godolphin Horne was Nobly Born/He held the Human Race in Scorn’ or ‘The nicest child I ever knew/Was Charles Augustus Fortescue’ etc.

When you consider the millions of words written about the 20th-century horror story – the revolutions, the wars, the labour camps, the gulag – has any long-winded academic volume on the subject ever surpassed the short parable of Orwell’s Animal Farm?

Falling in love again – in M&S

Our eyes met over the Easter eggs. If only her boyfriend wasn’t also there, stealing prime cuts of meat

jem clarke

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…

Mother has revealed she was once engaged to the East Coast’s most prolific housebreaker.

The topic came up when she was talking about his sister. She’s recently been moved into high-end residential care, at a home mother calls Doolally Towers.

Mother says, ‘You’ve got to be fully doolally to get into that one. Which is a good job because you’d have to be doolally to pay those prices, for slightly better furnishings and a fleur-de-lys piss pot.’

As Father pruned his eyebrows with the kitchen scissors, Mother said she regretted calling off the marriage to Britain’s best burglar: ‘If your father had been pinching pennies rather than just penny-pinching, I wouldn’t be waiting for the likes of you to loosen the lid of my beetroot jar, and him to strim my bush. I’d have staff.’

I had a similar problem when I bumped into a fanciable work colleague from the early 1990s. She left our open office under something of a cloud, when a photocopier went missing.

She sort of confessed, when she was tipsy on Tia Maria at the last happy hour we shared. ‘It was the Gypsy in me,’ she mumbled in my ear.

I was delighted the other day when she pulled my bobble cap off in the middle of Marks & Spencer, declaring, ‘So it’s me little Jem, all grown out.’

She had not aged a day, bar some crow’s feet and a little temple-greying. She still had eyes bright with mischief and untamed hair straight out of a Catherine Cookson.

When we were 20, we were never an item. But we did pop over the road to a bar or a cinema straight from work and do coupley things her carousel of boyfriends didn’t much fancy doing. I was, in essence, a stunt boyfriend.

She reminded me of how I had accompanied her to see Highlander II: The Quickening when she was ten months

pregnant and highly emotional. The evening before, her apprentice-butcher boyfriend had left her. Not even the Parisian pin-up Christopher Lambert could quell her tears. She grizzled so loudly that we were understandably pelted with peanut Revels. We left before the credits rolled in case they moved on to the larger, orange-centred ones.

Julie had the baby a day later. The baby is now 33.

‘I take it you’re not in touch with the father?’ I asked.

‘Oh God, no. I’m actually with Gavin now.’ Gavin emerged from behind an Easteregg point-of-sale display. Had he been in the fruit-and-veg section, I wouldn’t have spotted him – he was in full army-surplus camouflage. He seemed impatient and desperate to leave. Charming.

Julie explained, almost apologising, ‘I met him at an adult rave.’

I noticed Gavin’s muscular frame. I immediately pictured his large, callused hands and frozen grimace halfway up a

ladder, strimming my mother’s overgrown bush.

‘Do you do gardening?’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Julie beamed. ‘He does gardening and I do cleaning. We want to take the world back to the self-sufficiency my ancestors enjoyed. So we don’t use money. Rather than pay us, just leave us a patch of your garden to grow crops on, and we’ll do it all for free.’

I don’t think their intended business model would work with mother’s artificial turf and reproduction Tivoli Gardens. Besides, I was borderline worried that Julie – the ’90s crooked office girl with a demiperm, Pernod in one hand and a pound for the jukebox in the other –had evolved into a guerrilla night gardener. She might kidnap my mother’s plastic lawn.

Suddenly, as I stood there, taking in her unchanged electric eyes, I felt a real sadness. I’m sure sensitive souls like me have some appendix-sized organ that pumps painful nostalgia into our bloodstream.

I remembered that sunny early-’90s evening, when I escorted that young sniffling mum-to-be out of the cinema. As I gently removed small balls of chocolate from her hair, she said, ‘At least it was less shit than Ghostbusters II.’

The reverie ended as ambitious cuts of meat slid from beneath Gavin’s jacket. Julie quickly kissed my cheek before running off – away from the suddenly active security guard.

I felt something I couldn’t quite finger had been found and then lost again. Like Humphrey Bogart, I strolled at a philosophical pace towards lady’s outerwear and the exit beyond. I thought to myself, ‘Oh well. We’ll always have Highlander II.’

Town Mouse

The bench, king of park life

tom hodgkinson

‘Kirsty McColl 1959-2000’, with an echo of one of her songs – ‘One Day I’ll Be Waiting There, No Empty Bench in Soho Square’.

How would you go about getting a memorial bench? Local councils run schemes. The average charge is around £1,200, though this varies widely. In St Ives, you can get a memorial bench complete with inscription for £1,000. In London’s Holland Park, you’re talking £1,135. On Hampstead Heath, the charge is £2,500 for a 20-year term. Stockport Council charges £1,255. while in Edinburgh you’d need £4,805.

One of the greatest pleasures afforded by city life is completely free.

You don’t need to work hard, go into debt or struggle in any way and it’s available to everyone, prince or pauper, man or mouse. It’s the park bench – a temporary escape from grind, bustle and the consumerist race.

My own favourite benches line the main walkway in Kensington Gardens. I eat my cheese sandwich on one at lunch, doze, read, observe the habits of the exotic ducks, ponder the imponderables, and consider the majesty of the city around me. A public bench means freedom.

Park benches are romantic, anonymous zones. We imagine spies meeting on them, and lovers.

They are refuges. We don’t like sharing them with strangers. Bench etiquette determines that you should sit on an occupied bench only if there are no

empty benches available. If you do, sit as far away as possible from the other person or people, in case they think you’re a weirdo.

The benches in Soho Square have arm rests in the middle of the bench, not just at the end – you can sit down next to someone without their thinking you’re a creep. It also means that all bench space is used; very efficient.

And don’t you love reading the inscriptions? One bench-lover, the writer Stephen Emms, wandered round the 475 benches on Hampstead Heath in 2013, collecting inscriptions. Some were jokey: ‘ “THEY COULD DO WITH A BENCH HERE”, LEWIS GREIFER 1915–2003’.

Most celebrated slowing down, contemplation or peace: ‘May this bench bring peace to all who rest on it’.

A tour of bench inscriptions includes the one on the memorial bench to Kirsty McColl in London’s Soho Square:

A bench in a snooty royal park such as St James’s Park will set you back a whopping £10,000. Islington Council, true to its motto of ‘For a more equal future’, charges the lowest price in London: a mere £800.

A cheaper option is to bung a plaque on an existing bench. St Ives Council charges £102 for this service.

The benches come mostly from Essex-based street-furniture masters Branson Leisure Ltd. They’re made of iroko, a teak-like hardwood from West Africa, or oak. To buy a bench for your own garden would cost £450 upwards, depending on size. How I long to visit the workshops at Branson Leisure Ltd. They could inscribe ‘A mouse loved to sit here and do nothing’ on my memorial bench.

I love the classic wooden-park-bench design. Lutyens tried to improve on it with a high back, but in my view failed.

But let’s be open to groovy modern benches. It’s also good to see that the public bench is enjoying a renaissance as a place for creative expression. The London Festival of Architecture runs an annual competition where artists design a public bench, which is then made and installed.

In New York, home of the famous bench in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, sculptor Mark Gibian was commissioned to create three works for the esplanade in TriBeCa. According to the New York Times, they are ‘made from steel pipes that have been rolled, notched and welded’. Stockholm recently saw the Superbenches project, where ten designers were invited to create benches for a park, the Kvarnbacken.

Benches mean liberty, time out and reflection. ‘We spend our life, it’s ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench,’ wrote Samuel Beckett in Texts for Nothing.

It’s customary to complain and moan about local councils. But we should honour them for installing and maintaining these beautiful egalitarian thrones of peace and felicity.

Country Mouse

Oh to be on 1970s

giles wood

If we were to believe the lamentably inexperienced minister currently posing as Defence Secretary, we would be well advised to stay indoors to dodge conventional incoming Iranian missiles.

If the rookie is correct, purveyors of oaken tables, stout enough to break the inevitable falls of masonry, will be doing a roaring trade. ‘Nothing is written’, to quote the wise words of T E Lawrence.

Yet, judging by the increasing size of the typical television screen, even in the tiny parlours of our rustic hamlet, we are not suddenly going to revive the tradition of conversing on our doorsteps as we puff clay pipes, or of joining communal outdoor games like dancing round the village maypole.

Instead we will anaesthetise our fear by staying inside, glued to our individual screens. We will be streaming, watching sport or YouTube, in my case exploring the twilight world of Havergal Brian and his 32 symphonies, most of them written after he turned 80.

I’m sorry to announce that even older-style viewers are deserting terrestrial TV in droves. I’m sorry, because mass watching of the same programmes used to be a unifying force.

In the days before an excess of choice, my whole family would watch together and were perfectly happy to continue concentrating through the dull bits. TV suppers were unknown; as a nuclear family, we sat round the table and chatted amiably.

Little did I know then that, like Sheridan Morley, I would become a television reviewer in my eventide years. Or perhaps not.

‘Reviewer’, according to Mary, is aggrandising/wishful thinking/ a misnomer. Reviewing requires reflection. My function, on Gogglebox, is to react spontaneously in real time, with a battery of consequential or,

more likely, inconsequential ‘off-thecuff’ remarks.

We are part of diversity. Our stock-intrade is deep scepticism and an unwillingness, bordering on catatonia, to move our bodies to music. We don’t do grooving or capering. We are resistant to changing societal norms, and I get really agitated only when I see a remake of a classic such as Solaris or Bouquet of Barbed Wire, when the original was so much better.

With the exception of Happy Valley, it’s hard to remember any noteworthy new TV programme to have crossed our screens in the last seven years. Easier to remember the names of some of the best streaming ‘content’, which comes our way via word of mouth from a London friend who seems uncannily able to separate the wheat from the chaff: The Glory, The White Lotus, Slow Horses.

And yet the names of TV programmes from the seventies, which I firmly believe was a golden age for the small screen, still trip off the tongue: Play for Today, The Wednesday Play, not forgetting The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.

Or The Last Train Through Harecastle Tunnel, or the pagan-themed Penda’s Fen, now rereleased as a DVD. Have the Worcestershire waysides ever looked better? The camera lingering on the crowns of long-gone elms, the glowering purple Malvern Hills…

The prelapsarian vision really appealed to me, as did the scene when the church floor split into a gaping ravine to the rousing climax of the

It’s hard to remember any noteworthy new TV programme in the last seven years

Dream of Gerontius. It’s small wonder that this particular Play for Today achieved cult status.

Memories, I am reliably informed, are like oil paintings. The mind constantly adds layers of paint, superimposing on the original marks the accretions of outside forces from the prevailing culture. Our memories are palimpsests, so to speak.

And so it was that the 1972 TV movie The Stone Tape acquired mythical status for me – this via the injunction of a distant relation of mine who wrote some of the few scholarly scripts for Doctor Who (which were set in classical Greece).

Donald Cotton, probably the worse for wear from whisky, proclaimed that The Stone Tape (starring Jane Asher and Michael Bryant) was a ‘literally terrifying’ film.

Since I had never seen it, it had grown in stature in my mind, over the years, like a pearl in a shell. So much so that, when staying with a friend in Shropshire, I sourced a copy and bossily insisted on a group viewing.

I was crestfallen to find it almost unwatchable. It was too shouty – the main offender was the polo-necked Bryant, whose voice with every appearance grew more percussive than an Evelyn Glennie concert.

At least the pace of The Stone Tape was slow enough to permit comprehension. Much of modern TV content is too fast for even a quickwitted teenager to follow.

And it’s de-natured. Too many shots of indoors, offices or bedrooms (all with brown sheets, for some reason). Too many changes of scene, getting into and out of cars and slamming doors. Increasingly we are also shown the protagonists going to the loo.

Mary and I were watching Griselda, about a female Colombian drug baron, on Netflix, when I accidentally pressed the wrong button on the remote and flicked to BBC Four.

Clay, Smeddum and Greenden, set in a Scottish east-coast farming community in 1976, was slow-paced. The camera lingered on the swaying tops of larch trees before panning across ploughed fields to distant blue hills.

You could almost smell the sea air. And there was the vintage actor Fulton Mackay, whom I once met in Reid’s Hotel, Madeira.

‘Mary!’ I enthused for the first time that evening. ‘This is much more culturally congenial. Let’s watch this instead!’

No answer was necessary. Mary was asleep.

Postcards from the Edge End of the road

Thanks to rising insurance and declining eyesight, Mary Kenny waves a sad farewell to her Renault Modus

It’s best if we prepare for any big life change. Sadly, I’ve been gradually preparing myself for one: to quit driving by this autumn.

I feel quite forlorn at the thought of parting with my dear little Renault Modus. I’ve almost developed that ‘soul in the machine’ idea, evoked in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

This battered little vehicle has been so loyal, hardy and constant. It’s never let me down and coped with all weathers.

It is a modest jalopy next to the shiny big ones on the road, but it’s so well loved. Saying goodbye will be hard.

The first indication came when the garage said it probably wouldn’t survive another MOT, later this year. And I must face the fact that my eyes are not what they were: I’m still legal to drive, but I notice the deterioration.

Maybe the coup de grâce came with the startling rise in insurance costs. In 2023, I paid £30.84 a month for vehicle insurance. By 2024, this had increased to £52.19.

This, I am told by someone who can do sums, represents an increase of 71 per cent. And although the car bears the occasional scratch or graze where I have veered too near to an inanimate object – a wall, say – I have made no claims to justify increased premiums.

Everyone I know complains about the rise in car insurance. Nobody seems to have a satisfactory explanation. It’s inflation; it’s the cost of labour; it’s the ‘war against the motorist’; it’s the green lobby; it’s because the insurers have the upper hand.

Like this magazine’s motoring correspondent, Alan Judd (see p.82), smarter oldies have negotiated a deal by threatening to move their account; or by haggling the insurers down a few percentage points. With persistence and persuasion, it can apparently be done, but I’m no good at that sort of thing.

So I just passively accept the charges. It’s called ‘the inertia factor’ in the business.

But now, as Frank Sinatra sang, the end is near, and I’ll have to face the final curtain in my driving career. A friend who had her licence withdrawn because of failing eyesight says she’s heartbroken, and can’t get over the loss of independence.

I know I’ll feel the same. So I’m trying to savour every day’s motoring, attentively enjoying each trip and spin, and thanking the dear little vehicle for bringing me so much pleasure over the years. Dotty?

At a gathering of old feminists a few years ago, a discussion arose over ‘What has been the greatest benefit to women in our lifetimes?’ One said, ‘The Pill.’

One said, ‘The discarding of corsets.’

And one said, ‘Every woman’s right to her own car.’ Indeed so!

Every time I have trouble with my teeth, I think of a remarkable Victorian Irishman called Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh.

He was a benign landlord, an active MP, a traveller who journeyed to Egypt, Russia, Persia and India, and an accomplished sailor, painter, angler and huntsman.

Yet he was born without legs or arms, having only stumps for limbs. He moved around in a kind of saddle basket, or on

horseback, or was carried by a servant. He also married and had six children.

Towards the end of his life – he died in 1889 – Arthur was asked what had been the greatest difficulty he had experienced. ‘Toothache,’ he said. Dental pain represented the worst physical suffering he had endured.

Small wonder dentists have become so sought after, as NHS dental services have declined over recent years. The British Dental Association reckoned, recently, that access to dental care was much better in Rwanda than in the UK. This is allegedly being addressed. Not in Bristol, where queues going round the block were pictured at a dentist’s practice.

I recently turned my thoughts to Arthur’s aperçu when I developed an excruciating abscess under a molar. After five days and nights of throbbing agony, I got to see a dentist – private, necessarily.

Praying for an extraction, I came to understand why some tormented souls have resorted to pliers to practise self-dentistry to relieve the unique pain of toothache.

Ireland, being very progressive these days, has been preparing for a referendum to add ‘durable relationships’ to the institution of marriage, which already appears in the Constitution.

The idea is that there should be no difference between families founded on the ‘institution’ of marriage and the unmarried.

So there have been many fine old arguments about what constitutes a ‘durable relationship’. Cohabitants are already recognised in law as a couple if they live in intimacy for five years, or for two years if they have children.

An experienced lawyer and legislator, Senator Michael McDowell, says that trying to define a ‘durable relationship’ will keep the lawyers and the courts busy for years. ‘Diversity and inclusion’ often gets complicated!

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Poetry and emotion on a school trip

Some school trips are pointless –particularly from an English teacher’s point of view.

Geographers can go and look at a beach. People ‘studying’ media are taken to the Harry Potter Studios and Disneyland Paris.

But to persuade the powers that be that it’s worth taking a group to the theatre in school time is well nigh impossible. Even if the play in question is one they are studying for GCSE. We can arrange trips for evenings and weekends, but the trouble is that the children we most want to come are the very ones who are least likely to give up their time.

So we were delighted to be able to take a group of 40 pupils to Bristol to Poetry Live!, a celebration of poetry with appearances by many of the poets the children are expected to study. It was not cheap at £40. So many of the pupils waiting for the bus were the usual suspects – top-set children determined to do well and to jump at every opportunity.

But there was one pupil whose appearance surprised me. He is a bottom-set boy, leader of the pack of minor rebels, walking around during lessons, on their phones. He is the first to mock himself for his own obesity, brought on in part by the heroic number of Domino’s pizzas he downs.

I feel guilty whenever I see him. When I taught him in year eight, he wrote a love poem which ended with ‘and then I’ll take you for a big fried breakfast’, and I laughed.

‘I don’t know why I’m here, miss,’ he confided. ‘But Mum just bought the ticket and I suppose if it’s going to help, I might as well do it.’ I agreed and congratulated him. That, I thought, was that.

Children do love a school trip. They love fighting for the back row in the coach. They relax with their teachers and joke and laugh as though there had never been any beef in the classroom. In an odd way, despite having to wear their uniforms, they seem a little more grown-up out of the classroom.

As soon as we arrived at the venue,

they turned into different creatures. Some of the boys were flirting with pupils from other schools. Some were making football alliances or picking goodhumoured fights.

And then, to huge cheers, the first speaker came on to the stage. ‘Some of these poets you will have studied; some will be new to you,’ he said.

By chance, I was sitting next to Domino’s Kid. ‘Nah, mate,’ he bellowed across the huge arena. ‘I’m not doing poetry. I’m doing A Christmas Carol, innit.’ I felt a faint quiver of apprehension.

Carol Ann Duffy came on. She is a trouper. She has been doing this for as long as I’ve been teaching, but always looks deeply depressed about it.

DK turned to me again. ‘What, is she reading poems? I thought she was speaking – I didn’t know that was a poem. Is that what we’re here for? Five hours of people reading poems?’

I had thought he was exaggerating his ignorance about the trip, but he wasn’t. The poem in question was one he had ‘studied’, but he didn’t even recognise it.

The lunch break came and DK said he

had not brought a packed lunch, but he’d spotted a Greggs by the theatre. We let a learning-support assistant take him to buy something – and they got back a quarter of an hour after the afternoon session started. He had decided to go to a Domino’s, further away, and had had to wait for the pizza to be cooked.

Luckily he was back for John Agard, the performance poet the children always love. DK came alive – partly, it’s true, because of the man, but also because he saw a TikTok opportunity.

So was it all worth it? The ‘good’ children who had listened in class seemed to think so. The teachers thought so, although we had all hoped that Imtiaz Dhaker would explain her impenetrable poem ‘Tissue’, whereas she just read it aloud.

And DK, having grumbled and huffed and puffed his way through most of the day, got off the bus with cheery thanks and a smile. Best of all for him (apart from the TikTok) was that he’d had the courage to ask a question of one of the poets.

So for him, too, it was a day that won’t be forgotten in a hurry.

‘Don’t be crazy, Icarus – take a travel pillow!’

sister teresa

Salvador Dalí’s agony-free crucifixion

De gustibus non disputandum is all very well in its way.

But, having just discovered that Salvador Dalí’s Crucifixion was voted Scotland’s favourite painting in 2006, I must speak out.

It is a question not so much of taste as of fittingness. Obviously I can’t convert Scotland, but I think that such a travesty of what the crucifixion is all about is asking for repudiation, especially as we now approach Good Friday.

I have always been against the prettification of the cross but never more so than recently, having just read Tom Holland’s Dominion, with its preface on crucifixion. He gives us all the hard and cruel historical facts of this most horrible of executions. Deliberately to beautify the cross is, in my view, indefensible.

Jesus’s cross is his cross in all its brutality: there was no beauty in him after he had undergone horrible mistreatment and torture: ‘He was despised and rejected by the people, a man of sorrows…’ (Isaiah 53:1).

Dalí doesn’t show us the face of Jesus, but only a head of carefully groomed hair and the foreshortened and fine-looking body of an athlete.

We have here a dream world of blue and gold, the colours of the stars in the heavens. This fantasy landscape must have involved some very careful planning, but this is not an asset when the result is sentimentality.

16th-century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross. This is more eloquent by far than Dalí’s vast canvas, mainly because it is so highly concentrated. It shows the crucified Christ from an unusual angle: we are looking down on the Son of God – hardly our place to be so doing.

There is almost nothing to it, other than its focus on tension. It is a tiny image of total self-sacrifice which would be unbearable if one did not firmly believe in the divinity of Jesus.

The cross itself is suspended above earth and sea, which is not where it belongs. It needs to be earthed. When looking at this picture, I find myself asking, ‘Has this painter bothered to think?’

It is alleged that the inspiration for this work was the tiny sketch by the

A few years ago, a visiting priest preached on Dalí’s crucifixion. He talked about standing in front of it, contemplating its beauty, which he found so moving that it took him into another world. He rounded off his sermon by saying that, despite this, he had regrettably spoken angrily to a colleague shortly after leaving the art gallery.

Was this because his contemplation was based on whimsy, rather than on authenticity? Had he been meditating on a different crucifixion, might the outcome have been otherwise?

Memorial Service Betty Boothroyd OM (1929-2023)

The service for the first female Speaker of the Commons, Lady Boothroyd, was held at St Margaret’s, Westminster.

Tony Blair’s Defence Secretary, Lord Robertson, said, ‘You didn’t mess with Betty Boothroyd. A few tried; all failed. When she said, “Call me Madam,” it wasn’t a quip. It was an order.’

Robertson said, ‘It took 17 years, three by-elections, two general elections and innumerable selection conferences before she was elected for West Bromwich West and into what was to be for her, her first love, the British Parliament. Many might wonder if a man would have had the same hurdles to

jump or indeed the same tenacity to keep going at it.’

Robertson was reminded of Nancy Reagan’s words: ‘A woman is like a teabag. You only find out its true strength when it’s in hot water.’

Former Tory MP Lord Cormack recalled her autobiography, in which she writes movingly of the loving home she shared with her parents in Dewsbury. She describes the vigorous arguments when she said she wanted to become a dancer in London. Her father, who died when she was only 19, strongly opposed her decision to go to the bright lights.

She came to realise that his view was justified but writes, ‘Although my

Tiller Girl days cured me of my showbusiness ambitions, the daily routine and synchronised high kicks and co-ordinated teamwork taught me much about the need for vigorous preparation. Politicians, like Tiller Girls, are public performers. They forget it at their peril.’

The Dean of Westminster gave the Bidding. Readings were from Lord McFall, Lord Speaker, and Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Speaker of the Commons. Susan Bullock sang Ivor Novello’s Fly Home, Little Heart. The hymns were I Vow to Thee, My Country and Jerusalem.

The Right Reverend the Lord Eames and the actress Patricia Hodge read prayers. Dame Patricia Routledge read ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

Dalí’s Crucifixion (1954)

The Doctor’s Surgery

The illness of Charles III

Sadly, a good diet and lots of exercise can’t prevent cancer dr theodore dalrymple

No one could have learned of the recent incidental finding, during a procedure for prostate enlargement, of cancer in the King without a feeling of real sorrow and commiseration.

He had ascended to the throne only 18 months earlier, at the age of 73, and this seemed an especially cruel blow: a terrible misfortune, and not just for him.

Of course we don’t know the precise diagnosis, let alone prognosis, which might yet be good, as we all hope. We are told by the Prime Minister that the cancer was caught early, and cancer caught early has a better prognosis in general than that caught late.

Incidental findings of cancer are by no means rare. In one review of patients undergoing scans for coronary artery disease, between seven and 14 per cent had findings that required further investigation, principally for cancer.

About one in 25 cancers is found incidentally – that is without prior suspicion of it – and a quarter of cases of leukaemia are diagnosed on a routine blood test, or blood tests taken for other reasons.

The life expectancy of a man aged 75 in Britain is now 12 years, meaning that he will, on average, die at the age of 87.

Life expectancy at birth is considerably lower than 87, because many men fall by the wayside en route to

The King and Queen at the London Clinic in January

that much-greater-than-Biblical span. Averages encompass a multitude of sins, so to speak, and tell us nothing about the prospects of individuals.

His Majesty is by all accounts a man who should not have fallen ill at all, if disease were always the wages of disobeying health injunctions – or rather those decreed by the latest epidemiology.

He is generally abstemious and not overweight. He exercises regularly, does not smoke, drinks sparingly – and fasts for longer than 12 hours each day.

I should be surprised if he did not eat at least five portions of fruit or vegetables per day. No appalling fast food for him! In a sense, he is an epidemiologist’s dream.

But disease does not always strike according to desert, as a punishment for something that the sufferer has done wrong in his or her life. Moreover, it is not so long ago that 75 was regarded as a good age. I can remember the days when geriatricians took charge of patients who were aged only 65 or more.

In the year of His Majesty’s birth, 1948, the life expectancy of a male born in these islands was about 66. The first state old-age pension was set in 1908 at an age (70) few men would reach

I was once asked to review several books by middle-class Americans about their fatal diseases. There was a general tone of querulousness about them, insofar as the authors had always followed medical, which is to say epidemiological, advice, to the very letter – and yet had come down with lifethreatening conditions. Surely there was a serious injustice? Who was to blame?

No regimen guarantees longevity, let alone immortality – or for that matter precludes longevity, though immortality is a different matter. No smoker, in my experience, when told that he really ought to give up smoking and is for the high jump if he doesn’t, ever fails to mention an ancient aunt who smoked 90 a day and lived to be a hundred.

This is to mistake the nature of statistical reasoning. It is true that most drunk drivers get home safely.

But a disproportionate number of drunk drivers are involved in serious accidents, and a disproportionate number of serious accidents are caused by drunk drivers.

Therefore His Majesty may have been unlucky – though let us hope not.

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I once met Myra Hindley

SIR: I was interested in ‘I Once Met Ian Brady’ (February issue) because I once worked as an agency nurse at Holloway Prison. After a few months, I looked after the inmates of the long-stay wing. On noticing a new face, I asked her name – ‘Myra Hindley’ was the bemused reply.

She looked totally different from the images I’d seen in the newspaper. She was tall and slim with dark hair and seemed quite personable.

She was a divisive figure on the wing. I remember a bucket of hot tea being thrown over her; and a couple of convicted murderers went on hunger strike to show their displeasure with her. But she also attracted a group of loyal followers.

The prison officers couldn’t believe I’d had to ask her name and never forgave me!

Yours,

Chris Rigg, Horwich, Bolton

‘I got him from the pet shop. He was half-price’

Plucky Prue Leith

SIR: I dare say many others will have responded to the sacrilege and awful offal error in Prue’s News (March issue). A bovine pluck might produce a haggis to last a year; too much for most of us. It is of course lamb pluck.

Best wishes,

John Mason, Edinburgh

‘I can’t believe you wore flip-flops’

Ich bin ein fan

SIR: With regard to Olden Life (March issue) recalling the AA roadmaps of yesteryear, at some time, circa 1960, I decided to travel by car from Manchester to Düsseldorf to meet up with friends there, whom I had met during my Army service.

With the assistance of the Automobile Association, my journey was meticulously planned with a series of cards concertinaed together as a strip, the following of which was a foolproof method of completing one’s journey. It had mileage completed and points of interest and checks en route to ensure one was on the correct path at all times.

If that was not thorough enough, it even had what were called handy German phrases. If one scrolled down the list, one phrase in German stood out and translated as ‘Doctor doctor, I have blood in my urine.’ Thankfully I never got to use it. I have not been taking The Oldie long, but what a wonderful read it is.

My kindest regards always, Eric Jones (90 years), Southport, Merseyside

Brandreth’s blue material

SIR: I greatly admire Gyles Brandreth, but there are surely topics that polite society does well to avoid? Bob Monkhouse is one thing, but his depravities surely another.

Come on, Gyles and The Oldie, raise your game a little. You can do it so well!

Sincerely,

Rob Jackson, Alton, Hampshire

‘Would you like to see the antidotes menu, sir?’

Bathtime reading

SIR: I find that the quality of The Oldie is such that in spite of being dropped in the bath and dried on the Aga it remains

The Oldie, 23–31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk

entirely readable. Yet in spite of its ablutions, Bob Monkhouse’s joke (retold by Gyles Brandreth, March issue) remains a bit filthy.

Elaine Whitesides, Market Harborough, Leicestershire

Grim trains up North

SIR: It was interesting to read Tom Hodgkinson waxing lyrical about the Elizabeth Line (Town Mouse, March issue). Apparently the trains are large, spacious, air-conditioned and speedy. Spare a thought for those of us in the North, where the likelihood of a train running on time, regardless of its age and condition, is as great as that of one’s seeing Halley’s Comet.

It seems money can be always be found for projects in Greater London, whereas in the North projects are often downgraded or cancelled before they begin.

So much for levelling up.

Paul Carr, Wakefield, West Yorkshire

‘My snoring sounds like a saw going through a metal bar’

Honour of merit

SIR: A N Wilson (March issue) thinks that the Post Office scandal shows how worthless the honours system is.

When my father left school at 14, he went to work in the GPO; he stayed there until he retired on medical grounds in his

‘The big screen really brings out the violence’

late fifties. Judged medically unfit for regular military service during the Second World War, he nevertheless joined the Post Office Battalion of the Home Guard and spent many hours guarding communications infrastructure such as sorting offices, telephone exchanges and cable stations.

He was granted only a few years of retirement; he died when he was 64.

When he retired from the Post Office, he was awarded the Imperial Service Medal for 43 years of service. It has his name round the edge. He was very proud of it, wore it occasionally at Post Office veterans’ reunions he helped organise. Today it’s worth about £30.

My late father-in-law could tell a similar story, except he was telephones rather than postal – green van rather than red, for those who remember.

So come on, Mr Wilson, don’t begrudge my dad his ISM [Imperial Service Medal]; the GPO pay wasn’t great and the hours were often unsocial, but he and a whole generation stuck with it.

He’d be appalled at what the Post Office has been turned into today.

It’s a good thing to have a system to honour people for long, decent and faithful service. The problem with our current system is that sometimes the wrong people get the wrong awards; perhaps also the wrong people are making the wrong awards for the wrong reasons. Laurence Whitford, Killyleagh, Downpatrick, Co Down

‘My alcoholic uncle could do that’

Running out of steam

SIR: Mary Killen was spot-on when she advised against taking up running in later life (March issue). Plantar fasciitis, which I used to think had something to do with politics, and the need for a knee replacement are both things that I can definitely do without.

All the same, a feature I read in a health and fitness magazine shortly after my annual check-up almost persuaded me to have a go. The writer – a year older than Queen Camilla and looking as fit as a flea – claimed that age was no barrier.

Fortunately, I read on to discover that she herself had been running on a regular basis since 1968. A brisk daily walk will have to suffice for me.

Best regards,

Maggie Cobbett, Ripon, North Yorkshire

GRACEFULLY GUIDE TO GROWING OLD

Let’s Dance! By Arlene Phillips

Prue

Leith’s lazy short cuts in the kitchen

Roger

Lewis succumbs to utter boredem

Simon Berry

knocks back the wine

Guide to Growing Old Disgracefully

April 2024

Sponsored by

Cover: Willie Rushton

Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA

Editor: Charlotte Metcalf

Design: Lawrence Bogle

Publisher: James Pembroke

Advertising: Paul Pryde, Rafe Thornhill, Jasper Gibbons

For advertising enquiries, call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095

For editorial enquiries, email: editorial@theoldie.co.uk

Among the contributors

Robert Bathurst ‘s numerous credits include Cold Feet, Toast of London and Downton Abbey. He’s been in numerous West End shows and is the Audie Award-winning natrator of audiobooks, including Dorothy L Sayers’s first three Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.

Arlene Phillips is a celebrated choreographer and director who shot to fame when Mary Whitehouse said her dance troupe Hot Gossip was too racy for television. She’s instantly recognisable as the TV judge on shows like Strictly and Dancing on Ice

Simon Berry sold wine for his family firm, Berry Bros. & Rudd, for 40 years. At 60, he retired to write plays. The Dame and the Showgirl, about Dame Edith Sitwell meeting Marilyn Monroe, starring Emma Thompson, is on Audible and will hopefully reach a stage near you this year.

Avril Groom left the frenetic world of fashion for the slightly calmer one of watches and jewellery. She edits Country and Town House’s watch and jewellery supplement and contributes to the Telegraph, Time, FT and How to Spend It

04 Farewell lunch

Long live the long lunch

Rowley Leigh, Gavin Rankin, Sally Clarke and Brian Clivaz

06 Let’s dance

Keep moving

Arlene Phillips

09 What’s the point?

Succumb to boredom

Roger Lewis

10 Lazy cook Shameless short cuts

Prue Leith

11 Memory test Learning lines

Robert Bathurst

16 Racy living

Centenarians’ secrets

Patricia Owtram

Christian Lamb

Race a vintage car

Dress to shock

Ditch the

Liz Hodgkinson

20 Ditch home for a hotel

Join the young fashionistas

Derek Frost

21 Hit the high note

Sing yourself healthy

Mary Kenny

23 Watch out

How to buy a watch

Avril Groom

24 Frisky Ancient Greeks

Be less inhibited Harry Mount

25 Chuck me

Take up judo

Mark Law

27 Slim risk

Beware of miracle drugs

Garry White

30 Knock it back

Drink more

Simon Berry

The long goodbye to the long lunch

Four restaurateurs celebrate and mourn the demise of the delightful art of indulgent lunching

Rowley Leigh

Covid just about killed lunch. The patient was already on the critical list: anyone who dined between 2008 and 2020 could see the signs: the absence of wine, the presence of briefcases and ‘business papers’, the prevalence of ‘healthy food’, the disappearance of the cheese board in favour of ‘Just the bill, thank you.’ Lunch, in all its sybaritic splendour, and sense of time suspended, lunch as a celebration of idleness and debauchery, was already dead. Covid merely administered the last rites. When Le Gavroche, the last bastion of gourmandism, announced it would no longer open for lunch, it was merely confirming our worst fears. Lunch was dead.

Lunch – as a celebration of idleness and debauchery – was already dead

I spent my working life either cooking lunch or eating it. If wine merchants were the lancers in the battle to preserve lunch, the valiant infantry were the fourth estate. At Kensington Place, a raffish crowd from Associated Newspapers would assemble on Fridays on Table 9, a large oval capable of harbouring up to ten escapees from the nearby Rothermere fort. Lunch would begin fairly promptly and gently drift, like a Viking funeral pyre, across a lake of gossip and intrigue, amours and alcoholic dementia, through the afternoon. The more senior officers of this battalion

came three or four times a week. One particular convive was so alarmed by his new editor’s ability to recall him to his desk before he could clutch at his Martini that he was convinced she had paid a member of our staff to snitch on him as he arrived. She probably had. The puritans were on the march.

Rowley Leigh is a founder of modern British cooking

Brian Clivaz

I am delighted that maestro Jeremy King, he of Wolseley, Caprice and Ivy fame, is to take the helm at Simpson’s-inthe-Strand.

Founded in 1828 and owned by The Savoy Group for over a century, Simpson’s is without doubt the greatest English eating house and one of the last bastions of the long lunch.

A good, long lunch should start with a visit to the bar. To avoid any, ‘Shall we go straight through to the table?’ moments, you should arrive well in advance of your guests. A glass of champagne or a gin and tonic is a good, innocuous start. Three courses, with wines, a pause, then cheese - preferably a truckle of Stilton - with port.

At Simpson’s, the ‘Wednesday Boys’ arrived every week at noon

At five prompt, they returned to the dining room for the Early Bird pretheatre menu and another carafe or two

prompt; corner table reserved in the bar, a couple of rounds, followed by a three-course lunch with carafes of house white and red, then port or Grand Marnier. Back to the bar for post-prandials. Then, at five prompt, they returned to the dining room for the ‘Early Bird’ pre-theatre menu and another carafe or two. Then a stroll over Waterloo Bridge to catch the 19:42 to New Malden. Job done.

The Friday Club came on the first Friday of each month, and started in the bar with coffee, port and brandy. Then to the restaurant for steamed treacle roll, and sticky wines, followed by roast beef or lamb from the trolley, with claret, then smoked salmon and potted shrimps with Chablis. Then back to the bar for gins and tonics and champagne.

I well remember the Oldie lunches at Simpson’s: Denis Healey, Roy Hattersley, Barbara Castle, Willie Whitelaw, Spike Milligan, Clive Jenkins….now they knew how to lunch!’

Brian Clivaz owns L’Escargot in Soho

Sally Clarke

Today, just when I thought that the big lunch was a thing of the past, for no apparent reason, everyone who enjoys multicourse lunches, accompanied by a variety of wines by the glass, bottle and even magnum, seemed to arrive at lunchtime.

When Clarke’s opened 40 years ago, the ‘normal’ lunch crowd was Kensington-based, male, white, middle-aged, suited and polishedshoed, dining out on their business accounts (antique furniture dealers, estate agents, bankers or journalists). Back then, it was gin

and tonics followed by claret, then an Armagnac or two. We’d often be sweeping out the stragglers around teatime, or worse, when lighting the candles for dinner.

Nowadays we’re blessed with a broad customer base. Many are ‘regulars’: either locals visiting us twice a week or those further afield, four times a year – and even they are ‘regulars’ because whenever they’re in London, they come to us.

We’d often be sweeping out the stragglers around tea time, or worse, when lighting the candles for dinner

Around one table recently sat a very famous Scottish actor, two beautiful actresses, a ‘pop’ singer, a business ‘magnate’ and a retired army major. Their chosen wines included Dom Perignon vintage 2012, Meursault Les Narvaux, Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey 2017, Château Magdalaine, Grand Cru Classé 1982, Château Petrus 1993, Ridge Montebello, 1994 and Château Doisay Daene, Sauternes 1953 to accompany dessert. All

behaved incredibly - and surprisingly - well, taxis were called to carry them safely home and we managed to open again just in time for dinner.

Sally Clarke owns Clarke’s in Kensington

Gavin Rankin

I was kindly invited by Bruno Borie to visit his Château Ducru Beaucaillou, where I found myself, among other restaurateurs, in the company of a large number of sommeliers. Starting early, we tried 36 wines and I dutifully smelled, swilled and spat my way through the morning. Until the last six, which Bruno, with Biblical precedent, had kept until last.

No spitting for me then, (a strategic error), and I entered the enormous lunch tent, unsteadily, with the leaden feeling given to the face after peaking too soon. Four huntsmen in full fig blew us to our tables with French hunting horns.

Alarmed but game, I found a further six wine glasses before me, whose contents I found impossible to resist. Becoming ever more

The way we were: William Pitt and Napoleon carve up the endangered ‘plumb pudding’ (Gillray, 1805)

expansive during the magnificent meal, I waved a hand in emphasis, setting off a domino reaction with my filled glasses. I somehow managed to stem the line but unaccountably the domino effect started up again on the other side, too far away for me to intervene. The clattering line swept on and on at surprising speed past the distinguished assembly, until the last glass, like a scene from Disney’s Fantasia, deposited itself with a sort of pirouette, into the white silken lap of a prominent Bordelaise matriarch.

I found a further six wine glasses before me whose contents I found impossible to resist

I tried to blame my French neighbour, but he wasn’t having any of it – so much for the entente cordiale. Thereafter, much subdued, I carefully avoided eye contact until it was time to be led away. A larger wine order for my restaurant than foreseen was placed on my return to London. Gavin Rankin owns Bellamy’s in Mayfair

ALAMY

Let’s dance

Choreographer, dancer and TV judge Arlene Phillips dances for joy

Dancing has allowed me to grow old both gracefully and disgracefully. It’s been a joy - well, until I hit 80 last year. Suddenly my brain and body had minds of their own, and I was furious that they no longer obeyed my every word.

As soon as I could walk, I was responding to music by moving around the living room, which my parents called ‘dancing’. It still seems a minor miracle that children dance without ever having seen or been taught a step. That was me. I fell in love with dance and dance fell in love with me.

I am often asked if anyone can dance and I refer them to John Travolta in in Saturday Night Fever. One minute, he’s walking down the street; the next, he’s picking up the rhythm and then he’s in a huge disco with crowds of people dancing the hustle. So, yes, you can turn walking in time to music to dance in a heartbeat. Try it!

Talking of hearts, do you realise how good dancing is for your heart? Start listening to music you like, let your body relax and gently bounce in time to the music, gradually transferring your weight from right to left, using your hips and gently swinging your arms to keep time.

When you feel ready, switch to your favourite upbeat song and just keep moving, even for ten minutes – an easy way to to take care of oldie hearts.

My dream was to be a graceful ballerina.

I tried but money was scarce because my father was frequently unwell and couldn’t sustain a full-time job. Dancing lessons, while supporting three children, were far too costly. By 15, along with school and a daily paper round, I worked in a bagel shop and a café on Sundays. I was determined to dance, even if it meant paying for

my own lessons, but all this changed when my mother passed away from leukemia just three months after her diagnosis.

After that, I became even more determined and gained a grant from the best dance school in Manchester.

It was run by Muriel Tweedy, an ex-ballerina, then 70. She ruled with an iron fist and a cane, striking out at the backs of legs or stomach and poking it at your feet to force them to turn out with heels together.

It was painful but I loved it. I was discovering all genres of dance - tap, modern, ballroom, Latin, jazz and, after seeing a production of West

choreograph a small TV commercial for Lionsmaid ice cream. The milkmaid was played by Miriam Margolyes, certainly growing old disgracefully today. Soon I was choreographing commercials, including Hollywoodstyle productions for Dr Pepper and endless sexy jeans commercialsone starring a half-naked Sting.

Then I formed the dance group, Hot Gossip. It became a notorious sensation after we appeared on The Kenny Everett Show and Mary Whitehouse proclaimed us too sexy for television. After a complaint in Parliament, we were on the cover of every UK newspaper.

Arlene, 80, is still dancing. Below, in her Hot Gossip days

, I decided I would study jazz – and it had to be in London, where I’d heard the streets were paved with gold. Fortunately, I struck gold when I met Molly Molloy at the newly opened Dance Centre. She taught

scholarship to her classes. She also found me a place to live with her friend, director Ridley Scott. I began baby-sitting and cleaning his house. Eventually he asked me to

I danced a naked pas de deux in Oh! Calcutta! at the Royalty Theatre and played the only female role in London and on Broadway in the drag drama Flowers, created by the outrageous Lindsay Kemp.

Dance allows you to hold onto your inner youth genes

Dance keeps you fit and stimulates your heart and soul. Dance allows you to hold onto your inner youth genes. Dance is your teacher and guide, keeping your brain active as you move forward then backwards - on tiptoe, on flat feet, with knees bent. It pushes you numerically as you count your rhythms and join step eight back to step three and forward to five. Make dance your friend by dancing freely round the room to Philip Glass. I guarantee instant love and tears of joy.

Let’s raise a glass to oldies past and present, who, like me, will tell you, you’re never to old to dance!

Thank you, Angela Rippon, Chita Rivera, Rita Moreno, Gillian Lynn and Marie Rambert, still turning cartwheels at 100, and to the great Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, neither of whom ever stopped dancing.

What’s the point?

Just succumb to boredom, suggests Roger Lewis

As Sir Les Patterson might have phrased it, my boredom threshold is so low, it could parachute out of a snake’s bottom and still freefall.

I have given up on more books than I have finished – and I can’t stand literary novels or most poetry.

I stopped going to the theatre when what I most looked forward to was the interval. Shakespeare, I’ve decided, is frightfully overrated: actors spouting yards of gush, little of which sinks in.

On my few (these days) visits to the cinema, I spend much of the film glancing at my watch. Audiences are always drinking and snacking, or checking their phones. Television is tedium, with its police procedural dramas, camp chat shows or programmes starring Toby Jones and Olivia Coleman.

I used to take refuge in popular classics, but they are often incredibly boring. Sid James’s lechery isn’t comical; it’s dead creepy. Monty Python is as amusing as a baby’s open grave. Harry Secombe, expostulating as Neddy Seagoon, must be the most tiresome entertainer ever, next to Roy Castle – all that forced, pop-eyed jollity.

Sport has always bored me. The way I got around growing up in rugby-obsessed Wales was to say I preferred bullfighting.

Kingsley Amis said, ‘Golf bores me to the point of hatred,’ and I absolutely understand what he meant – not just the game itself, but the men who play it, their wretched clothes and clubhouse bonhomie.

If the elderly are on the whole unspeakably boring, it’s because they go on about their ailments.

I once spent Christmas with my late grandmother, whose sole topics of conversation were hips, bowels, hospital appointments, tablets and strokes. She was also stone deaf, which was additionally frustrating and boring.

I stopped making phone calls about 20 years ago, but that hasn’t stopped my Auntie Goffin. Last week, when she phoned, I handed the instrument to my wife and went in the rain to Marks and Spencer’s

sale. When I returned, she was still on the phone. I went out again, to the charity shop. Came back. Still on the line. I ended up looking at tropical fish and reptiles in the pet shop. My wife was drained but there’s no point saying, ‘I’ve got to go. There’s a chop under the grill,’ because Auntie Goffin never listens.

I used to know an acidulous queen who was even more boring –we changed our number twice to try shaking him off. It was all malicious gossip, gleaned from the sort of parties I never attend. He sent me

Life, or my own anyway, consists of little more than continuous exposure to boredom

735 emails down the years, though they’ve stopped – maybe he died.

As Kenneth Williams said of Frankie Howerd, ‘He is undoubtedly a very boring man. Loves talking, but there is no really cultivated mind.’

On the other hand, boredom and chit-chat can be transcendent. Hence the plays, sketches and monologues of Alan Bennett and Victoria Wood, who found lyrical beauty in domestic trivialities, like

knitting patterns, buckets, surgical stockings, gravy, stairlifts and hairnets. Caroline Aherne inherited the tradition, getting Mrs Merton to say, for example,’Exactly 15 years today since my hysterectomy, but I don’t like to dwell.’

Generally, nevertheless, life, or my own anyway, consists of little more than a continuous exposure to boredom and the threat of it (bad meals, dull company, monotonous journeys and traffic jams) – unless it’s worse than that, and boredom, anguish, the doldrums, languor, sloth, and the rest are symptoms of clinical depression?

Evelyn Waugh, fearing lassitude and a lack of stimulus, retreated to Combe Florey, the squire with his ear trumpet, and died, in 1966, aged only 62. It might be said he died of ruthless boredom.

Similarly, George Sanders, in 1972, aged 65, swallowed an overdose of barbiturates and wrote in his suicide note, ‘Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored.’

I recognise the symptoms – a temperamental restlessness; a psychological malaise; a sharp appreciation of the despair and pointlessness of everyday life, instanced by manilla envelopes, pre-paid funeral plans, blood tests, airport security queues, letters about my diabetes from Dr Fortunati.

Peter Cook, having looked at the world, drank himself to death. Kenneth Williams, depressed when not manic, made another sharp exit.

Philip Larkin, though scared of dying, said he was tired of living. Likewise, Tony Hancock, who, in his final agony, explained, ‘Things have gone too wrong too many times.’

Willie Rushton returned his ashes to London in an urn in a Qantas holdall, which the air hostess placed in First Class. That detail makes me laugh anyway, as does Willie’s reply to the Heathrow customs officer who asked what was in the holdall.

‘Tony Hancock,’ replied Willie, pointing at the urn.

Roger Lewis is author of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (riverrun)

Yawn, yawn, yawn... Joseph Ducreux’s 1783 self-portrait

Confessions of a lazy cook

Take shameless short cuts in the kitchen, says Prue Leith

Until my mother was in her seventies, I’d never heard her swear, but in her old age she started cussing like a trooper. I remember her repeatedly lambasting her sewing machine with the pinking shears and yelling, ‘You absolute bugger, you f******g well WILL work, you WILL work!’.

Abandoning the principles of a lifetime is liberating. Having almost never bought a ready meal, nor eaten junk and always cooked from scratch, I’m discovering that I’m now a lot less fussy.

Cooking for me and my husband is increasingly an assembly job –usually something on toast.

Mind you, if you are throwing things together, they need to be good things. It’s helpful that today’s ready-prepped food is much better than it used to be and there’s more good stuff to be had.

The toast has to be made from decent bread – neither limp and tasteless Mother’s Pride nor tough sourdough that is all huge holes and crust. The baked beans need to be Heinz, not some watery own brand.

mustard on top; left-over panettone, toasted and topped with a banana fried in butter, vanilla ice-cream, hazelnuts and a splash of brandy – all bliss.

The young don’t go in for formal dinner parties. They haven’t the time for all that tidying, finding hand towels for the loo, arranging flowers, polishing the silver, fitting candles into candlesticks, chilling the fizz and uncorking the red - to say nothing of laying the table, deciding who sits where and cooking three courses. I like it, but it’s a hell of a marathon.

I prefer the ‘kitchen supper’ trend where no one dresses up if they don’t want to. There’s no ‘placement’, only two courses and they can be Spag Bol followed by cheese. The cook has time to sit with guests instead of stressing in the kitchen, and the simpler the food, the better.

Some of the best supper dishes are the quickest. To make Smoked Mackerel and Spinach Pasta, boil

Baked beans on toast can be a treat, not a sign of desperation

of fake caviar (lumpfish roe) from a jar. These days, the consommé often doesn’t set. To test, put it in the fridge. If it remains liquid, warm it slowly with a teaspoon of gelatine or four sheets of gelatine until the gelatine has melted.

Another good cheat is homemade Nando’s Chicken, miles better than from Deliveroo. Buy Nando’s Medium Peri-Peri sauce, smear it all over a really good chicken. (Sorry, I know a £20 chicken is four times pricier than a supermarket cheapo, but it’s also four times juicer and more flavoursome).

Roast it until a skewer glides into the thigh. Serve with baby potatoes tossed in butter and a packet of salad leaves jollied up with a handful of mixed seeds and some French dressing.

My family’s favourite pud is trifle. But I cheat all the way. I spread slices of any leftover cake thickly with any jam, soak them in sherry, brandy, rum or whisky (or any of those liqueurs forgotten in the back of the cupboard).

Next comes the custard, straight out of a packet and mixed three parts custard to one of double cream. I prefer packet to tinned custard, and even to fresh custard from the chilled shelves which is delicious but too liquid to hold its shape. And it’s years since I made the real thing. I then top it with more double cream, whipped this time.

And if you take the trouble to add a few fried lardons or good-quality sausage and a pinch of chilli, baked beans on toast can be a treat, not a sign of desperation.

Almost anything that tastes good on a plate, tastes better on toast: Caesar salad on fried bread; yesterday’s roast lamb or beef, finely sliced and piled on toast with a drizzle of gremolata or American

tagliatelle for ten minutes, then add a couple of balls of frozen spinach, bring back to the boil and cook for another minute, then drain. Flake the flesh of a smoked mackerel into it. Then a few turns of black pepper (no salt, the fish is probably salty enough). That’s it. Done. Delicious.

Or there’s this throwback to the sixties. Tinned consommé, set in a little bowl, covered with soured cream and topped with a teaspoon

Then scatter the top with anything I can find: chopped dried apricots, mixed peel, chocolate truffles, glacé cherries, walnuts or pecans, freeze dried raspberries, mint sprigs, fresh berries or orange segments. Any of this – even all of it together – works a treat.

These days, I only cook elaborately and classically very rarely, and for the pleasure of it. Otherwise, I’m shameless. My next book will be called ‘Life’s too short to stuff a mushroom’, a title I nicked from the great Shirley Conran.

Prue Leith’s collection of her Oldie columns, Bliss on Toast, is out now

Once more unto the breach

Robert Bathurst is back on stage – and learning his lines

‘How did you learn all those lines?’ is often the slightly unsatisfactory audience response to a show.

Actors take it as a given that if you’re going to get on your hind legs for an hour or two in front of a thousand people or, in the case of my latest show in a Soho pub, about 70, you need to be on top of the material.

It’s that pressure which drives you. If I tried to learn a one-hour speech, or just a poem, to be shared only with my bathroom mirror, it would be next to impossible. There would be no looming threat of the temple-throbbing Execution Walk onto the stage to perform it for the first time.

When I come to look back on my career - which I don’t want to do quite yet - I’ll probably conclude that in several theatre projects I’ve given myself an excessively hard time.

In the eighties, I did a two-hour monologue on cannibalism at a Chelsea pub theatre. In the early 2000s, I did another solo stage show, as Alex the banker from Peattie & Taylor’s Telegraph cartoon strip, an 80-minute performance with cartoon animation.

I spent much of the 2010s preparing and performing a 90-minute stage adaptation of two books by the poet Christopher Reid, again with Peattie animation but performed as a two-hander.

Back solo, I’m currently doing occasional runs of Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell in the bar of his old boozer, Soho’s The Coach & Horses. It lasts an hour and I do two shows a night.

Each actor has their own way to learn scripts. Lists are helpful and get learned first with a handy mnemonic. Verbs are key to driving the process along and little bridges between sections can unlock the next sequence.

First-night nerves can’t be trusted. They’re all about whether you’re going to foul up, forget stuff and look stupid. Once the show has run a week or two, the nature of those nerves changes. The main tension is whether the play will work.

All anxiety about command of the lines has gone. It’s the best feeling to know an hour or two of material inside out.

Those shows, and others, have been big learns, and some, perhaps all, have been narrow squeaks. The cannibalism gig, Judgement by Barry Collins, was frightening. I rehearsed with director Paul Jepson for three weeks but, with just days to go, the lines hadn’t begun to stick.

Two days before the play opened, we began walking circuits of Brockwell Park, trying to learn it. Round and round we went each day, till well after dusk and Paul could no longer prompt me from the book.

Phrases absorbed became paragraphs learned. Paragraphs became whole pages but it was like an exploded jigsaw in my mindnothing connected. Then at about 6pm on the second day, with the first show the following night, it occurred to me that the monologue had begun to knit and we were heading for safety - ignominy averted.

Forgetting lines on stage is hideous, but sometimes there are

Forgetting lines on stage is hideous but sometimes there are ways to ride the problem, unseen by the audience

ways to ride the problem, unseen by the audience. In the Alex show, I had a bottle of water at the side of the stage next to the proscenium. When, in the first couple of shows, the lines went, I pretended I needed a drink. Half on-stage and half off-, I could swig while producer Eleanor Lloyd whispered my next cue.

I don’t know if learning swathes of material and having a busy mind actually help the ageing brain. I think of Iris Murdoch, struck at 77, despite her genius. There is, however, great satisfaction to be had in challenging oneself to learn.

In one group of friends (not actors) each person learns a poem every month and performs it. Prompt copies are allowed but they all try to commit them to memory, part of the perverse pleasure being that it would be much easier not to.

One aspect of the Jeffrey Bernard show is that it is performed only occasionally. This presents the challenge of keeping it in my head.

Oddly, the mind helps by retaining something I know I’ll need to be repeating before long, whereas when I know that a play is finished for good, the lines can disappear within a week.

‘How did you learn all those lines?’ It’s not a bad reaction really; better than any pitying looks I’d get if I hadn’t.

Details of Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell at www.jeffreyplay.com

Robert as Jeff Bernard, in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell at the Coach & Horses, 2024

Don’t tell

Never reveal or act your age, says Mary Killen

In 2010, I watched a four-part BBC documentary called The Young Ones.

Langer’s book, Counterclockwise - How to think yourself younger and healthier had just been published. The ubiquitous Dr Michael Mosley and Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer, were overseeing an experiment.

Six celebrities, Liz Smith, Lionel Blair, Dickie Bird, Sylvia Syms, Derek Jameson and Kenneth Kendall, all then in their 70s or 80s, agreed to spend time living as though it were their heyday - 1975 - to see if they could ‘trick’ their minds and bodies into rejuvenation.

A country retreat had been retro-fitted, as it were, with authentic 70s decor and equipment. The TV would show only 70s programmes and the available music would be LPs from the early 70s.

The celebrities would dress in 1970s clothes and would only eat 1975 food: cornflakes and bangers and mash, for example.

again and, crucially, reliving their heydays over a sustained period.

Why, I myself was briefly rejuvenated when David Cameron walked back onto the world stage for the first time since 2016. I couldn’t think why I was so pleased to see him but then I realised it was because it reminded me of the days when I was seven years younger than I am now.

The experiment showed that the celebrities did indeed go from doddering to walking with more of a spring in their steps. Their moods improved, their health improved, they looked younger and some of their arthritic fingers even straightened out, giving enhanced flexibility.

The findings were not published in a peer-reviewed journal but it was no surprise that the participants felt younger. They must have adored the social aspect of being shacked up with fellow showbiz folk, being in the limelight

documentary was grist to my mill. The speed of your cognitive and physical decline is inextricably linked to your own expectations of how that decline is going to play out. Mind over matter is everything.

Around the same time, we went to a 50th birthday party where virtually all the fellow guests were also 50. No matter how good a specimen you are yourself, there is a profound reality check when you are faced with the general levels of decrepitude in others of your exact vintage. A memento mori is not helpful in keeping up morale. Such gatherings should always be multigenerational to pre-empt the ‘graveyard smash’ vibe.

Joan Collins blocked her ears when Louis Theroux tried to compliment her on being 90 in his interview series. She says, ‘First of all, I don’t even feel my age. I don’t even talk about it. I don’t think about it. Everybody’s gotten older except me.’

‘I never think about my age – it’s not relevant’

Richard Dawkins, 82

Clearly this is a successful policy. The absurdly juvenile-looking Richard Dawkins, 82, is the same. ‘I never think about my age – it’s not relevant,’ he says.

But not acting or thinking about your age is difficult if you live with a contemporary who groans when he gets out of chairs, talking about aches and pains and how he’s unable to do certain things because he’s too old. And how he can’t remember names of people and things they’ve known all their lives.

They must be trained to drop the topic if we don’t want our own optimism and vitality to be sapped.

Don’t, as Virginia Ironside, The Oldie’s agony aunt, advises, signal your age with walking sticks and glasses dangling from neck ropes.

Instead, take balancing exercises, as Prince Philip did, to strengthen your core. Get lenses or take a tip from Paul McCartney, whose eye exercises can be viewed on YouTube. Because of the Beatle having done eye yoga, he has never needed glasses.

You do not want to be your own Goebbels-like propaganda minister. Don’t pronounce once an hour that you have health conditions appropriate for your age, or that your memory is going – of course it is, because of your age – or that you can no longer move fluidly because you are whatever age you are.

Don’t keep saying things like, ‘Well, at my age I can’t be expected to do X or Y’. Don’t say, ‘The only social events I go to these days are memorial services and funerals.’

Don’t keep a running commentary when the television is on or you are travelling by train saying things like, ‘In the old days, that would never have happened.’

These aren’t the old days. They are the new days. The past is over. Get on with the present whether you like it or not.

Mary Killen and Giles Wood wrote Giles and Mary: Country Life

older except me’ Joan Collins, 90

Rock ’n’ Roll Retirement

Move into a glamorous riverside community – and write a memoir, says Paul Davis

Iheard the news today.

Then I rolled over and went back to sleep. Allegedly, I have retired –well, not quite.

A year ago, I moved from rural France to Riverstone in Fulham. It’s a new agerestricted (65+) retirement community next to the Thames. Community it is; retiring it is not.

Such developments have received mixed press in the UK. I don’t understand why. Other countries seem to design them better and they’re more than popular amongst senior citizens. But then London now has Riverstone.

Saatchi Gallery and Cadogan Hall. I never was good at twiddling my thumbs.

While the pandemic was tragic for so many, I was lucky. The breakdown of my second marriage coincided with the first lockdown. I retreated to live alone in the French countryside, walking in the hills, growing and cooking vegetables and writing.

More time is the best part of retirement, not getting up at 6.30 everyday to commute to work. No more jangling alarm clock. Waking plays a different tune. Roll over under a warm duvet and enjoy an extended involvement with a downy pillow. I’ll make the bed later. It’s my apartment – I can do as I like.

If it’s a sunny morning when I open the curtains, I’ll go for a walk by the river. If the tide is rising, the salt sea air can be scented, now that the gin factory has gone. If the day looks gloomy, I head for the swimming pool – it’s only 37 paces from my front door.

Twenty minutes of lengths, a quick splash in the hydro pool jets, the sauna and steam room, a selection of stretches and breathing exercises get oxygen into the system. It’s a better hangover cure than a spicy Bloody Mary.

Pop along for an award-winning flat white at the espresso bar and catch up with a few resident friends.

A and B are off around South America tomorrow and C gets back from New York next week. I wonder how she navigated the Big Apple in a wheelchair – she is one strong lady.

My new best friend is D, entertainingly indefatigable, sharp-witted and well informed. He’s 91. The other day, we popped up to see the Hockney show at the Lightroom and have lunch at Coal

After a year in residence, it’s time for my major wellness review. I am officially one year younger

Drops Yard. I needed a rest after non-stop conversation.

After a year in residence, it’s time for my major wellness review. I am officially one year younger. How’s that for time management?

Back in my apartment, emails call for attention. Retirement? How did any of us oldies find time for work?

I’ve just published my memoir, Mr Chelsea. A series of promotional talks to different societies around London is keeping my brain whizzing and meeting a multitude of interesting people.

Once upon a time, I designed recording studios, houses and touring stage sets for Roxy Music, The Moody Blues, Duran Duran and Ringo Starr.

My involvement with rock ’n’ roll started by doing lightshows for bands, culminating with The Who and Pink Floyd. There are lots of irresponsible stories across the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s – oops, four decades of rock ’n’ roll and I was supposed to be an architect. There was lots of that, too - mostly reinventing over a hundred buildings in Chelsea; much of Sloane Street, the new Duke of York Square,

I was not alone. Everyone was scribbling away at their life story. Writing a memoir delivers a particular catharsis.

Delving back through our lives gives perspective. Trawling the past, recalling anecdotes, reliving achievements, successes and failures, friends and passions and painting pictures with words. Was it a life well-lived? Have you told an entertaining story?

I enjoyed the graft to reach publication: editing, laying out, avoiding ‘orphan words’. How many titles and cover designs can you labour over? Then your baby arrives fully formed. It’s already a grown-up, – no chance to influence its character or personality. It’s not a baby; it’s a book. Now it has become an opportunity for reinvention, an active present and planning an exciting future. But giving birth did take time, energy, love, passion and commitment. Just like life.

Suddenly, it’s Tuesday. Better get to the cinema bar. Chris and Claudia (concierge team) are preparing a selection of cocktails and helping us to mix, shake and stir. A rum and ginger punch, Adonis, followed by a couple of White Russians and it’s time to slide slowly back to my flat.

Last time, we learnt the difference between Martini recipes: classic, Vesper and dirty. Useful for the next time Mr Bond drops by.

Paul Davis is author of Mr Chelsea: A Life in Rock ’n’ Roll & Architecture from the King’s Road to Tokyo www.liverstoneliving.com

Paul lives it up at Fulham’s Riverstone

We shall never surrender

Christian Lamb, 103, and Patricia Owtram, 100,were WWII heroes – and they’re still having the time of their lives

Christian Lamb

At 103, people often ask me if I have any rules that allow me to live so long. I can’t say that I do, but the thing is to go on enjoying myself and try not to think about how many people I depend on.

Since I first fell over, cracking all sorts of bones, I do exercises taught me by a magic physio, including how to negotiate stairs and allowing me to approach taxis.

My daughter, Felicity, found me a selection of carers, nearly all from South Africa, who make delicious fried sandwiches with melted butter. With careful weeding, they have become friends.

The way my family celebrated my 100th birthday still astonishes me. Felicity invited my descendants, including 15 greatgrandchildren, to a lunch party at

Going down with a plane would suit me very well

her house. Two days later, about 20 friends gathered for drinks at my flat. On the day itself, I had a tea party with a magnum of champagne and a huge cake, a gift from Searcy’s of Sloane Street, who made my wedding cake 77 years before.

The toasts and speeches were so flattering that I began to wonder if they still referred to me.

In 1943, I was stranded in Bath as a newly appointed plotting officer required in Plymouth.

A delightful Polish flight officer and RAF instructor, with whom I’d consorted at a party the night before, offered to take me back in the ‘old crate’. He meant his aeroplane, and I accepted rapturously. Such a flight might sound ordinary now, but then it was most daring.

At my rescuer’s disposal was a Miles Magister training plane with two seats, one behind the other - in the open air of course - held together by wood and a kind of papier-mâché. With my parachute on my back, we set off, looking out for and overtaking the train I had missed. My pilot made the trip extra-thrilling by dive-bombing cows or anything that took his fancy. I was hoping he might loop-the- loop, but just as well he didn’t or I might have fallen out.

At 103, flying low over the Tamar Estuary was an experience I have long hoped to relive. I don’t care about the risks – I’ve got to die of something - and going down with a plane would suit me very well.

Having recently written a book Beyond the Sea, bailing out and going down in a blaze of glory would attract great publicity!

I can’t simply sit in an armchair and wait for the end. So the prospect of another plane ride filled me with delight. How would I get in one, now that I’m no longer a youngster? Luckily, my able grandson, Jamie, lifted me into my cockpit (and hauled me out again afterwards). I enjoyed every minute with my magnanimous Miles Magister host/pilot as the strong, fresh wind rushed through my wildest dream.

me out again afterwards). I enjoyed every minute with my Magister

host/pilot as

Top: Christian Lamb, 103, about to take o in a Miles Magister. Left: as a Wren in 1942

It’s totally against my principles to give in. I shall keep going and try to keep the marbles afloat. Aside from the 2024 D-Day anniversary and the chance to relive my landing-craft plotting days, I’d like to be at my daughter’s 80th. The future is full of possibilities. I can’t wait for them to begin.

Christian Lamb is author of Beyond the Sea: A Wren at War

Patricia Owtram

One doesn’t expect to live for a century. It seems to have happened so fast. When you reach 100, people treat you like a delicate piece of china, which takes a bit of managing but I’m careful not to be considered a Methuselah. If you’ve enjoyed life, you hope it will continue as long as you’re healthy and not lost your hearing too much.

On September 8th 1939, less than a week after the declaration of war, I wrote in my diary, ‘Daddy’s 40th birthday! Why should we grow old – shrewish middle age: shaking, half-dead old age? Why spoil a joyful memory of a proper life, full-blooded youth, by the anticlimactic ending of slow decay?’

How I’d like to tell that 16-year-old that growing old really isn’t so bad. On the cusp of ‘shrewish middle age’, my father had much ahead of him,

I’m not content for adventure to pass me by

including his three years as prisoner of war. In my forties, I had a BBC career and organised interviews with the Apollo Mission astronauts. Their courage was so inspiring that, though I’d not have gone to the moon then, I’d probably go now, given the chance. I would want confirmation I’d get back.

As a child, I was often ill with TB, which should have precluded my entry to the WRNS. Luckily, my conversational German inducted me into a secret world of interception as a special duties Wren. There were 400 of us in Y Service Brigade, headed by Lt. Freddie Marshall. Today only my friend Pam Harding and I remain.

At a reunion about 20 years ago, Freddie wrote to his ‘Freddie’s Fairies’, ‘Like all good fairies you shall live forever.’ Pam and I seem to be doing so.

‘It might have been worse! It might have been very much worse!’

I considered calling my memoir by that title.

This attitude and a readiness to embrace opportunity, shared by my late sister Jean, remain strong. I’m not content for adventure to pass me by. Nor were we when serving in the war or hitchhiking through Europe afterwards.

After speaking at a history festival recently, Jean and I spotted a Bugatti (pictured) like one our uncle had. Despite ‘Don’t Touch’ signs, Joan climbed in. ‘I’m sorry, this is a 1928 vintage!’ cried an usher. ‘Well, I’m a 1925 – so we fit well together,’ responded Jean.

How I miss her! She was in the SOE in Egypt and Italy but it took us 40 years to ask each other, ‘By the way, what did you do in the war?’ We signed the Official Secrets Act within a year of one another.

Our childhood nanny, Beebee, taught us that whatever disaster befell one, one must repeat the mantra,

whatever disaster repeat the mantra,

Left: The sisters during the war

the

Being asked for a signed book by nice Boy George after being on the Jeremy Vine show and receiving an award from Gyles Brandreth both prove how interesting life can continue to be in triple figures. It seems a little over the top to be around so long, like the giant tortoise on Saint Helena. Still, no-one wants to go when there’s still the promise of spring.

Patricia Owtram was Oldie Secret Agent at the 2023 Oldie Awards. She’s co-author of Codebreaking Sisters and Century Sisters with her late sister Jean

Top: Patricia, 100, with her late sister Jean seated in a 1928 Bugatti.

Speed up!

Abandon comfort and climb into a vintage car, says Matthew Bell

The key to staying young is not to get too comfortable. Buy yourself a leather-lined Lexus that massages your temples and chauffes your buttocks and you might as well check into Dignitas now. Much better to invest in an open vintage car that is noisy, dirty, and a pig to steer, as that way you’re forced to stay awake, and alive.

Modern cars may well save your life if you nod off at the wheel but we wouldn’t fall asleep if they weren’t so nannying and boring. Did anyone’s eyelids ever droop while driving an Austin Seven?

No, you are far too busy double declutching and looking out for stray dogs because your brakes are at best diffident and there is no ‘crumple zone’. The driver of a modern car is cosseted into a state of passive imbecility, bullied by beeps to fasten his seatbelt and unable to wander across a line without a vicious jolt from his self-correcting plastic prison.

I have just got back from The Measham, a 200-mile night rally across Herefordshire, held every January for prewar cars.

Also competing was David Filsell, 89, navigating for Priscilla Llewellyn, 80, in her red MG. David is deaf as a post and can’t see much but he has been rallying since the 1950s and recently navigated Priscilla on a 2,500 mile jaunt to Sicily and back for the Raid dell’Etna.

They were the only British entry

and at a disadvantage as the instructions were in kilometres but they finished 37th out of 100.

‘It’s good for people our age to go out and do this instead of sitting in an armchair,’ Llewellyn told the Abergavenny Chronicle afterwards. ‘The journey home was rather exhausting, but we wouldn’t have missed it for anything.’

The driver of a modern car is cosseted into a state of passive imbecility

There were 40 cars, half with no roof, on this year’s Measham, organised by the Vintage Sports-Car Club. Last year, there was a foot of snow and black ice. This time, I was navigating for a 70-year-old in a Bentley ,who recently did the 24-hour race at Le Mans in one of his other three Bentleys. He keeps young by marrying often and having lots of children, his youngest being 13. He gave his latest wife a 1938 BMW 328 as a wedding present.

He was so excited to stay up all night that I had to beg him to slow down for time controls. ‘I could do it all again,’ he beamed as we crossed the finishing line at 7am. ‘I won’t sleep tonight, the adrenalin’s too much,’ he yelped, as I passed out, exhausted - and I’m only 41.

The next day, I visited Brian Gray, 85, a retired GP from Tewkesbury who runs a 1926 Frazer Nash. He let me drive it and then began urging me to go faster.

‘Accelerate into the bend, don’t slow down!’ he yelled over the wind, despite signs ordering us to ‘Reduce your speed’. His wife, 85, later asked if I had kept my foot down on the bends, as Brian had taught her. They recently crossed the Pyrenees in the Nash and frequently tour the Alps.

Nobody in the VSCC thinks about slowing down. They’re too busy planning the next adventure, blowing a head gasket or fixing the endless things that go wrong.

Hicky Hickling, 75, says, ‘My idea of hell is a car that never breaks.’

His cars include a 1916 Dodge, in which he goes trialling, urging his machine up a muddy hill. A bachelor for 71 years, he always had a gaggle of women ‘bouncing’ in the back, the idea being to give the rear wheels more traction. Sometimes, with no seatbelts, they fell out. Married in 2019, he now leads a respectable life.

Trialling, like rallying, began when manufacturers had to prove their cars’ ability. A typical exploit included the 8,000 miles driven by the Hon. Mrs Victor Bruce in an AC in 1927. She left the John O’Groats Hotel on January 1st and didn’t stop until Monte Carlo. After a night at the casino, she went to Sicily, across to Tunisia and along to Morocco, before driving back through Spain and France.

She added some detours into the Sahara and rounded off by whizzing 1,000 miles non-stop round the banked circuit at Montlhéry.

Now some of these exploits proved fatal, or sent people mad, like poor Agatha Runcible in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. The lesson is not to overdo it but not to underdo it either, as computerised ‘moderns’ tempt us to do. Remember, never get too comfortable.

Matthew Bell edits the Vintage Sports-Car Club Bulletin

Bogged down: oldies in an 1926 Amilcar CGSS, competing in the 2023 Exmoor Trial

Dress to Shock

Ditch the dowdy image and horrify your grandchildren, says Liz Hodgkinson (aged around 79)

In my young day, when we dressed up for a party or disco, parents and grandparents would exclaim in horror, ‘You’re not going out dressed like THAT, are you?’ They tut-tutted over our tiny skirts, croptops, stilettos and beehive hairstyles.

Today, it’s more likely to be the young who look at us oldies in shock as we sashay around in our sequin skirts, leopardskin leggings, skintight trousers and stilettos or, worse, huge bovver boots.

And it’s not just older women who upset their children and grandchildren by what they wear. The men are doing it too.

Instead of fading into the background in three-piece tweed suits, old men are now imitating 80-year-old Mick Jagger with his crimson satin jacket, open shirt, gleaming white teeth and dyed hair.

No wonder our grandchildren can be ashamed to be seen out with us. ‘Who do you think you are, Elton John?’ they gasp, as grandpa arrives in a gold lurex jacket. They cry, ‘Is that a toupée he’s wearing?’

Why, some of us are even sporting tattoos and piercings, body art once considered the preserve of the rebellious young.

My 73-year-old neighbour recently got her first tattoo and is considering another one.

Once, old people knew their place, at least sartorially. Grannies did everything possible to look past-it, with grey hair scraped into a bun, no make-up, dowdy clothes and wrinkled Lisle stockings. My grandmother was quite happily invisible, whereas modern grannies do their utmost to be noticed.

Many of us are now going along with Bake Off’s Prue Leith, 84, who stars in this issue of The Oldie

While not exactly shockingly dressed, Prue always appears in the brightest of garments. She even advertises Kettlewell, a clothing company specialising in eyecatching colours and designs.

At a crowded Paddington station recently, I spotted our Prue in a

Liz: never too old to make an impression It’s the young who look at us oldies in shock, as we sashay around in our sequin skirts, leopardskin leggings, skintight trousers and stilettos

bright red coat and peacock-blue trousers. She was highly visible among the sea of identical young people in dark puffer coats, baggy jeans, black trainers and, often, lank, unwashed hair.

It’s the young looking dreary now, while we oldies are making bold fashion statements.

We’re even wearing ripped jeans. And before you imagine that means the wearers can’t afford anything else, we are buying them readyripped and distressed.

Felicity Kendal,77, and Madonna, 65, have often been spotted in ripped jeans.

Ralph Lauren has some on sale for £405, way beyond the budget of most youngsters, but affordable by the would-be trendy old.

In fact, ripped jeans often cost

far more than untorn ones. And we, the first generation to wear miniskirts, are not giving up on those, either. We believe they can look good paired with thick black tights and if the young go yuk at the sight of gran in a mini, well, tough. We shall please ourselves, however much we incur their disapproval.

When it comes to hair, it’s not unusual for us to have long, flowing blonde or brunette locks, made possible by extensions and highlights. Yes, it’s high maintenance, but not for us the skimpy grey buns of yesteryear.

Leading the way here is Cher, 77, also a grandmother, who is rarely seen without her huge hair.

Gone are the days when older women routinely had rigid white perms, like our late Queen.

And we haven’t finished yet. We are also wearing biker jackets with our skinny jeans and, once again, these leather jackets are beyond the price range of the young. But grannies are striding about in them, and why not?

To the dismay of the young, the shock factor goes on increasing. Whereas our grannies wore stiff pink corsets underneath their dull grey dresses, we are now often to be seen in gym clothes, even pounding the streets in them, ensuring that we retain the figures of our youth without any restricting underwear or outerwear.

No wonder our grandchildren don’t want to be associated with us and have to admit to their friends that this woman in a tight purple leotard is actually their granny.

In the summer, the ultimate fright sight is for a granny to wear a bikini on the beach. Surely these skimpy two-pieces must be reserved for the young and firmfleshed? But no – America’s Martha Stewart posed for a cover shoot in a bikini at the age of 78.

We won’t be cowed, and if we have to brave the sneers and sniggers of the youth, it’s a price we are prepared to pay for our boldness.

Feeling at home – in a hotel

Derek Frost, 71, sold his house to become a permanent guest

If you’re as spoilt, fortunate and travelled as we are, you’ll know a lot about hotels, because you’ll have stayed in as many as we have.

Location is always of paramount importance. During my hippy days, I stayed in cheap, backpacker places, varying from downright sordid to utterly magical, like one high in the Himalayas facing many of the world’s tallest mountains across endless chasms of space.

In Paris, there’s a pension behind the Deux Magots Café, ordinary enough but memorable because it was where I lost my virginity to Tom, then one of the world’s supermodels.

With J, my husband, with whom I’ve lived for over 40 years, our tastes have led us to the interesting and novel rather than the traditional and grand. So, in Bangkok, we’d choose the Sokhothai over the Peninsula.

A rule when choosing hotels has been to avoid anywhere with over 200 rooms, golf buggies or describing itself as a ‘resort’.

For a while, we were Aman junkies. Horror - they now call themselves Aman Resorts. They’re always spectacularly located and designed with a great sense of place. In Bali, you’re staying in a Balinese palace. In Java, in a temple at Borobudur. Fabulous and theatrical but maybe overly focused on ‘design and style’ if you know what I mean.

The trouble with grand hotels is - big generalisation - mostly only old people can afford to stay in them and locals are rarely present unless bearing a tray or carrying your suitcase. Besides – I can say this, being old – a collection of mostly old people tends to be rather dull.

Not so long ago, after being at the Aman in Luang Prabang, Laos, I headed on alone to join up with trustees of an Aids charity we run, trading a $800-a-night hotel for one costing less than $50.

Here fun reigned – local people, riotous partying, adventurous food, a wedding, colour. The dramatic contrast with the perfect, reserved Aman made it more enjoyable, memorable and what in modern talk might be called ‘experientalist’.

In South Africa, at high-end bush

camps like Royal Malawan and Singita, fine dining and designer cushions are guaranteed alongside good game sightings.

We prefer walking camps like Plains Camp, where you’re housed in great comfort in old-style bush tents and are much more likely to smell elephants than scented candles. The grub is delicious and plentiful – just what you want after three hours stalking rhino on foot!

Your bill will be a fraction of the high-end alternatives and you’ll have an experience infinitely more genuine, profound and memorable.

Magic and fun are altogether more intangible concepts and challenging to achieve

We’ve stayed at many Phillipe Starck, Ian Schrager or similar architect-led designer hotels. Most offer surface decoration draped over limited hotel ‘know how’, comprising poor service proffered by ill-trained pretty kids, similar to the gorgeous high-born Peruvian bus-boys who used to work for us at the Embassy Club, too in love with themselves to deign to pick up a dirty glass.

What we don’t need is a place designed to make us feel important but which makes us feel uncomfortable. In Tokyo, when departing The Palace Hotel, 40 uniformed staff bowed to us – I

counted. Were they thinking, ‘Is my obsequiousness to your satisfaction, sir?’ as they genuflected?

If you’re as spoilt as we are and getting older (I’m 71 and J is 75), we prefer six-star and all it implies –high quality, fabulous food, extreme comfort, beautiful service. Many places supply those if you can afford them, but magic and fun are altogether more intangible concepts and challenging to achieve.

Since selling our London house, we stay in hotels. Our initial choice had fabulous views down the Thames to the Houses of Parliament, but it was corporate and dull. We didn’t return.

Then we found our homes from home, Soho Hotel, London and Crosby Street, New York.

Firmdale Hotels is a group that gets it right: super-friendly service without being servile; uberglamorous without showing off; colourful, bold design; comfortable but thoroughly modern, quirky, uplifting, inspiring and fun. And no piped music! What a relief!

The bars and restaurants are filled with young fashionistas. Cameras and models constantly arrive for shoots, alongside skilled artisans delivering artfully designed arrangements of flowers. Executives dash in and out, doing deals and air-kissing one another.

These hotels are cool and fun and make even us feel cooler and younger, still in the swing of things and able to carry on ageing disgracefully.

Welcome guests: Derek (left) with husband, Jeremy, flanked by epidemiologist Dolly Theis and her husband, CBBC presenter Dr Xand Van Tulleken. At Firmdale’s Ham Yard

Hit the High Notes

Diagnosed

with a

breathless condition, Mary Kenny discovered that singing led to a happier, healthier life

In the latter part of 2011, when I was 67, I remember thinking to myself: ‘This is curtains.’

I was in a hotel in Wicklow, waiting to join an Old Girls’ School Reunion. But I was plagued with breathlessness, night sweats, and horrible-looking phlegm.

There were paroxysms of coughing and feelings of exhaustion. A chest infection seemed to have developed into a chronic, if episodic, condition. I thought I’d be saying goodbye to the Old Girls.

As I’d been a heavy, and enthusiastic smoker (though I quit, I still haven’t fully repented of the nicotine habit, thinking back to all the good times sharing ciggies), it was to be expected that I might develop bronchitis, emphysema or lung cancer. So this was the penalty for my sins – an Irish convent girl would think that.

Antibiotics were prescribed and investigations took place, and it transpired that, thankfully, I didn’t have the fatal diseases I’d imagined.

My lungs were ‘a little below par’ but not abnormal. What I had was bronchiectasis, where the pulmonary airways are thickened or scarred, causing a build-up of this revolting mucus, and feeling a little à bout de souffle.

The consultant at a local Dover hospital told me to lose weight to reduce breathlessness – oh, doc, if only it were that easy!

Then a referral to the Brompton Hospital in London turned out be cheerier. The chest man there – and they’ve being doing chest medicine since before the Crimean War – told me, ‘Take up singing. Go to a singing class or find a singing teacher. Best thing for any pulmonary condition.’

And thus came the start of my singing career – well, let’s say regime or practice. But it’s how regular singing came to be a significant part of my life, bringing about a substantial improvement in my pulmonary health.

I tried out a couple of choirs in Kent which offered ‘singing for breathing’ sessions. They were fine,

but the schedules didn’t suit me, or else I didn’t somehow connect with the group. In every discipline of life, you have to find the right teacher, and the context that is best for you individually. And then I did find the right one, in Deal, and I’ve benefited, ever since, from her tuition.

Avril Gray had a career as professional singer and diva, in London, Paris and Milan (where she sang with Tito Gobbi), and in Bayreuth, where she performed Wagner. And still, in her early eighties, she has all the stature, authority and charisma of a grand dame of opera. She’s been teaching proper singing students for 30 years – younger people who go perform and win awards – and providing therapeutic lessons for the likes of me: average warblers for whom singing is prescribed for health.

The half-hour lesson always begins with breathing exercises.

‘Breath’, says Avril, ‘is the first vital function. It represents both life and death.’

The lung is linked to the psyche, the Greek word for soul and spirit, and to what the Chinese call ‘CHI’ – the life force.

Avril says, ‘Lungs govern feelings, emotions, sensations and instinct –as well as performing their respiratory function. Breathing before singing opens up the lungs –and gets rid of tensions.’

And so, after all those deep breaths – hold it, and breathe OUT

Unleash your inner Streisand

– as well as physical exercises with arms, torso and stomach, come the basic ‘solfa’ scales. Then I sing three or four songs, provided with sheet music and piano backing.

The songs you sing need to fit your range, but Avril has encouraged me to attempt songs I never thought I could manage – from Send in the Clowns to Blow the Wind Southerly and a hilariously enjoyable number called Keep Young and Beautiful, which would be banned from any feminist canon.

Besides exercising the pulmonary capacity, there’s a release of happy hormones

I’ve learned a lot over my years of singing for breathing: so much about music, although I’ve never thought of myself as a musical person; and about the impact that music and singing makes on the whole person.

Besides exercising the pulmonary capacity, there’s a release of happy hormones. Singing came before speech, so it must be something fundamental.

Julia Hollander’s lovely book Why We Sing illuminates the wide variety of positive outcomes from singing, from improvement of memory to better breast-feeding (the lullaby is universal).

It’s a rare person who cannot sing; but Avril Gray says even tonedeafness can be ameliorated or even corrected.

Anyway, singing has enormously improved my pulmonary condition. The breathlessness and exhaustion have receded. I get the odd chest infection over the winter, but the ghastly sweating that can be part of bronchiectasis has also disappeared.

I’m off the hook with smoker’s guilt, too. A diagnosis has suggested that it was childhood pneumonia which scarred my bronchials, not (necessarily!) the Gauloises habit, naughty though it was.

Watch out!

Expert Avril Groom reveals how to find and buy a watch for life

Luxury watches are having a moment, or at least their absence is, as the recent spate of high-profile thefts testifies.

So it’s probably not the best time to invest in a sought-after rarity beloved of sports and movie stars, even if you have the unfeasibly enormous funds to do so.

As Coco Chanel said, decent diamonds represent the greatest value in the smallest volume.

Watches – which rarely exceed 45 mm across and are often much smaller – are not dissimilar, though the best are a beguiling combination of extraordinary precision craft with inspired design.

Even with the means to buy a rare piece, there is such a discrepancy between supply and demand that you’d be unlikely to get your hands on one without being a ‘friend of the brand’ and having bought from them before. The good news is, if you want to invest a sensible amount in a high-quality, attractive, reliable watch for a child or grandchild, or in Patek Philippe’s slogan, to ‘start your own tradition’ and pass one on, there are now many practical ways to do so, though you may end up with a less starry name.

Top brands are reticent towards new customers to forestall the quick reselling for profit. So you are more likely to receive a warm welcome from a reputable family jeweller, especially if you have patronised them before.

A friend wanted to upgrade his mid-level luxury watch collection with a specific, limited-edition model from a byword brand but received no joy from its London flagship. But the market-town jeweller, where decades ago he bought his wife’s engagement ring, also sold the brand. They still did, they had his records and put him on the waiting list, securing the watch sooner than expected. He subsequently collected several more and is now invited to the brand’s special client events.

Family jewellers foster long-term client relationships, originating in

‘Oh dear! I shall be too late!’

The White Rabbit by John Tenniel

their bespoke jewellery services.

Firms like Pragnell (a Rolex specialist) and Boodles (devoted to Patek Philippe), founded generations ago in Stratford-uponAvon and Manchester respectively, work hard at achieving the personal touch, even in their luxurious Mayfair salons.

Any watch bought as a special gift would ideally boast a well-crafted mechanical (hand-wound or automatic) movement, though be warned that servicing may mean a prolonged stay with its maker.

Traditionally it would be gold but, even with an investment of £10,000, that would be hard to find today. Canny brands from Cartier to Omega have made bi-colour styles desirable again, adorning a steel case with gold details such as bezel, hands, indexes or bracelet parts, creating an opulent touch at an attractive price.

It’s also worthwhile exploring the pre-owned market. True watchonistas upgrade their timepieces as often as their cars – so their cast-offs probably last longer.

Management consultants BCG estimate that secondhand items make up 30% of the $75 billion luxury watch market and are its fastest-growing sector.

Check specialist websites like Watchfinder or Chrono24. The

latter now has a plush physical presence in a restored Essex barn, where you can browse the extensive stock, seek expert advice and enjoy calming rural views. Looking for a watch that will increase in value is probably futile in this time of tightened luxury spending. But research and advice can lead you to a timeless classic that that will hold its value.

The saving over new allows you to indulge in ‘a little complication’, as extra functions are known.

The more gung-ho option is an auction. Auctions dedicated to watches-as-investment-assets are proliferating but most big houses also run more moderately-priced online sales. Research and a firm price limit are essential – even one rival bidder can make the exercise torrid. Lower-profile local auctions often include decent watches.

I bought a working, early 1970s, cushion-shaped Omega evening watch with a pretty woven-gold bracelet for low hundreds at a country house sale and had much pleasure from its modest beauty, until it was stolen. My compensation was thinking how furious the thieves must have been when they found it was only nine-carat gold.

For a younger person, seek a good, simple, new watch to maximise its lifespan.

Most big brands have entry-point models (around £5,500 for a Rolex or £4,500 for a Cartier) but there are interesting, less-publicised brands with mechanical watches for around £3,000. Independents like Oris (design and sustainabilitycred), Maurice Lacroix (known for its Aikon model), German brand Nomos (cool design and graduatelevel prices) and British brand Bremont (sporty and military styles) stand alongside bigger marques like always-value Longines and Rolex’s little sister Tudor.

Give your youngster any of these and hope they start their own tradition – affording their own upgrades when the time comes.

Ancient Greek Guide to Sex

The Greeks, old and young, loved sex games and pornographic sculpture. By Harry Mount

Feeling a bit inhibited between the sheets?

Well, take your inspiration from ancient Greece. Yes, they nailed philosophy, tragedy and comedy and scaled the sublime heights of architecture and sculpture with the Parthenon. But they were also much more open about sex.

When I visited the museum on Apollo’s holy island of Delos, a mere handful of tourists listlessly ambled through rooms containing some of the greatest Greek sculpture on earth, including the crouching, roaring Delos lions – set up in honour of Apollo by the islanders of Naxos in 600 BC.

The tourists ignored the lions to pose giggling around a small display cabinet containing a stone frieze of two jousting, winged penises, each with its own tail – each made out of two penises, naturally. Below was the inscription: ‘Touto soi kai touto emoi’ – ‘This for you, and this for me.’

The Ancient Greeks would have taken the jousting penises in their stride, relaxed as they were about sex, and thoroughly, unembarrassedly keen on it.

Greek women, too, had a cheerful, open approach to sex – like the women in Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, who go on the first ever sex strike, to bully their husbands into stopping fighting in the Peloponnesian War.

For much of the play, the

desperate men hobble around stage with outsized erections. The women are equally desperate, mourning the shortage of dildoes – even the inadequate ‘eight-finger-width’ ones. That is, around five inches long.

Sex strikes still go on today. In 2014, Ukrainian girls launched the ‘Ne Dai Russkomu’ campaign –‘Don’t Give it to a Russian’.

Corinth’s Temple of Aphrodite was so crammed with courtesans that Aristophanes referred to sex as ‘corinthing’

The Odyssey is crammed with sex. Take Odysseus’s trysts with Circe and Calypso, his naked dealings with Nausicaa, and his yearning to hear the Sirens.

Attitudes to homosexuality in Athens were even more open. Socrates cheerfully admitted losing the power to philosophise when he glanced down a beautiful youth’s tunic. He said having a libido was like being chained to a madman.

In Sparta, oldies instructed younger men about life, before hopping into bed with them.

In Thira, on Santorini, today’s party island, sacred, sexual games – gymnopaidiai, from gumnos, ‘naked’, and paizdo, ‘I play’ – took place in the burning August sun. Naked adolescent boys danced and fought on an exposed rock terrace by the sea, watched by older men. An inscription in the rock reads, ‘Amotion and Kripon f***ed here.’

Even more graphic graffiti was unveiled in 2014 on Astypalaia, an island 30 miles east of Santorini. Dr Andreas Vlachopoulos stumbled on two enormous fifth-century BC phalluses, alongside the name ‘Dion’, scored into the dolomite limestone of the Bay of Vathy. A sixth-century BC inscription read, ‘Nikasitimos mounted Timiona here.’

‘This graffiti is not just among the Love Goddess: Aphrodite

earliest ever discovered,’ Dr Vlachopoulos said. ‘By using the verb in the past continuous [tense], it clearly says that these two men were making love over a long period of time, emphasising the sexual act in a way that is highly unusual in erotic artwork.’

How many and varied are the uses of Greek grammar.

Lesbianism wasn’t such a big deal in Greece. Yes, Lesbos was the birthplace of the seventh-century BC poet and renowned lesbian Sappho.

But her poems rarely describe the physical act, and are often written to men too. What’s more, Sappho was married with a daughter called Cleis.

Ancient Corinth was held up as Greece’s sexually frenzied heart. The Corinthians’ riches, luxury and laziness were paid for by the toll fees charged for crossing the Corinthian isthmus, before the famous canal was built, and the cash drove them sex mad.

Their Temple of Aphrodite was so crammed with courtesans that Aristophanes referred to sex as ‘corinthing’.

Five hundred years on, the Corinthians were still on the job. In his first letter to the Corinthians, St Paul said, ‘It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you.’

This explains why ‘Corinthian’ was used in 19th-century Britain and America to describe rich, amateur sportsmen and yachtsmen.

Only later did it come to mean those who played a game for the sheer, idealistic love of it – as in the Corinthian Casuals, the Surrey amateur football team – rather than for wicked, money-grubbing reasons. A word meaning plutocratic, sexual self-indulgence performed a backflip to mean austere athleticism.

So, today’s oldies, if you want to reinvigorate your life, go Corinthian, in both senses. Take plenty of improving exercise, but also get down to some wild corinthing.

Harry Mount is author of Odyssey

– Ancient Greece: In the Footsteps of Odysseus (Bloomsbury)

Chuck me!

Mark Law on the heady bliss of taking up judo

It’s Saturday afternoon and the huge dojo in the Victorian school building is packed with people clad in white wearing various coloured belts. It’s mayhem.

No wonder walls and floor are padded like a lunatic asylum: bodies are flying, cartwheeling, crashing to the mat and grappling. It is a sort of frantic fusion of ballroom, pub brawl and bouncy castle. Here I am happy. I cannot behave this badly anywhere else and get away with it.

It was a magazine photograph I saw in childhood that did it. A figure in white somersaulting through the air, over the shoulder of another. They were doing something called judo; it looked magical and I wanted to try it, but I was too timid and the sport wasn’t on offer on a Home Counties menu of riding and tennis.

Decades later, in a moment of menopausal lunacy on the eve of my 50th birthday, I decided to try this judo thing. Scared and uncertain, I booked some lessons at the Budokwai in Chelsea, and, at 7am one autumn morning, stepped onto the firmly padded mat and entered another world, which I have never been able to leave.

The wonderful thing was that the bad behaviour started almost immediately. As soon as my instructor had shown me how to grip the collar and sleeve of his coarse cotton jacket and do some basic throws, he was demanding I attack him. I was fantastically happy to oblige. I didn’t achieve much but it was a wonderful sensation. A few weeks later, he said I was ready for the Saturday afternoon class. I was to be released into the wild.

It started with a vigorous warmup before about 30 of us paired up for the hour of sparring - a succession of five-minute bouts with two-minute intervals to catch one’s breath and find one’s next opponent.

If I tried to rest, I’d be dragged back into the middle of the room and, safely and skilfully, thrown all over the place.

At one point, I got incredibly excited when I managed to throw a black belt, only later to realise that

he had ‘jumped’ for me, springing into the air, executing a flying somersault and landing at my feet with an almighty splat.

I was completely hookedentranced by the sport’s exuberant childish abandon, but most of all by how to achieve victory, which was either to throw your opponent on his back, pin him helpless to the floor or torture him into submission by bending his arm to breaking pointor strangling him nearly unconscious. Disgraceful or what? It was so much more entertaining – and worthwhile - than scoring a goal or serving an ace.

This visceral – but very safe –violence (not to be confused with what happens in an ugly street fight) gives each encounter a truly desperate character. Winning was so glorious; losing so catastrophic.

The effort required was astonishing. It is ‘not done’ to refuse to fight but being on the receiving end of a high grade judoka’s handiwork is like a near-death experience. At the end, I’d be on the floor in my sweat-sodden jacket, sobbing with exhaustion. I was never much good but, triumphant or

Here I am happy. I cannot behave this badly anywhere else and get away with it

trashed, I always came away from the dojo feeling as if I had just drunk half a bottle of champagne.

Disgraceful behaviour comes at a price. In the early days, brute force and enthusiasm got me a long way. But to defeat others and progress up the hierarchy of coloured belts, I had to acquire skill and a level of fitness to survive against people half my age from some of London’s scariest postcodes. This was painful: weight training is mind-blowingly boring and I dislike running almost as much as walking. It all demanded a lot of self-denial.

Once, hurrying down the Fulham Road to the dojo, I saw William Donaldson (aka Henry Root) sitting alone in Finch’s in front of a double brandy. He beckoned me to join him.

His company was gold dust, but I shook my head and hurried on, leaving him looking wounded, a Cavalier whose comrade had defected to the Roundheads.

I would not be diverted because I was heading for another sort of conversation – a wonderfully raucous but good-natured physical debate in which you must defeat your opponent’s arguments until he has no leg to stand on and crashes to the floor.

Disgraceful? Maybe, but what bliss.

Mark Law is author of The Pyjama Game, a Journey into Judo

Martial artists: Inspector Clouseau and Cato in The Pink Panther

Slim Risk

Beware of the new miracle weight-loss drugs, says Gary White

Conviviality rocks. We oldies may be long in tooth with a creak in the bones – but we could teach youth a thing or two about having a jovial time.

The finest of wines and the greatest of food, all served up amid an atmosphere filled with pithy anecdotes accumulated during our lives well lived. Everything about these evenings is utterly perfect –apart from the unfortunate impact it can have on our waistlines. Overindulgence costs, but medical science has now come up with a way to slash the physical tariff that comes alongside the jolliest of times.

A new medical revolution is afoot that could extend our health spans and allow conviviality to come with less of a physical toll. A new wave of weight-loss drugs could herald the end of obesity, PR machines claim, eliminating many of the problems that overindulgence can bring. We may now be able to have our skinny cake and eat it.

Almost 40% of people worldwide are categorised as obese, according to the World Obesity Federation (WOF). So this latest pharmaceutical innovation really is a revolution in healthcare. The WOF forecasts that this will increase to 51%, or more than four billion people, by 2035. This would push up the global cost of obesity to more than four trillion dollars a year – comparable to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

New blockbuster diabetes and weight-loss drugs are proving highly effective at helping people shed the extra pounds. This new class of drugs promises body-weight reductions of as much as 20% and

may cut users’ risk of a heart attack or a stroke to boot. They work by mimicking a hormone produced in the gut, called GLP-1, which regulates blood sugar and sends signals to the brain that you are full.

These drugs require a prescription from a doctor and need to be administered by injection, typically once a week. This is the biggest issue facing their uptake –with a pill to pop being the weightloss holy grail. Another problem has been their popularity. The leaders in the race to develop these drugs can’t produce enough doses to meet demand. Once an easy-to-produceand-administer pill is developed, the blockbuster status of these treatments will be assured.

We may now be able to have our skinny cake and eat it

As stock market valuations of other big drug groups languished after the Covid-19 boom, last summer Danish group Novo Nordisk became Europe’s biggest company by stock-market value, dethroning the luxury colossus Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy.

Novo currently dominates the market with brands Ozempic and Wegovy. Ozempic is a diabetes treatment that can result in weight loss, while Wegovy is a weightmanagement medication for obesity.

The main rival is Eli-Lilly with Zepbound (US) or Tirzepatide (UK) – its rebranded diabetes drug Mounjaro that is now approved on

both sides of the Atlantic as a treatment for obesity.

The potential end of obesity will have an impact throughout many different industries. For a start, weight loss is one of the world’s biggest businesses today – with the industry worth about $225bn a year. Should weight-loss drugs live up to their potential, it could be adios to Weight Watchers and the like.

The new obesity drugs are already affecting people’s relationship with food. Their users are losing weight by eating less and consuming 20-30% fewer calories, according to a Morgan Stanley study. But weightloss drugs don’t suppress appetite for all foods in a uniform way. People eat more fruit and vegetables and weight-loss management foods while on the drugs, but they consume less confections, baked goods, sugary drinks, alcohol and salty snacks.

Being skinny is not so important to those with accumulated wisdom. We tend to be comfortable in our own skin. We also don’t know if these drugs’ potential will ever be realised. After all, the availability of Prozac has not eliminated unhappiness. So, portending the end of human stoutness may be overegging the obesity pudding somewhat. Of course, we all want to be healthy, but you don’t have to be skinny to live a healthy life.

There may also be unknown side-effects waiting to emerge and the development of an easy-toswallow pill may not be on the horizon. Also, if these treatments live up to their potential – increasing longevity for the many – there may be implications for the retirement age and how much younger folk need to put into their pension pots. After all, conviviality can cost – if you are doing it right.

But, once a person attains oldie status, why should we care what other people think? A few pounds around the waist are an indicator of who we are. After all, a corpulent behind, on both men and women, was prized in ancient Greece.

Gary White is the Chief Investment Commentator at Charles Stanley

The Roly Polys on The Les Dawson Show

To

Knock it back

Ignore the killjoys and drink what you want, says Simon Berry

‘OOh I get much simple pleasure,’ sang Flanders and Swann, ‘when I’ve had a tiring day, In the bath, (in the bath), in the bath.’ Excellent advice, except they left out the most important part: ‘with a large glass of wine’. Probably didn’t scan.

I’ve been retired from the family wine merchants for some years, and I now drink less than when someone paid me to do so. Call me a lightweight, but I was thoroughly spoilt, certainly for 25 of the 40 years I toiled away at the bottom of St. James’s Street, when my staff canteen was the Directors’ Dining Room above the shop.

During lockdown, I started compiling a spreadsheet of all the lunches I had there, together with the wines we drank and the company we kept. It’s almost complete (we still don’t seem able to find the 2017 menus) but, so far, I’m up to almost 1,200 meals, none teetotal.

The guests were spectacular (few turned down an invitation to dine in that legendary room); the wines even more so. I probably developed a taste for the finer things in life that is trickier to satisfy in retirement.

But I try. Decades in the wine trade teach you many valuable lessons – not just how to develop a taste for first growth claret. My father used to say that there is nothing quite as disappointing as cheap wine, but it is undeniable that the overall standard of wine has improved

massively over the past 45 years. It’s hard to find a really nasty glass of wine nowadays. Even that last bastion of vinous disappointment, the West End theatre bar, seems to be upping its game.

There is still a threshold under which you’re paying too much for fixed costs like bottling, marketing, shipping and duty, and not enough on liquid’s quality, but if you’re prepared to stretch to at least £12 a bottle, all sorts of treats await

Make a bee-line for the unfashionable – we Oldie readers surely eschew fashion in the knowledge that it’s not aimed at us anyway. German wines are delicious and stupidly under-priced, as are Alsatian wines (designed to drink with food by the most gourmet of all French tribes). A bottle of Austrian Grüner Veltliner is the safest bet on any restaurant wine list.

However, by nature our age group remains (small c) conservative. But we can indulge our Bufton-Tufton tendencies and still duck the expensively fashionable.

Sherry and madeira, prized by our great grandfathers, are better than ever nowadays and, sip for sip, probably the best-value fine wines on the market. The same goes for vintage port. If you’re after fizz, Crémant de Limoux was being made – they say – before Dom Perignon was a twinkle in Madame Perignon’s eye, and much better value and tastier than cheap champagne. Rioja

is always a steal, and if it appeals to us claret-lovers, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. When phylloxera hit Bordeaux 150 years ago, brave Médoc winemakers escaped over the Pyrenees and revolutionised the Northern Spanish wine world.

The techniques still used to make modern Rioja are closer to 19thcentury Bordeaux than most people realise. Our ancestors would instantly recognise the similarity.

We’re living in a golden age for spirits, too. The Japanese worked out long ago that distilling whisky was not an art form divinely bestowed upon the Celtic race.

Even if the rarest Scotch currently fetches silly money, the whole world now produces excellent whiskies. Even the English. Because whisky takes a long time to mature, English distilleries calculated that their cashflow would improve if they produced gin in the meantime. Thus the boom in local, ‘artisanal’ gins.

All excellent, and most perfect in a Martini (so long as they’re not too eccentrically flavoured).

So don’t hold back. We’re old enough to know our limits, and they’re not as stringent as National Health puritans ordain them to be.

The enjoyment of fermented liquids has been central to human existence since time immemorial. Making those liquids delicious is one of our species’ earliest and finest achievements. So don’t let the killjoys – for killjoys they are – win.

In 1979, when the Sunday Times invented the concept of the alcohol unit, the government decreed 52 units as the highest weekly recommended adult dose. Now it’s 14 – simply because spin doctors have convinced real doctors to scare us if we are to reduce our intake.

And if Rishi tells us a ratchet system, based on age, is the nation’s way to control the intake of tobacco, then it’s only fair that we oldies should base our alcohol intake on a system invented for our generation and imbibe a disgracefully large number of units.

Simon Berry was Chairman of Berry Bros & Rudd

‘For heaven’s sake, one glass won’t do any harm’

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I Once Met Tommy Trinder

I was a young local journalist when I met Tommy Trinder (1909-89) in 1982.

How I enjoyed the stream of stage history and theatrical anecdote. He recalled working with a troupe, with one lad on stilts who couldn’t fit under the proscenium arch – ‘I had to stop people walking into his knees. Came from Bristol, called Archie Leach. You’d know him as Cary Grant.’

And so the stories kept pouring out from Tommy.

‘Where was I born? Sunny Hill, Streatham. Went recently to find the old house. A chap sees me casing the joint and I tell him I was born here. He says, “Why, you’re Tommy Trinder!” I agree, and suggest they put up a blue plaque.

‘ “Can’t do that until you’re dead,” he said, reasonably enough. So I tells him, “Why not put up one that says, ‘Watch this space’?”

‘Comedy’s timing. My humour is what the man in the street would say – if he thought of it.’

Well, if he thought of it fast enough. No one ever ad-libbed with such speed as Tommy. He started out as a juvenile soprano in music hall and learnt his trade the hard way.

‘I remember seeing an audience actually sitting down,’ he recalled. ‘I’d always been on as they were coming in. That’s how I started this trick of talking.

‘ “Good evening,” I’d say. “You’re late. Did you buy a programme? My name’s Trinder and I’ll tell you what you’ve missed.” ’

We take this technique for granted today, but Tommy started it. Barry Humphries took it even further. But even Dame Edna never embarrassed a victim – as Tommy did one Harold Wilson – to such an extent that he rushed out of the theatre with his wife, drank three bottles of wine and became a father again nine months later. Wilson enjoyed explaining the story of his last child for years afterwards.

Trinder: ‘You lucky people!’

with a live audience, no matter whom or where. He gave 14 Royal Command Performances and was awarded a CBE in 1971. He showed me the photographs. In one, Mae West invites Tommy to come up and see her. In another, George VI and Queen Elizabeth sign their photograph to him on 17th June 1944. His wife said she couldn’t dust the piano on account of them, and so the photos lived in a drawer.

Seventy years ago, my father bit into some lead pellets in a stewed fig. It had been shot.

He wrote to the editor of the Shooting Times, asking if any of his readers knew when the season was for shooting figs, and where the best figshooting was to be found.

A huge correspondence ensued. Fig-shooting was condemned as somewhat infra dig, undertaken by the peasants of Corsica and Malta. Apple-shooting, originally devised by a Mr William Tell, a Swiss gentleman, was more socially acceptable.

Tommy didn’t really like television and it couldn’t do him justice: ‘I’ve got a freaky memory and all I see are repeats. There’s nothing new.’

His particular skill – honed from years in music hall – was an immediate rapport

We had coffee in his comfortable family house near Walton-on-Thames. It wasn’t obviously the home of a famous comedian. Awards, mementos and cups were confined to the garden room. But in the dining room there was a large oil painting of Tommy as a court jester. It was a role he liked. ‘Many a true word…’ he said.

Diamond geezer. Naturally funny, seriously nice bloke.

Louise Dumas

Bull’s-eye! My fig-shooting adventure

One correspondent boasted that, when shooting in a Kentish orchard, he’d had a right-and-left of a partridge and a Cox’s orange pippin.

Denizens of the Empire also had their say. A nabob from India boasted that his right-and-left was pleasingly unusual: when shooting from the back of an elephant, he’d potted several mangoes and a monkey, all with one fusillade from his 10-bore.

A landowner from Barbados wrote of his evening rambles, his bearers carrying his four-bore firearm loaded with buckshot: many a bunch of coconuts had succumbed to his deadly intentions.

A Frenchman said that, for satisfaction, the shooting of plums was supreme: he

sent a photograph of himself, neatly attired in British suiting and accompanied by his plum hounds, Caspar and Renée.

The final letter broke the editor’s tolerance –‘Enough! No more!’ It was from a Yorkshireman who advocated the shooting of gooseberries: he preferred a rifle to a shotgun – a .22 caliber with a sniper’s foresight. ‘Eschew your tweeds,’ he wrote, ‘your Norfolk jackets and knickerbockers; replace with camouflaged attire: goosegogs are very alert and nervy and continuously on guard.’

We had peace until my father discovered a recipe for budgerigar pie in his cook’s edition of Mrs Beeton’s. His letter to Fur & Feather was received with no comment.

My father is now dead and I am a little old man. I have forgotten many things: places I visited during my three and a half million miles as a Queen’s Messenger; the people I’ve met in my 85 years. The faces of old friends and relations are fading, their voices only just recalled as murmurs and whispers.

One thing I still remember is the special pleasure my father and I had with the delightfully mad reaction to his figs letter.

By George Courtauld, Halstead, Essex, author of The Travels of a Fat Bulldog, who receives £50

Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

And did those feet...

CHRISTOPHER HOWSE

The English Soul: The Faith of a Nation

By Peter Ackroyd

Reaktion Books £20

As a boy in the 1760s, William Blake looked up and saw ‘a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough’.

That was at Peckham Rye in south London, on one of his solitary walks. Peter Ackroyd, himself haunted by the spirit of London, doesn’t mention that a

mural occupying the whole side of a house there, to commemorate the event, was painted in 1993, only to be vandalised three years later. Perhaps that belongs to the uncharted history of the dark side of the English soul.

Ackroyd wrote a biography of Blake in 1995, and almost every year since has produced a book or two on English history. Blake’s ‘vision has never been lost’ he declares now. ‘It is integral to the English soul.’

Discerning the English soul is here performed through 23 chapters of biographical sketches from Bede in the seventh century to the present day. In an important prefatory note, Ackroyd states

that Judaism does not ‘characterise’ English religious history. The same, he says, is true of Islam and Hinduism, which would be material for another book.

Ackroyd’s language is spare, and little theory is added. Readers must gather shared features through implicit similarities. Thus Blake’s intuition of ‘a World in a Grain of Sand / And Heaven in a Wild Flower’ echoes a remark by Jakob Böhme, the early-17th-century shoemaker mystic from the kingdom of Bohemia, whose followers had a chapel in Bow Lane off Cheapside in Blake’s day.

‘If one conceives a small minute Circle, as small as a Grain of Mustardseed, yet the Heart of God is wholly and perfectly therein,’ he wrote.

Two hundred pages and 400 years earlier than Blake, the solitary mystic Julian of Norwich sees in one of her visions or ‘showings’ a little thing the size of a hazelnut lying in the palm of her hand. In reply to her questions, Christ tells her that it is everything that has been created. Despite its fragility, ‘It lasts and ever shall last, for God loves it.’

Blake was moulded by his mother’s espousal of the pietism of the Moravian brethren (like Böhme, of German origin). They found glory, Ackroyd says, in sexual intercourse. In this, they had affinity with Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish religious thinker who died in Clerkenwell when Blake was 14. Swedenborg believed in sexual intercourse in life after death.

These sects with sex do not seem distinctively English, but Ackroyd picks up the theme 200 years later. John Robinson, the Bishop of Woolwich and, in the 1960s, the author of the bestselling Honest to God (heralded in the urbane Observer with the headline ‘Our image of God must go’), held the orthodox belief that love between husband and wife is sacramental.

Jerusalem, in England’s green and pleasant land: William Blake (1757-1827)

But then poor old Bishop Robinson felt the call to go into the witness box during the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960 and declare that what D H Lawrence was ‘trying to do is to portray the sex relationship as something essentially sacred’. Ackroyd comments that this ‘caused a small furore’. He does not have room to add that John Sparrow, the Warden of All Souls College, Oxford, mischievously wrote an essay in the periodical Encounter after the trial.

He pointed out that a central act in the novel was what is technically known as buggery, at that time illegal even between heterosexual couples and inviting a sentence of imprisonment for life.

Sparrow’s point was that the Bishop didn’t even understand what was going on in the novel, let alone whether it might be called ‘essentially sacred’.

Robinson shares the final chapter with Don Cupitt, born in 1934 and happily still with us. This Cambridge theologian insisted that ‘we may worship our idea of God, but He or It is unfathomable and therefore unknowable’.

He said we must have a religion ‘without absolutes, without perfection, without closure, without eternity’.

Ackroyd thinks this agrees with the English mystic contemporaries of Julian of Norwich, such as Richard Rolle, author of The Fire of Love

The difference is surely that, though Rolle could not know God’s nature, he insisted on praying to him and worshipping him, not an idea of him, in the sacred mysteries of the Mass.

Rolle thought that someone was at the other end of the telephone, as it were, even if they could not be heard.

But if Ackroyd does not convincingly find the English soul, he is agreeable company in the journey through the centuries in search of it.

Christopher Howse is author of AD: 2,000 Years of Christianity

Venetian find HUGO VICKERS

Love from Venice: A Golden Summer on the Grand Canal

By Gill Johnson Hodder & Stoughton, £25

Every now and again, a dream-like book slips on to the shelves, having battled its way past a politburo of marketing executives with their spreadsheets.

Such a book is Love from Venice. I loved it. It concerns a young woman, in love with her fiancé, with a city and with a family. To say that it is in the genre of Bonjour Tristesse is not quite fair, but just as Françoise Sagan evoked a French summer, so too Gill Johnson has recreated the world of Venice in the summer of 1957.

The author, then 25, left her staid job at the National Gallery. Her husband-to-be was working in Paris, and, on a tenuous recommendation from the stage-designer Oliver Messel, who vetted her, she was sent to the Brandolini family in Venice to speak English to their two young boys. The story is crafted from the letters she wrote to her fiancé and her parents.

In the summer, Brandolino and Cristiana Brandolini, very rich and completely delightful, lived in their fabulous palazzo on the Grand Canal. It was filled with exquisite treasures. Richard Wagner had stood on its balcony, gazing at the Rialto and the Accademia bridge. On my one visit there in 1983, what impressed me was the lift hung with golden silk, the doors covered in dark red silk.

And I loved the huge Art Deco wicker chairs that could have come from Mrs Higgins’s winter garden in My Fair Lady.

Cristiana Brandolini told Gill that both sets of their parents had died young, enabling them to live in such style.

‘Our early losses are why we can live like this,’ she explained. It helped that she was an Agnelli of the Fiat family and her grandmother was Princess Jane di San Faustino, a celebrated figure in Venice.

The Count called her Giulietta. Thanks to Messel, she was treated as one of the family, to the intense irritation of the ghastly nanny, Fraulein Rasch, ‘wearing an expression that had congealed into a gargoyle of contempt mixed with stoically born despair’.

want to spend my holiday holding my stomach in.’

In their quest for entertainment, the Brandolinis threw the net wide – sometimes too wide. One such person arrived while Gill was there – Philip van Rensselaer, a well-connected gentleman conman. Gill soon got the measure of him. Van Rensselaer wrote of the Brandolinis in his memoirs, Rich Was Better, disguising them as Maestro and Raffinella Maestriossi.

In 1973, he helped himself to a cache of their treasures, which were so well known to dealers that they proved impossible to sell. The family did not press charges. That would have led to vulgar publicity. (He died in a care home in Los Angeles in 2013.)

Gill was aware that this was a very particular world to which, in the end, she did not belong: ‘Behind the sparkle, the parties and the balls, personal calamities seemed to loom, many of them beginning with D – divorce, dependencies, depression, “distressed circumstances” and worse.’

Cecil Beaton enjoyed examining Cristiana. He wrote, ‘In another walk of life, she could have been an actress.’ She beguiled the friend he brought ‘with her worldly theories of love, how no woman can resist a repeated onslaught of attention…’

Cristiana was responsible for my favourite line in the book: ‘Fashion is for people without taste.’ In a crisp phrase, she kicked her heel through an entire industry. Most people don’t have confidence in their taste. They buy a look one year and change it the next. Cristiana was not talking of those doughty ladies in the country who wear midi-length tweed skirts and maroon jumpers and come into fashion by accident once every 20 years.

She had historical taste – imbued by her having been brought up surrounded by beautiful things, and no need to follow seasonal changes.

Her dictum compares well to Diana Vreeland’s funny but in a sense meaningless ‘Pink is the blue of India’, though even Mrs Vreeland conceded, ‘There are a lot of people with no taste at all, making a damn good living out of it.’

Gill Johnson has given an enchanting and affectionate snapshot of a rarefied and all but lost world.

‘Listen, dear – I think he’s playing the Last Post’

The Brandolinis knew everyone and entertained such figures as Maria Callas and Audrey Hepburn. In 1983, the Count told me Cecil Beaton would ring to invite himself ‘and can I bring Truman?’ Cecil wrote that a fellow guest, Yul Brynner, forbade photos: ‘I don’t

It is good to know that Cristiana lives on in her palazzo, the respected matriarch of a large family, now aged 97.

Hugo Vickers has written biographies of the Queen Mother, the Duchess of Windsor and Queen Mary

Mesopotamia mess

IVO DAWNAY

The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the Middle East, 1979-2003

By Steve Coll

Allen Lane £35

Saddam Hussein was indisputably an obscenely bloody tyrant. But after one has waded through this forensic analysis of the follies and missteps leading up to the Second Gulf War, it is hard not to feel a tiny bat squeak of sympathy for him.

By the late-1980s, at the height of the Iran-Iraq war (which he, of course, had initiated), the United States was steadily supplying both sides with military intelligence, despite repeatedly assuring Saddam that the White House had his back alone.

Guided by US spy satellites, Iraqi tank formations would attack Iranian troops armed under the secret Iran-Contra deal with more than 4,000 US and Israelitrafficked TOW anti-tank missiles.

Meanwhile, America turned a blind eye to Iraq’s illegal use of poisoned gas on the battlefield while, initially at least, castigating both Baghdad and (this time) wholly innocent Tehran for the appalling 1988 gassing of up to 5,000 Kurds, largely civilians, in Halabja.

As Henry Kissinger drily observed, ‘The ultimate American interest … is for both sides to lose.’

The novelty in Pulitzer Prize-winner Steve Coll’s near 500-page, dry-as-dust magnum opus is that it is informed by hitherto classified Iraqi records of hundreds of Saddam’s meetings, unsealed by the Freedom of Information Act.

The new material lays bare the astonishing misreading both of the Saddam regime by Washington and vice versa. But it also shows that Saddam’s paranoia was fully justified.

His brutal reign of terror, turbocharged by a constant fear of assassination – he rarely slept in the same place throughout his life – meant the CIA failed over 25 years to install a single agent anywhere near him.

The ‘Achilles trap’ of the title is Coll’s take on the vulnerabilities of both sides. He cites Saddam’s chief weakness as his erroneous belief that the CIA knew everything – including that he had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD); and also his gamble that the US would not risk a ground war to topple him.

The US’s failures centred on a lack of

sound intelligence sources and the assumption that Saddam must be concealing WMD, despite a decade of fruitless UN inspections.

Far more interesting than this Achilles thesis, however, is the central chronological narrative charting the unfolding of what is arguably the greatest political/military disaster of the century: the US-led invasion of Iraq –and its domino impact on the Middle Eastern tinderbox.

George W Bush’s Iraqi adventure and the insurgency that followed caused up to a million deaths, and another halfmillion in the subsequent Syrian civil war. It hugely diminished US influence and let Russia back into the region.

Moreover, after the brief flowering of the Arab Spring, it also consolidated other Arab dictators and helped unleash a tide of destabilising immigration across Europe with (as yet) unseen consequences.

Yet Bush’s decision – based largely on his gut instinct – was taken in the face of considerable doubts within the US intelligence agencies.

That is not to say Saddam’s maniacal misjudgements did not play their own crucial part. But so brutal was his regime that no one dared whisper a word of cautionary advice to the autocrat for fear of torture and excruciating death.

One anecdote Coll reports is of the dictator summoning his generals for their views on a possible promotion of his murderous son, Qusay, to minister of defence. When three of them very tentatively suggested such a move might be premature, they were never heard of again.

Over-deference plagued Western leaders too. George Tenet, the CIA director, cautioned the President against using some flaky British intelligence about alleged Iraqi uranium purchases from Niger as part of his case for war.

But equally flimsy claims, from an Iraqi asylum-seeker, over mobile biological labs were greedily swept up for the dossier. It is clear that Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Advisor, were very uncomfortable with the President’s gamble.

But when Bush asked Powell privately, ‘Are you with me?’ his affirmative response owed more to an old soldier’s knee-jerk deference to his commanderin-chief than to the wise counsel of a civilian secretary of state. Much the same can be said for another courtier at the White House, Tony Blair.

On the eve of battle, Coll’s account also confirms that – soon after a final UN

report declaring no evidence whatsoever of a nuclear weapons programme –Bush offered Blair an out. ‘I would rather go it alone than have your government fall,’ he said.

Blair’s foreign secretary, Jack Straw, urged his boss to take it. But deference won through here too, with Blair later citing ‘disastrous consequences’ for the UK’s relationship with the US if he backed out.

The disastrous consequences were actually lying in wait. It does not require this book to reveal that there were no plans for the war’s aftermath.

Ivo Dawnay was Washington bureau chief for the Sunday Telegraph

‘He’s

Texan Promised Land

NICHOLAS LEZARD

Melting Point: Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land

By Rachel Cockerell

Wildfire £25

In April 1903, over the Easter weekend, there was a pogrom in the Russian town of Kishinev (now Chișinău, Moldova) directed, as pogroms tend to be, against the Jewish population.

News seeped out, and horror was widespread. ‘The outrages are so horrible as to be almost beyond belief,’ said the Ithaca Daily Journal.

American politician Oscar S Straus said, ‘No one can read without a shudder of horror the reports of the fiendish outrages at Kishinev. This barbaric holocaust appeals for redress not to the Jews throughout the world, but to the civilised world.’ Grover Cleveland, once US president, said, ‘Every American humane sentiment has been shocked by the attack on the Jews in Russia.’

Und so weiter. And also: plus ça change

a bad dog, but a good CEO’

Of course, pogroms had been happening for a lot longer than that, and the Jewish desire for a homeland had been strong for just about as long: ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ as is sung at Passover.

Melting Point is a history of how Jews found a homeland, but it is very much not a conventional history. It is composed, as Rachel Cockerell says in her introduction, ‘entirely of memories – taken from diaries, letters, memoirs, articles and recordings’. The authorial voice is entirely absent, except in the brief preface and afterword.

In the book’s early stages, as she puts it, ‘I began to notice my irritation at my own interjections, and found myself reaching to delete them.’

This is unusually self-effacing (literally) for a historian; and it makes for an unusually fascinating and authoritative book. As people have known for a long time now, the question of Jewish settlement is an extremely fraught one. And, until 7th October last year, many people, me included, have been ambivalent, or non-dogmatic, about the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians. This book’s gestation long precedes those barbaric events, and thank goodness: it might not have been so level-headed.

It starts at the end of the 19th century. The nascent Zionist movement of Theodor Herzl and Israel Zangwill was gathering steam, although it had not settled on Palestine as the ultimate destination, whatever mention was made of Jerusalem at Passover.

Various places were proposed: Western Australia, Mexico, Canada and Cyrenaica (now in Libya); a strong contender for a while was British East Africa. ‘Is it to be Jewganda?’ asked a commentator for the Daily Express. A 1903 editorial in the Times questioned the whole enterprise: it welcomed assimilation (or ‘amalgamation’, as they put it) and ‘what may be described as a softening down of the salient points of their national character’.

Cockerell’s withdrawal from comment seems particularly commendable here. I would have had plenty of questions, such as ‘What do you mean, “softening”? What do you mean, “national character”?’

(Especially when you don’t have a nation.) Antisemitism is often a nasty smell in the background.

But not always. In July 1933, Jews in London held a huge anti-Nazi march. Many of the marchers were proud First World War veterans, the three leaders carried Union flags, and the route was lined with well-wishing spectators.

‘“Good luck, boys!” was a frequent call from Gentile onlookers,’ noted the Jewish Chronicle. The mood was so sanguine that the Sunday Mirror could say, ‘This unhappy outbreak of Jewbaiting in Germany will pass, and even be forgotten.’

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Odessa-born poet, orator and activist, was not so optimistic. ‘I have been ceaselessly warning you that the catastrophe is approaching,’ he said in 1938, and he had, for years, and he was right.

Interspersed among these bulletins are memories from Cockerell’s own family. These arrived long before the Holocaust – which hardly features here.

Instead we have the Jewish experience in Britain, or America. Thousands of refugees landed at Galveston, Texas.

Their stories come not so much as light relief but as vivid eye-witness accounts to history, snapshots of events both momentous and mundane. One of Cockerell’s family members, after the bitter winter of 1946-47, said, of her forthcoming emigration to Israel, ‘Oh, thank God. I’ll be warm for the first time in my life.’

The whole book itself sprawls through history; it ends, slightly raggedly, as historical events often do, with the foundation of Israel.

It has no agenda, except to present the facts, the stories and the portraits of the players both important and unimportant. It is unlike any other history book you will ever have read: like a vast pile of notes you have to organise yourself – and all the better for it.

Oh, and the number of Jews murdered in Kishinev, over that Easter weekend in 1903? 49. Some things do, regrettably, change, after all.

Nicholas Lezard is author of It Gets Worse: Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury

‘The previous owner was an artist’

War heroines

ALAN JUDD

I Am Not Afraid of Looking into the Rifles: Women of the Resistance in World War One

By Rick Stroud Simon & Schuster £22

We think we know about the First World War, but all most people really know is snatches of war poetry and pictures of the Somme battlefield.

We are largely ignorant of the fact that it was also an intelligence war, with an early version of the code-breaking Bletchley Park and organised resistance in Belgium and occupied France.

When German soldiers invaded Belgium, they committed atrocities, murdering, torturing, deporting, looting and, in a few instances, burning people alive. They had been told that they were there to repel a French invasion (see under Ukraine now).

One result of these atrocities – a scandal at the time but later forgotten or denied – was that many courageous Belgians risked execution to spy on and sabotage the German war effort. This book is about some of the brave women who took part, the best known of whom in this country is Nurse Edith Cavell.

As war broke out, she was working in a teaching hospital she had helped set up. She could have got out, and urged her British staff to do so, but they stayed with her. Before Belgium was overrun, she personally escorted her German staff to safety, remaining with them all night to ensure they got back to Germany.

Drawing on her deep Christian faith, she saw nursing as a vocation without limits, acknowledging no circumstances in which help should be refused. She regarded loss of self-control as a selfish failure to put patients first.

During the early months of mobile fighting, her hospital was filled with wounded soldiers, including British ones. She hid those able to escape and helped them on their way to neutral Holland. A trickle became a stream, involving a network of secret helpers.

Edith and her colleagues were aware of the risks. ‘If we are arrested,’ she said, ‘we shall be punished in any case, whether we have done much or little. So let us go ahead and save as many as possible of these unfortunate men.’

She converted her office into a room where nurses could relax and lined it with empty shell cases filled with huge chrysanthemums.

But German counter-espionage was effective. Already suspicious – ‘Cavell must go in front of the firing squad!’ – they penetrated the escape network, arresting Edith and 35 others.

Imprisoned in brutal conditions, she didn’t attempt to deny what she had done, taking it all on herself, signing a confession in German (which she couldn’t read) and admitting in court to helping 200 soldiers escape.

She and three others were duly sentenced to death. One who was sentenced to ten years, Princess Marie of Croÿ, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the court to let her take Edith’s place. Edith refused to plead for mercy, saying ‘I am English, they want my life.’

The words for which she is famed had a context: ‘Standing as I do in the view of God and eternity, I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.’ She denied heroic status, adding, ‘Think of me as a nurse who tried to do her duty.’ She was killed, aged 49, in 1915, by three bullets to the heart and one to the forehead.

Her execution was a propaganda disaster for the Germans, leading to the Kaiser’s banning female executions without his authority. There were a few more but not many; men, on the other hand, were routinely executed.

Stroud’s readable account extends beyond Edith Cavell, featuring among others not only the princess but heroines such as Louise de Bettignies, Gabrielle Petit and Countess Jeanne de Belleville.

They were acknowledged in postwar Belgium, but are now mostly forgotten, as are the published sources on which Stroud draws.

Vital information such as the composition of troop trains, the gossip of German soldiers in cafés, the location of ammunition dumps and the planning of Zeppelin raids on London was passed by these women to cut-outs (intermediaries) such as Canteen Ma, an old woman with a vegetable cart, who passed it to smugglers who got it across the electrified border into Holland.

Many were caught, but one large and very successful network endured. Called la Dame Blanche, it was founded by a group of Belgian professionals and comprised an astonishing 919 reporting agents. It was organised and funded by MI6 and by the end of the war was producing 70 per cent of the British Army’s tactical intelligence. MI6 subsequently ensured that they were all granted army ranks, pay and honours.

There is more to be written about la Dame Blanche and the intelligence

war as a whole. Meanwhile, this compendium of individual experiences, deeds and misdeeds is a great stride towards bringing the subject to modern public consciousness.

Alan Judd worked in the Army and in the Foreign Office. He is The Oldie’s motoring correspondent

‘Well, it will feel strange when you’re so used to black’

Burmese daze A N WILSON

Burma Sahib

By Paul Theroux Hamish Hamilton £20

George Orwell’s first novel was called Burmese Days and was based on his three years as a policeman for the British Raj (the force was organised from India).

Twelve years after he wrote it, he admitted, ‘I dare say it’s unfair in some ways and inaccurate in some details, but much of it is simply reporting what I have seen.’

Orwell depicted a brutal, racist, nasty lot of British people, beating criminals with canes, insulting and torturing potential dissidents and having no sympathy with the indigenous population, its culture, religion or ethos.

It is not a very good novel, but it contains within it superb reportage, and no one who has read it will be surprised that Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, sided with the Japanese against the British during the Second World War. He welcomed the Japanese Imperial forces into what was then called Burma, now Myanmar, in preference to the awful oafs who were defending British commercial interests in rubber, teak, rice etc.

The blurb for Paul Theroux’s novel about Orwell in Myanmar, Burma Sahib, says that the transformation of Eric Blair, gangling Old Etonian, into George Orwell can be told only in fiction.

One sees what the blurb-writer meant, if these words apply to Orwell’s fiction. But his life is now so fully documented that it is not true that Paul Theroux’s only way of writing about this subject was to make it into a novel.

Theroux is a travel writer I admire, but I’m sorry to say this particular experiment is a dud. His novel about Orwell in Myanmar is not as good as Orwell’s on the same theme.

It would have been better for Theroux to write a non-fiction book about going to Myanmar (which he has clearly done) ‘in the footsteps of Eric Blair’. He should not have attempted the often wooden dialogue. There are excruciating attempts, by an American author, to reproduce the cadences of, for example, Scottish speech (in Blair’s fellow officers).

Burma Sahib chronicles, as did Orwell, the ghastliness of the British in that time and place, the airs they gave themselves, their cruelty and greed and insensitivity. But the novel takes an age to get going, and the details – the beatings and tortures of Burmese, the attitudes to sex, the racism – all read as if they have been carefully researched, which they have. But careful research, which is acknowledged at the end of the book – thanks to a friend for ‘securing me a University of Hawaii card’ – does not make a novel.

The theme of the book is the gulf between the races. For the first half of the story, you just feel that Theroux has been collecting information, and not knowing how to make it into a narrative.

Then Eric Blair goes to spend Christmas in Moulmein with his mother’s family, the Limouzins (French in origin) and the story takes off. Two of his relatives have married ‘out’, one to a Burmese, one to an Indian. When his cousin Cathleen comes into the room, Blair realises she isn’t a servant only when he looks at her smart patentleather shoes.

He is not the mature Orwell who might have come to terms with having mixed-race relatives. He is a racist snob aged 20 who feels simply ashamed.

Thereafter, when he is posted to Moulmein, he is terrified that his oafish colleagues in the police force and in the European clubs will realise that he has these demeaning relatives.

Hereafter, the story picks up, too. Blair supervises a hanging– a

gruesome scene that Orwell himself wrote up. After an elephant runs amok, causing chaos and destruction, Blair makes a hash of things, and his short fuse leads to his telling his superior to shove his rifle up his … ‘He had violated the code of the pukka sahib for whom free speech was unthinkable.’

One of the best scenes in the book is when two of his Eton contemporaries –Seeley and Hollis – turn up, and take him out for a meal.

As with the excruciating family scenes in Moulmein, Theroux is good at the pain of contrasts. Hollis (the Roman Catholic historian, Christopher, brother of Roger, the spy), contrasts Blair the policeman – quite brutal and racist – with the would-be schoolboy anarchist they had known at Eton.

Eric Blair the Burmese policeman came home and became George Orwell, the contrarian socialist.

A N Wilson is the author of Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises

Bad news on the Rialto

TANYA GOLD

Shylock’s Venice: The Remarkable History of Venice’s Jews and the Ghetto

By Harry Freedman

Bloomsbury Continuum £20

The Venice ghetto was the centre of lateRenaissance Jewish scholarship in Europe. It produced polyglot and philosopher rabbis and printed books of incalculable value.

Now it’s a sullen district in Cannaregio. It’s almost an island, with a few tourists wondering why, with its gloomy tenements (the five synagogues are disguised), it is the only part of Venice that isn’t pretty.

Harry Freedman answers this question – in a confined space, you build upwards – in a history with a unifying idea: the search for Shylock, Shakespeare’s invented Jew.

We never learn who Shylock was, though Freedman offers compelling candidates: Anselmo del Banco, for instance, whose son Jacob converted to Judaism and was accused of stealing a 2,000-ducat jewel, like Shylock’s Jessica.

The word ‘ghetto’ is likely to have been named after the Venice foundry, or geto, on which it was built. But Venice wasn’t the first city to corral its Jews into a ghetto, as it did in 1516. Prague had done so 250 years earlier.

Christian Europe resented the Christ-killers. The first Jews in Venice arrived from Germany, where they fled pogroms sparked by the Black Death. Jews were expelled from Naples in 1288, and from England in 1290. Jews banished from Spain and Portugal arrived later.

But the Venetians were more ambivalent and grasping. Their empire declined after the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama opened a sea route to the east in 1497-99, thwarting their trade monopolies. They coveted Jewish taxes, moneylenders – Christians were forbidden from usury – and ransom. They allowed Jews to live in Venice, but on probation and subject to sanction.

Charters were granted for five or ten years, and vast payments were made in exchange for security: 1.5m ducats (or £157m in today’s money) between 1644 and 1659.

In some ways, though, Venice was the safest city in Europe for Jews. Tens of thousands of eastern European Jews were murdered in anti-Jewish riots in the 1640s and ’50s. The Venetian community raised funds to buy captured Jews from the slave markets in Istanbul and held a day of mourning.

But, still, the Talmud was burned in St Mark’s Square in October 1553. By the end of the Venetian Republic in the late-18th century, the Jews couldn’t be expelled: they had borrowed too much money from the local nobility. If they left, the debts left with them.

Freedman traces many such contradictions. When Jews are forced to live together, their own singular culture thrives: Venetian rabbis were learned and famous and were consulted by Jewish communities from Amsterdam to the Levant. But the ghetto was not, intellectually at least, an island: the gates were locked only at night.

Some Jews could read Arabic and, by translating Arabic texts into Latin, they made Arab philosophy available to Christian scholars and nobleman, who

employed them. When Henry VIII wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon, he sent an emissary to the Venice ghetto for a Jewish legal opinion and bought a copy of the 1520 Bomberg Talmud, which lived in the archives at Westminster Abbey until it was sold in 1980.

The Duc d’Orléans, the brother of King Louis XIII, came to Venice to listen to the rabbis. Jewish scholars were acquainted with the writings of Thomas More, Montaigne, Machiavelli and Galileo. They wrote dictionaries and secular philosophical tracts.

It is a truism that Jews mirror their place and time. As Venice declined, so did its ghetto: the centre of Jewish scholarship moved eastwards to the Kingdom of Poland. When the Venetian Republic fell to Napoleon in 1797, he ordered the ghetto gates destroyed. The Jews were asked for a final tax of 200 ducats for the Christian poor. They raised 314 ducats and were full citizens of Venice until the Austrians took power and removed Jewish civil liberties.

You know how it ends. When the Nazis arrived in Venice in 1943, they went to Giuseppe Jona – president of the Venetian Jewish community and a doctor, like so many Venetian Jews before him. They gave him two days to provide the names of all Venetian Jews. Jona burnt the identifying documents, told Jews to flee, wrote his will and killed himself. He was 77.

Hundreds acted on Jona’s warning. Those remaining were transported to Auschwitz – Freedman puts the figure at 243 –including Adolfo Ottolenghi, the blind Chief Rabbi of Venice.

When I was there last month, the Venice ghetto was almost empty. I found it a place of bleak despair. Chabad, the Hasidic outreach movement, retains a presence, and you can visit the synagogues and buy Jewish religious objects. But these are remnants.

Freedman has written a worthy history of what came before.

I’ve played a hell of a lot of different roles, but they’re all me – with different hats on.

Sid James on the Carry On films

Acting must be scaled down for the screen. A drawing room is a lot smaller than a theatre auditorium.

Arthur Lowe

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Harper Lee

Bigamy is the only crime where two rites make a wrong.

Bob Hope

In Britain, an attractive woman is somehow suspect. If there is talent as well, it is overshadowed. Beauty and brains just can’t be entertained; someone has been too extravagant. This does not happen in America or on the Continent, for the looks of a woman are considered a positive advertisement for her gifts and don’t detract from them.

Vivien Leigh

Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.

W E Gladstone

Saying sorry

I’m really angry that nowadays many people don’t say sorry for having done or said something wrong or offensive.

Instead they try everything to avoid doing so, using several different methods.

Commonplace Corner

I guess I’m just an old, mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.

S J Perelman

A 41-inch bust and a lot of perseverance will get you more than a cup of coffee – a lot more.

Jayne Mansfield

Recently a mobile-phoneuser bumped into me – but said nothing. On another occasion, a hefty bloke stamped on my foot. ‘Oops,’ he mumbled as he rushed past. ‘Oy – that hurt,’ I roared, seething with rage.

Some well-known people also skirt round apologising. A television celebrity who had used offensive language when arguing with colleagues announced later, ‘It makes me upset that I might have upset people.’

In a Wimbledon championship, a player who had smashed a ball into a stand in a fit of anger announced, ‘It was completely unintentional. Luckily, it wasn’t close to anyone.’ She was given just a code violation.

Delay is the deadliest form of denial.

C Northcote Parkinson

It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.

Walter Bagehot

Riches should come as the reward for hard work, preferably by one’s forebears.

Steven Runciman

Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.

Charles Addams

It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little – do what you can.

Sydney Smith

Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.

Aristophanes

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I’m not trying to stump anybody. It’s the beauty of the language that I’m interested in.

Buddy Holly

I’m especially annoyed when restaurant staff often duck out of directly admitting fault. Recently when I complained about waiter service being slow, a staff member replied, ‘I’m sorry you found it upsetting.’ I waited for more, but sadly that was all I got.

SMALL DELIGHTS

Walking from one room to another, and remembering what you set out to find.

JUDY

CRADDOCK, FOREST GREEN

Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

When a friend complained her food was cold, the manager answered, ‘I’m sorry we didn’t get it right on this occasion, but why not come back and try again?’

As if. He didn’t even offer a refund for this disastrous meal or offer the next one free.

Why has this once common form of politeness fallen so much out of favour? I know that everyone is in a hurry these days, but surely saying sorry wouldn’t take that much time. I’m sure it could save other people from a lot of unnecessary stress.

Please, though, don’t use that awful, meaningless expression ‘My bad’.

It may work on American television, but certainly doesn’t in this country.

CAROLYN WHITEHEAD

Carry On Laughing: Sid James (1913-76)

Return of the Irish question

A Sinn Féin First Minister doesn’t mean reunification is imminent david horspool

When devolved government returned to Northern Ireland earlier this year, Rishi Sunak channelled his inner Inspector Clouseau.

‘Now is not the time’ (to debate reunification), the headlines ran, conjuring up images of the new First Minister, Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill, leaping out of a cupboard, Cato-style, and bashing the PM over the head with a proposed border vote.

Historians are notoriously bad at predicting the future. So I won’t presume to say when the time might be right. A recent poll – from 2022 – showed that support for the Union hovered around 48 per cent, but crucially only 31 per cent in favour of unification.

Don’t-knows, independence and ‘other answer’ make up the rest. That would seem to support the view that O’Neill would be wise to wait.

But what about the more distant past?

From this side of the Irish Sea, Ireland’s history, and particularly Northern Ireland’s history, casts a complex spell.

We know we should try to understand it better, because our ancestors, or forebears at least, interposed themselves in Irish affairs for eight centuries. But British historical interest risks reprising the very phenomenon it might seek to understand: broadly, sticking our noses in where they aren’t wanted and getting it wrong when we draw conclusions.

If Northern Ireland has a single historical point of origin, it is the Flight of the Earls, on 14th September 1607.

The Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell left their estates, setting sail from Donegal and ending their days living on papal handouts in Rome. They had been staunch opponents of English rule, but had eventually lost in their attempts to throw out their enemies, suing for peace at the end of the Irish Nine Years’ War in 1603.

The Earls’ departure led to the forfeit of their lands in Armagh, Cavan, Donegal,

Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone. They reverted to the Crown and were subsequently parcelled out to English and Scottish settlers in the Ulster Plantation.

The long-term implications of introducing a large number of people of a different faith from the native population were certainly not anticipated by the British. Admittedly, the project threw up enough short-term problems to keep everyone occupied in both senses of the word.

As for the Irish, Plantation did not stand out for another two and a half centuries as a special bone of contention. Civil war, Cromwell, famine, land war and the fight for home rule, among other matters, were always more pressing.

It was only in the late-19th century, as the demand for home rule began to find a more sympathetic response, that Unionism emerged as an identifiable political cause. Even so, it was not a uniquely Northern phenomenon. About a quarter of a million, mostly Anglo-Irish, mostly Protestant Unionists existed in the South, and opposed Home Rule.

Ulster Unionism was given real impetus by the First World War. The Ulster Volunteer Force, formed in 1913 as a paramilitary group to resist home rule,

transformed into the 36th (Ulster) Division of the British Army, which suffered catastrophic losses at the Somme in 1916. Here was a sacrifice to point to. The protection of Unionists through Partition in 1920 was cast as the minimum recompense.

Most historians seem to agree that the Irish Civil War, which followed the Anglo-Irish Treaty, ratifying partition, was fought more over the future arrangements between the South and Britain than over Partition itself.

If that is right, and devolved government began in 1921, why, more than 100 years later, are we still unsure how to make Stormont work, or in some quarters whether Stormont should be made to work at all?

Any answer to that can’t be simple. Perhaps the best answer is that despite changes of government and demographics and, yes, Brexit, Northern Irish government keeps coming back to Stormont, first opened in 1932.

History is easier to understand when presented as distinct events – the Flight of the Earls, Plantation, ‘Ulster will fight …’ and so on. But ‘Devolution is a process, not an event’ – a sentiment expressed by a Secretary of State for Wales – applies all the more strongly to the tangled history of Northern Irish self-government.

We may not know when the time will be ‘right’ for any next stage in that process, but we can bet it will take a long time.

Free State troops shell rebels in the Irish Civil War, Dublin, 1922

FILM HARRY MOUNT

WICKED LITTLE LETTERS (15)

Wicked Little Letters is based on a wonderfully juicy sex scandal that took place in – wait for it! – Littlehampton, West Sussex. The Carry On team would have had a field day.

In 1921, Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley) was summoned to the Littlehampton County Bench for criminally libelling her neighbour, Edith Swan (Olivia Colman).

Swan had received poison-pen letters, saying things such as ‘You bloody old cow, mind your own business and there would be no rows – R.’

Rose was sent to jail for a year. Then an enterprising Scotland Yard detective inspector investigated other letters that appeared when Gooding was in jail.

He identified Edith as the culprit. She had been sending the letters to herself, her family, other neighbours and –wonderfully – the Littlehampton Sanitary Inspector (Kenneth Williams, if there were a Carry On version).

Edith was finally trapped when a Scotland Yard undercover operative sold her a stamp marked with invisible ink –which she used on a dirty letter.

Imagine how funny this would have been in the hands of, say, Alan Bennett and Stephen Frears. Instead, the story has been wrecked by director Thea Sharrock and writer Jonny Sweet.

First, they completely change the story. They turn Rose Gooding, in fact a married Sussex woman, into an Irish single mother with a black boyfriend – so they can win plus points for saying Rose was persecuted by Edith as a wicked outsider and strumpet.

And they make the male Scotland Yard detective inspector into a young woman (played with medium blandness by

Arts

Anjana Vasan). Cue lots of bad jokes by her fellow police officers about how women shouldn’t be in the force.

It’s fine to play around with real life for dramatic or comic effect – but not to make the story boring with agitprop lines.

This is a laughless, flat exercise in British Olden Days Comedy – where writers think it’s funny just to have people in period costume speaking in a generic yokel accent and swearing a lot.

Olivia Colman is a gifted, natural actor but even she can’t raise a laugh from dead, unnatural, sweary lines, such as ‘You want f***ing in the nose, you old beetle!’. The talents of Timothy Spall (as Edith’s twisted father) and Eileen Atkins (as a wise neighbour) are wasted, too.

The swearing goes on and on – never funny; only boring. And the boredom eats away at any remnants of tension in what was naturally such a good plot. In

real life, Edith was acquitted of libel in 1921 because she was thought to be so respectable – only to revive her wicked letters. She was finally convicted in 1923 – for the letter to the Littlehampton Sanitary Inspector.

For period comedies to work, the humour has to be as good as in modern comedy. The same goes for period drama – the Peaky Blinders are as compellingly vicious as the Sopranos.

Dressing people in 1920s suits and having them walk around charming seaside towns doesn’t make their bad lines any better. The same low standards apply to the theatre, where mediocre plays get laughs that would never raise a titter on telly.

Alan Bennett (90 in May, incidentally) knows all this. A Private Function, set in 1947, is just as funny as The History Boys, set in the 1980s. The Madness of George III, set in the 18th and early-19th centuries, is as sharp as The Lady in the Van, set in the 1970s.

To make jokes about a period, you need to know it inside out, as Bennett does. The characters in Wicked Little Letters speak – and swear – with no ear for how people actually talked in 1920s Sussex. At one point, the woman police officer has to refer to the ‘poor emotional well-being of women affected by crime’. Strewth!

In Life of Brian and Holy Grail – their best films – Monty Python were funny because they knew precisely what they were lampooning. A hundred medieval historians voted Monty Python and the Holy Grail their favourite film because it was so full of shrewd in-jokes.

Professor Carolyne Larrington, of St John’s College, Oxford, even uses it to teach her undergraduates about medieval literature. I can’t see Wicked Little Lies cropping up in any decent university tutorials any time soon.

Rudest woman in Littlehampton: Olivia Colman as Edith Swan

GARY SMITH

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK

THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA

Harold Pinter Theatre, London, until 15th June

Is Jez Butterworth Britain’s greatest living playwright? Alan Bennett, Michael Frayn and Tom Stoppard are all still with us, but Butterworth, the author of critically acclaimed dramas such as The Ferryman and Jerusalem, is a generation younger – and, at 54, he’s reaching the peak of his powers.

He burst onto the stage in 1995 with Mojo – a dark, dynamic thriller set in a 1950s Soho nightclub. Written in his mid-twenties, it was an incredibly accomplished debut, drawing comparisons to Harold Pinter. Pinter played a gangland villain in the 1997 film – so it feels fitting that Butterworth’s new play is playing in a theatre named after his theatrical godfather.

Like Mojo, The Hills of California is about the sleazy underbelly of showbiz, yet this time the setting isn’t seedy Soho but the drab back streets of Blackpool. It’s the long hot summer of 1976, and three sisters – Jill, Ruby and Gloria –have gathered beside their mother’s deathbed to say goodbye.

Jill still lives at home. She’s sacrificed her youth to nurse her mother through her final illness. Ruby and Gloria have managed to get away, but only as far as Greater Manchester. Both marooned in boring marriages, they are living lives just as humdrum and their future prospects seem similarly bleak.

The riddle of the play is the absence of their eldest sister, Joan, who may or may not be on her way back to Blackpool. She’s her mother’s favourite, but none of the family has heard from her in years. What’s the reason for this estrangement? Like all good dramatists, Butterworth lets the tension build and build – and then we flash back 20 years, and all is revealed.

Now we’re back in the 1950s; Ruby, Jill and Gloria are children, in thrall to their precocious teenage sister, Joan.

Their mother, Veronica, is a vivacious single mum, running a B&B singlehanded, determined to give her daughters a better life than hers. America is the promised land – and the best way to get there, she figures, is by putting her four daughters on the stage.

As this sorry tale unfolds, the sense of dread and menace mounts. We know something awful is about to happen, but we can’t work out quite what. It’s a tragedy in the truest sense, driven by character as much as circumstance. Like

Keep it in the family: Laura Donnelly, Jez Butterworth’s partner, as Veronica

Shakespeare, Butterworth asks us, is the fault in our stars or in ourselves? Joan and Veronica are selfish. Ruby, Jill and Gloria are selfless – yet none of these women gets what she wants, or even what she needs.

You might think such a pessimistic plot would be too glum for entertainment, yet every scene is riveting. All Butterworth’s characters are believable – not just the leading players but also the supporting roles. His writing is realistic yet intensely theatrical. There are plenty of laughs amid the pain.

Ophelia Lovibond, Helena Wilson and Leanne Best are enthralling as Ruby, Jill and Gloria – all so different from each other, yet siblings beyond a doubt. Sophia Ally, Nicola Turner and Nancy Allsop are mesmeric as their younger selves, full of the flimsy bravado of adolescence. Lara McDonnell breaks your heart as the young Joan, teetering on the edge of womanhood, and disaster.

The star of the show is Laura Donnelly, Butterworth’s muse and

partner, who plays both leading roles: first the feisty matriarch, Veronica; then Joan, her eldest daughter. Her two portrayals are so different that it wasn’t until the curtain call that I realised she’d played both parts.

The director is Sam Mendes, a master of his craft, and the biggest compliment I can pay him is that, throughout this seamless show, I didn’t pay his direction a single thought. Rob Howell’s revolving set transports us back and forth, between the 1970s and the 1950s.

Never mind Pinter. This play has an epic quality, closer to Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams.

Like all great dramas, The Hills of California isn’t afraid to ask big questions. Is stardom really worth the price? Do nice guys always finish last? Does true love ever last?

Butterworth provides no easy answers, but he addresses these eternal conundrums with wit and insight, and he creates five wonderful female characters who feel as real as you and me.

RADIO

VALERIE GROVE

When anyone mentions standing on one leg while cleaning their teeth or walking backwards, it’s a giveaway.

They have been following the weirdly addictive Michael Mosley series, Just One Thing. Even if they’ve heard most of the advice in childhood (an apple a day/ early to bed and early to rise…), they lap it up from Dr Mosley.

If they prefer, Mosleyites can hear programmes that promote ill-being instead.

Series such as Things Fell Apart, in the softly irritating voice of Jon Ronson, or the brave Marianna Spring’s Why Do You Hate Me? expose online weirdos and fantasists, and the havoc they wreak.

James Bartlett’s The Gatekeepers presents the silicon squillionaires who never imagined, when they invented social media, that one day monarchs and popes would choose to communicate to the world via Twitter, or X.

But it’s now accepted: harmful misinformation, conspiracy theorists and trolls are let loose on our phone-addicted young. Chatbox AI is already in the classroom. Who will show our poor manipulated grandchildren, threatened with hate mail, how to discern true from false and how to recognise manipulation and bias? We hear only the worst – of teenagers driven to suicide.

What can be clawed back from this digital abyss? Handwriting, for instance: will future generations ever again learn the skill? In A Point of View, the wise sociologist Sir Tom Shakespeare, aged 57, lamented his once neat, cursive hand having fallen into desuetude. Children now write with their thumbs, he said, on screens. What will become of penmanship? Calligraphy? Your individual signature?

Typed text is anonymous. He resolved to re-learn to handwrite, alongside his granddaughter.

Actor Cillian Murphy, on Desert Island Discs, hymned the handwritten letter. Meanwhile, the performance poet John Cooper Clarke said he possesses no computer: ‘I write my poems with a quill pen, by candlelight.’

Radio 4 keeps us supplied with such small nostalgic things. Paddy O’Connell’s Why Do We Still Need the Pips? (100 years ago they were ‘the dots’) featured presenters who still quake at the prospect of crashing the pips. ‘It’s like being in a speeding car with a roadblock ahead of you,’ said Mishal Husain.

In Traffic Roundabout, poet Paul Farley discovered wildlife sanctuaries and secret meadows behind one-way HBO

gyratories. And another poet, Paul Muldoon, read his poem The Sightseers, about the day his family motored to gawp at the new Ballygawley Roundabout, the first in Ulster, and drove round and round in awe and wonder.

But my ‘just one thing’ this spring, for everyone, is the incomparable Archive on 4 on beloved, immortal Barry Humphries. His epitaph: ‘I am not necessarily dead.’

Gary Lineker and his two sidekicks at Goalhanger Podcasts, Tony Pastor and Jack Davenport, came to lunch with the Broadcasting Press Guild the other day.

Beforehand, I spied them striding together from the tube towards Soho, in gleaming trainers, chatting and laughing – a happy trio, as they should be, with 270 million downloads last year.

They attracted a full house of hacks, and told us their demographic is twothirds under-45s. Lockdown is what supercharged their success. ‘It’s easy. Getting a TV programme green-lit takes years. Think up a podcast and you can make it the next day.’

People tell Goalhanger they wish they’d been taught history at school in the manner of The Rest Is History

The Rest Is Politics is an extraordinary moneyspinner, more so than The Rest Is Money. Lineker, star of his own The Rest Is Football, had a good line: ‘My ambition is to make a podcast about sleep, and call it The Rest Is Rest.’

TELEVISION

FRANCES WILSON

‘Did I say I have a TV set now?’ Philip Larkin wrote to Kingsley Amis in 1979. ‘Where’s all this porn they talk about?’

Our so-called permissive society, he complained, ‘never permitted me anything as far as I recall. I mean like WATCHING SCHOOLGIRLS SUCK EACH OTHER OFF WHILE YOU WHIP THEM’.

Larkin would have been delighted by Sky’s new drama Mary and George misdescribed in the publicity material as ‘an audacious historical psychodrama’.

The rise and rise of the dim George Villiers, 1st Duke of

Larry David: ‘I don’t like talking to people I know, but strangers I have no problem with’

Buckingham (Nicholas Galitzine), stage-managed by his stone-cold mother, Mary (Julianne Moore), is porntastic.

Mary spends a happy night with a whore called Sandie (Niamh Algar), and George, sent to France in order to advance the family, navigates the heaving, humping, groaning bodies draped around the drawing rooms.

‘This is FRANCE!’ he is told, as he blushes to his roots. Because French men are all gay, our hero soon acquires the skills to get himself noticed by James I, who is interested only in ‘cock’ and hunting. These days, George could have trained for the royal bedchamber in Cardiff where, Larkin reported, there is a newsagent with ‘a good line of Yank homo porn’.

When the cast of Mary and George (a reference to Gilbert and George?) have got their clothes on, not much happens. George falls over a good deal, in the mud, off his horse, carrying a platter of meat to serve to the King. Mary holds a dinner party, where the topic of discussion is the youth of today and how things have gone downhill since the days of Elizabeth. On another occasion, she invites the King for supper but he fails to turn up.

Everyone on the set seems to be enjoying themselves enormously, and no one more than the 63-year-old Julianne Moore, who plots and schemes in an excellent English accent and, unlike Nicola Walker (Lady Hatton), manages to make her ruff look sexy. Playing an aspirational mother determined to get her most handsome child into bed with the King, Moore may have channelled Carol Middleton. Prince Harry, if he’s watching, will be intrigued to learn that George Villiers was a second son who nevertheless eclipsed his older brother. The climax (in both senses) of episode two, where King James (Tony Curran) lifts his shirt and bends over while George licks his fingers in preparation for the assault, recalls Hugh Grant’s Jeremy Thorpe seducing Ben Whishaw’s A Very English Mary and George also has a dead-dog storyline). Grant apparently watched A Very English Scandal with his 89-year-old father, who served with the Seaforth Highlanders. ‘Isn’t your poof film on tonight?’

said Captain James Grant. When they reached the bit where Thorpe

McLachlan

‘There’s no doubt about it – this ancient society was definitely female-dominated’

whipped out the Vaseline, Captain James made his excuses: ‘I really am quite tired – I might go to bed.’

Meanwhile, the 12th and final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm (Sky), television’s first improvised sitcom, is drawing to a close. Over the last 24 years, we have watched Larry David, playing an over-the-top version of himself, evolve from a self-hating misanthropist with a long-suffering wife, Cheryl, into a divorced self-hating misanthropist reluctantly sharing his house with Irma Kostroski (Tracey Ullman), whose grandfather’s shoes he stole from the Holocaust Museum after stepping in dog shit. Has the Jewish Basil Fawlty mellowed over the years? No, but he has gained some self-knowledge.

Rewind to the first ever episode where Larry, on the car phone to his agent Jeff, refers to Cheryl as ‘Hitler’.

Jeff is also in his car on speakerphone, and his conservative Jewish in-laws, on the back seat, demand that Larry apologise to them. Larry then goes to the cinema with Cheryl’s friend Nancy, and is accused by a woman of looking at her breasts as he passes with his popcorn.

Nancy, calming Larry down, notices the bunch-up in his trousers which make it look as if he has an erection. She demands an apology. The breast woman turns out to be the date of Larry’s best friend, Richard, who demands he apologise ‘by sundown’ (‘What are you, Gary Cooper?’).

Season 12 kicks off with Larry’s

meltdown in the car, when his phone doesn’t understand the directions he is giving. He is paid to appear at the birthday party of a fan; the fee is contingent on his ‘being cordial’ to the guests – which he fails to be. Unless he apologises to his host, he won’t receive his cheque.

‘I really did the best under the circumstances of a person who hates people and yet had to be amongst them,’ Larry explains, which just about sums up this blazingly brilliant comedy.

MUSIC

RICHARD OSBORNE

LOS ROMEROS: ROYAL FAMILY OF THE SPANISH GUITAR

Maria von Trapp and her troupe, immortalised by Rodgers and Hammerstein in The Sound of Music, were not the only musical family to flee Fascism before winning fame in the United States and beyond.

Nineteen years after the von Trapps first glimpsed the towers of Manhattan one September morning in 1938, a family of Spanish guitarists arrived at the self-same place from Franco’s Spain. Their stories were not dissimilar. In the case of the von Trapps, it was the Roman Catholic priest and family music director, Father Franz Wasner, who’d secured train tickets for a non-existent Italian ‘tour’, with the hope of onward travel to New York funded by an interested agent.

In the case of the Romeros, it was the story of an ailing Portuguese relative that earned guitarist Celedonio Romero, his wife and three young sons a temporary exit visa. Financial backing from a pair of wealthy American admirers did the rest.

The 44-year-old Celedonio was, after Andrés Segovia, the finest classical Spanish guitarist of the age. What’s more, his three teenage sons – Celin, who’d been born in the middle of a Nationalist air raid on Málaga in 1937, Pepe and the 13-year-old Angel – were all budding virtuosi each in his own right.

Just how mesmerising the group was can he heard on the recordings they made for Mercury Records between 1962 and 1967 – eight individual albums which Decca has recently reissued in a superbly engineered ten-CD box Los Romeros: The Mercury Masters

The set also includes the pair of breakthrough albums that Celedonio and his two eldest sons made in 1960 for the cult label Contemporary Records.

The label’s principal jazz pianist was André Previn. It was he who’d spotted the 15-year-old Pepe on The Ed Sullivan Show, playing alongside the famously eccentric hipster comedian Lord Buckley. The boy was a sensation. Aside from his mastery of the guitar, he’d been playing flamenco with the gypsy communities in Andalusia since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. By the time Contemporary commissioned his debut LP, ¡Flamenco Fenómeno!, he was already giving lessons to Hollywood session musicians.

Launched as Los Romeros in 1960, the quartet hit the headlines after an appearance at New York’s prestigious town hall. Seizing on a quote from the morning’s first editions, their manager, James Lucas, booked a stretch limousine to take the whole lot – guitarists, wives, girlfriends, hangers-on – to Mercury’s offices on Fifth Avenue. There a message was sent to Wilma Cozart Fine, the legendary Mercury Living Presence classical-record producer, announcing the arrival of ‘the royal family of the guitar’.

‘How many are there?’ she asked.

‘A whole bunch.’

Next stop was the office of Mercury’s fabled music director Harold Lawrence. The family piled in; the Romeros played; he signed them on the spot.

Of their eight Mercury albums, three were devoted to flamenco – the real thing, not the kind of ersatz entertainment that’s mostly served up to today’s visitors to Andalusia’s Costa del Sol. Three more albums were devoted to music written or transcribed for classical guitar. The music spanned six centuries, from the time of Galileo’s father, a famous amateur lutenist, through Bach and Vivaldi – there’s an enchanting disc of transcriptions of mandarin and violin concertos by Vivaldi – to Granados, Respighi and Villa-Lobos.

Joaquín Rodrigo is here, of course –his much-loved Concierto de Aranjuez, played with rare refinement by Angel Romeo. (Aged 18, he’d given the concerto its West Coast debut at a concert in the Hollywood Bowl.)

There’s also a Concierto Andaluz by

Rodrigo, specially written for the quartet in 1967. It’s a rather tired piece – until the finale, which might appeal to one of our many easy-listening radio stations.

In the end, flamenco’s the thing: that ancient music, brooding and bittersweet, which generations of outlaws – gypsies, Jews, Greeks, Syrians and even Christians fleeing the Inquisition – had brought to the hills of southern Spain.

Guitars, Song, Dance, Poetry is the subtitle of the Romeros’ two-LP blockbuster album World of Flamenco, recorded by Mercury in Hollywood in 1967. It was their biggest undertaking, drawing in singers and dancers (the footwork cleverly recorded) from southern California’s large expatriate Spanish community.

Here that lifelong lover of flamenco Federico García Lorca comes into view, as Pepe improvises accompaniments to his father’s recitation of four Lorca poems, by turns folksy and politically charged.

Happily, Decca’s superbly edited booklet carries full texts and translations, so we can follow Lorca’s word. I especially like the Rumba in which a woman rejoices in two lovers.

‘If one candle goes out,’ she explains, ‘the other continues to burn.’

GOLDEN OLDIES

RACHEL JOHNSON

THE TALL WHITE DUKE

Having inhaled the guileless memoir of the 12th Duke of Beaufort, a topping

read, chocker with Grade-I-listed anecdotes and Woosterish incident, I am now aware that the author – the artist formerly known as Bunter – is a singer in a prog rock band.

I was only dimly aware of it before. I’d seen him around plenty, but I’d never heard him sing. He always seemed to be a slight hazard at parties, with his sudden sideways crashes on the dance floor.

Twenty years ago, I remember chatting at one party and, as I come up only to his waist, I spotted that his belt had a bronze buckle with the letters MBA on it. Given that his name was (then) Harry Worcester, known as Bunter, this seemed puzzling.

‘Stands for Married But Available,’ he bent over to bellow in my ear.

The foremost question in my mind is this: had he not been destined to become The Unlikely Duke (title of the aforementioned memoir), would Bunter be one of our celebrated 70-something pop stars now? Did his poshness, in fact, impede his path up the charts?

To answer this question, I laid down his hugely enjoyable book (even if the best line is Jerry Hall’s, after he blabbed about their tryst in a London hotel: ‘If that boy’s cock was as big as his mouth, he’d be one hell of a lay’) and undertook to listen to Bunter’s band online.

The duke is very busy running Badminton but he does find time to perform live. Last summer, his band, The Listening Device, appeared at Badminton on a bill alongside UB40 and The Who.

I have to report that finding his music online is not as easy as putting the name of the band into Google.

That sends you down rabbit holes about electronic hearing aids, which may of course be of more interest to Oldiereaders than the four albums of The Listening Device.

When Spotify delivered, I was transfixed. The tall white duke is the real deal!

He started off imitating the gravelvoiced Joe Cocker as a party piece, but he’s got game. Along with cocomposer, Janet Thompson, he’s made four albums to date, all highly listenable.

It doesn’t surprise me that superproducer Ertegun almost signed him, and he toured with Jools Holland and Bryan Ferry. But it also doesn’t surprise me that he never really made it to the big time.

Why? He had it all already: the name, the fame, the Jerry Hall anecdote, the height and the very, very big house in the country.

Bunter didn’t need to become a rock star – this Lord of the Dance was born one.

Los Romeros: (left to right) Pepe, Celedonio, Celin and Angel

EXHIBITIONS

HUON MALLALIEU

WADDESDON MANOR:

GUERCINO AT WADDESDON, 20th March to 27th October

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666) was known as (Il) Guercino, ‘the Squinter’. He became one of the most popular artists among 18th-century British Grand Tourists, who avidly collected his drawings as well as paintings.

His considerable success in life and afterlife is the more surprising in that he came from a family of peasant farmers near Cento in Emilia-Romagna. Although conventionally described as largely self-taught, he evidently benefited from his apprenticeship to the Bolognese Benedetto Gennari, since he learned his early Caravaggesque manner from him. He was also strongly influenced by Ludovico Carracci’s Madonna and Child with Saints in a church at Cento, and at an early age won the praise of Carracci himself.

Early in his career, he also painted Claudian classical landscapes. Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego is world-famous, but it was Guercino who first used the subject and Latin tag. However, he really found his form with Biblical and classical subjects rendered with Baroque animation. Even his single, seated figures – as are four of the five pictures in this concentrated show – are animated; one feels that they are still only for a moment.

Two of these paintings now belong to the Waddesdon collection. The King David – sitting to contemplate a stone carved with a verse from Psalm 87: ‘Glorious things are spoken of thee,

O City of God’ – was bought by the present Lord Rothschild from the Spencer family in 2010.

The Moses was known only through copies until it was discovered in France in 2022, and its acquisition by Waddesdon was the genesis of this show. The prophet’s head and hands take up

Guercino masterpieces. Clockwise from top left: The Samian Sibyl with a Putto (1651); King David (1651); Moses (1568)

the whole composition. His whole being is concentrated on his communication with his God on Sinai, and his palms bear the grime of the ascent to the mountaintop.

Guercino painted numerous versions of the 12 Sybils of antiquity. Three of them have been brought in here; painted in 1651, the same year as the David, until now they have never hung together since. The Cumaean Sybil with a Putto and the Samian Sybil with her books both come from the National Gallery, while the Libyan Sybil reading comes from the Royal Collection.

I would urge anyone who feels that they don’t ‘get’ Old Masters to spend half an hour with these. There is so much to see in them. However, I would have loved to have a few spirited Guercino drawings displayed nearby.

NATIONAL GALLERY; WADDESDON IMAGE LIBRARY; MORETTI GALLERY

GARDENING DAVID WHEELER

NEW SHOOTS

March is my merry month of mulching. April needs a watchful eye to prevent nesting birds from robbing the plants of their new moisture-retaining duvets.

We had no measurable precipitation in May and June last year Fearing yet another dry spring and early summer, I’m keen to keep as much of the recent wet winter’s water available to newly installed trees and shrubs.

Young plants need time to develop sturdy and penetrating roots, roots that not only anchor the little darlings but allow them to drink from lingering moisture. The application of a surrounding mulch just three or four inches thick protects a young plant’s immediate top soil from desiccating winds, strong sunshine or a sneaky, late and penetrating frost.

If you missed the March window, it’s not too late to get shovelling. There’s still time to raid the compost pile and any heaps of semi-decomposed autumn leaves. Lightly fork it around the plants’ stems to a diameter of at least a foot –wider still if there’s enough of the precious stuff to hand.

Mounds of old grass clippings do an excellent job, too. Beware, though, that therein might lie abundant weed seeds that could all too readily take advantage of their new milieus, gifting you bountiful carpets of unwanted groundsel, dandelion, bitter cress and buttercup.

You can of course pop to the garden centre and buy bags of sterilised compost or pulverised bark. But, as at the dinner table, homemade is best.

It’s pleasant work. The whiff of mature compost is to the gardener what an infusion of garlic, lemon juice and olive oil is to the cook. As Victorian novelist

George Meredith put it, ‘Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay.’

With those practical pleasantries out of the way, it’s time for more plants. This year’s quest is for hellebores and a new collection of auriculas, flowering now to better enable a careful selection of choice colours. Of course, I come away from nurseries with far more –pulmonarias, pulsatillas, fritillaries, violas and, if they’re available, a clutch of Primula sieboldii.

Known in some quarters as Japanese primroses, the sieboldii, once common in moist places among Japan’s volcanic soils, was found also in the light woodland and damp meadows of eastern Siberia and Manchuria. Populations of them declined a couple of decades ago and in Japan they were put on its red (threatened) list in 2000. A few years later, thanks to successful conservation efforts, they were reclassified as ‘near’threatened and are, thankfully, plentiful again in a few dedicated British and other overseas nurseries.

I’m also on the lookout for pot-grown bulbs in full flower. While they might cost a tad more than dormant bulbs, they provide a good opportunity to observe

species and varieties previously overlooked or undervalued.

I recently found daffodils the colour of old ivory piano keys and placed them around a recently installed new-to-me edgeworthia. Its clusters of scented, creamy flowers appear on bare stems before leaf emergence. And those bare stems display interesting, cinnamoncoloured bark.

Edgeworthia chrysantha, my recent acquisition was named in honour of Irish-born botanist and photography pioneer Michael Pakenham Edgeworth (1812–81). It has the unusual if not unique habit of continuously making new shoots, technically known as trichotomous branching (that’s one for the pub quiz). That results in a neatly small, rounded, almost globular shrub, without pruning.

Oh, and the edgeworthia’s interesting bark? The Japanese make rather posh paper from it – used for bank notes. Perhaps I should get busy and rename the potting shed Fort Knox.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD RHUBARB

The rhubarb plants in my kitchen garden, which are now almost 20 years old, are still growing a vigorous crop every year.

Some are forced with a covering of straw under an upturned dustbin, and the pink stems will be ready this month. We let others grow without cover, and their stronger stems are used during summer in various dishes.

Apart from putting compost on the roots during winter, I find our rhubarb looks after itself. It is best grown

Clematis ‘Etoile Violette’, growing through Hydrangea paniculata

from crowns, which are available now, or as potted plants in late spring. Picking of the stems is not advised in the first year.

It hadn’t occurred to me that there are different varieties of rhubarb. Timperley is an old favourite for early forcing, and Poulton’s Pride is said to keep on cropping until November.

Marco Polo is credited with having brought rhubarb from the east, and it was used medicinally for several hundred years. The forcing of rhubarb without light, which is big business in Yorkshire, was started by accident in the Chelsea Physic Garden in the early-19th century.

Someone covered a dormant crown with soil, which after a few weeks produced pink stems that tasted sweeter than those grown uncovered.

While most garden catalogues list rhubarb as a fruit, and it has been legally classified as fruit in America, the Royal Horticultural Society has decided it is a vegetable. This is presumably because of its leaf stem.

We are familiar with rhubarb in sweet puddings – pies, crumbles, fools – not to mention the stewed rhubarb with lumpy custard from schooldays. But recent recipes have tended to recognise it as a vegetable by combining rhubarb with meat and fish.

The ‘vegetable’ is recommended with roast pork, calves’ liver and oily fish such as salmon and mackerel. And I have just come across an interesting recipe for rhubarb-and-lentil curry, with spinach and coriander leaves.

In summer, some rhubarb stems may need to be peeled before cooking. With rather more acidity than rhubarb forced in the dark, they can do a very effective job of cleaning burnt saucepans.

COOKERY

ELISABETH LUARD

EASTER BUNNY'S DREAM PICNIC

Dust off the Easter bonnet and tuck a primrose in your buttonhole.

The hens are back in lay. Church festivals mirror the farming year. That’s why eggs are back on the menu on Easter Sunday along with the usual symbols of rebirth – nuts, seeds, newborn animals and the first green shoots of spring.

That explains pussy willow on window sills in parish churches, roast lamb with mint sauce and fake fluffy chicks on marzipan-layered fruitcakes.

It also explains marzipan fruits in Belgian shop-windows and lambshaped butter-moulds in Danish hardware stores.

Each to their own.

Easter egg-and-bacon tart with cheese and greens

Perfect for a picnic in the park on Easter Sunday. Skip the roast lamb and escape to the great outdoors with a plain potato salad, fresh bread, farmhouse butter – and this savoury custard tart baked in a buttery, cheesy crust, wrapped in a tea-towel to keep it warm.

For a vegetarian version, replace the bacon with de-stoned black olives and/or de-salted capers – magic! Serves 4-5

The pastry

175g plain flour

25g grated cheese

½ tsp salt

125g chilled, unsalted butter

1 egg yolk

About 3 tbsps very cold water

The filling

100g lean bacon, diced 1 tbsp butter

350g fresh greens (spinach, watercress, wild garlic)

4 medium eggs

300ml double cream

Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg

Salt and pepper

First make the pastry. Toss the flour with the cheese in a roomy bowl and grate or chop in the butter. Rub lightly between your fingertips till the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. Add the egg yolk forked up with a couple of tablespoons of cold water, and press the crumbs together lightly to make a firm doughball (you may need a little more water). Wrap in clingfilm and set in a cool place for half an hour. Preheat the oven to 390˚F/200˚C/gas 6.

Have ready a 23cm-diameter tart tin with a removable base. Tip the doughball on to a floured board, flatten it with a floured rolling pin and roll it out to fit the tin with a wide overlap, so you can ease the pastry up the sides without stretching. Trim generously, leaving a flap to allow

for shrinkage, and use the trimmings to patch up any holes with a damp finger. Prick the base with a fork in a few places, line with foil and weight down with a spoonful of dry beans or rice-grains. Bake for 10 minutes to set the pastry (it’ll turn whiteish). Remove the foil and bake for another five minutes to dry the surface.

Meanwhile, prepare the filling. Rinse and shred the greens. Fry the bacon gently in the butter till the fat begins to sizzle, then add the greens, cover loosely and wilt them in the hot fat, bubbling up at the end to evaporate any liquid, and leave to cool.

Fork the eggs with the cream, season with nutmeg, salt and pepper, and stir in the contents of the frying pan.

Tip the mixture into the cooled pastry shell (don’t overfill or it’ll bubble over and burn). Bake at 340˚F/170˚C/gas 3 for 30 to 40 minutes, till the custard is lightly set and the pastry deliciously crisp and golden. Serve at room temperature, never chilled. Very 1960s retro.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE

KOREAN PAEAN

Undoubtedly, the worst time to go out for dinner with friends is after a drinks party.

It’s not just because everyone is sozzled or because we’ve all gorged on irresistible canapés. It’s because no one can make up their minds where, when and with whom they want to take vittles.

I had booked a table for four at 8pm but, within minutes of arriving, John asked, ‘Would you mind terribly if I brought my cousin and her husband?’

Idiotically eager to please, I fell into the bonhomous trap of saying, ‘Of course – no problem,’ in the certain knowledge I would have to leave the building to get a signal to call the restaurant, who confirmed my theory that restaurants hate tables for six because they lose two covers. They could fit in a six only at 8.30, half an hour after the book launch finished and the time of my original table.

As I returned to the drinks, I bumped into John’s cousin, who appeared quite anxious when I said, ‘I gather we’re having dinner together.’ She said she wasn’t sure what they were doing. In other words, like everyone at every drinks party, she was vying for the best post-drinks table and, clearly, John and I were B-list.

When she finally threw in her lot with us four lemmings, I had to confess to the venue. ‘Hope you both like Korean!’ I might as well have said, ‘We’re going to that new place, Embryos, for their tadpole soup.’

ELISABETH LUARD

She was even less pleased when I said we had to wait in a pub for that extra halfhour. So by the time we sat down at Yori, near Piccadilly Circus, I was poleaxed with angst. And that was before I saw the menu. All eyes were on me, as I admitted I had no idea what to order because I had never been to a Korean. ‘North nor South,’ I weakly japed as I lost my audience.

But then something wondrous happened. Our Uzbeki waiter took control and my esteem soared as dish after unknown dish came into land: jeon, a savoury pancake with dipping sauce; squid bokkeum and spicy chicken bokkeum. The works.

And then the fun really began as we griddled huge portions of pork and beef on the submerged barbecues in the centres of our two tables. We even forgave the lack of wine and indulged in a couple of bottles of perfumed soju, which puts sake in the shade. There are 12 branches in London and beyond. Set sail now.

A week later, I was nurtured by another semi-divine host, Chef Tee, at Paradise Cove, a Caribbean restaurant two minutes from Wandsworth Road station. I had visions of a huge, loud Rasta but ‘Likkle’ Chef Tee was clearly named after the tiny support for golf balls.

His was a tale of triumph over adversity: a year ago, a burglary left him destitute, but locals rallied round and raised £20,000 to revive him. His kindness and music permeate; he employs only youngsters who have been in care.

The food is exquisite: a set menu for two for £54 of fried plantain, delicious home-made curries (goat and vegan) and obligatory crunchy jerk chicken, and two of the fluffiest rice dishes, topped by a rum-soaked cake. It’s also a BYO venue. So another great place to take a young group who had you down as a meat-andtwo-veg type.

DRINK

BILL KNOTT

DISTILLED WISDOM

We are a resourceful species.

This was driven home to me recently in Goa. There, around this time every year, millions of cashew ‘apples’ ripen, each with a solitary nut, painstakingly extracted from the fruit.

It is not in the Indian nature, however, to let things go to waste – particularly not fermentable sugars, of which cashew apples contain an abundance.

Traditionally, the apples are de-seeded and trodden in an open stone tank: a colmbi, much like the lagar used for the treading of port grapes. (Given Goa’s Portuguese heritage, I wonder if there is

some connection.) The juice is then fermented in large earthenware pots for a few days, wild yeasts work their magic, and the resulting liquor (neero) is distilled twice, producing a spirit of 40˚ to 43˚ ABV.

The resulting hooch is called feni. It can also be made from coconut, much like the arrack made in Sri Lanka and elsewhere, but cashew feni is a uniquely Goan concoction. Modern methods have been introduced by commercial distillers. The apples are mechanically pressed, rather than trodden. Earthenware stills have been usurped by copper. But the result is the same. In any case, there are still thousands of small producers who stick to time-honoured techniques.

Feni might be politely described as an acquired taste. Pungent and fruity, it has an aroma that recalls Chinese maotai. On the palate, it has both a pleasant astringency and a plummy flavour, reminiscent of vieille prune.

The best brand I tried during a fortnight’s rigorous research was Lembrança, from the Madame Rosa Distillery, which includes some aged feni in the blend. I also discovered that, to my palate at least, feni is best sampled neat, as Goans tend to enjoy it. Adding ice seems to suppress its complex fruitiness.

Until recently, you would have had to travel to Goa to sample feni – not a great hardship, admittedly – but now it is available in the UK through a Readingbased importer with Goan-Portuguese roots. A G Caravela (agcaravela.co.uk) offer Gianna’s Classic Cashew Apple Feni for £27.02.

Feni is not the only alcohol to be made from what might otherwise be termed agricultural waste. Grappa – known as marc in France, chacha in Georgia and orujo in Spain – is made from grape pomace, the skins and pips left over from winemaking. And it has become increasingly popular (and expensive) in recent years. Try grappa di Moscato, which retains some of the Moscato grape’s aromatic qualities.

And you may have come across (or even make, as my grandfather did) wine from peapods, or foraged fruits and flowers such as dandelions, elders (berries or flowers), crab apples and brambles. Stinging nettles – just the bright green shoots – make a very drinkable beer. Thrift need not be a barrier to inebriation, but perhaps steer clear of building a still in the garden shed. Beer and wine are fine for hobbyists; spirits are probably best left to the professionals.

Or to Goan farmers.

Wine

This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a versatile white from the heart of the Languedoc, a bright, ripe and organic Côtes du Rhône, and a Pinot Noir from California that would be perfect with roast lamb. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Vermentino ‘Chants du Closeau’, Pays d’Oc, France 2022, offer price £8.50, case price £102.00 Refreshingly crisp, light and dry Vermentino (aka Rolle) with hints of green apple.

Côtes du Rhône

‘Réserve de Fleur’, France 2021, offer price £11.90, case price £142.80 Spicy, lively, Syrahheavy Côtes du Rhône with gentle tannins and plenty of fruit.

Pinot Noir ‘Odd Lot’, California 2018, offer price £11.50, case price £138.00 Silky, cherry-ripe fruit with toasty, oaky notes and plenty of bottle age.

SPORT

JIM WHITE

FOOTBALL'S CRAZY FANS

When it comes to football, things are not happy in Sheffield.

But, even as the city’s two great clubs, United and Wednesday, languish, marooned at the bottom of their respective divisions, a local councillor called David Cheetham came up with a bright idea he thought might alleviate the seemingly relentless suffering his constituents are going through.

‘Get all United and Wednesday fans to swap season tickets with each other,’ he wrote on Twitter. ‘That way, they get to watch each other getting battered every week and everyone’s happy.’

It was an intriguing idea. Wallowing in your neighbour’s pain is part of being a football fan. Nothing makes you chuckle quite as much as seeing your fiercest rival suffer.

And Mr Cheetham knows what he is talking about: he is a lifelong Blade, as fans of United call themselves.

But while it was clearly intended as a joke, a light-hearted take on collective misery in his city, there is one problem with his solution: ultimately, it wouldn’t make everyone happy.

If the attendance at a live sporting event were driven solely by the requirement to witness victory, the only places where anyone would turn up are Manchester City and Liverpool. Yet check the size of the crowd at their next home game and you can bet that Sheffield United’s Bramall Lane stadium is rammed to the gunwales. And it won’t be much different at Wednesday’s Hillsborough.

It isn’t just in Yorkshire that misery remains a draw, either. There will be people turning up in their hundreds at Forest Green Rovers and Sutton United, despite the fact both clubs are marooned at the wrong end of League Two.

Why? Because part of the process of being a football fan is the embrace –however reluctant it might be – of defeat.

Sure, demand for tickets increases when things are going well. But, odd as it might seem, plenty of fans turn up even as their team loses every single time.

However deluded it might be, a significant element of the pleasure of setting off to watch the game comes from the hope that this week it will be different and you might actually witness a win.

Even as you settle in your seat, raising your eyes heavenwards as you nod at the bloke in the row behind, you still live in

hope. A blissful sense of possibility continues until the very moment the opposition scores. And even as you watch your side’s chances of victory decline and disappear, there is an odd pleasure to be drawn from the evident haplessness.

You can apportion blame, you can tell your neighbour precisely what the team should be doing and how if you were in charge, you would have picked a completely different team. And, best of all, you can unleash a week’s worth of frustration bellowing at the linesman when he raises his flag on the rare occasion when your side actually gets anywhere near the opposition goal. Shout therapy: it works.

There is no denying that laughing at your rivals may alleviate the pain temporarily. But ultimately Mr Cheetham’s comical take has no anchor in the reality of being a fan.

In the end, you would rather watch your side lose every week than be obliged to watch your rivals fail. For many of us, the possibility of pain is part of why we attend live sport in the first place.

The truth is, we fans are all masochists at heart.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD INSURANCE HIKES

If you haven’t renewed your car insurance recently, you’re in for a shock. Expect increases of 50 to 110 per cent – though an industry insider told me that in his company they’re ‘only’ 30 to 40 per cent.

Reasons? As usual, a combination. Higher inflation, worldwide supply-chain difficulties and modern cars requiring more expensive repairs, especially electric vehicles (EVs).

Another cause is a consequence of supply-chain difficulties: delays in spare parts mean that policies providing you with a car while yours is off the road are paying hire-car charges for much longer than hitherto. I heard recently of someone who has been told it will take at least four months to deliver a new wing for his Defender – and that for a modern car still in production.

As for costs, an unnamed German manufacturer now charges £7,000 for a new front bumper because of all the sensors and electronic trickery built into it. There are reports of some Porsches having their headlights chopped out because they cost so much to replace.

EVs are more likely to be written off

than petrols or diesels because of the training and equipment required for repair, especially if batteries are damaged. In fact, the cost of replacing the battery often makes repair uneconomical.

My current insurance quandary is, thankfully, a minnow compared with these. My daily drive is a 31-year-old Defender, which last year cost £320 to insure with one other named driver and a £250 excess.

I’m with the NFU. They’re pricier than most, but over many years they’ve polled better in surveys, not least because when you ring them, you speak to a human being familiar with the industry. In my experience, they also pay out promptly and are unfazed by age. The quote this year is £512, or £486 if I double the excess to £500.

I offered not to have a replacement car in the event of an accident (there are others in the home fleet, and for local shopping I could happily use my 1960 Fordson Major tractor), but they won’t knock that off because it’s part of their standard terms.

I’m reluctant to leave the NFU, but such an increase demands attention, especially as my beloved Land Rover is neither more nor less likely to be stolen or damaged this year than last. Am I paying for all those Porsche headlights? Yes.

I put my details into go.compare.com – this yielded 59 quotes, ranging from Admiral at £457 (including an additional paid-for £250 excess) to Principal at £1,414 (£600 excess). When I did it again the next day, Admiral had increased to £470.

I still haven’t decided. When, some years ago, my Defender was stolen (as they often are) the NFU offered, without my asking, 50 per cent more than I’d insured it for on the grounds that prices had increased. That encourages loyalty.

Leaving aside whether this industrywide price hike is really justified (can’t they ring-fence the rest of us from EV prices, charging them more?), should there be tighter regulation of vehicle insurance?

Unlike your life, home, possessions, health and travel, you are legally obliged to insure your car. Shouldn’t there be some base level of the compulsory element of insurance – third-party only, perhaps – that is price-capped across the industry, leaving us to decide whether to add to it? Most would.

It used to be the case that you could insure third party, fire and theft significantly more cheaply than comprehensive – but no longer.

PS After amicable discussion with the NFU, renewal, when it came, was reduced to £414. I’m sticking with them.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life Writers vs Robots

There is a good argument brewing between old and new technologies.

It isn’t a resurgence of the Luddites. Instead, it’s the old guard accusing the youngsters of theft.

It’s all to do with Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI allows computers to read and process gigantic amounts of information in the blink of an eye (or faster). It may help us mere humans make more informed decisions. That’s the idea, anyway.

The problem is that the information being processed has to come from somewhere. For a while, there have been audible grumblings from some longestablished sources of knowledge (mostly news organisations) that AI is mercilessly plundering their websites to do its work, without citation or payment.

Webwatch

For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

chat.openai.com

Try OpenAI’s system for yourself – ask it to write you anything. Be brave.

victorianweb.org

Articles about history and culture in Victorian times, written by professional scholars. Very browsable.

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

This has recently come to a head and provoked several lawsuits in America, most notably from the New York Times (NYT). The paper complains that OpenAI (49 per cent owned by Microsoft) has been shamelessly regarding anything on the internet as being in the public domain. The NYT has even produced examples of OpenAI repeating some of its articles verbatim, without any acknowledgement.

It isn’t just news-gatherers that are complaining. The novelist John Grisham and some academic writers have joined forces to protect their work from being looted (as they see it) by AI. Other similar lawsuits are popping up all the time.

OpenAI’s response, so far, seems rather feeble to me. It says that, unless it is allowed free rein with other people’s intellectual property, it will be ‘impossible’ to develop AI for the benefit of humanity, as it believes that the world wants it to. Perhaps the best arguments are being saved for the courtroom.

Clearly, this is a clash of conflicting interests. It isn’t always obvious, but almost every commercial website has, tucked away somewhere, a statement forbidding the use of any of that website’s content for any purpose, without consent. They mean it; published words are, after all, their bread and butter.

The NYT’s objections aren’t an issue created by the internet age; piracy is as old as printing. Benjamin Franklin was notorious for re-publishing 18th-century British authors such as Wordsworth without any attempt to pay them.

A Christmas Carol was on sale in America within two weeks of publication, with none of the American proceeds going to Dickens. Great Britain was no better: Edgar Allan Poe’s works were published over here to great acclaim but enriched only the British publishers.

The problem was eventually resolved by the establishment of reciprocal international copyright conventions. But it took years to achieve them, and enforcement remains a challenge.

Effective copyright law is crucial if writers, and other creative people, are to make a living. But, of course, the current agreements did not remotely envisage the problems posed by AI. Nobody did, I imagine.

The ultimate solution must surely be to amend the agreements so that they do.

This has already started. Germany’s biggest publisher, Axel Springer, which owns the Bild and Welt newspapers, recently agreed to allow OpenAI to use their content in return for acknowledging the source, and – guess what – a regular payment. We don’t know the amount, but it is likely to be tens of millions of euros a year.

I can’t see why any newspaper wouldn’t welcome such a deal, if it can be achieved. Papers exist mainly to sell their words. If you and I won’t pay for them (as increasingly, it seems, we won’t), then they must seek new revenues.

In the meantime, of course, it is m’learned friends who will profit. Plus ça change

Neil Collins: Money Matters

My share tip – beware of buybacks

If you own quoted shares, you might have noticed announcements about buying back shares in the market.

On the face of it, this sounds like a splendid idea. The shares are cancelled, and because there are fewer of them, you own slightly more of the company than you did before.

Moreover, the move mops up shares from holders who might be about to sell anyway and thus depress the price. What’s not to like?

Rather a lot, it turns out. In most cases, paying some shareholders to go away at the expense of those who remain is really valuable only to the executives in the company and their advisers.

Here’s why. The top executives have convoluted incentive schemes that frequently run to a dozen pages in the annual report. A common feature is to link bonuses to earnings per share. Fewer shares in issue mean more earnings per

share, ceteris paribus – so bonus targets are easier to hit.

Other things are not equal, of course. Buying back shares replaces equity with debt (or less cash) on the balance sheet, making the whole enterprise more risky. The advisers like it because they get paid to handle the buying programme. There is nothing for them if the company pays out dividends instead.

A worse criticism is the way these programmes are handled. Many allocate

a lump sum to be used to keep buying regardless of price until the money’s all gone. Shell once boasted of a big buyback programme, but then the oil price collapsed; the board panicked and cut the programme – and the dividend, for the first time in half a century.

Simon Wolfson, the CEO of Next, has spelled out when the company will buy back shares – essentially when they are

cheap enough to be a better use of funds than investing in the business. Under Tim Martin, pub group J D Wetherspoon is buying back shares issued at £10 each during the Covid crisis, paying around 830p.

Unlike the Shell executives, both men have very large holdings in their companies. It helps them tell the difference between the directors’ interests and those of the shareholders.

'I'm picking up a lot of acidity'

Join Huon Mallalieu and Kirsty Fergusson for

A Festive Tour of the Low Countries

9th to 14th December 2024

The canals of Belgium and Holland are at their most hauntingly romantic before Christmas. And there’s the added bonus of Christmas markets and hot vinous drinks. Huon Mallalieu, our Exhibitions correspondent and Country Life’s Art Market columnist, and Kirsty Fergusson will be leading this tour to a region they know extremely well.

We will be staying in Antwerp at the Hotel Franq (www.hotelfranq.com), part of the Relais & Châteaux group.

Huon writes, ‘The concentration of cultural superlatives in Flanders and Brabant is unrivalled. Belgium was the much fought-over “cockpit of Europe”, and also produced outstanding art and architecture, accompanied by glorious food and beers. We shall avoid the warfare and relish the rest.

‘As well as seeing Van Eyck’s greatest works, we shall visit Rubens and some dealers in great tapestries and textiles, and perhaps sense why Belgium was the centre of the early-20th-century art world. We shall also cross the border to discover overlooked Dordrecht. None of the distances is too great.

‘Another discovery for some will be a remarkable new Belgian whisky. All this and a great winter market.’

Limited to 20 readers.

Monday 9th December – Antwerp Depart St Pancras on the 0901; arrive

including the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, the masterpiece of the Van Eyck brothers. Lunch at restaurant De Witte Leeuw, on the canal, followed by a visit to two of Huon’s art-dealer friends: Francis Maere, who has wonderful Symbolist/Surrealist paintings (Delvaux, Spilliaert); and Jan Muller, who specialises in Old Masters and 19th-century paintings.

Thursday 12th December – Bruges

Antwerp in time for lunch at Bourla, in the Graanmarkt. Afternoon tour including the Fine Arts Museum and Rubens House, both of which have recently reopened.

Tuesday 10th December – Antwerp and Mechelen

Morning stroll around town taking in the Gothic cathedral; visit to Christian Vrouyr, the Armenian carpet king. Then a half-hour drive to pretty, untouristy Mechelen, which has more UNESCO sights than any other city in Flanders, not least St Rumbold’s Cathedral and the Stadhuis. Lunch at the Het Anker Brewery.

Wednesday 11th December – Ghent Morning tour of St Bavo’s Cathedral

Morning tour of the medieval hospital and visit to the De Halve Maan brewery. Lunch at the Duc de Bourgogne on the river, followed by optional tour of the Groeningemuseum, which has a superb collection of Flemish Primitive and Renaissance works.

Friday 13th December – Dordrecht

This charming small city (‘the Venice of Holland’) has the biggest Christmas market in the region. Lunch at Villa Augustus, followed by a visit to the medieval Grote Kerk.

Saturday 14th December – Return to London

We will be catching the 10am train after breakfast, arriving at St Pancras at 12pm; you are free to get a later train if you prefer.

HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 or please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Price per person: £2,250 which includes all meals, wine with meals, transport and entrances. You need to book and pay for your own Eurostar tickets. Single supplement: £300. A non-refundable deposit of £750 will be required, with the full balance due on 1st September 2024.

Above: Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp Inset: Scenery with water canal in Bruges

The Crane

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

The crane (Grus grus) ceased to breed in Britain from the 17th century. But herons were colloquially called ‘cranes’, as John Clare’s 19th-century – but appropriate –lines show:

While far above the solitary crane Swings lonely to unfrozen dykes again

Cranking a jarring melancholy cry

Thro the wild journey of the cheerless sky

From March

That cranes were widespread is testified by cranberries, cranesbill – and many place names such as Cranbrook (Kent), Cranborne (Dorset), Cranfield (Bedfordshire) and Cran Hill (Aberdeenshire). Once the ‘noblest quarry’ in falconry, they and their eggs were a prized meal and propelled the drive to extinction.

East-coast Scotland and England, particularly Norfolk, harbour continental vagrants, not least cranes.

John Buxton, a wildlife film-maker, and his family lived at Horsey Hall, in the Norfolk Broads. Horsey forms part of the Thurne Broads, adjacent to the North Sea.

One day in September 1979, Frank Starling, a tenant farmer at Horsey, excitedly rang Buxton: ‘Just seen the biggest bloody herons I’ve ever seen in my life!’ he exclaimed.

It heralded the British crane renaissance. Buxton knew at once they were cranes. He had seen occasional migrating vagrants flying high over Horsey. It transpired that a pair of cranes were feeding on an unharvested potato field – potatoes are a favourite food –and roosting in the surrounding marshes. A third crane joined them in October and the three overwintered, moving between Hickling and Horsey. Buxton had not seen cranes on the ground before.

The cranes remained at Horsey and in 1982 fledged a chick, the first in England for 400 years. At least one pair of nesting

cranes was annually recorded from then until Buxton’s death in 2014. In that time, four successful fledgings happened twice, as recounted in John Buxton’s The Norfolk Cranes’ Story.

On my visit to Horsey in 2010, only one of three pairs was visible: 4ft tall with a 7ft wingspan. It was easy to see why these stately and elegant birds, Britain’s largest, provoke astonishment.

It was also understandable why Buxton, a self-described ‘craniac’, so tirelessly guarded (aided by his wife Bridget and wardens) these shy birds. Foxes had a taste for crane eggs and professional egg-stealers still exist. Private land meant visits were confined to invited guests.

Inspired by the Horsey colony, from

2010 to 2014 the Great Crane Project, a conservation partnership including the WWT and RSPB, imported crane eggs from Germany and released the fledged birds in the Somerset Levels. There are now 30 British breeding pairs and 145 residents, with offshoot colonies in Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Yorkshire. A small colony in north-east Scotland is the only one to migrate.

One March day at Verdun, when I was visiting the Douaumont Ossuary and Fleury-devant-Douaumont National Necropolis, commemorating the 230,000 French and German soldiers killed in the battle, there was a wailing of many voices, as if from an associated soundtrack. It was the passing of a thousand migrating cranes.

Travel

The slow road to Santiago

For his 70th birthday, Nigel Summerley gave himself a daunting present – an arduous walk along the Camino de Santiago

This was only the second time in my longish life that it had happened… I woke up, tried to get out of bed, and found I had lost the use of my legs.

The first time, ten years earlier, had been after an op and general anaesthetic. Now I was just turning 70 and it was the morning after I’d walked 18 miles in one day – on Europe’s great pilgrimage route the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.

My immediate reaction was slight panic. My next was to ask myself again: what am I doing here? The answer was that friends (much younger) had asked me to join them for the last five days and 71 miles of the Camino through northern Spain – and another friend (a bit older) had quelled my fearful reluctance by telling me, ‘Just do it! If you don’t, you’ll regret it.’

In earlier years, I had run marathons, and hiked into the Australian Outback, down the Grand Canyon, across the Atlas Mountains, and over Andean volcanos – but wasn’t it now time to stop?

With my knees aching regularly and nagging pain from an arthritic toe, I had thought the answer might be yes. But I had decided to rage against the dying of the joints and see whether I could make it. And, yes, people do get seriously hurt or even die on the Camino – as this trip was to prove.

The rewards, though, are high –and not just the lovely certificate (the

Final stop: Santiago

compostela) confirming that you’ve completed your pilgrimage. My walk began on a wet autumn morning with Gary, 39, his partner, Carmen, 36, and his mum, Marilyn, 66. When I asked Marilyn, who had extensive arthritis, why she was here, she said, ‘I’m a nutter.’ But later she admitted, ‘Because it’s a challenge.’

Like me, she wanted to see if her ageing body could still do what it used to. And, like me, she’s pretty stubborn.

We headed west after a night in Sarria, a grim and foggy Galician town with buildings resembling prison blocks. And we were soon in the beautiful green hills, forests and idyllic hamlets through which much of the Camino would take us.

It would also lead us into the kind of apocalyptic rain that makes you wish someone had built a new Ark.

One of the great lessons of the Camino, path to the tomb of St James, renowned for its transformative insights, is: pack waterproofs.

I found that you also need the madcap humour of a Gary, the questing curiosity of a Carmen and the true grit of a Marilyn.

A man who had all these was Ken, 77, a retired US military man from Dallas, by whose side I walked on our second day, from Portomarin to Palas de Rei. This section had the steepest hills, yet Ken powered on. He’d spent two years training for the Camino, while my preparation had been, er, two walks across London.

But, still, Ken was doing the whole 480 miles of ‘the French Way’ from St Jean Pied de Port, while we were doing the minimum required to get your compostela

Ken was walking in short stages – to ensure he could successfully tick the Camino off his bucket list. He had done 40 days when I encountered him, and he had met people from 31 different countries. The meeting and greeting of fellow pilgrims (with a ‘Buen Camino!’) is a big part of walking the Way.

Ken said he hadn’t seen anyone older than him on the path but he had heard that day, via social media, that a 92-yearold woman had just arrived in Santiago.

Some don’t make it at all. Regular shrines along the Camino (mostly to middle-aged men) made it clear nothing was guaranteed. It’s tempting to say it’s not that tough a walk, but actually it’s bloody hard – on the feet, legs, back and, sometimes, the spirit. But I was with people who wouldn’t even cut a corner –they were doing every last step.

The first casualty we saw was a young Frenchwoman being bandaged up by the side of the path by other caminantes. She had sprained her ankle but was saying it wouldn’t stop her. We weren’t entirely surprised she’d had a fall – earlier, she had run downhill ahead of us with a huge backpack bouncing around.

Later we met a Canadian woman who had slipped and broken her arm when there were still 190 miles to go – she was now completing the latter stages, some on foot, some by taxi.

But the big shock came on the morning of that 18-mile third day to Arzua, which ominously was also Spain’s Day of the Dead.

The Camino is mainly off-road but occasionally it crosses major highways, like the one outside Palas de Rei. In the gloom of a wet, windy morning, we made it across safely – but at our late-breakfast stop, in the village of Pilgrim in El Acebo, León

Casanova, we heard that another pilgrim hadn’t been so lucky that day. He’d been hit by a car and killed. Stunned walkers had seen the body covered up and taken away.

On the fifth day, we finally arrived at the Cathedral of Santiago, resting place of James the Apostle, patron saint of Spain, in yet more pouring rain. This time we were side by side, our arms linked, to cross the finishing line together. We must have looked bedraggledly triumphant, and we earned applause from waterproofed onlookers.

In the downpour the cathedral looked grim, but the following day, with our compostelas in our rucksacks, we were blessed with blue skies and sunshine, and saw the majesty of the building and visited the tomb of St James.

Backpacks can be couriered from one stopover to the next – but I carried mine all the way. If you’re going to give yourself a hard time, you might as well do it properly. So by the end, every part of me ached. But the feeling of revelation was undeniable – drawn from conversations on the Way, from the green beauty of Galicia, and from pushing the body to its limits.

The Camino is a metaphor for life. We are all the same on this road – all travelling in the same direction, with the same ultimate destination. Sometimes we have to endure setbacks and pain, but if we recognise that we are all frail mortals, and if we support one another, the journey can be joyful.

And what did I do on that morning my legs failed to function? I followed Marilyn’s example, waited a few minutes, got myself up, had a laugh with my fellow pilgrims ... and did another 12 miles … and another 11 miles the day after that.

And I found that the Camino doesn’t end – its lessons and its spirit remain with you.

Follow the Camino offers Sarria-toSantiago packages from £532: www. followthecamino.com. EasyJet flies London Gatwick-Santiago, from £200 return. Independent travellers will find Airbnb useful; albergues (hostels), around €15pp a night, are listed at alberguescamino.com

Shoes discarded on the Camino

Overlooked Britain

Stables fit for a King

lucinda lambton

Before the Prince Regent built the Brighton Pavilion, he created an Indian palace for his horses

What building is more exhilaratingly exotic and unexpectedly beautiful than the royal stables at Brighton Pavilion?

With their romantic Indian forms weaving into their glorious finery, they are spectacularly rare.

They were designed by William Porden for the Prince of Wales between 1803 and 1808, some years before his famous Pavilion.

Influences from the East started to infiltrate into the rich schemes by 1801. There was a plan to add a Chinese façade to his villa, but this did not materialise.

So the first oriental building of any consequence to be built in England was this one: Porden’s Indian temple for horses, modelled on the general plan of the Jama Masjid in Delhi.

The dome was inspired mainly by the Halle aux blés, a cornmarket in Paris, and it was huge. It was 80 feet in diameter, only 20 feet less than that of the dome of St Paul’s.

In 1804, when the building was finished, there was a general terror that, as soon as the scaffolding was removed, the whole lot would crash to the ground.

Porden wrote to his daughter, ‘The cupola is now on and the workmen are swarming about it like jackdaws. The whole proves fully to expectation. The roof dome [of lead and glass] now supports itself without assistance from the scaffolding, and has not yet fallen.’

There were 44 stables, five coach houses and two harness rooms in the great circle, all of them delightfully framed with scalloped arched windows and doors. Upstairs there were 20 bedrooms for coachmen.

The cost was enormous, thought

The Royal Stables, Brighton (1808), built by William Porden. Picture by John Nash, who built neighbouring Brighton Pavilion

to be at least £60,000. I fear the Prince never paid his bills. Mr Sanders, who was in charge of all the timberwork, was to die a broken man, with £10,000 owed to him.

In the mid-1780s, the Prince of Wales first rented a small lodging house to overlook the fashionable Brighton promenade. The town was developing from a decaying fishing village into a gracious retreat for affluent swells. The sea was also renowned for its health-giving remedies. The particular favourite was ‘dipping’ –total immersion in the waters.

superb edifice, indeed quite unnecessarily so’. I can only beg to differ.

Porden, despite his architectural triumphs of Indian architecture, never went to the country. Still, by that time, there were examples for boffins to follow, thanks to beautiful work by William Hodges and Thomas Daniell. Warren

Hastings’s country house at Daylesford in Gloucestershire was a quite magnificent example.

There was a general terror that the whole lot would crash to the ground

Brighton was spot-on perfect for the Prince. A vain and extravagant man, he warmed in the most full-blown way to its wealth of fashionable womanising, gambling and drinking. He was taking revenge on a strict upbringing.

The decadent life, combined with the love of finery, was to create the finest stage set of splendour. In 1815, George decided to turn his modest villa into an oriental palace for his horses. In fact, the Prince was neither a keen nor a good rider, although it was reported that ‘He was an enthusiastic patron of Brighton Races.’

He was determined that his animals should be most luxuriously appointed. He succeeded with most marvellous success. The equestrian buildings were approached through an open courtyard for carriages and carriage horses. Inside, there was a parade ring for the horses. What glories!

The Irish diarist Mrs Calvert, writing in 1807, thought the stables were ‘a most

The exquisite watercolour of the stables’ exterior (pictured above) is by Humphry Repton, from the folio of Twelve Views of Brighton, produced for the Prince in 1808. He describes the ‘stupendous and magnificent building which, by its lightness, its elegance, its boldness of construction and the symmetry of its proportions, does credit to both the genius of the artist and the good taste of his Royal employer’.

The other delightful interior (pictured left) is from John Nash’s Views of the Royal Pavilion of 1827.

Porden and Repton drew up plans for the new royal palace and James Wyatt submitted a scheme in 1813, but it was killed before it could be realised. It was left to John Nash to complete this oriental paradise in 1826. Today, planted with a mix of Indian and Chinese species, the gardens have been restored as closely as possible to the original Regency schemes. The stables became Brighton’s Corn Exchange and are now an arts centre, part of the Brighton Dome complex.

The Prince Regent became George IV in 1820. However, owing to increased responsibilities and ill health – he became enormously fat – once the interior of the Royal Pavilion was finally finished, he made only two more visits.

On his death, George was succeeded by his younger brother William IV, a popular and affable king who continued to live in the Pavilion.

When he died in 1837, he was succeeded by his niece Victoria. She was always somewhat discomfited by the reputation of her uncle’s somewhat wild ways. She determined not to live there herself.

During the Second World War, more than 4,000 wounded Indian soldiers were nursed back to health in the Pavilion, with an operating theatre in the dome itself. What a sight and a half it was, with a host of Indian faces towered over by the great dome, relishing their native surroundings in Sussex. HURRAY!

ANGELO HORNAK / ALAMY

Above: the stables’ exterior by Repton. Right: George IV

In WWII, the Pavilion housed 689 beds for wounded Indian troops

On the Road

Queen of Coronation Street

Maureen Lipman tells Louise Flind about her hatred of packing, the sexual horrors of Gogglebox and the joy of the wheelie suitcase

Is there anything you can’t leave home without?

My Rosa Mosqueta skin oil, a heated appliance for my hair and Nytol.

Do you travel light?

I travel heavy. I’ve never mastered packing. I hate packing. That’s why I don’t travel that much. My PA is a very good packer and she will occasionally say, ‘Go away. I’ll do it.’

And the case is always the last one to come off the turntable. Or, in Israel once, my case came off first. I was overwhelmed with the joy. Later the phone rang and a man said, ‘Is that Mrs Rosenthal?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘I think you have my suitcase.’

What’s your favourite destination?

I’m excited by cities – New York, Tel Aviv. They’re cosmopolitan, everything is there and the food is fantastic. I felt something sinister about Venice. Barcelona is wonderful, and I do like flamenco. And Vancouver and those little islands around it.

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?

They’re of being in the car and somewhere in Yorkshire, like Scarborough or Skegness. Another is of Scheveningen in Holland, where my father refused to have suntan oil on because it wasn’t manly and got firstdegree burns.

Did you always want to be on the stage?

Apparently, yes. I couldn’t wait to get on stage in the pantomime. They’d ask, ‘Are there any little children?’ I was up there. I’ve got an essay somewhere that says, ‘When I grow up, I want to be (a) a dress designer [I can’t sew], (b) an air hostess [I hate flying] and (c) an actor.

Did you grow up in an artistic household?

No. We had the telly for the Coronation and once a year for the pantomime.

What was your first big break?

Agony [the TV series]. I don’t think it made fantastic ratings, but it was very much loved by those who loved it.

Up the Junction in 1969 I suppose gave me a bit of a profile – and working in theatre at Watford.

What was it like touring in the ’70s?

What sort of places did you stay in?

When I was at the RSC in 1973, I was playing Celia in As You Like It with Eileen Atkins. My landlady, Mrs MacDonald, had a boxer dog, two armchairs and a telly. Instead of being in the Dirty Duck like everybody else, I sat with Mrs MacDonald and Suki, watching the telly.

Do you prefer theatre to television?

It’s essential to keep being in the theatre. Otherwise you lose your nerve. I like proper filming when you perfect something small in a day. I enjoy Corrie enormously, but we’re doing six shows a week. There’s no time to perfect anything.

What’s been your favourite TV experience?

Oklahoma at the National in 1998, which was filmed for television.

How was it doing Gogglebox with Gyles Brandreth?

Gyles and I got on really well and I loved going to his house every Saturday, but I didn’t like the show. They just kept showing us willies, basically, to see our reaction.

What do you think about the situation in Gaza?

When the Chinese torture and brainwash the Uyghurs, which we all know they’re doing in concentration camps, I don’t think you get Chinese restaurants being bombarded. So why is it that Jews are suffering all over the

world for what someone is doing in the only Jewish state?

How did you get the BT ads?

I was only 41. So I wasn’t perfect casting – but I did give them a lot of comic input and that’s what swung it for me.

Did the Queen give you your damehood?

She gave me my CBE, but Charles gave me my damehood.

Are you brave with different food?

I don’t eat anything from pigs, or some cheese or chocolate, or drink red wine because I had migraines. I’m greedy and I struggle slightly with my English pear shape.

Do you have a go at the local language?

My French teacher despaired of me, and the only German I ever did was when I sat under a friend’s desk. I did speak Hebrew and I can say obrigado in Portuguese.

What’s the strangest place you’ve ever slept in?

When I was about 16, I went with a group of friends to Israel by train. When we came back, Arthur the organiser had forgotten to book us tickets. So we had to stand from Marseille to Paris.

Do you like coming home?

We had a house in Muswell Hill. The first time I went back to the house without Jack [her late husband, Jack Rosenthal], there were two passion flowers in bloom and those tall hollyhock things had grown either side of the step –very welcoming.

What are your travelling tips?

What did we do before cases on wheels?

Invented in Israel, incidentally. My daughter says, ‘Don’t let Ma go to the airport on her own because she’ll start talking to people and she’ll get on their plane.’

Maureen Lipman plays Evelyn Plummer in Coronation Street

Taking a Walk

Chatting at Chatsworth

patrick barkham

The first days when the light lifts with the earliest hint of spring are all the more magical after a wet and windy winter.

The sun had elbowed through chill-inducing cloud by midday, and snowdrops were popping up on roadsides when we took a walk at Chatsworth.

A walk with a gang of old friends is a rare and special event. My former university mates and I were so engrossed in catching-up conversations in the car park that we incurred the wrath of other arriving walkers. They tooted with impatience as they bustled in to park and open doors, as deferentially as chauffeurs, for imperious dogs riding on back seats.

The dogs were on leads, but the children were unleashed and ran across the irresistible swath of Capability Brown parkland to stalk the fallow deer who twinkled silver in the sunshine. ‘Can we blow some sort of whistle?’ wondered Claire D as we surveyed our vanishing brood. But the children hurtled back to rejoin us, having satisfied themselves with shooting videos of the herd.

We set off south beside the River Derwent, the afternoon sun lighting up the scene. The gold sash windows of the spectacular house shone back like something from a bizarre fairy tale. Window frames edged in gold leaf might be derided in a footballer’s mansion, but here they were part of a treasured idyll of Englishness.

‘I feel a bit like a spring flower,’ said Claire B as we unfurled in the sunshine, a buzzard wheeling in the hazy blue, the river purring at our side as it raced over diminutive weirs.

The joys of a group walk are many. The nicest is the way the group is constantly shifting shape, like a murmuration of starlings (thanks, daughter Esme, for that simile). And so we fall into conversations with others in a gently turning kaleidoscope.

It’s all so natural and easy and you’re never stranded with anyone as you might be at a dinner party (not that I’d ever feel stuck with any of my old friends).

A stop to distribute snacks, and the children and I chatted about Betty the

dachshund. Crossing pasture, I discussed livestock and rewilding with Ted. Through the copse, we pondered the recent storms that had decorated the ground with bouquets of pine and toppled several shallow-rooted beech trees.

We turned west at a cattle grid –which car tyres crossed with a farting sound – and took a peaceful lane up a small, steep-sided valley which fed the Derwent. It cascaded with tinkling streams, each one singing of spring as it danced through neat holes in the limestone walls towards the mother river.

The other feature of a group walk is its speed. Apart from lepidopteran excursions, this was the slowest walk I’ve ever taken. It made a meander look like a motorway drive. There was always someone wanting to pause and admire the estate’s features, from the weighted footpath gate to the oldest alder I’ve ever encountered. It was short and stout, and the heartwood had rotted away. But it was still bound together by twists of bark and burrs, the branches still proudly bearing miniature black cones.

Then we shifted north, breasted the ridge and began a long descent through Capability’s landscape, enjoying glorious views of Chatsworth below.

We met another cluster of 100 fallow deer, supervised by one antlered stag. We then emerged on to the road in the estate village of Edensor, with its fine Victorian houses, every gutter and door and all the eaves painted regulation Chatsworth blue.

Here we salivated over a stall selling jam and ‘homemade luxury tiffin’. We walked at a pace that would disgrace a snail, in the softest of early spring sunsets, back to the grand house, its gold windows shining more preposterously than ever.

We parked at Chatsworth (what3words: venue, puddings, exit), headed south beside the Derwent, turned west at Calton Lees and up the valley, turning north at Calton Houses, through New Piece Wood and down to Edensor in a four-mile circuit that can take an hour or four, depending on your party

Across

1 Server finding first ace after measure of pressure (7)

5 New company sees celebrity backing place (5-2)

9 Drink firms needing answer (5)

10 What was that - extend a further invitation? (4,5)

11 More endless fighting as result of visit to dentist (10)

12 Said case of spirits to be missing (4)

14 Spotted girl on grand feature of church (7,5)

18 Partnership put forward by union (5,7)

21 Take a sly look back at cost of board and lodging (4)

22 Fresh carcass not inviolable (10)

25 Strangely ignorant about iodine and post-war austerity (9)

26 Spitting feathers at international tariff (5)

27 Drug, one taken during a short run (7)

28 Gave up profit, outwardly exposed (7)

Down

Genius crossword 437 EL SERENO

1 Supporter needing one for a row (6)

2 Deliver ceremony outside flipping church (6)

3 Left first part of play in, say - this always depends (10)

4 A way to incorporate business course (5)

5 Half-asleep and moon’s set fast (9)

6 A final cut short, unfortunately (4)

7 Leaves baker worried for rest of workforce (3,5)

8 Maybe fine writer with a story about origin of species (8)

13 Hostile reformer not in favour replaced by a German (10)

15 Repeat literary device ignoring everybody (9)

16 A track a DJ played dismissing clubs in capital (8)

17 Celebrate as it happens, with revolutionary Russian leader cut short (4,2,2)

19 Implied nations generally not happy about Italy (6)

20 Beat after separation? (6)

23 Times must support drugs (within limits) for sport (5)

24 Tie up, seeing low resistance (4)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk Deadline: 3rd April 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.

Genius 435 solution Moron

Winner: Roland Rance, London E17

Runners-up: Mrs Jenny Hancock, Chippenham, Wiltshire; Julian Reckert, West Byfleet, Surrey

Players learn that the odds when you are missing the king and two low cards are in favour of finessing. The finesse is 50-50. The drop (cashing the ace) will work only when the king is singleton – one third of the 2-1 splits (78 per cent), so only 26 per cent. However, it is a mistake to get fixated with these a priori chances. Seldom does the play boil down to the play of one suit – take our featured slam deal.

Dealer South Neither Vulnerable

The bidding

South West North East

1 ♠ Pass 4 ♣ (1) Pass 4NT(2) Pass 5 ♦ (3) Pass 6 ♠ End

1. Splinter bid, showing a raise to four spades with a singleton (or void) club. 2. Fabulous hand facing a splinter. 4NT is Roman Key Card Blackwood. 3. One (or four) of ‘five aces’ (including the king of spades).

West led an unenthusiastic (given the splinter) king of clubs. Declarer won the ace, and at the table ran the queen of spades to East’s king and had an unavoidable third-round heart loser. One down.

If the king of spades is with West, you do not have to take the finesse to succeed (unless West has all three spades). Follow this elegant winning line after winning trick one with the ace of clubs.

Ruff a club, cash the ace of spades (two low cards appearing), cross to a top diamond and ruff the third club. Cross to the other top diamond to eliminate both minors, and now make the key play of returning to the king of hearts before exiting with a second spade.

If West has the king of spades, you are certain to succeed (West’s minor-suit exit can be ruffed in dummy while the knave of hearts is discarded from hand).

If East has the king of spades (as here), you’ll succeed unless East has a heart, leads it, and you finesse into West’s queen. Here, East is heartless (because you crucially cashed the king) and you succeed via the ruff-and-discard.

ANDREW ROBSON

Competition TESSA CASTRO

IN COMPETITION No 303 you were invited to write a poem called Best Wishes Polly Sharpe’s sad tale began, ‘My dad was cool, he played guitar, / He shagged a woman in HR, / My mum said he had gone too far, / Divorced him for deception.’ Bill Holloway’s narrator stipulated, ‘Your taste may be for oysters, lentils, punk, a ton of Brie – / That’s fine, my darling, fill your boots, / Just don’t wish them on me.’ Rob Salamon’s wishes were enemies of happiness: ‘A robin hops. Clouds drift. Another day /Of yearning for that faraway,/ Unlived life I wish I’d had.’ Bob Morrow wrote that, now formality’s gone, ‘For the Keirs and Eds and Rishis, / I’ll end my letters with “Best wishes”.’ Commiserations to them and to Ann Beckett, Bruce Maunder Taylor, Sue AjaxLewis and Michael Turner, and congrats to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Veronica Colin.

Retirement blurs my days – but nights

Are sharply focused.

I’m sent my golden girls, Larger than life, exotic blooms Rampant on sun-kissed beaches, Not a deck chair in sight.

They never stay. Milky waves

Lap at my bone-white ankles. I’m left, a faded snapshot, Stuck on an empty shore.

Let me stay rooted in the here and now. I need familiarity, The well-worn face and smile, the known body

Humped in the next bed.

Let me be grateful for my lot Of small realities.

Veronica Colin

They play the other game at Grosvenor High. In Cregagh, East Belfast, a scraggy mite Resolves to thwart this galling oversight By bidding rugby union goodbye.

He truants, in pursuit of something round To dribble, keep, make magic with, caress; His happiness improbable unless A football-playing sanctuary is found.

Glentoran scouts reject him: ‘Some wee spide; He’ll never play for us – too small and light’. George longs to gain the freedom to excite, And fill his mammy’s heart with loving pride.

The chance – and wealth – he wishes for Bring ‘booze, the birds, fast cars’ to Georgie Best;

In his own words he ‘squanders all the rest’, Fifth Beatle, ‘soccer great’, first superstar.

Richard Spencer

Our wishes range? We planned a choice of three Graded for social norms as taste decreed But then we found comparability Wasn’t in tune with what our clients need.

Good’s always popular, the standard line, Reliable, robust and trusted, so It’s widely recognised as strong design. But Better? Well, that simply had to go.

It struck a cautious, too judicious tone With over-calibration in its voice. So that leaves Best: superlative, alone Heading the field, the safe and classic choice.

But take your time to choose: Good versus Best?

It’s your decision; both have passed time’s test.

D A Prince

‘I wish that I was bullet-proof,’ Sang Thom Yorke way back when. I wish that I could stay aloof, Hard-boiled, and count to ten.

I wish I could dissimulate, Wear masks, as passion dies While love turns to contempt or hate And egos vulcanise.

Some hope. The hurt has left me in A septic pool of tears, Divested of my second skin, A prisoner of my fears.

I wish she hadn’t said she thought I needed a retread.

Life is all pain – but I stop short Of wishing I were dead.

Basil Ransome-Davies

COMPETITION No 305 From blackbird to goldfinch, the birds join in astonishingly early. Please write a poem called Dawn Chorus, in any sense. 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 305’, by Thursday 4th April.

Contact Grenville Collins.

Tel: 020 7834 1852. Email: grenvillejcollins@gmail.com

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Books & Publishing

QNanny from Hell

We live next door to two high-flying business people. They’re lovely parents, when they’re around – but the rest of the time the child is looked after by a French au pair and we can hear her screaming at the little girl. As a result the child is very withdrawn. Should I tell the parents, or would I be interfering? Name and address supplied

AIf you spotted a newborn baby lying in the middle of a motorway you wouldn’t hesitate, would you? Of course you’re interfering – and quite rightly. Ask the parents round for a drink as soon as possible and tell them exactly what you’ve told me. If you can get recordings, so much the better. If they get defensive, well, you’ve done your bit. One hopes they’ll give the au pair her marching orders as soon as possible. Why anyone has children at all if they don’t want to be there most of the time when they’re small is beyond me.

Time to lunge?

QI’m 50 and single and recently I met a lovely man of 40. He broke up with his girlfriend six months ago, confides in me and texts me lots, but he’s never tried to see me alone. My feelings for him are getting stronger. What should I do?

G H, by email

ASurely you know what his feelings are for you, just from a sixth sense? Do your eyes ever meet? Does he brush by you closer than

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

is necessary? Can’t you test the water by asking, in a motherly way, if he’s found anyone else? Call him ‘sweetie’ ‘by accident’, and then laugh about it. Add an extra ‘x’ to your texts. So much of courting can be carried out subliminally, without your having to make direct – and often humiliating – statements.

My funeral blues

QMy father has only weeks to live. The problem is that he wants to take over the funeral. He’s organised the hymns and designed the headstone. He’s already got his best friend to write the eulogy – and even insists on vetting it! He’s always been a control freak. My brother says that once he’s dead, we can do what we like, but I’d feel uneasy. What do you think?

Angela, by email

AWe’re surrounded by advertisements from funeral companies trying to get us to organise (and pay for!) our own funeral in advance. But organising a loved one’s funeral is an important part of the grieving process and makes the bereaved feel they’re honouring their loved one. It gives us some kind of agency and helps us heal. Perhaps you could write to the people who’ll be coming, along these lines:

‘Looking forward to seeing you at Dad’s funeral. We just wanted to let you know that he insisted on organising the entire thing himself before he died. To respect his dying wishes, we’re going to go along with this. We hope you understand, and thank you for being here.’

Later, you might have a memorial tea, where you can create your own service and make your own contributions.

QLonging for a baby

My husband and I have tried six times to have a baby via IVF with no success. I’m 40 and he’s 47. Had my husband known that we couldn’t have children, I’m sure he’d never have married me. I so want his happiness that I feel I should leave. I know I could cope on my own – but I do love him so. Am I being selfish to stay?

Name and address supplied

AIn this case, tell him your fears and ask him how he feels, honestly. You’re imagining you can read his mind, which you can’t. No one can. Not even Derren Brown. I’ve so often felt absolutely certain that an intimate thinks a certain way, I’d swear it was true on the Bible. But it’s not. Often the truth is the exact opposite.

A tip from a reader

Re your writer who didn’t want any more things as presents: when my sister decided the same, she suggested that people might like to offer events instead.

This led to some memorable days out; the present could have been a meal or a cup of coffee – or a fortnight on an island in the West Indies.

David Lane, Wakefield

A brilliant idea! Another one is to ask only for perishable goods – flowers, plants or delicious food. Those won’t be cluttering up the garage, gathering dust, in the years to come.

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.