Bill Wyman was declared our Oldie of the Year at our dazzling annual awards ceremony.
The former Rolling Stones bassist, 88, was astonishingly modest.
As he picked up his award from Gyles Brandreth, he said, ‘I feel very embarrassed. I’m very honoured to receive this but it’s also strange to me to be here, as a poor working-class kid from South London.
‘I can only thank my grandma. She taught me everything. She taught me to write a diary, to Scrapbook, the art of collecting things, to say the alphabet backwards.’
Wyman proceeded to say the alphabet backwards, at top speed. Wyman’s grandmother died in 1961, the year he joined a then little-known rock combo called the Rolling Stones.
He closed by reciting Rudyard Kipling’s If–, taught to him by his grandmother.
Not a dry eye in the National Liberal Club, where the ceremony was held. For full citations of our Oldie of the Year winners, turn to page 14.
Film director Mike Leigh, of Abigail’s Party fame, our Golden Oldie of the Silver Screen, gave the shortest acceptance speech in Oldie history:
‘Short speech. Short script.
‘Act 1. Old. Act 2. Old fart. Act 3. Dead.
Among this month’s contributors
Kenneth Cranham (p21) is one of our finest actors. He turns 80 on 12th December. A friend of Joe Orton’s, he was in Loot. He was in Shine on Harvey Moon (1982-5), Oliver! (1968) and Hatton Garden (2019).
Simon Berry (p24) was Chairman of Berry Bros & Rudd, the family wine company founded in 1698. A Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, he served on the Royal Household Wine Committee.
Peter McKay (p49) wrote the Ephraim Hardcastle column on the Daily Mail He worked for Private Eye and wrote Inside Private Eye. He is a keen motorcyclist and pilot.
Daisy Dunn (p55) wrote The Missing Thread: A Women’s History of the Ancient World. She is author of Catullus’s Bedspread, In the Shadow of Vesuvius and Homer: A Ladybird Expert Book.
Oldies of the Year: (back, left to right): Harry Mount, Mike Leigh, Bill Wyman, Nanette Newman, John Standing, Stan McMurtry, Gyles Brandreth. Front row: Manette Baillie, Christian Lamb
‘Somewhere lurking between the acts, The Oldie magazine; these awards. What an honour – thank you. I’m really overwhelmed.
‘It’s great. Cut.’
Next year’s Oscar-winners, given to verbose, maundering acceptance speeches, take note.
Our Oldie In-Laws of the Year are actress Nanette Newman, 90, and her actor son-in-law, John Standing, also 90.
Nanette said, ‘I had my 90th a few weeks ago. I woke up one morning and I
Important stories you may have missed
didn’t feel 90 at all... I felt more like 104!
‘Now, after winning this award, I don’t feel 90. I feel 82 and a half.’
John Standing began by declaring, ‘No mother-inlaw jokes!
‘How wonderful to get an award from a magazine I’d never read – the title always put me off!’
Shoe sniffer given suspended sentence i Faster flushes on the way in Peebles Town Hall Border Telegraph
Drink driver ‘could have killed someone’ after fleeing police Leicester Mercury
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Now, he said, he buys The Oldie every week – only to be corrected by Gyles Brandreth, who reminded him that the magazine in fact comes out every four weeks.
Among those at the ceremony who had drunk deep at the fountain of youth was Stan McMurtry, better known as Mac, 88, the Mail on Sunday cartoonist.
He began his professional career doing cartoons for the Daily Sketch in the 1960s. Mac, who won our Oldie Lead in his Pencil Award, looks half a century younger.
In his modest speech, he said, ‘You’ve made this oldie very much a youngie with this award.’
Christian Lamb, 104, our Oldie D-Day Mastermind, who helped plan D-Day, thanked Gyles Brandreth ‘for the remarkable account of what I’ve done and so on and so forth and how marvellous are all the people here’.
Manette Baillie, 102, her fellow wartime Wren,
won the Oldie Flying Angel of the Year award for jumping from a plane at 13,000 feet this year.
Her tips for a long, happy life? ‘Simplicity and fun.’
Left: Maureen Lipman and Tom Courtenay. Below left: Don McCullin. Below: Roger McGough and Michael Crick
Left: Angela Rippon and Peter York. Below left: Prue Leith. Below: Simon Williams and John Standing
Above: Nicky Haslam. Right: Nanette Newman. Far right: Mary Killen and Giles Coren
A recent account of the life of Lord Massereene and Ferrard (he was the 14th Viscount Massereene and the 7th Viscount Ferrard) claimed the family name was subject to satirical alteration.
The Telegraph obituary mentioned one nickname: the Lord Mass of Cream and Feathers.
The Telegraph’s late, great obituaries editor, Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd (1946-2007), loved the other nickname – of one of the late Lord’s ancestors: Lord Vaseline and Push Hard.
Hugh adored a tease about the deceased’s peccadillos in his priceless obituaries in the Telegraph – among them the 12th Marquess of Huntly (1908-87). He married a nurse 40 years his junior, declaring, ‘I still have my own teeth. Why should I marry some dried-up old bag?’
John Prescott, who has died at 86, used to share digs in Clapham with his fellow Labour MP Dennis Skinner.
Jeremy Corbyn said the two flatmates had an itchy relationship, worthy of Neil Simon’s play The Odd Couple
After the last vote of the Commons day, they would head home separately.
Skinner (still with us, aged 92) ‘always made sure he got there first’, said Corbyn, ‘so that he could get hold of the one television in the flat, turn it on and watch the darts or snooker. John would turn up and want to watch Newsnight
‘Dennis would refuse to change the channel, saying “No way – you watch the darts with me.”’ It’s a wonder Dennis Skinner didn’t have his nose flattened.
The Chris Beetles Gallery in St James’s has got some lovely cartoons for sale this Christmas.
In The Illustrators: the British Art of Illustration 1791-2024 (until 4th January 2025), you can find everyone
HEAD: The boys and girls have the same curriculum.
MUM: Well, I don’t like that. I should have thought they would have built ’em separate ones.
from Gillray to Oldie favourite, cartoonist Ed McLachlan (1940-2024).
Also starring is Donald McGill (1875-1962, pictured).
Writer Lee Child has been dicing with death.
‘On my Wyoming ranch, I can follow my nose and wander for hours, although I need to watch out for bears and mountain lions,’ says the author, who’s just turned 70.
‘Some folks even carry “hiking pistols”, but I haven’t gone that far yet.’
Child adds, ‘In fact, I think it would be a cool way to go – born in Coventry, died in a bear attack in the Rocky Mountains.’
Want to get something for that special secret agent in your life?
Well, Heywood Hill, the Mayfair bookshop, has the answer, in the shape of Tradecraft, its new spythemed book subscription.
The bookshop has picked the 50 best spy novels published since 1900.
The list includes everything from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) to Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die (1954). Fleming shopped at Heywood Hill, where he came across Nancy Mitford, who worked there during the Second World War.
Mayfair has long been a haunt of spies. John le Carré set a scene in Heywood Hill in
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. And MI5 was once in Curzon Street, home to the bookshop.
William Boyd explains why spies make for good fiction:
‘There is an overlap between the qualities required to be a good spy and the qualities of a good novelist.
‘The ability to tell convincing lies is the most obvious connection, but also the novelist looks at the world rather as the spy must – with an intent, focused gaze, very curious, very objective, looking for idiosyncrasies, anomalies of behaviour, telltale signs.’
Happy 80th birthday to the great American singer Brenda Lee.
Brenda, who turns 80 on 11th December, first recorded her hit Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree in 1958, when she was only 13. Last year, she topped the American charts with the song, at the age of 79;
the oldest artist to hit the US Number One spot.
As Brenda declares in the song,
‘Rockin’ around the Christmas tree
Have a happy holiday Everyone dancin’ merrily In the new old-fashioned way.’
A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all Oldie-readers.
Rockin’: Brenda Lee in 1958 and 2023
Byron, Lord of Panto
Forget the poet – his kinsman created Buttons and Widow Twankey!
Back in the mid-1960s, when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister, Harry Corbett (1918-89), the Bradford-born magician, puppeteer and creator of Sooty, was awarded the OBE intended for the Laboursupporting actor Harry H Corbett (1925-82), the creator of the sitcom character Harold Steptoe.
Mistakes can happen. I regularly wonder if it isn’t the wrong Byron who has been honoured with a memorial stone in Westminster Abbey.
The Byron immortalised in Poets’ Corner, next to the memorials for Lewis Carroll, D H Lawrence and Dylan Thomas, is George, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824).
Is this as it should be? Who reads Lord Byron now? Seriously. Who in 2024 is reading Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage? Nobody I know. Be honest: nobody you know, either.
IMHO (see below), the Byron who should be remembered is not George the poet, but his kinsman Henry James Byron (1835-84), the playwright.
This Byron started out as a medical student, became an actor and ended up as one of the principal fathers of modern British pantomime, creating the character of Buttons for his version of Cinderella in 1860 and inventing Widow Twankey for his Aladdin in 1861.
If we are talking about a lasting contribution to British culture, let’s face it: H J Byron’s comic creations will be delighting generations of Christmas panto-goers long after Lord Byron’s Don Juan has left the stage.
I first discovered the genius of H J Byron in 1968.
I was at university and met the young Diana Quick, soon to become famous playing Julia Flyte in the television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, but then 21 and the first female President in the history of the Oxford University Dramatic Society.
I remember our first encounter vividly. We had a drink in a pub; she was wearing a leather miniskirt; she was both exciting to be with and a bit alarming.
But she encouraged me in my ambition to direct an OUDS production at the Oxford Playhouse and suggested I might have fun producing a traditional Victorian pantomime.
I did. After much research, I chose Byron’s Cinderella and it changed my life. Never mind Diana Quick – on the first day of the auditions for my production I met two more exciting and slightly alarming young women.
One was called Eliza ManninghamBuller. I cast her as my Fairy Queen. In the fullness of time, she went on to become the Head of MI5. The other was Michèle Brown. In short order, she went on to become my wife.
At Oxford, Eliza and I also appeared in Brecht together and I appeared with Michèle in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Michèle played Viola and I gave my Sea Captain.
Twelfth Night is a play I know well. I have also played Feste the jester and had a go at Malvolio – twice. The great Sir Donald Sinden was the definitive Malvolio in my book (I have seen at least a dozen) and when I last took on the role, Sir Donald asked me how I was getting on with the scene where Malvolio is locked in a cell and taunted by Feste. I told him I was finding it difficult to learn the lines.
‘You’re not alone,’ said Sir Donald. ‘Every Malvolio finds that scene a bugger. Sir Donald Wolfit found it impossible to learn and believed it must therefore have been the work of another hand. Wolfit
said, “If I can’t learn it, Shakespeare didn’t write it.”’
The enterprising Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond has a production of Twelfth Night running until 25th January, with Oliver Ford Davies as Malvolio.
On 19th January, I am hosting a fun fundraising matinée at the theatre, featuring a galaxy of luminous Twelfth Night alumni (led by Judi Dench, who has played Viola and Maria in her time) sharing their Twelfth Night stories.
I hope the theatre will sell seats at a discount to audience members who can show that they have appeared in Twelfth Night, too. I reckon anyone who has played Fabian deserves to be let in for free. Is there a less satisfying part in all Shakespeare?
In the Brandreth household, the festive season isn’t complete without a family quiz, with questions suited to a variety of aptitudes and ages – eg:
1) Feste’s song at the end of Twelfth Night – ‘The rain it raineth every day’ –features in another Shakespeare play. Which one?
2) Lord Byron had one legitimate child, a mathematician daughter who anticipated the computer. What was her name?
3) According to a recent survey, what are the first names that the people burdened with them most dislike? One male, one female; both five-letter names.
4) IMHO stands for ‘in my humble opinion’. What do these modern initialisms stand for: TTYL, BRB, IRL, WYD, IDK?
5) What does the King do when he burps?
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Answers
1) King Lear. 2) Ada Lovelace. 3) Nigel and Carol. 4) Talk to you later; be right back; in real life; what you doing; I don’t know. 5) He issues a royal ‘Pardon’!
Read Gyles’s daily anagram at www.fullrainbow.co.uk
Henry James Byron (1834-84)
I read the news today – oh boy!
Six words in the Daily Mail drove me crazy with terror
matthew norman
It is not this column’s inclination –much less its desire – to frighten you unduly.
Quite the reverse; its mission is to apply a dollop of soothing balm to the fractious soul in these wickedly alarming times.
Yet, every now and again, when a threat level so dictates, alerting you to a grievous danger becomes a moral imperative.
So it is that we must turn to the recent article in the Daily Mail that struck dread into this reader and others beyond counting.
Never the journal to spread fear without compelling cause, the Mail is as responsible a harbinger of doom as the world of letters has known.
Its proselytising of the link between the MMR jab and autism, as most diligently prosecuted by then columnist Mad ‘Melanie’ Phillips (now, curiously, of the Times), is one among myriad examples of its trustworthiness in the field.
This one comes under a header that concerns us (or should) almost as much as wholly fictitious threats to public health: computer crime of the kind that can ravage a life.
‘Urgent warning,’ reads the headline. ‘Don’t type these six words or your computer could be HACKED.’
You’ll discern from the block capitals – deployed in the fashion of the once and future King-President Donald J Trump tweeting on the loo at 3.27am – how exceedingly serious this is.
‘According to cybersecurity firm SOPHOS,’ expands author William Hunter, ‘hackers have used a sophisticated set of tools to hijack the results of one particular Google search.
‘And the experts warn that searching for this specific six-word phrase could put you at serious risk… Once your computer is infected, hackers can
steal your information, take control of your computer and hold your data for ransom.’
As an erstwhile victim of identity theft, I am perhaps hypersensitised to the menace. Yet everyone who uses the internet is at grave risk of cybercrime –and seldom graver than here, given how much in common parlance this phrase happens to be.
Inevitably, given this, some will already have typed it into a search box. These are the lost, and nothing can rescue them now.
It is those on the verge of doing so that this column, like the Mail, is dedicated to hauling back from the precipice of calamity.
If what follows seems superfluous, apologies. The phrase is such a part of daily life, as implied above, that you’ll probably have worked out what it is.
In that case, what follows may strike you as an insult to the intelligence. It is for the tiny minority of dimwits who still haven’t rumbled it that I am obliged to spell it out.
And now, because there isn’t another nanosecond to lose, here it is. The six-word phrase that compelled a reluctant Daily Mail to issue its urgent warning – and don’t be smug if you guessed; it couldn’t be more bleedin’ obvious – is this:
‘Are Bengal cats legal in Australia?’
Are they, though? I wish I had the answer that would spare you the incessant fretting about Bengal-cat legality in a land down under (where women glow and men chunder), cited by sleep-disorder clinicians as the third leading cause of insomnia in Britain.
Searching for this specific phrase could put you at serious risk
Yet since the way to find out would be to google the six-word phrase ‘Are Bengal cats…’, you see the problem.
Not to sound pious, but there are few lengths to which I wouldn’t go in your service. One of them is having my computer hijacked by the sort of fiendish criminal genius who conceived the ‘Are Bengal cats legal in Australia?’ master plan.
Now you may think I should have contacted the relevant ministerial department in Canberra, or possibly a Bengal-cat charity with global reach, for the answer.
But, in this matter, as in most, I try to follow the lead of the Daily Mail. If William Hunter declined to resolve the mystery in his otherwise flawless article, he’ll have had good reason. It would be outrageously rash to usurp him.
To be rigidly honest, I can’t imagine why Bengal cats would be illegal in Australia. But I’m no expert. It may be that they pose an even greater risk to certain marsupials, or to the duck-billed platypus, than googling the enquiry does to you and me.
In future, as you wheel the trolley round Waitrose, you will learn to recognise fellow sufferers by the befuddled look and waxen complexion that go with long nights fighting the urge to google ‘Are Bengal cats legal in Australia?’.
Some will crack under the strain, of course, and ruin themselves. Such tragic victims you will find swigging ginger wine in the doorway outside Waitrose, with nothing to warm them but a soiled blanket and the sense of superiority that comes from knowing whether Bengal cats are or are not legal in Australia. Leave a fiver in the mug if you can.
The vast majority, revering its selfless commitment to protecting us all, will give thanks that the Daily Mail’s urgent warning came in time.
what was VistaVision?
Seventy years ago, cinemas showed White Christmas, starring Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. It was the first film in the new high- and wide-screen VistaVision process.
In 1954, theatre managers advertised White Christmas as an entirely new motion picture. They didn’t want audiences to be confused with an earlier Bing Crosby film, Holiday Inn (1942), where he had previously sung the Irving Berlin standard White Christmas. The song got another outing in the film of the same name.
White Christmas became the UK’s second most popular film in 1955, after The Dam Busters, and America’s most popular in 1954.
In 1954, VistaVision was the latest screen development from Hollywood to try to lure people away from the TVs in their comfortable living rooms and back to the cinemas.
VistaVision was a deep-focus process that eliminated distortion and included action taking place in all areas of the
screen. Exhibitors had the flexibility, with compatible lens and aperture plates, to choose their own screen ratio (from 4 x 3 to 2 x 1) on a large screen. In the 2 x 1 proportion on a big screen, VistaVision looked rather like CinemaScope.
what is a photodump?
A photodump is when you upload a whole bunch of photos onto your Instagram feed all at once.
To qualify as a photodump, the photos must appear as artless as possible – as if you just selected them at random in five seconds while sitting on the loo.
Still, there are unwritten rules. You must open with a picture of yourself looking incredibly hot but in an insouciant sort of way. Your ‘carousel’ (that’s the technical term) may also include: salad; a couple of your friends laughing hysterically; and maybe two or three more selfies in which you again look smoking hot.
The photodump is, in some ways, the antithesis of how social media used to work. Instagram launched in 2010, the same year the iPhone began to feature front-facing selfie cameras; the same year
that the mental health of female teenagers began its alarming decline.
Back then, the thing was to post just the one perfect, artful photo per day. As social media have evolved towards more impermanent, throwaway content, however, to post an image onto your Instagram wall – potentially for ever! –seems rather fraught with significance.
The beauty of the photodump is that it allows one to present a more multifaceted, less overdetermined version of one’s life. In musical terms, it’s an album as opposed to a single. It says, ‘I’m cool and fun but I’m also a great friend and parent and I don’t take myself too seriously!’ Instagram recently upped the maximum photos from 10 to 20 in response to the trend.
For celebrity-watchers, the ‘seasonal photodump’ is increasingly a newsworthy event, rather as LPs used to be. The model Gigi Hadid used her August photodump to treat her 77.5 million followers to images of streams, weddings, her own reflection, garden-hose frolics,
For VistaVision, the film was photographed by an oversize negative running horizontally through the camera. When optically printed on a standard 35mm positive, it brought a new clarity to the picture.
The VistaVision screen – higher and narrower than CinemaScope – had speakers behind it. It made VistaVision less expensive than CinemaScope’s stereophonic sound.
At the 1955 Academy Awards, Paramount Pictures and all the engineers and technical staff received an honorary Oscar for the development of VistaVision.
The film got varying reviews. None of the new Irving Berlin songs achieved the popularity of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas in 1942. The best-known new song from the film was Count Your Blessings (Instead of Sheep), which received an Oscar nomination for best song of 1954, losing to Three Coins in the Fountain As for VistaVision, it continues to be used occasionally for special-process effects in films.
Christopher Moor
children’s colouring books and a yellow Miu Miu handbag which promptly sold out. Jennifer Lopez’s 251 million followers, meanwhile, glimpsed a summer of ice cream and Super Mario backpacks, as well as J Lo’s cleavage, bottom, and Insta wisdom: ‘Everything is unfolding in divine order.’
Lopez and her husband Ben Affleck recently filed for divorce. The photodump said: life goes on.
So that’s celebs. But are not all Instagram-users celebrities to some extent? You might consider grouping your recent photos under the term #bratsummer or #demureautumn or #octoberdump. Remember, it should look very much as if you uploaded it with scarcely a second thought – oh, but lots of thought went into it. Absolutely aeons of thought.
The librarians of the great Mouseion of Alexandria catalogued their shelves with scarcely less discernment.
Richard Godwin
VistaVision and White Christmas turn 70
The 2024 Oldie of the Year Awards Our Champion of Champions
Bill Wyman
THE OLDIE OF THE YEAR
One snowy evening in December 1962, a 26-yearold, Brylcreemed family man from south London presented himself at the back door of the Wetherby Arms in the less fashionable part of Chelsea.
He was there to audition for a job as the bass-player with what seemed to be an only fitfully promising start-up rhythm-and-blues group.
The newcomer thought the pastyfaced teenagers who greeted him might last a year or two if they were lucky. They in turn had their doubts about his smart turn-out and taste for mainstream pop music, as opposed to their own obscure American blues favourites.
The job-seeker did possess two distinct advantages. First, he brought with him a pair of fridge-size Vox amplifiers, capable of a volume beyond anything the aspiring young musicians had ever experienced. Secondly, as his perfunctory audition established, he could really play his chosen instrument.
To seal the arrangement, he went on to buy his new colleagues a round of drinks and offered cigarettes, ‘which were jumped on as if I were delivering famine relief’.
The start-up group called themselves the Rolling Stones, and their new member was our 2024 Oldie of the Year, Bill Wyman.
Wyman was always a being slightly apart from the other Stones. He’d done three years’ National Service in the RAF. There his essentially practical approach to life was reinforced by an emphasis on neatness, punctuality and unquestioning obedience of authority, not all of them virtues we might associate with his new workmates.
There was also Wyman’s age, and his general disdain for mind-altering drugs. Still, he did go on to enjoy something of a gladiatorial sex life during his 30 years with the band – in some accounts, personally introducing the word ‘groupie’ into the English language.
Wyman was all over the Stones’ classic records, from the famous divebombing bass that marks the climax of ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’, to the organ pedals he played not with his feet but by pounding them with his fists on ‘Paint It Black’ and the wonderfully infectious riff he pumped out on ‘Miss You’.
He was never merely ‘clever’ as a musician, always served the song and had the good sense to let others in the band set themselves up as the shock troops of the sixties revolution.
‘You’d see headlines saying “Stones on drug charges” splashed all over the press, and just roll your eyes,’ he told me with an amused sigh. ‘None of it had anything to do with me.’
Born in 1936, Wyman can vividly remember the Luftwaffe passing overhead on their way to attack the London docks, as well as the many privations of life growing up in the war.
‘Once my mum sent me to pick dandelion leaves we could boil up for a meal,’ he recalls. ‘Other mornings, she
Bill Wyman, now 88, on Ready Steady Go! in 1965
didn’t bother to get us out of bed, because she knew there was nothing for us to eat that day.’
A lifelong collector, Wyman still has his childhood ration book.
‘What I chiefly remember about those days is the feeling of being hungry and cold most of the time,’ he said at an Oldie Literary Lunch this year. ‘Even today, I want the heating turned up wherever I go.’
In 1992, Wyman decided he’d had enough of touring the world in private jets and generally being treated like King Farouk, and became one of only two men in the Stones’ history to walk away from the band. (The other was Mick Taylor.)
He’s been far from idle in years since. Among other things, he started a smallerscale rhythm-and-blues group (‘It made music fun again’), became a restaurateur, developed his own line of metal-detectors and published several books, most recently an engaging memoir called Billy in the Wars.
A lifelong cricket enthusiast, he once took a hat trick when playing for a showbusiness XI against Old England at the Oval, a feat he accomplished while keeping a lit cigarette in his non-bowling hand throughout.
Proving there really can be a second act to life, today Wyman is once again a happily married family man who spends most of his time on his estate in the Suffolk countryside. He has been married for 31 years to Suzanne Accosta, after previous marriages to Diane Cory and Mandy Smith.
He went back on stage to perform as a guest with his old group in 2012, and played on a track on the Stones’ most recent album, Hackney Diamonds, as a tribute to the band’s late drummer Charlie Watts.
‘We got a divorce, but, corny as it sounds, we’re still family,’ he says.
Few of us will have touched the peaks or experienced the valleys of life quite as Bill Wyman has.
Does he fret about posterity and his posthumous reputation? ‘Not really. I’m not that sort of bloke. Maybe the whole war experience changed my perspective on life, but to me it’s all about getting up
Wyman became a restaurateur and developed his own line of metal-detectors
each day and just being able to enjoy the important things, like nature, history and friends and family,’ he told me. He’s become a national treasure, and an eminently worthy Oldie of the Year into the bargain.
Mike Leigh’s subjects ought to be depressing, but for some reason his films are uplifting – and this is because of the quality of the acting. Leigh is one of our greatest living directors.
Famously, Leigh’s films, during a long rehearsal period, are improvised, the scripts coming together as the actors learn to inhabit their roles.
By these means, perhaps, it is not acting going on at all. It is being. The late Antony Sher couldn’t stop talking to me about the fascinating process of working for Mike Leigh, now 81 – the son of a doctor, incidentally, so maybe he is conducting psychological experiments.
Hence Timothy Spall as the taxi driver in All or Nothing, his big startled face empty of hope. Yet Spall, under Leigh, could be the painter Turner, too, a bristling warthog lapping up storms and sunshine, seeing visions. In Naked, David Thewlis seeks oblivion, is flailing – with tremendous élan
Who can forget Imelda Staunton’s prolonged look of terror when she’s arrested in Vera Drake? The character played by Mark Benton in Career Girls, twitching and stuttering, complaining of skin allergies, is called Richard Burton: ‘I don’t look like him or anything. My mother was a fan.’
From Abigail’s Party onwards, in Nuts in May particularly, Alison Steadman, once-upon-a-time Mrs Mike Leigh, had great lines (‘I’m itching down below and I don’t know why’).
But, often, as in Bleak Moments, there’ll be long conversational silences interspersed with banality, which turns awkwardness into stylised poetry.
James Corden, Pam Ferris, Ruth Sheen, Lesley Manville, Sally Hawkins,
Stylised poetry: Mike Leigh
Brenda Blethyn, Liz Smith, Jim Broadbent – they have all played Leigh’s feral folk in high-rise flats.
And if, as I did, you watch lots of Mike Leigh’s films in a row, one after the other, over a period of two or three weeks, the unremitting, grinding grimness and the virtuoso inarticulacy of many of the characters reveal themselves, paradoxically, as belonging to a coherent, quirkily comic conception.
The hospitals and bedpans, catastrophic camping trips, and the dead-end lives: these can all be found in the Carry Ons or in any programme devised by Galton and Simpson. Tony Hancock, prone to panic and humiliation, would have fitted easily into Mike Leigh’s world.
What makes comedy different from tragedy in the end is the degree of luck (Happy-Go-Lucky is one of Leigh’s ironic titles; Life Is Sweet is another) –otherwise, tumult leads to destructiveness and torment, rather than farce and hilarity. Gilbert and Sullivan, in Topsy-Turvy, find the levity of the Savoy operas a hard slog to bring off.
In recent years, Leigh has demonstrated a fondness for costume dramas, such as Mr Turner and Peterloo, about the 1819 political massacre.
So might I offer Leigh this project: a biopic about the Brontës and the high-pressure atmosphere in the Howarth parsonage, with the competitive sisters coping with both mortal illness and their brother Branwell’s alcoholism?
A mad, Gothic lot, the Brontës. Only Leigh could adequately explore all the ramifications, on the rainy moors. By Roger Lewis, author of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor
John Standing and Nanette Newman
oldie in-laws of the year
Actress and author Nanette Newman, 90, is the mother-in-law of actor John Standing, also 90.
Between them, the nonagenarian in-laws have 11 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. United by their acting careers as well as their family, Nanette and her son-in-law are just three months apart in age.
John’s wife is the journalist Sarah Standing, Nanette’s older daughter by the film director the late Bryan Forbes (1926-2013). Nanette and Bryan also had a second daughter, Emma, the television presenter.
Bryan Forbes is most famous for his debut film Whistle Down the Wind (1961). Nanette met Bryan in 1953 at Marylebone Station when he was on the tracks acting the part of someone killing himself. Eighteen-year-old Nanette had been sent to try for a part in the film, but it was the last day of shooting.
Nevertheless, Bryan drove her home, and that was that. They were married for 57 years. She’s said that marrying Bryan was the cleverest thing she ever did.
Nanette went on to appear in nine of her husband’s films, including The Raging Moon (1971), The Stepford Wives (1975) and International Velvet (1978), for which she won the Evening Standard Film Award for Best Actress.
Oldies will recall Nanette starring in numerous Fairy Liquid ads, particularly the one in the ’60s with four-year-old Leslie Ash playing her daughter and marvelling at her soft ‘hands that do
John Standing, 90, and mother-in-law, Nanette, also 90
dishes’. Nanette is also the author of 30 children’s books and six cookery books.
John Standing is one of the most instantly recognisable oldies on stage and screen. He’s played numerous parts in TV series such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Crown, Midsomer Murders and Patrick Melrose, and last year starred with Michael Caine and the late Glenda Jackson in The Great Escaper.
Despite his success as a thespian, John wanted to be a painter and studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art. However, he comes from a big family of actors who didn’t think a job was a job unless it was on the stage or screen. He landed his first part in 1955 as a spear carrier in Titus Andronicus with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Oliver, and has gone on to work with some of the greatest of our time, notably with Maggie Smith in Private Lives directed by John Gielgud. Happily he now has more time to paint and see his family, including his dear mother-in-law.
By Charlotte Metcalf
Christian Lamb
oldie d-day mastermind
Christian Lamb, 104, is one of the last surviving planners of D-Day.
She painstakingly created detailed maps to guide the crews of the landing craft that ferried the men to the Normandy beaches.
Christian gave up a place at Oxford to join the war effort. She became a Wren rating in 1939 and was at Wren HQ as the Blitz raged on, surviving a few near misses. She was then promoted to leading Wren and posted to a degaussing range at the Coalhouse Fort in Tilbury. Officer training followed at Greenwich, and she became Third Officer of plotting and operations for the Battle of the Atlantic, at Plymouth. Posted to
Belfast Castle in 1943, she met Lieutenant Commander John Lamb DSC at a party.
They became engaged after just ten days. Then she had the agonising experience of overseeing convoy ONS 5 in her operations room – just as a U-boat wolf pack surrounded HMS Oribi, John’s destroyer. Thank God, his destroyer rammed a U-boat and made it safely to America.
They married in December 1943, just before Christian entered her secret war job, planning D-Day in Whitehall. Christian joined Combined Operations HQ Landing Craft and Bases at Richmond Terrace, Whitehall.
It would be 40 years before the couple spoke about her role – and 80 years before she received recognition for it.
Christian left the Wrens in late 1944, after her daughter was born. Two sons were to follow, and she spent the next decade following the fleet until settling in Cornwall. She is a mother of three, with seven grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.
In her 70s, Christian gained a degree from the Open University. She has written five books. Her latest is Beyond the Sea: A Wren at War. This year, 80 years after D-Day, Christian made her first trip to the Normandy coastline she had mapped 80 years before. President Macron invested her with France’s highest order of merit, the Légion d’honneur.
On Remembrance Sunday this year, she was the oldest of the 11 Second World War veterans there. She was at the front of the Wrens column.
To mark her 103rd birthday, Christian recreated a 1943 flight she had taken in a Miles Magister (a two-seater monoplane with open cockpits) in the same vintage aeroplane 80 years earlier.
Christian with Légion d’honneur (left)
‘I was disappointed that we didn’t loop the loop this time,’ she said.
By Simon Robinson
Stan ‘Mac’ McMurtry
lead-in-his-pencil oldie of the year
Cartoonist Stan ‘Mac’ McMurtry says that during his decades on Fleet Street, his duty has been to make news pages brighter ‘by putting in a laugh’.
Ever-modest Mac, 88, undersells his genius. His drawings in the Daily Sketch, Daily Mail and, to this day, the Mail on Sunday have always done more than that. Since the 1960s, they have humanised the news, reminding us that after every thermonuclear disaster there will be some office cleaner surveying the mess, leaning on a broom with wry detachment and a half-smoked fag.
The fashion for newspaper cartoons has drifted towards party-political indignation and starkness of nib.
Mac’s art is softer. His work is in the tradition of the Bystander’s Bruce Bairnsfather, the Daily Express’s Carl Giles and the Evening Standard’s Jak.
The shading is gentle and the visual effect more rounded than sharp-edged. Mac’s cartoons include domestic fixtures such as telephones, wastepaper bins, steaming teacups and – in drawings of the late Queen – corgis. During the Gulf War, they were given doggy gas masks.
Mac has always liked drawing the Royal Family, be it Charles’s geraniums
legging it out of the greenhouse before he can start talking to them or Prince Philip holding a banner saying ‘NOT BLOODY LIKELY!’ when Lilibet is on the blower to William and Kate, asking if they need a babysitter. Bishops and the police are favourite subjects, too.
The humour, while never woke, is more affectionate than angry.
When Nick Clegg wanted to legalise drugs, Mac had a tramp toking on a huge joint, saying, ‘This is good stuff – I can see a Lib Dem landslide.’ During the pandemic Mac drew a police car chasing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, an officer bawling ‘Oy! Two metres apart!’
For half a century, his work graced the pages of the Mail, reassuring readers that they were not alone in thinking officialdom dotty. He drew their bedrooms, their scuffed shoes, their office canteens, their lives.
When he retired, the paper missed the mollifying balance of his stoical humour. But he was soon back on Sundays.
Many cartoonists are prey to glumness. Not Mac. He cheerfully says he has been ‘so lucky’. It’s that modesty again. This brilliant artist is a delightful man and generous colleague.
And Oldie-readers will be reassured to learn that ‘old people are easier to draw because of their wrinkles’.
His favourite of all time? Golda Meir. By Quentin Letts, Parliamentary sketch-writer for the Daily Mail
Manette Baillie
oldie
flying angel
wishing her a happy birthday. The Prince said he and the Princess of Wales would be thinking of her during her mighty leap into the unknown.
The Prince of Wales said of the charities she was helping, ‘They are tremendous organisations who help so many people. From my time with East Anglian Air Ambulance, I know how many lives are saved thanks to the generosity of people like you.’
Manette, who was married to a paratrooper, is no stranger to adventure. On her 100th birthday, she zoomed round Silverstone in a Ferrari at 130mph.
‘The Air Ambulance,’ Manette explained, ‘is close to my heart because a helicopter saved my son’s life on the Isle of Wight after a diving accident in 1969. Even now, every Saturday, I hold a coffee morning at my cottage with everyone chipping in by donating money.’
She chose the Motor Neurone Disease Association because her great niece suffers from the condition.
Cartoonist’s block: Mac’s self-portrait
This summer, Manette Baillie parachuted her way into the nation’s hearts as Britain’s oldest sky-diver.
At 102, Manette, of Benhall, Suffolk, made her first ever jump, plunging from 13,000 feet up in the air over Beccles Airfield.
Having served as a Wren in the Second World War, Manette found nothing new in such plucky feats of derring-do.
‘It was a bit scary. I must admit I just shut my eyes firmly – very firmly,’ she said of the jump, which raised £30,000 for the Benhall and Sternfield Village Social Club, the Motor Neurone Disease Association and East Anglian Air Ambulance.
Just days before her jump, Manette received a personal message from the Prince of Wales on her 102nd birthday,
Manette said of the Benhall and Sternfield Village Social Club, ‘I want to help do it up for the next generation. It started as a rickety tin hut for those coming home from the First World War. No doubt there’ll be more wars and young people will need a place to gather.’
Manette had planned a small party to celebrate her 102nd birthday but she then heard of a friend’s father who sky-dived at 85. She says, ‘If an 85-yearold man can do it, so can I.’
Manette, who holds gatherings at her cottage and challenges visitors to games, added, ‘Keep busy, be interested in everything, be kind to those around you and let them be kind to you. Oh, and don’t forget to party!’
By the way, her gin mornings are legendary throughout Suffolk.
By Harry Mount, Editor of The Oldie
Taking the plunge: Manette Baillie, 102
Always on our mind
Actor Kenneth Cranham salutes Elvis on his 90th birthday – and his fellow fans the Duchess of Devonshire and writer Elaine Dundy
Elvis Presley would have been 90 on January 8th 2025.
I was first struck by him when I was a 13-year-old boy in Stockwell, in 1957, when his second film, Loving You, came out.
The closing sequence, with Elvis wearing denims – which he regarded as work clothes – was sensational.
At the time, one critic said Elvis would never be as wild again. His beauty and energy were exceptional.
Elvis’s friend Muhammad Ali said, after beating Sonny Liston in 1964, ‘I shook up the world.’ Elvis had already done that in Technicolor.
I was hooked.
Many years later, in 2001, I was on Broadway, playing the title role in J B Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, with Rosemary Harris, a star on the Great White Way.
She was a friend of Elaine Dundy (1921-2008), who’d been married to theatre critic Kenneth Tynan. I’d much admired her biography of Elvis and his mother, Elvis and Gladys (1985). So, thanks to Rosemary giving me Elaine’s address, I sent her one of my Elvis compilation tapes.
Elaine Dundy wrote back, ‘What a brilliant idea to record the originals [of Elvis covers] and then Elvis’s version!
‘I hear Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup [1905-74] for the first time loud and clear with That’s All Right, My Baby Left Me and, above all, So Glad You’re Mine Elvis takes these songs, always with a nod of respect to the original, and raises them up to Art.
‘You will be amused to know that the Duchess of Devonshire got to Elvis after his death and loves him. I wrote to her, enclosing Elvis and Gladys, and
immediately received a sweet, graceful fax thanking me. We Elvis fans are a decent sort, aren’t we?
‘I knew her amazing and delightful late sister Decca Mitford. A wonderful woman who spoke pure Mitfordese.
‘I still think of a conversation we had, which guided me towards Elvis. We were talking about hymns and how they ran around in our heads.
‘She was very serious about the ones she wanted at her funeral –this was just after Lord Mountbatten’s 1979 funeral in Westminster Abbey.
‘I asked other writers about hymns and all remembered them –even sang them.
Someone said, “Nobody sings gospel like Elvis.”
I remembered that when I got his album He Touched Me.’ I sent the Duchess (19202014) one of my tapes. She wrote back, sending me an Elvis photo and explained that it was the ‘operatic’ Elvis she was interested in.
Her favourite Elvis number, though, was a lovely country-andwestern song, Funny How Time Slips Away, written by Willie Nelson.
On a trip to New York, the Duchess was involved with the hierarchy of the fine-art world, who were surprised that she took herself off to Graceland. She was enthralled and inspired by it.
In the UK, she took to seeing stage presentations, with Elvis on film and his original band and backing singers playing live.
I was first struck by him as a 13-year-old boy in Stockwell
She wrote in a motherly way of his favourite female backing singers, the gospel group the Sweet Inspirations –including Cissy Houston, Whitney Houston’s mother, who’s just died at 91.
I would have loved to see them all together.
When Elvis died in 1977, aged 42, his father, Vernon Presley, commissioned an epitaph by Janelle McComb for his tomb at Graceland.
It declared, ‘He had a God-given talent that he shared with the world.’
Happy 90th birthday to the King!
Cranham fell for Elvis in Loving You (1957)
Duchess & the King: Debo Devonshire
My bleak midwinter
Pity us church organists at Christmas, overwhelmed by carol services. By Lois Letts
Spare a thought this Christmas for church organists.
December is a mad steeplechase of carol services, Christingles and secular seasonal singalongs. To us organists, the Yuletide period is ‘the Christmas outrage’.
The C of E has given up observing Advent’s penitential restraint. Every church and chapel, primary school and pub is on the blower, seeking an organist for ‘our lovely carols’.
Our nearby Herefordshire villages of Mordiford, Woolhope, Sollers Hope, Brockhampton and How Caple come first for me – and the diary is soon a scribble of ink. Organists become like plumbers: turn up, fiddle with the pipes, dash to the next job. I look after ten churches; some of my friends do more.
Those of us who can pedal (ie play with hands and feet) spend December on the road swerving potholes.
My Christmas begins with a primaryschool nativity. The headmaster has a weakness for drippy ‘worship songs’ –but at least I get to play on an 1894 Nicholson organ. Its trumpet stop is good for the finale of Bach’s ‘In Dulce Jubilo’.
Sometimes there is no keyboard – so I lug a Viscount Cantorum portable organ into my battered Vauxhall, and throw in a spool of electrical wire, a portable spotlight, a miner’s headlamp (some lofts are dark) and music. The Vauxhall becomes a white van.
Outdoor services: will it rain (danger of electric shocks from the Viscount’s plugs) or blow a gale (pages of ‘Silent Night’ taking ghostly flight across the churchyard)? Noel Rawsthorne’s ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ provides easy preludes, and I often finish with the Bach and a not-terribly-dignified ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ as the punters stampede for the mulled wine. I always mean to learn more Christmas music –‘It’s not as if you don’t know it’s coming,’ says one of my daughters.
The Crown Inn, by Woolhope Church, has outdoor carols. From the skallenge (lych gate), I drape a cable across the graveyard and the pub car park to an indoor socket. The curate’s wife holds my
pages flat against driving rain/overrefreshed locals. Pub-goers blast through eight carols. Andrew the builder brings his trumpet. I get paid in pints.
At nursing-home services, one learns not to underestimate the oldies.
A kindly gent thanked me for playing. As his nurse wheeled him away, she told me, ‘He invented the MRI scanner.’
Throw in choir practices (of varying tonality) and charity fayres, plus all the normal Sunday services.
Some organ lofts stink of bats which fly round my head as I play, as in Dracula
Each service demands preparation, yet some church treasurers think £15 is handsome reward. Not with travelling time, petrol, music costs, organ lessons and practice time, it ain’t. Pedal-friendly organ shoes can cost £120, since you ask.
has a connection with the SAS. As young wives – husbandless – push prams to the communion rail, it overwhelms me. Something more otherworldly than mere pipe reverberation trembles in the air.
‘And is it true? … The Maker of the stars and sea, become a Child on earth for me?’
Then midnight service at Woolhope, packed with revellers (hic) and the Rev Moore’s five sons singing tenor and bass harmonies. At last, I can legitimately play ‘Yea Lord, we greet thee, born this happy morning’. Home for a nightcap and to read Facebook messages from other organists – like me all too revved up (so to speak) to sleep.
On the Sunday before Christmas Day, we have our own village service of nine lessons and carols at How Caple’s beautiful church. The oak reredos, the barley-twisted pillars of the Grinling Gibbons rood screen … at such times, with 100 souls in the pews and the smell of hot wax, an organist’s lot is bearable.
The Church prospers when it gives punters what they want: a youngster singing the first verse of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’; the King James Bible read by farmers; descants; two anthems from my 20-strong village choir. And no sermon. Hallelujah!
The last push begins at 8.30pm on Christmas Eve at St Martin’s, Hereford, on a fine Henry Jones organ. The church
December is a mad steeplechase of carol services, Christingles and singalongs
On the day itself, I’ll be back on the organ stool for 9.30am matins at How Caple – congregation c 80 – and then a dash to the 11am at Woolhope. I will have now played perhaps 100 verses of ‘Hark the Herald’ in three weeks.
We are sometimes offered payment in booze, chocolates or orchids. People wouldn’t dream of trying that with an electrician. We put up with it because we love the organ and – sometimes – our congregations. But organists cannot on communion wafer alone survive. Justin Welby could have remembered that before offering to pay billions in slavery reparations – and before his resignation.
I have yet to meet a retired organist. They do not exist. In 1937, maestro Louis Vierne died at his console. Near the end of a recital, he pitched forward, stone dead. His foot became stuck on a pedal, and a low E sounded through NotreDame as his soul rose to heaven – where St Peter no doubt said, ‘Ah, Louis! Great! I don’t suppose you can play for us tonight, can you?’
Let us play: Lois Letts
Oxford blues for PMs
Prime Ministers used to get honorary doctorates – until Mrs Thatcher, 40 years ago. By Michael Beloff KC
In 1985, Oxford University’s Congregation decided by a substantial majority to refuse to award Margaret Thatcher, a Somerville alumna, an honorary doctorate.
Only Pakistan’s Prime Minister and President Zulfikar Bhutto suffered a similar snub, because of his responsibility for the 1971 Bangladeshi massacres. On any rational calculation, that is more terrible than the cuts to higher education – the core of the case against Mrs T.
As President of Trinity in 1996, I discussed with Dame Fiona Caldecott, then Somerville’s Principal, whether to try to have the 1985 decision reversed.
But Brian Mawhinney, then Chairman of the Conservative Party, told me over drinks in my lodgings, that she would not have accepted the honour second time round. End of effort.
All other Oxford-educated British Prime Ministers in the 20th century received the doctoral distinction. But, in the 21st century, none has.
Asked whether Tony Blair would get an honorary doctorate, Roy Jenkins, the then Oxford Chancellor, replied, ‘No. Not now.’
Blair is now a Knight of the Garter but his only degree is the one he earned in his finals.
Mrs Thatcher’s hurt was mitigated by the honorary fellowship conferred on her by Somerville. But even the tradition of granting this honour – more silver medal than gold – has gone into decline.
Theresa May was denied it because of her role in the Windrush scandal. Boris Johnson’s chances of
succeeding Asquith, Macmillan and Heath – all, like Johnson, former Balliol Prime Ministers – or even such nearly men as Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey as an honorary fellow are rated infinitesimal by college cognoscenti.
Who would bet on Liz Truss’s chances of becoming an honorary fellow of Merton? My impression, gleaned at a guest night at Lincoln College, Rishi Sunak’s alma mater, is that his loyalties are thought to lie more with his old MBA campus in Stanford, California, than with Merton. So don’t bet on an honorary fellowship for him, either.
Blair was made an honorary fellow of St John’s in 2001 at a time when things could only get better. David Cameron became a Brasenose honorary fellow when he was still leader of the opposition. Both got under the wire just in time. Would the former have been honoured after the Iraq War? Or the latter after permitting the Brexit vote or promoting Greensill?
Keir Starmer, an ex-Teddy Hall boy, received an honorary fellowship, but as a
Why has Oxford indulged in this woke trend? Surveys indicate that the majority
Willam Hague, the new Oxford Chancellor; Margaret Thatcher, ignored in 1985
of Oxford fellows are at least leftish of centre. And most are sensitive to the views of the still more radical student community. In the face of possible protest, quiet flow the dons.
In another not unrelated development, the rules for selecting the new Oxford Chancellor, in succession to Chris Patten, were temporarily changed.
Previously, anyone could stand for election, if nominated by 50 members of Convocation, a body constituted by all
Keir Starmer got an honorary fellowship as a lawyer, not a politician
Oxford graduates. Instead, a Committee populated entirely by insiders would, according to the new rules, have ‘due regard to the principles of equality and diversity … and determine which candidates are eligible to progress to the next stage of the election process’.
This showed a puzzling lack of confidence in an electorate, confined to the alumni/ae in 2024 of a world-class university, to make a sensible choice. And Imran Khan was removed from the candidates’ list for reasons not publicly explained. The winner was William Hague, a once and future PM, from a group of well-known political and academic figures. At least Imran Khan retains the consolation of his Honorary Fellowship at Keble.
Michael Beloff KC was President of Trinity College, Oxford
Simon Berry salutes Harry Graham’s wicked wit on
his 150th
anniversary
Ruthless rhymes
Monday 23rd December marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of one of Britain’s great comic writers, Harry Graham (1874-1936).
A household name for the first third of the 20th century, he’s a poet I suspect only Oldie-readers will have heard of today and, even then, too few of us.
The collection of verse that rocketed him to fame was Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes
It was published in 1899 when Graham was not quite 25, and still a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards.
The book struck a chord and was rapidly reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic. Graham was fascinated by late-Victorian technology, and the dangers resulting from new and faster modes of transport:
‘I collided with some “trippers” In my swift De Dion Bouton; Squashed them out as flat as kippers, Left them aussi mort que mouton. What a nuisance “trippers” are! I must now repaint the car.’
Or:
‘Uncle, whose inventive brains Kept evolving aeroplanes Fell from an enormous height On my garden lawn, last night. Flying is a fatal sport; Uncle wrecked the tennis court.’
The poems were brief and perfect:
‘Baby in the cauldron fell, See the grief on Mother’s brow. Mother loved her darling well. Darling’s quite hard boiled by now.’
ender-heartedness (left):
‘Billy, in one of his nice new sashes, Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes; Now, although the room grows
I haven’t the heart to poke poor Billy.’
‘O’er the rugged mountain’s brow Clara threw the twins she nursed, And remarked, “I wonder now Which will reach the bottom first?”’
By the time Ruthless Rhymes was published, Graham was already cutting a dash around town.
As a young Old Etonian Guards officer he had caught the eye of Ethel Barrymore, the American actress, who in 1897 was playing the ingénue in the latest revival of Irving’s famous production of The Bells in London.
The 18-year-old Ethel took society’s cohort of eligible bachelors by storm – most notably Winston Churchill, whose proposal she declined. But she did accept the advances of the young, still unpublished Harry Graham.
Sadly, the engagement didn’t last; Ethel returned to Broadway and Harry, heartbroken, continued scribbling his dark verses.
Almost all describe horrible fates of children, relatives, servants, golfing companions and pedestrians. Only one speaks of a wife, and it is perhaps the darkest of them all:
And Calculating Clara (pictured above):
‘Late last night I slew my wife Stretched her on the parquet flooring; I was loath to take her life, But I had to stop her snoring.’
The success of Ruthless Rhymes took time. Graham became ADC to Lord Minto, the recently appointed Governor General of Canada.
His service there was interrupted by a year in South Africa at the end of the Second Boer War. Minto was made Viceroy of India, and Graham was not inclined to travel with him. He wrote:
‘A relative of mine, Aunt Maud, For years had longed to go abroad; She pined to breathe the ampler air Of Schnitzelbad or Plage-sur-Mer; She often felt that she would choke If she remained at Basingstoke.’
Graham re-enlisted at the outbreak of war in 1914 and saw active service in France; this coincided with his theatrical career, when he wrote lyrics for operettas including The Cinema Star. At the same time, Ethel Barrymore was making the transition from the stage to the silent screen.
How poignant it must have been to write ‘The Picture Palace Queen’:
‘In many a garb I masquerade As Smart Princess or Beggar Maid… With burglars on the roof, I struggle; I haunt the caves where smugglers smuggle!
‘For sad or merry, well or ill, The camera pursues me still, Till ev’ry single thing I do Is thus exposed to public view! For I appear on ev’ry screen The famous Picture Palace Queen.’
The poems grew longer. The casual violence of Ruthless Rhymes gave way to more subtle social observation, sometimes expressed through gritted teeth:
‘My wife has brothers, charming men, Who never seem to need inviting; They know they’re welcome in my den,
And when I’m busy writing They very often condescend To sit with me for hours on end, Explaining how I’d make it pay By doing what I do today
In some completely different way.’
plenty of gems to be found. Take ‘Breakfast’ – a warning against ‘being bright at breakfast time’. Two churchmen come to blows:
‘Dean Cope, the eminent divine Was breakfasting at half past nine, Perusing (as he munched his toast) “The Anglican or Churchman’s Post”, When in there blew, to his distress, The Bishop of the Diocese …Who shouted “Cheerio, old chap” And gave the Dean a playful slap.’
The dean inhales his kedgeree; tempers are lost. A fight ensues – which ends with a couplet that could reduce my father to tears of laughter and may well be the first lines of poetry I ever learnt:
‘The Bishop took a careful shot And brained him with the mustard pot!’
We also find the warning we should all follow when in ‘The Bath’:
‘Remember, wheresoe’er you be, To shut the door and turn the key!’
But still nothing quite matched the success of Ruthless Rhymes. It continued to sell (and was even one of the volumes chosen for the library of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House in 1924).
Thirty years after its publication, Graham wrote his masterpiece, More Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes
‘When Grandmama fell off the boat And couldn’t swim (and wouldn’t float)…’
is perhaps his most famous poem. Sometimes, if only for light relief, nobody dies at all:
In Grandpapa, a child commentates (pictured left):
‘Grandpapa fell down a drain; Couldn’t scramble out again. Now he’s floating down the sewer. That’s one grandpapa the fewer.’
…or the perpetrators, as in Quite Fun:
‘My son Augustus, in the street one day, Was feeling quite exceptionally merry. A stranger asked him: “Can you show me, pray, The quickest way to Brompton Cemetery?”
“The quickest way? You bet I can!” said Gus, And pushed the fellow underneath a bus.’
How I adore Presence of Mind:
‘When, with my little daughter Blanche, I climbed the Alps, last summer, I saw a dreadful avalanche About to overcome her; And, as it swept her down the slope, I vaguely wondered whether I should be wise to cut the rope That held us twain together. I must confess I’m glad I did, But still I miss the child – poor kid.
Or L’Enfant Glacé (pictured above):
‘When Baby’s cries grew hard to bear I popped him in the Frigidaire. I never would have done so if I’d known that he’d be frozen stiff. My wife said, “George, I’m so unhappé!
Our darling’s now completely frappé!”’
‘Weep not for little Léonie, Abducted by a French Marquis! Though loss of honour was a wrench, Just think how it’s improved her French!’
Happy 150th birthday, Harry Graham!
Simon Berry was Chairman of Berry Bros & Rudd, the family wine company
Every Tuesday, The Oldie will upload a talk or interview with such national treasures as Leslie Caron, Henry Blofeld and Pam Ayres.
You’ve heard about podcasts, those recordings of interviews and documentaries … well, The Oldie is launching its own series of enthralling recordings with Oldie favourites. And it’s all free. All you have to do is click and listen – any time you like. Go to www.theoldie.co.uk/radio-oldie Go to www.theoldie.co.uk/top-of-the-pods
Listen to recordings of our Oldie of the Year ceremony. Speakers include Bill Wyman, Rolling Stones legend, director Mike Leigh and actress Nanette Newman
And Harry Mount talks to Craig Brown about his new bestseller, A Voyage Around the Queen. Craig talks about a lifetime of writing sublime, hilarious satire.
We’re also bringing you TOP OF THE PODS… Listen to our pick of the best podcasts out there, from documentaries and history to comedy, arts and life!
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Plenty of room at the inn
One Christmas, publican John Armstrong was astonished when the Christ family booked a room in his stable
Sometimes running a pub at Christmas can be a joy.
As I write, a local choir is singing carols; both our inglenook fires are blazing; candles are flickering on all the tables. For a few wonderful moments, the low, slow voice of Bing Crosby has stopped singing White Christmas through the pub speakers. The slight whiff of turkey and stuffing abounds; the Christmas decorations are sparkling; a wonderful aroma of mulled wine and cider permeates the bar.
And, as the choir goes silent, I look at my watch. It’s 8.20pm and I smile. My dear old gran used to say if it’s silent at 20 to the hour or 20 past, there’s an angel flying overhead.
Christmas day is still a few days away and, after the last few years of poverty, plague, politics, pestilence and war, the British public are still able to put on a brave face and celebrate this rather special time of year.
Pubs are unique places for many people. As I look across the bar, I see many locals and visitors genuinely moved by this warm, inviting and friendly setting.
I have the privilege of knowing that some of these people have had a fairly traumatic few years. They have lost loved ones to Covid. They have struggled to find work. But tonight they have all decided to put that behind them and dive deep into to their threadbare pockets to support their local pub.
What a strange life we publicans lead. It was only last week that we were privileged to hold a wake for a young mother of 60, who on 1st October believed she was fit and well and died before 1st November. Her daughter organised the whole day, including a playlist of ELO, Meat Loaf, the Smiths and REM. What a joy.
Meanwhile, in the other bar, six bricklayers were laying into one another over who earned most money. They decided it would be fun to remove all the light bulbs in the toilets and flush them down the pans.
And a local customer has just come to
tell me he is here tonight to have a meal with his family, as his wife was buried today in the village church.
You truly couldn’t make it up. Death, taxes, carols and funerals. I could not let the festive spirit pass without sharing with you a genuine email I received in December last year:
Good morning
Would it be possible to stay with you in our camper van (not too large) overnight – and book a table for two in your lovely pub for 7.30 pm on Saturday 16th December?
Could you kindly advise if you have room at your inn?
Thanks, Julia Christ
I wrote back:
Julia
Please excuse my hurried reply. But, with your name, the date, Christmas week and your request, I need to get my stable block cleared, try and find three wise men in the village – unlikely – and ensure we have maternity midwives on call.
You will be more than welcome.
All booked.
John
Julia wrote:
OMG! This made my husband and me laugh. I don’t really think about the name any more but it does raise eyebrows sometimes! So glad you have room at the inn and we are looking forward to seeing you.
Yes – get the stable ready please. Don’t think there will be much need for the midwives, though.
Cheers, Julia
The stable is brushed, your table is booked, I’ve found one wise man, I employ a midwife and there is room at the inn.
John
After her stay, I received the following email:
Hi John Jesus here. Well, you pulled out all the stops. Stable at the end of the car park was perfect –quiet and level for our donkey.
Shame the midwife was off that night and no sign of a wise man, but nevertheless the inn was comfortable and welcoming.
With very best wishes – and we will be back.
J x
My last message to her read:
Julia
By chance I was outside tonight, gathering firewood, when I looked up and saw planes’ lights, a moon, a satellite or a meteor. Anyway, I went back in the bar and there were truly three wise men from the village sitting in the bar. The midwife’s daughter is working tonight, and truly and collectively we thought…
No way. Surely not – but perhaps. Come and see us again for the second coming!
Happy Christmas!
John Armstrong is landlord of the White House at Ampfield, Hampshire. He has been a publican for over 50 years
Al Murray: the Pub Landlord gets in the Christmas mood
Britain’s Greek tragedy
What a blow to civilised life – only 200 pupils do Greek A-level
a n wilson
There is a historical curve.
In the 16th century, British people started to learn Greek. From those times until they stopped doing so, what we call civilisation prospered.
Elizabeth I read Greek easily. Made jokes in the language. From her days down to the 1970s, when educationalists began to bugger up the education of the poor, ‘the elite’ in Britain were, to put it in a nutshell, those who knew Greek.
This included thousands of grammarschool children from poor backgrounds. I was taught by such people.
Now ‘the elite’ are know-nothings, with degrees in PPE or business studies. The Great Tradition is over.
A few weeks before Christmas, a professor of social mobility at Exeter University, one Lee Elliot Major, asked for education to be aimed at workingclass students.
Rather than being taken on trips to museums, today’s young should be ‘learning’ about the miners’ strike and the Jarrow March.
If they had been learning Greek literature and history, they would not be discussing house purchases (another of the professor’s worries); they would be asking the great questions – what we mean by good or evil; how we come to learn to live with inexorable fate; what is the nature of matter?
Last year, only 200 pupils took Greek A-level. Because of our skewed educational system, they will all be privately educated. Many of them, sadly, will be the children of pushy parents who have heard that it’s easy to get in to Oxford if you offer to read Honour Mods (ie Latin and Greek literature).
Now the classics departments of universities are so desperate, they are offering places to children with no Latin or Greek at all. To read Greek in translation – such as my daughter Emily Wilson’s Iliad and Odyssey – is a great
thing to do, but it is hardly the same as tackling the language.
Louis MacNeice, the great Northern Irish poet, has a splendid passage in his 1938 Autumn Journal, in which he describes his day job, teaching the stuff. He was
‘Impresario of the Ancient Greeks
Who wore the chiton and lived on fish and olives
And talked philosophy or smut in cliques;
Who believed in youth and did not gloze the unpleasant Consequences of age;
What is life, one said, or what is pleasant
Once you have turned the page Of love?’
Acknowledging our great difference from the Greeks was, for MacNeice, one of the reasons for our soaking ourselves in their philosophic dialogues, the unrivalled Homeric epics, and the tragedies of the great ones – Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.
Someone once said that all Western philosophy is just footnotes to Plato. All Western literature is just footnotes to those three and Homer. Those who read them truly are in a better position to be wise. That is why ‘the elite’ of the past were wiser than our present politicians.
In the past, most of those ordained in the Church of England had a rudimentary knowledge of New Testament Greek –Koine, as it is called, possibly the easiest language there is to learn, and a thousand times easier than Plato. (Or English.)
It meant that wherever you went in England, you were only a mile or so away from a parsonage where some clergyman knew the language in which Christianity was first formed; the language that, undoubtedly, Our Lord himself spoke. Greek was the lingua franca of the entire Mediterranean world. The Hellenistic city of Sepphoris was just on the doorstep
of Nazareth. Compare the old C of E and today’s mess, and this is a vivid example of ‘the curve’ – the decline!
Virginia Woolf’s best essay is ‘On Not Knowing Greek’. It is in the literal sense pretentious, since she in fact knew Greek rather well. She was taught it by Clara Pater (sister of the famous aesthete Walter and one of the first Fellows of Somerville College, Oxford).
Poor Virginia! When she went mad, she would hear the birds twittering in Greek. When sane, she was reminded, as she read and re-read them, that learning the language of Sophocles or Plato is difficult.
But, more than this, getting your mind round the way these writers think and speak is difficult. In that exercise, she writes, we broaden ourselves and truly learn.
‘There is a sadness at the back of life which [the Greeks] do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its confusions, of our own age.’
She wrote when the ‘age’ had shreds of Christianity left. Now our confusions are those of the fake godless optimism with which we spoon-feed our young: the most insidious life view that it is possible to hold – the lie that everyone has a hope.
That professor who wanted to tell children the story of ‘working-class’ history wanted to make them feel good about themselves, as do all the other calls to retell history from the underdogs’ point of view.
The Greeks knew that, under the pitiless eyes of Fate, we are all underdogs. But also we are all capable of having the wit, knowledge and courage to feel bad about ourselves.
Sophia Waugh: School Days
E M Forster’s lesson for clever pupils
Do we do enough for our clever children? It’s a question that often puzzles us.
Schools are focused on ‘making you the best possible version of yourself’ and ‘achieving your potential’. Both these clichés actually mean getting the best possible results for the pupil and the school.
With the focus on SPI (subject progress index) per
class, teachers know it is harder to succeed with top sets than with middling ones. The SPI is one of the many pieces of data that rule us. It means the level of progression a pupil has made in a subject since primary school compared with all the other children nationally who achieved the same primaryschool result.
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whole is likely to get a better SPI if they are a low set are various. Some pupils develop later than others, while recently arrived children with English as a second language will have gained more fluency in the language. These are the good reasons. The others are more problematic. You will have children who never come to school and are totally disengaged, whose SPI will be terrible.
Then you’ll have other children in the class who have plodded away for years and who, with a good teacher and patience, will significantly exceed their SPI.
The boy with the sweet smile I taught recently will be one of those. So will another girl in the set, whose level of resilience and determination has just seen her write an amazing criticism of an unseen poem.
When I get their results this summer, they will be balanced against the three persistent truants, the two who spend most of their time in the Enrichment Centre (for emotional support) and the one who genuinely just can’t hold any idea in his memory for more than half an hour.
The class will probably be in the red, not the green. But, as long as those who have worked hard come out dark green, I can live with the scarlet failure of the others.
So why is it hard for the clever ones to improve? And do we care as much? In the same way as every school is chasing after the 4s and 5s, we also want as many of the 8s and 9s as we can muster.
The 9s are impossible to
teach, but I’d like to boast that I have in the past had more than my fair share of them. It is mathematically obvious that someone predicted a 7 has a smaller chance of going up three grades than someone predicted a 3 (there is no grade 10). But it is down to more than that.
Mahnoor Cheema has 34 GCSEs, 33 9s and one 8. In May, she took four A-levels and was awarded four A*s. She is taking 24 more A-levels over the next year, and will presumably continue to shine.
In her spare time, she criticises state schools for not doing enough for children like her. She may have a point (she is studying for most of her A-levels at home and entering as a private candidate).
But, to be fair, there just aren’t many children like her and there is no chance that a state school with its large classes and its financial, recruitment and retention problems could really facilitate such ambition – nor should it be asked to do so.
Teachers have different attitudes to their top sets. They are often based on how much the teachers know and love their subject. Teach a top set Frankenstein and there is every reason to swerve off into The Ancient Mariner for a couple of lessons – but how many see the link or can be bothered?
As E M Forster insists in Howards End, ‘Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted.’
And that is exactly what we should be doing with our clever pupils.
Hosted by the legendary Douglas Harrison of Best of Wines, who specialise in distinct wines from independent growers, who strive to be ‘green’ yet maintain their true goût
One Sunday morning in 1972, as my wife and I were breakfasting on the QE2 – the voyage to and from New York having been paid for by a generous publisher’s publicity office – a hatchet-faced American couple sat down opposite us, without so much as a by-your-leave.
Lifting her spoonful of hominy grits, the wom an suddenly said, ‘We didn’t see you at divine service this morning.’
‘No,’ said my wife, braver than I. ‘You wouldn’t have.’
There was a pause. Then, after more hominy grits, she suddenly said, ‘The camel is a signal mark of heavenly grace. He can go for six or seven months without water. Is that not a miracle?’
I failed to think of a response, and suddenly had a fit of coughing – noting that a gentleman sitting at a neighbouring table, behind the Americans, was barely concealing his hysteria.
That evening, he came up to us as we were having a drink in our favourite bar.
‘The Tormé can go for as long as five hours without a cocktail,’ he said, buying us two more gimlets.
Indeed, it was Mel Tormé (1925-99), the American singer and composer, aka
The Jeremy Lewis Prize for New Writing
By Brian Walsh – this year’s winner of the annual award in honour of our late Deputy Editor
I remember the day Miss World invited me to lunch in November 1966.
She didn’t have to. It wasn’t a community-service order from Mecca, who ran the contest and were said to penalise awkward contestants.
When the list was circulated through my college seeking volunteers to escort contestants on their day in Cambridge, I’d been allotted Miss Japan.
So it was that, on a bright, cold November morning, I was standing
I Once Met Mel Tormé
the Velvet Fog. At that time, he was at the height of his splendid career, and on his way to the London Palladium. He gave two fine concerts on board (with a first-class stateroom thrown in for him). Between them, we shared another gimlet or two with him. A splendid gossip, he told a number of extremely good stories about his career.
My favourite was about the time when,
outside King’s College Chapel alongside an Oriental beauty. She sadly had no English to express her distress at being in a line of stunning young women paired with strange males, ranging from grubby teenage misfits like me to the occasional devious don.
Our ramble continued in awkward silence until it was intercepted by a young Japanese man with a flag who chattered away to my ‘date’. As we marched back to the Cambridge Union for lunch under the banner of the Rising Sun, I knew I had lost her.
I was slightly consoled by the sight of the gorgeous Miss India, exasperated by an escort dressed comically as Pandit Nehru, down to the long, buttoned jacket and the white Gandhi hat.
She had clearly shed this impostor by lunch, where she sat at the end of one table facing an empty seat. I was standing alone, in my accustomed wallflower position. To my surprise, Miss India noticed me and beckoned me to the empty seat.
She certainly shattered the stereotype of a beauty queen. A medical
as a youngster of 18, he was touring America with Chico Marx’s band – and, his popularity having gone to his head, he kept badgering Chico for more notable billing.
One day, the band was approaching Las Vegas for a stint at El Rancho. As they bussed into the city, the bandleader told Mel to ‘watch the lights’. Gradually the huge advertisements above Fremont Street grew more and more legible until, with less than full satisfaction, the singer was able to make out those over El Rancho.
In startlingly large and vivid letters, they read ‘MEL TROME’.
Derek Parker
student, she was fiercely intelligent and set on her career, yet mature in her outlook and quite happy to enjoy briefly the fun of travel and the nonsense of the beauty circuit.
A few days later, she charmed the judges too. They remarked that her national dress, the sari, suited her down to the ground. She became the first Asian winner.
No, she didn’t ask for my telephone number (not that I had one). When interviewed on TV, she disappointingly made no reference to our lunchtime tryst.
I once mentioned this episode to a girlfriend. She immediately explained that, just like her, Miss India was obviously a really nice person who simply took pity on a loser standing around gormlessly.
I agree.
But, still, Miss World did invite me to lunch!
Jeremy Lewis (1942-2017)
Velvet Fog: Mel Tormé (1925-99) wrote Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire (1945)
DAVID HOCKNEY
Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips
Tall order
Buying clothes for lanky people is quite a stretch
In the 1940s and 1950s, the most sought-after job in Ireland was a position at the Guinness Brewery in St James’s Gate, Dublin.
The reason? Nothing to do, in the days when the Irish drank heavily, with the free pint of Guinness served daily to each staff member over the age of 25.
It was because the philanthropic Guinness family provided their workers with free medical care, a pension, free lunch and, best of all, regular social events at which singletons had a good chance of meeting a romantic partner.
The most popular event in the social calendar was the tall man’s dance. There was much laughter and conniving at the entrance point to this event, as the door was six feet tall and only men who had to duck were allowed to go in.
Shorter men tried to gatecrash, because the top-of-the-range female workers were always certain to be at this event – women fancy taller men. It’s an epigenetic thing, dating back to cavewoman days when we needed bigger brutes to fight off predators.
Clothing for bigger brutes was much harder to source in those days. Jackets, jumpers and shirts were always easier to find than trousers. These usually had to be bespoke. Fortunately, Irish women were handy with sewing machines.
Meanwhile, in England, supersize males were forced to go to tailors such as the world-renowned Carl Stuart in Yorkshire, who still today will deliver an elegant product, albeit at four times the price of off-the-peg versions from M&S.
Historical note: M&S in the 1990s were so famed for the excellence of their off-the-peg suits that wearers, when questioned as to what tailor had been involved, used to quip, ‘Yves St Michel.’
Today, owing to working from bed, business suits are no longer in the same demand. Remember when every man in the city had a suit and a bowler hat?
Contrast that with Industry, the first
rate, though stressy-to-watch BBC drama about the world of finance.
When class-anxious junior banker Robert, played by Harry Lawtey, turns up at Pierpoint in a business suit, his millions-coining colleagues, all in leisurewear, tease him, ‘You look as though you’re about to make a court appearance on a racism charge.’
Hawes & Curtis are currently London’s top supplier of British classic clothes for giants. They have 100 years of history and used to be favoured by Lord Mountbatten and Cary Grant. There is also a fairly good online retailer (suitsupply.com).
Thanks to the internet, today’s giant males can order from online Asian tailors, with variable results.
What about tall women? The high street seems to assume the top size of five foot ten will do for their tall section.
Next is best for jeans because they offer regular sizes, with long or extralong options – you could get an 8L or a 16L. Zara, although pricey, is another good source. Long Tall Sally – now online rather than in physical shops – is famed for coats and, if a tall woman is selective and scrolls for long enough, she can find other attractive clothing.
Longer dresses tend to work best. If the body section comes up short, it’s not the end of the world as it can pose as an
empire-line dress – ie intended to go in just under the bust instead of at the waist.
People are getting taller all the time. Look at six-foot-nine Barron Trump and his father six-foottwo Donald Trump. Six-foot-two Daniel Barlow has just gone viral in a picture, dwarfing his five-foot-eight father, Gary Barlow, formerly of Take That.
Oldies must have noticed that their grandchildren are much taller than they themselves were at the same age (as well as fatter), and the average height in the UK goes up by one inch every 19 years – no one knows why. Perhaps it’s the growth hormones in the beefburgers.
I was delighted to talk to Mike Tunstall (six foot seven) who runs the Tall Persons Club in the UK. It holds regular social events where the tall can have the huge relief of socialising with people they can occasionally look up to and not always down to. The average height of a female club member is six foot one, and of a male club member six foot seven.
Last August Bank Holiday, 60 members checked into a hotel in Peterborough for a weekend. Tunstall says the locals looked really alarmed when the 60 of them went on a group walk together.
It has been really helpful for the tall to get together, as they can exchange much information. Take bedstretch.com – they supply upholstered extensions to place at the ends of beds.
And the best result of the Tall Persons Club? As a result of the frequent social events, they have overseen 30 marriages.
Son also rises: 6ft 7in Barron Trump (far right)
Town Mouse
Self-driving cars on a road to nowhere
tom hodgkinson
Whatever happened to the promise of self-driving cars?
As I pedal my mousy way across London every day, I peer with interest at the various vehicles on the road. But I have yet to see a taxi or any sort of vehicle gliding past me without a driver.
This is not what the overlords of Silicon Valley foretold. For over a decade, they have been promising the conquest of the roads by driverless taxis and cars, and their propaganda has been effective.
Ten years ago, I remember my friend Mr Fox confidently asserting, ‘In five years’ time, Uber’s entire fleet will be driverless.’
There have been some steps forward towards this goal. A company called Waymo, owned by Google, has a handful of selfdriving cars on the streets of San Francisco and Phoenix. Though they’re easily disabled by protesters who confuse them by putting a traffic cone on the bonnet, Waymo claims they’re now providing 10,000 rides each week, along pre-planned routes.
Uber announced its plans to create a fleet of automatic cars in February 2015. But, following a 2018 incident in which a pedestrian was killed by one of its vehicles, they’ve been very quiet on the matter.
Elon Musk has been absurdly bullish in his predictions.
In 2016, he said Tesla fully self-driving cars were ‘two years away’. In 2017, he said ‘six months, definitely’, and claimed that people would be able to sleep in their Tesla while it did all the driving in ‘two years’. In 2018, the dream was still ‘a year away’ but would be ‘200-per-cent safer’ than human driving. In 2019, he said there would be ‘complete, full self-driving this year’. Ford and Apple mentioned 2020 as the year when it would start happening.
Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Musk ‘told investors in 2019 that Tesla would have more than one million robotaxis on the road by the following year. The company hasn’t deployed a single autonomous vehicle in the years since.’
Tusk recently revised his estimate to 2027. We shall see. So far – nothing from Tesla. You can’t help concluding that talk of self-driving cars is a mirage promoted by companies to boost the share price.
Safety isn’t great either. One down from fully self-driving cars are semi-self-driving cars. In other words, you need a driver. But this isn’t as safe as promised. According to website The Verge, US federal
regulators are investigating at least 1,000 individual Tesla crashes involving autopilot and fully self-driving (FSD) cars. At least 44 people died in these crashes. Why? Because of what is known as ‘automation complacency’.
Mica Endsley, former chief scientist at the US Air Force, has studied the issue: ‘The public don’t quite understand the subtle ways automation affects their attention [but] it’s like giving people a sedative. They’re going to find something else to do or they’re going to zone out, and neither is good.’
The Chair of Robotics at Eindhoven University of Technology, René van de Molengraft, is also sceptical about self-driving cars. He says the problem is that self-driving cars are stupid. They need to be lazier, like humans, and become capable of weeding out the unimportant information.
‘Imagine yourself on a bicycle. You perceive all the information that you do not require for safe participation in traffic, but you don’t store that information. That person walking out of the supermarket you’re cycling past: unimportant!
‘A self-driving car cannot do that yet. It has 20 cameras running simultaneously, viewing and analysing each image. Everything is equally important, which takes a lot of computing power and a lot of energy. That needs to be improved.’
Even the highest-level FSD software is patchy, to say the least. FSD struggles to recognise motorcyclists, says tech site
The Verge: ‘A 28-year-old motorcycleowner was killed near Seattle earlier this year by a Model S driver who was using the driver-assist feature.’
‘Fully-self driving – human-level or above, in all possible conditions, where you can put kids by themselves in the car to send them to arbitrary locations without worrying – is not something I expect to see by 2031,’ says Necmiye Ozay, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan.
This mouse doesn’t expect to see robot taxis on the streets of London any time soon. Human beings are infinitely more sophisticated than computers. When I’m cycling, I’m making a million calculations a second and, in the middle of those, I still have time to acknowledge a friendly wave from a driver who is letting me pull out. And humans are happy to take on the high risk of managing a car because they all think they’re better at driving than they really are.
Musk uses his considerable clowning and circus-master skills to part the unwary from their cash, like a P T Barnum of technological capitalism. But I ain’t buying it.
Country Mouse
The naff British way of death
giles wood
When the funeral director tapped me on the shoulder, possessed of a guilty conscience I naturally thought I had done something wrong. So I flinched.
Far from it, the tall, sepulchral fellow with a yellow-ochre waxwork complexion and straw for hair was saying something in hushed tones. I leant in towards him.
‘If you don’t mind my saying, sir,’ he wheezed, ‘your conduct at this funeral service was exemplary – better than that of most celebrants who pass through these doors.’ His rheumy eyes rolled in an attempt at affability. ‘And my assistant agrees.’ The underling nodded obediently.
Later, when I walked back through the cottage doors, the service and the ‘wake’ behind me, I felt two feet taller. That’s what I’ve been missing. It was my mother who used to compliment me, at every opportunity. My wife compliments me only on a wartime rationing basis.
What is a funeral celebrant and what is their role? There are two main types to choose from: a civil celebrant or a humanist celebrant. Both can conduct funerals only in non-denominational locations. Their duties include ensuring specific funeral wishes are carried out.
I was not only celebrant but also curator and auteur of my mother’s very personalised, artistic service. Since it was based on the theme of vegetative regeneration, some of the younger members of the congregation were invited to read out poems by Walt Whitman and Sir John Betjeman.
Two screens projected a photograph in lurid Technicolor of the dear departed’s Welsh walled garden with views of Snowdonia. Onto these was superimposed my mother’s name in white (my only gripe was that the typesetting was a bit Janet and John).
You could almost smell the sea and
hear the bumble-bees. ‘All the live murmur of a summer’s day’, to quote Matthew Arnold.
Other duties for me included the creation of a eulogy. Tick. Offering support to the family on the day of the funeral. Tick.
And hosting and officiating at the funeral service on the day. Tick. It was not difficult for me to ‘keep it together’, as they say. I didn’t well up or get ‘emosh’. This simply never occurs.
When I was a minor public-school boy in Salop, one of the first lessons we boarders learnt was to compartmentalise our feelings and develop a stiff upper lip.
Or risk the chilling prospect of being held down behind the bike sheds and used as a human sleeping policeman while cycling contemporaries repeatedly ran over their chosen victim.
The idea of celebrants arose from families wanting to arrange services unbound by rules and regulations to celebrate their loved ones’ lives, but with a secular MC standing in for a priest. EEK!
Thankfully there was a conspicuous Christian cross affixed to the wall of what was a perfectly pleasant, light and functional space. But how long before the whole funeral palaver becomes an unregulated free-for-all, like Mafia-run vets and care homes?
Having arrived an hour early – this celebrant errs on the side of caution regarding punctuality – I wandered through the ‘extensive landscaped grounds’ around the crematorium. I spotted some jolly odd post-Christian imagery. A giant resin badger stood sentinel over a deceased children’s area.
An odd-looking tree, which I could tell was a type of monumental sculpture, attracted my attention. Each individual removable leaf bore an inscription to a ‘loved one’. The whole thing to my eyes
was hellish, but there’s no accounting for taste. The metallic leaves were designed to rust to ‘imitate the natural colouring of nature’s seasons’ – and then I thought of Harry and Paul’s sketch of the Notting Hill purveyor of grot to trustafarians whose shop sign above the door said ‘I SAW YOU COMING’.
The money-making potential of deregulated end-of-life/passing-on services and events has scarcely begun.
The few Anglicans who remain loyal to the church must expect further haemorrhaging in the wake of recent safeguarding issues. Abject families, at a difficult time, are emotionally vulnerable and can be easily exploited by the unscrupulous, just as a sick pet can be by a vet.
So it might be a good time to discuss money. Do celebrants charge fees for their services? Well, let me be the first to tell you that the going rate is approximately £230, though I will naturally be waiving my own fee.
But, without the waiver, you would be paying a bit extra for the polish – the little bit of polish – I accrued from Shrewsbury. You would expect to pay a little bit extra for a celebrant with no trace of a regional accent – although I know, in these topsy-turvy times, that many Britons prefer one, especially a Geordie accent.
The big decision for the budding celebrant would be whether you could stomach more than one service per day.
I would exempt myself from consumer websites such as Checkatrade or Tripadvisor, but I would make a special point of advising the bereaved on what NOT to spend their money on –including these nice little earners:
1) Paying extra to launch your loved one’s ashes into outer space, with or without video footage, for ashes to fall in the future as rain or even snow.
2) Having your loved one’s ashes enfolded into a compact disc of your loved one’s favourite music. Yuk!
3) We almost fell for this one. Expensive bejewelled caskets to transport your loved one’s ashes. No thanks. A good quality, robust paper bag will do. Preferably from sustainably and ethically sourced wood pulp.
Sermon from the Mad Monk
Keith Joseph was one of the quirkiest people Mary Kenny ever interviewed
It’s 30 years since Keith Joseph died – on 10th December 1994, aged 76.
I’m glad to note he’s been included in Vernon Bogdanor’s recent book about six of the most consequential modern British politicians.
Joseph, aka ‘the Mad Monk’, had a formative influence on Margaret Thatcher. He was one of the quirkiest people I ever interviewed in the course of my journalistic life.
His political career effectively came to an end when he made a speech criticising poor people for embarking on parenthood – ‘children born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world’.
hearer and I was captivated by him – and his dedication to his mother as a Congregationalist preacher, well before women were ordained.
I told him I disagreed with this: poor people should be supported in becoming parents. He had had to apologise profusely for this ill-judged speech, and he did so again, quite humbly.
‘You see, I believe in embourgeoisement,’ he explained.
He believed in encouraging respectability and self-improvement, as the route out of poverty.
He then spoke nostalgically about the high culture of his own background and his German-Jewish heritage of family musical evenings and earnest discussions about Continental philosophy.
As Bogdanor says, he could never have been a party leader, because he kept having to qualify his speeches with apologies. Yet I was struck by his innate quality of anxious gentleness and well-meaning aspirations.
As it happens, I also interviewed two of the other politicians Sir Vernon writes about in Making the Weather: Six Politicians Who Changed Modern Britain
Tony Benn had the courteous manners of an 18th-century aristocrat, despite –or because of – his left-wing views. Beautiful manners always flatter the
As for Enoch Powell, interviewing him was like being tutored by a demanding Classics master. I made the mistake of showing him the text of my interview – known as ‘copy approval’ in the trade (usually a mistake, by the way) – and he put a blue pencil through every second paragraph.
The piece was reduced to such shreds that it never appeared, though I still have the tape somewhere.
We spoke about Ireland, on which Powell was quite shrewd. ‘The Ulster Protestants don’t have the “blarney”,’ he remarked of the Unionists’ more taciturn ways. He seemed to think that the ‘blarney’ would carry the Catholic Nationalists to greater political success.
I admired Enoch, however, for addressing the farmers of South Down in classical Greek. Apparently, they were hugely flattered.
Modern life has many contradictions.
So there is measurable public and political support for ‘assisted dying’, for those moving towards the departure lounge. This is lauded as a personal choice. And yet the Labour government plans to ban smoking in all hospital grounds – even for patients who are already dying. No choice for them!
In certain American states, where the death penalty for egregious crimes is still carried out, an unfortunate felon is nevertheless denied a last cigarette.
Karol Sikora, a leading, sometimes outspoken cancer specialist, deplores smoking because it’s a cause of cancer.
Yet he believes it’s compassionate to allow those with terminal illness to partake of a ciggie, when it may be the last pleasure left. And why shouldn’t they, if it comforts them?
That wonderful and legendary cook and gourmet, the late Jennifer Paterson (one of the Two Fat Ladies of the eponymous TV programme), sadly contracted lung cancer. Towards the end of her life, she was found smoking – and drinking – in her hospital bed.
‘You can’t smoke here,’ reprimanded the ward sister.
‘I’m dying!’ cried Jennifer, con brio, ‘I can do whatever I like!’
And she did.
In the name of the late, splendid Jennifer, terminal patients should be permitted to drag on a fag, if they yearn for one. Those who support assisted dying should surely see the logic of this personal choice.
I’m afraid I’m not much of a Christmas person – a simple Nativity Mass and an occasion to sing Hark! The Herald Angels Sing would do me just fine. Those who say it has become a festival of pagan bacchanalia starting in November have a point.
Charles Dickens is to blame for inventing the modern Christmas, although it has been greatly merchandised and marketised by contemporary capitalism. The politically correct brigade, who have tried for years to ‘cancel’ Christmas, are doomed to failure, because Christmas is now a brand, and too big to take down.
Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is a great work, but it is also shamelessly manipulative, and the author pulls every artful stratagem to prompt our sentimental engagement in the story.
Yet, paradoxically, if the unredeemed Scrooge were around today, he wouldn’t be condemning Christmas – he’d be making money out of it!
Small World
OMG! Mother’s got an Old Batphone
Bye-bye, freedom – she now bothers me night and day 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…
My friend Demi has recently lost two cats.
Now it’s cheaper for me to visit her – her loss has cut the tuna-steak admission fee.
So I’ve been using her house as a bolthole from my caring duties. Otherwise I am shackled to my mother by her ‘care’ wristwatch – or Old Batphone – which vibrates whenever she presses her witchy pendant.
She buzzes it for pointless reasons: ‘Turn the fox garden ornament 45 degrees so it shows less of its bottom’; ‘Find your father and tell him I don’t need him.’
Demi’s house is near enough to mean I can physically see my own (well, my parents’ own). If mother sets it on fire in some cigar and cashmere catastrophe, I can still make a reasonable attempt to rescue sentimental items. I’m still far enough away that the wristband-of-evertwitching-trivia-requests is out of range.
Despite having a Hollywood name, Demi is – through a series of health crises – a mobility-scootered saucepot in her 40s. Owing to a series of poor life choices, she lives in a mobility-friendly maisonette on the state’s coin.
pensioner neighbours as ‘looking very much like an Amazon driver’.
I’m there to watch a new Godzilla film on her impossibly large TV. But she thinks I’m there to console her over her terrors that the new government may lean in on her benefits and allowances.
Sometimes she cries so hard in the film that I mistake her nose-blowing for Godzilla’s fearsome roar – and vice versa. That leads me to lay a comforting hand on her shoulder at the wrong times.
She looks at me questioningly through her crumpled red eyes and I realise she is one of the only people who is slightly prettier when she cries.
Rupert and Emily (named after the Harry Potter actors) have disappeared. Rupert was seen near a local lake, famous for being ‘shallow enough to teach dogs to swim in’. Emily was last seen being led away by a man described by her
The two remaining cats, Edward and Elizabeth, suddenly appear from nowhere like the teenagers they are. They position themselves behind me on the back of the settee, tapping on my head at annoying intervals to get me to hunt more tuna for them.
The Old Batphone buzzed – even though it was strangely out of range.
I scarpered, to find my perfectly upright and not-remotely-on-fire mother. She asked me to ‘reach down the Peter Rabbit figurine. Thirty-four years I’ve stared at that for no good reason.
She buzzes it for pointless reasons: ‘Move the fox garden ornament’
‘Great Aunt Ruby [the donor] died two years ago – why should I keep her ghost happy a minute longer?’
I took off my wristband alarm and swung it in front of her face like some cheap stage hypnotist.
She shrugged and said, ‘Oh yes. Elaine the physio did this tweak on my wristwatch that boosts its radius.’
I must write a letter to the local NHS trust asking whether their physios really have the time to be radius-tweaking.
But Mother didn’t really want a bit of Beatrix Potter removing. She actually missed me.
I asked her, ‘Why did we never have any pets?’
She said, ‘What would I want with a creature under my feet all day with a misplaced sense of affection, living off me till it dies – when I already have you?’
I took the Old Batphone and tied it round my tiny neck. Mother looked at me quizzically.
My Technicolor dream machine
I do find what the brain gets up to at night most odd.
I don’t think I am remotely artistic, but I have the weirdest dreams, especially when I am only half-asleep. I dream in vivid Technicolor and in the greatest possible detail.
I watch, fascinated, as a parade of faces worthy of Rembrandt drifts by. Sometimes it’s just eyes, noses or mouths that morph from one to the next. They are exquisitely drawn or painted.
How did my brain do that, when I can barely draw a matchstick figure? It’s like tripping on LSD. Only reliably pleasant and interesting, not scary.
And why, when I am generally optimistic and happy, are my dreams so terrifying and grim?
And then there’s the ability of my night-time brain to concoct scenarios more complicated than The Lord of the Rings, and more gruesome than Bluebeard – all in, allegedly, three minutes. I’ve murdered my mother (whom I adored) and abandoned my first husband (to whom I was devoted) for a total stranger.
Yes, I know other people’s dreams are unspeakably boring and I apologise for going on about mine. But is there any rhyme or reason to our dreams? Is it true that being too hot, eating cheese or pork or watching scary TV leads to bad dreams? And what do dreams mean? Freud thought all dreams were expressions of repressed sexuality.
I doubt that, but I’m sure there are such things as ‘occupational nightmares’: actors who dream of standing on stage in the wrong play; surgeons dreaming they’ve left the scalpel inside the patient. When I was a caterer, I’d repeatedly dream of opening the oven to find the beef wellington stone-cold and raw, while
the customers sit expectantly in the dining room.
The brain seems to be more awake when the rest of the body is fast asleep. My dad told me, in the days when I did exams, that if I memorised facts before I went to sleep, they’d stick. And I do believe that works. Even today, if I need to learn something, such as a script or a poem, I do it before I fall asleep.
So I guess my octogenarian sleeping brain is in fairly good nick. It’s my waking brain that’s the problem.
I recently turned up at the hospital for a cervical smear, having been prompted by a message on the screen in the GP’s waiting room: ‘Had a smear test recently? You should have one every five years.’
So there I was, lying in an undignified position on a gurney, while a nurse got going with some icy-cold instrument. She straightened up abruptly.
‘You don’t have a cervix,’ she said.
I’d forgotten I’d had a hysterectomy.
Last week, when asked how many children I had, I said ‘Three.’ Wrong answer. I have two children and have had for the last 50 years.
‘Time for the vet,’ said my husband.
Prue Leith’s Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom is out now
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Prue dreams in lurid colours
sister teresa
Magical dream of the Magi
In Old and New Testament times, there was full acceptance of the reality of dreams and visions. The more direct they were, the more they were valued as the revealed word of God.
In the infancy narrative of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus’s early life is the subject matter of five dreams. Four were sent to Saint Joseph. The fifth, which is of vital importance, was sent by God to the three kings, otherwise known as the three wise men, or Magi.
‘But they were warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, and returned to their own country by a different way.’ (Matthew 2:12)
The scholarly scripture commentaries that I have consulted elaborate very little about this dream. Given its extraordinary importance, I find this odd.
In art throughout the ages, there are countless versions of the three kings following the star to Bethlehem, and many more of the Epiphany, glowing with exotic clothing, animals and gifts. As far as I know, in relatively modern
times, no attempt has been made to illustrate the kings’ dream.
One has to go back to the Middle Ages in order to find pictures of it. These occur in illuminated manuscripts: all of them are humorous and all of them are tiny. One of the nicest is from the Queen Mary Psalter (England, 1310-20, pictured).
The kings are tucked up in bed together, under a white sheet covered with a golden blanket. They are in their birthday suits, but with their crowns on their heads, and they are lying neatly in layers. One way and another, they don’t look very comfortable.
Queen Mary Psalter, 1320
They are all awake. The senior king on the right is the one who responds to the angel’s sudden appearance –by holding up his left hand as if to ward off the heavenly visitor. The angel is having none of this and points a stern forefinger at him: ‘Pay attention!’
Had the three kings not paid attention, Jesus would have been killed
Memorial Service
by order of Herod, as a very young baby. There is something touching about this tiny picture, pretty and comical, telling us about an integral part of the story of Christ in a simple and naive way.
Within 30-odd years, the baby that the kings are protecting will have been crucified by the authorities of the world. On Easter Sunday, he rises from the dead and by his Resurrection becomes the saviour of us all. Herod’s murderous intention is thwarted, allowing us to rejoice over the birth of the infant king. For a little while, the sense of menace that we experience in our violent and threatening contemporary world becomes irrelevant. We have a real need to celebrate and have a HAPPY CHRISTMAS.
Baroness Gardner of Parkes AM (1927-2024)
A thanksgiving service for Baroness Gardner of Parkes, the first Australian-born peeress, was held at Westminster Cathedral. Father Matthew Blake was the celebrant.
Trixie Gardner, who died aged 97, was born in Parkes, New South Wales. She qualified as a dentist in Sydney and was a London dentist from 1955 to 1990. She was made a peer by Margaret Thatcher in 1981. Peter Willis, her nephew, a Melbourne lawyer, gave the first tribute. Noting that she came from a highly educated family of Catholic girls, he invoked Germaine Greer, who attended Melbourne and Sydney universities, and then Cambridge: ‘Trixie was born in 1927 into a family of strong, accomplished women who made a mark wherever they went. She
was the eighth of nine children. There were six girls, one of whom died, and three boys. All the girls were tertiary educated or qualified, from the 1940s onwards.’
Willis explained that her ancestors were from County Mayo where they ran a dairy. They came to Australia in the 19th century to prospect for gold and became prominent Labor politicians.
A GLC member and City of Westminster councillor, Trixie stood as a Tory in two general elections: in 1970, against Barbara Castle in Blackburn; and in 1974, against John Pardoe in North Cornwall. In 1981, she succeeded Lady Trumpington as UK representative at the UN Status of Women Commission.
‘In my late-teenage years, Mum was
always away on my birthday, in Vienna with the UN Commission,’ her eldest daughter, Sarah Joiner, said in her tribute. ‘I was indignant because my friends’ mothers were at home with them but, ten years down the line, I realised I had parents who were endlessly interesting.’
Sarah told how her mother was recorded yawning 15 times during one minister’s speech in the House of Lords.
The hymns were Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven, Be Thou My Vision and To Be a Pilgrim. The choir sang Beati Quorum Via and Parry’s I Was Glad Corinne Cowling, an Australian soprano, sang I Am Australian.
Readings included The God-Forgotten Election by Henry Lawson (1867-1922), an Australian writer and bush poet.
JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW
The Doctor’s Surgery
Don’t be anti-antibiotics
The allergy to penicillin is wildly exaggerated dr theodore dalrymple
A minor operation, said the great physician Sir George Pickering, is an operation performed on somebody else. In like fashion, I suppose, a low risk is one taken by somebody else.
Certainly, doctors and patients may evaluate risks differently, and doctors even think of different kinds of risks, not least among them that of being sued. This renders doctors either laudably cautious or obsessionally – even paralytically – overcautious.
After all, there is more rejoicing in the chambers of malpractice lawyers over one missed diagnosis than there is regret over a hundred unnecessary, expensive, painful and intrusive medical investigations. When in doubt, diagnose.
Among the errors doctors most fear committing is giving a drug to patients known to be allergic to it and who have a fatal reaction to it. The paradigm case is penicillin, but the number of fatal cases of anaphylactic shock after penicillin is given by injection is difficult to estimate.
In 2001, an American paper suggested that between 500 and 1,000 people a year died in the United States of an anaphylactic reaction to penicillin injections. But deaths from anaphylaxis all told in the UK are put at about 30 per year, and only some of them would be from penicillin.
However, up to ten per cent of people consider themselves to be allergic to penicillin, and therefore doctors are wary of prescribing penicillin or its derivatives for them. This may not be to the patients’ advantage, for such drugs are still often the most effective available.
At the same time, it has long been known that most people who claim to be allergic to penicillin are not allergic to penicillin – indeed perhaps as many as 19 out of 20 of them. And sometimes it is essential for doctors to know whether or not they are truly allergic because penicillin or its derivatives are precisely what patients urgently need.
But how to find out whether someone is truly allergic? One method is to give a patient a skin test with a small injected dose of the drug – but the drawback is that such a test is (a) unreliable, (b) slow and (c) not always easy to interpret.
When it is a question of infection, speed is often of the essence.
Brave doctors have challenged their supposedly allergic patients with normal doses of penicillin. The results of all scientific reports of doing this have recently been analysed.
Of 9,225 patients, only 3.5 per cent had anything like a reaction, and only six had a serious reaction – none a fatal one. Children were more than twice as likely to be affected as adults.
Patients in Europe were more likely to have a reaction than those in North America, perhaps because American doctors were more cautious in whom they were prepared to challenge in this way. The patients whom they challenged probably called themselves –
or were recorded as – allergic to penicillin because of mild reactions on initial exposure to the drug.
No one would be so bold as to try the experiment on someone who had already suffered from anaphylaxis.
The message was quite clear: doctors should not fear prescribing penicillin to the supposedly allergic, most of whom are not allergic. But whether this will change the practice of doctors is another matter: rationality proposes, but fear disposes.
If a patient were to tell a doctor about an allergy to penicillin, the doctor’s fear of anaphylaxis would probably be so deeply ingrained that he or she would still fail to prescribe it even while knowing that such fear was unjustified – unjustified, that is, if the research is to be believed.
Only those young doctors not raised on the fear of anaphylaxis caused by penicillin would have the courage of their statistical knowledge.
‘Those were the good old days of leading Santa’s sleigh. Then along came GPS...’
The Oldie, 23–31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk
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Judi Dench v Eileen Atkins
SIR: I adore Judi Dench and have celebrated her in print scores of times. But ‘our greatest living actress’, as Gyles Brandreth says? I suspect Judi herself would give at least equal billing to Eileen Atkins, also 90 years old.
Take just one of many remarkable achievements, her performance in Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana at the National in 1992. I’ll never forget the way she held the first-night audience rapt for long, long minutes with the stillness, precision, warmth and depth she brought to one of the strangest, saddest monologues ever written.
Benedict Nightingale, former Times theatre critic, London SW6
Dagenham Girl Pipers FC
SIR: Your December-issue Olden Life (Dagenham Girl Pipers, by Mike Foley) reminded me of my favourite football riddle.
Dagenham Girl
Pipers in Egypt
Lazy Lord Lucan
Q: Who played for Arsenal in the morning and Spurs in the afternoon?
A: The Dagenham Girl Pipers.
I wonder if it actually happened. Best wishes
Chris Maher, Wallasey, Cheshire
SIR: I was at St Swithun’s School, Winchester, with Veronica Duncan, later the Countess of Lucan (Algy Cluff’s ‘Lord Lucan: the grisly truth’, November issue).
Being small and very thin, she was a fast swimmer and cut through the water like a tadpole. She never became a friend. Years later, I met her at a party. Now Veronica Lucan, she was overwhelmingly friendly. The warmth of her greeting and her pressing invitation to dinner perhaps should have warned me of her feelings of isolation and loneliness.
It was not a dinner party I enjoyed. The atmosphere seemed tense, uncomfortable. Seated between Lord Lucan and Lord Savernake, I could have been invisible.
They talked across me. ‘What do you do all day?’ Savernake asked Lucan.
‘Do?’ answered Lucan. ‘I don’t do anything. Gentlemen don’t. Well, I walk my dogs in the park.’
Then we all went to Annabel’s and I can honestly say I was relieved to get home.
I believe Lucan was a truly Thicko Aristo, a compulsive gambler, not clever enough to hide for all these years, and he probably jumped overboard on the cross-Channel ferry and drowned.
A few years ago, I walked into the Ribbon Bar of the Army & Navy Club and there was Veronica, who clearly recognised me. I averted my eyes and sat at the far end of the bar. Cowardly, perhaps – but what could I have said? ‘Hello, Veronica – what have you been doing all these years?’
She killed herself in 2017.
Shirley Lane, Castle Cary, Somerset
‘So ... do you have any younger sisters?’
How not to be a bore
SIR: I also am 85 and enjoyed Nick Peto’s ‘Warning! Bore alert’ in the December issue. My approach at a dinner party is to ask questions of my neighbours that give them the opportunity to answer briefly – or at length – before I pose the next question. The result is I know everything about them and they know nothing about me, and that seems very satisfactory from my perspective.
Graham Lang, Cupar, Fife
‘We’re calling the baby J. They’ll be gender neutral’
The Biscuit Book
SIR: In Modern Life (December issue), you asked, ‘What is the Red Book?’ When I joined the Ordnance Survey in 1972, we were equipped with three tomes of surveying instructions and manuals. One was red and was known, unsurprisingly, as the Red Book. The second was blue (no guesses).
The third was the colour of a Rich Tea and was called, with the literal precision of the Civil Service, the Biscuit Book. Jon Sims, Rownhams, Hampshire
Vintage Pamela Harriman
SIR: In your online report on Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker, you describe Pamela Harriman as ‘mesmerically charismatic’. You are right. She had warmth as well as allure.
In 1995, I organised a dinner party at the British Embassy in Paris (ambassador Christopher Mallaby) to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and of the greatest vintage of the century.
1945 was a small and difficult vintage – after a glorious summer when grapes were picked largely by the old, women and children, at a time when in Germany manpower was hard to find.
The owners of several great estates came with bottles of their ’45s:
Rothschilds, Aubert de Villaine of Romanée Conti, Piero Antinori … and to my joy, Germany’s greatest vintner, Egon Müller of Scharzhofberg. It was snowing. Egon Müller drove through the snow from Trier, bringing his last two bottles.
There had not been enough grapes in the weed-choked vineyard to make more than one barrel, not Spätlese or Auslese but everything at once, a pale wine of incredible intensity, one of the best I have ever drunk. ‘I would rather be drinking this here than anywhere else,’ he said, tears in his eyes.
And Mrs Harriman. She arrived late, shaking the snow off her boots, having just seen President Clinton off home at Le Bourget. He had been signing the Bosnian Peace Accord. I had only a few minutes with her, but what a woman. I never met Cleopatra, but now I know the type.
Hugh Johnson, Kensington, London
Loving last words
SIR: I was deeply distressed to read the article ‘Say it before it’s too late’ in the December issue by Richard Britton, who said that he was unable to say the things he wanted to say to his terminally ill wife.
As a nurse, I was taught that the last sense to go in a dying person is hearing – surely the nurses should have told him that. The reassuring voice of her husband during her last hours would have been such a comfort to her as she was dying.
I hope other people in similar situations will read this and be strengthened by my words.
Pat Whitehouse, Oxford
Autograph-hunting tips
SIR: Mark Ellen’s piece on autographs (Golden Oldies, December issue) makes a good point about hunters pursuing often reluctant celebrities for a signature.
I have been collecting autographs for over 30 years, always by written requests, at book-signings or doing showbiz research.
I have a good haul of a collection, mainly signed photographs, including those of Michael Caine, Dame Judi Dench, Richard Harris, Rex Harrison, Jack Lemmon, Clint Eastwood, Laurence Olivier and Dick Van Dyke, to name a few.
I have never had the courage to stop a celeb in the street. Seems a bit rude to me and, at best, you might get an illegible, hurried scrawl. By post, however, there is time for a tidier autograph and, often, a little message.
So autograph-collecting on the pavement might be dead, but there are still kindly folk out there happy to respond to a polite request by letter.
Yours faithfully, Joe Cushnan, Worksop, Nottinghamshire
‘Too much to drink, please’
Nobody knows what tomorrow brings
A new show in Oxford is full of dodgy prophets
david horspool
A few years ago, I found myself in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room of the British Library, reading a prophecy.
The Tudor commonplace book containing ‘In the Yere of Our Lorde’, as the prophecy is known, can be dated to about 40 years after the events it describes – or, if this is really a copy of an older original, the events it predicts.
There I read that, in 1483, ‘betwixt the departing of April and not far from May,/ The bull shall depart and pass away’.
That, plausibly, was King Edward IV, who died – a little before this schedule, admittedly – at the end of April that year.
The text also ‘predicts’ that ‘Wales shall bear arms and to Albion go’. That might just be a reference to the coming invasion of Henry Tudor, who landed in his native Pembrokeshire, again not quite to the text’s timetable.
The Wars of the Roses was a time when prophecies, predictions, spells and horoscopes were rife. In Shakespeare’s Richard III, ‘false, fleeting, perjured Clarence’, Richard’s older brother, falls foul of the ‘Prophecy of “G”’ – which, according to his other brother, Edward IV, predicts a ‘G’ will replace an ‘E’. Clarence’s Christian name was George – thus suspicion falls on him. Richard, of course, was Duke of Gloucester. So, as is the way with a good prophecy, any attempt to forestall it merely hastens its fulfilment.
Did prophets, such as Nostradamus, and necromancers really predict the future? Occasionally – just as meteorologists occasionally get tomorrow’s weather right – but rarely next week’s, let alone next month’s.
And if, as Shakespeare suggests, following his Tudor source, people in high places believed in such things, then historians had better be interested too.
A new exhibition at Oxford’s Bodleian Library will show just how universal our attempts to know the unknown have been, and for how long.
Future imperfect: Nostradamus (1503-66)
Oracles, Omens and Answers displays items from ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary Britain. It runs the gamut of predictive jiggery-pokery, from Chinese ‘oracle bones’, dating to the 13th century BC, to those curling red plastic ‘fortune-teller’ fish to be found in Christmas crackers.
From medieval England, there is a manuscript illumination of a Zodiac Man, whose body parts correspond to star signs (Aries for head, Pisces for feet, Scorpio for genitalia etc).
There are astrologers’ casebooks from the 16th and 17th centuries: Elizabeth I consulted her astrologer Dr Dee regularly – enough to lead to rumours she was having an affair with him.
But knowing, or pretending to know, what the future held was often a dangerous business. Previously, Dee had been put in the Tower for casting a horoscope for Mary I (he talked his way out).
Henry VI’s government imprisoned the Duchess of Gloucester (no relation to Richard) for life, for casting a horoscope of the king that predicted a future illness. That was construed as imagining his death, which was treason.
If more people trusted supernatural explanations, that didn’t mean some didn’t use them to their own advantage. Accusing your enemies of witchcraft, necromancy or ‘forecasting’, as Richard III did, could be very handy.
Shakespeare sees such moves as purely cynical. Perhaps they were, but the genuinely paranoid can be
just as dangerous as the calculatingly Machiavellian.
As the Bodleian exhibition shows, the rise of science never killed off divination and its cousins.
In Europe, the days of extispicy and haruspicy – prediction by the inspection of entrails in general or those of birds in particular – have passed.
But one of the curators of Oracles, Omens and Answers, David Zeitlyn, is described as a nggàm dù diviner, a Nigerian practice of ‘spider divination’.
Not that you have to go to West Africa to find diviners. As Professor Zeitlyn points out, ‘Whether a diviner uses spiders or tarot cards, what matters is whether the answers they offer are meaningful and helpful to their clients. What is fun or entertainment for one person is deadly serious for another.’
Many of the most popular current forms of divination in the West really got going in the 19th century. So it’s good to see a record of Oscar Wilde’s palmreading in the exhibition, as well as a popular print of a Chinese Wheel of Fortune from one of the Park brothers of Victorian Finsbury.
Those of us who pride ourselves on our rationality might view all this as a diverting guide to the follies of the past, and some fripperies of the present.
Just as we look down on those Victorians (and their successors) who thought phrenology was a genuine science, future generations might laugh in their sleeves at some of our own ‘modelling’ and predictive schemes.
Whether it is way-off forecasts of ‘expected deaths’ from a pandemic, or predictions of ‘knife-edge’ election results that turn out to be anything but – we too like to know what the future holds. And we haven’t got much better at it.
Oracles, Omens and Answers, Bodleian Library, 6th December-27th April 2025
Travel Special
with SAM LEITH
On tour in Guatemala – Pattie Boyd
Villa guests from Hell – James Pembroke
Skiing for oldies – Geoffrey Wheatcroft breaks a leg African Dolce Vita – Lisa St Aubin de Terán in Mozambique
Cinema Paradiso – Bologna Film Festival by Hugh Thomson
Among the contributors
PATTIE BOYD was a well-known model in the 60s, photographed by David Bailey, Terence Donovan and many more. Cast as a schoolgirl in A Hard Day’s Night, she met and married George Harrison, whom she subsequently left to marry Eric Clapton. Today she’s married to Rod Weston and is a photographer, food podcaster and author of a memoir, Wonderful Tonight.
The Anglo-Guyanese novelist, LISA ST AUBIN DE TERÁN, used to be a perpetual traveller but now, in her dotage, she is based on the Thames. She lived in North Mozambique for 19 years and her heart is still there, invested in the community projects she runs with Teran Foundation (www.teranfoundation.org). Her new novel The Hobby is published by Amaurea.
HUGH THOMSON’s many travel books include The Green Road into the Trees about walking across England, which won the first Wainwright Prize. His new novel Viva Byron! imagines what might have happened if the poet had not died an early death in Greece – but instead went to South America with the great last love of his life, Teresa Guiccioli, to help liberate it from the Spanish.
Go Away Travel Special
January 2025
Cover: LMPC/Getty Images
Go Away is published by
The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA
Editor Charlotte Metcalf
Design Caroline Jefford
Advertising Paul Pryde, Jasper Gibbons, Monty Martin-Zakheim
For advertising enquiries, call Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095
For editorial enquiries, call 020 7436 8801 or email editorial@theoldie.co.uk
4 Guests from Hell
8 Majestic Mayan ruins in Guatemala
16 Bruce Beresford’s Communist honeytrap
26 Cinema Paradiso Bolognese
6 Turkey by gulet
22 Trojan oldies
Guests from Hell
James Pembroke – driven mad by rude friends at his Puglia villa – has five tips. Cartoons by Nick Newman
The best type of holiday?
Stay in someone’s villa, either their own or one they have rented. Not only will you save a minimum of £200 a night on hotels, but you’ll enjoy the most stress-free holiday.
Your biggest decision all day will be whether to concentrate on tanning your back or front. During your hosts’ early years of ownership, they’ll have made all the mistakes to ensure they know all the best restaurants, beaches and important cultural sites. They’ll scurry off to the shops, book restaurant tables and organise little tours, all designed to give you the truly relaxing holiday you deserve.
But there are certain things you must do in return.
1. Don’t arrive after midnight
One family recently took two and a half hours to come from the airport
half an hour away. They finally arrived at 1am to enthuse about the fun they’d had, having a drink in the local town which was ‘buzzing’. Then they asked me for a night cap.
As I was showing some other late arrivals to their bedroom, I heard the wife say loudly, ‘Don’t let him palm us off with the worst bedrooms.’
2. Do not be rude about the house and the local area
We fools who have bought abroad and have suffered at the hands of local builders and planners have partly invited you so that you can condone and applaud our absurd decision. Flattery is all we want.
So, don’t announce during dinner that you and your two small children played a game in the car called ‘How we would improve the house if it was ours’. Compliment everything, right
down to the chipped mugs and rusty shower heads.
And heap praise on the local towns, food and people. It might help if you know even a little about where you are. A guest recently asked me, ‘Are we in Southern Italy?’
Even the tiniest enquiry on the flight might have taught him that Brindisi is not parallel with Milan.
Try looking at Wikipedia for three minutes if you can’t be bothered to buy a guidebook.
3. Don’t just hang around –go out for the day
On the fifth day, the host didst tire of the guests, and they did embark on a journey to faraway places with strange-sounding names.
We all need space. It’s delightful that you ‘just love chilling out by the pool, doing nothing’, but you still
want drinks, lunch and, worse, lively conversation. As you’ve done for the last four days.
If the host is daft enough to propose leading an excursion, departing at 10am, please view that as the time to be in your car – not to make coffee or look for beach towels, books or sunglasses.
Why don’t you sluggards ever see that making your hosts and four fellow guests wait in their cars for ten minutes means they have lost 60 minutes between them, just because you were still ‘chilling’ or faffing about for those essential ten minutes between 9.50am and 10am?
And never say you’d like to go back home ten minutes after arriving at the lovingly chosen destination.
Far better to head off unescorted for just a few hours and bitch about the hosts in total freedom, as they will about you.
Villa Life
So we were very excited about his own grande bouffe.
4. Sort the kitty out at the start and buy the hosts dinner
There’s always a meanie in a group.
One guest suggested we each buy and cook a dinner for everyone. He was very helpful suggesting huge joints of veal and royal sea bream when it was our turn.
Out came plates of spaghetti with specs of yellow. ‘Spaghetti al limone.’
He added as a clincher, ‘It’s a Gwyneth Paltrow recipe’.
Solution: all chuck in €100 a head. And no, this doesn’t let you off taking the hosts out to dinner.
5. Don’t make loud offers to help in the kitchen –just get on with it
My least favourite question? ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ I once replied to a Bambi-eyed 18-year-old, ‘Yes, how kind! Could you wash the salad?’ I might as well have shot her, her mother and Thumper. She fled. How could she not know that salads need making and tables laying?’ Just do something – anything.
The worst crime of all?
Suggesting a barbecue and then disappearing.
My favourite guest asked me, unprompted, where the recycling went and then drove all the bottles to the dump. My least favourite left lunch to sunbathe and then walked past us all clearing up, humming his way to his bedroom. Still, he got his comeuppance: he now edits a magazine for the elderly.
James Pembroke is the publisher of The Oldie and author of Growing Up in Restaurants: The Story of Eating Out
The words ‘guided tour’ alone can put discerning oldies off.
While we enjoy absorbing new cultures, we’ve all experienced standing around a museum or historical site, parched, exhausted and aching, as our oblivious ‘tour leader’ tells us what we already know or bombards us with details we have no hope of retaining –especially at our age.
But, if chosen with care, I am a fan of guided expeditions. I’ve just been on my fifth trip to Turkey with Somewhere Wonderful, a small company, owned and run by Jeremy Seal, respected author, broadcaster and teacher.
With archaelogist, Yunus Özdemir, Jeremy leads cultural tours of around ten guests – all likely to be of a certain age.
Turkey
My grand tours
Jane
Jeremy and Yunus are a superb double-act; solicitous, without being patronising. They never make the less mobile of us feel the need to get a move on. They gauge immediately if we’re restless.
On this last trip, there were four lawyers, a doctor, an economist and me (a literary agent with an anthropology degree), so you could safely say we were an impatient lot.
We were not bored once. Jeremy and Yunus’s combined knowledge is second to none and they’ve been running their tours for a maximum of 12 people for the last decade.
My most recent trip was to south-east Turkey, where the three great Peoples of the Middle East –Turks, Arabs and Iranians –converge, and where the land’s ancient claimants – Kurds, Armenians and Surianis – have left their mark.
Starting in Diyarbakir, we travelled to Gaziantep via astonishing sites, including neolithic Göbekli Tepe, still being excavated but deemed to be one of the most important archaeological discoveries in human history. To put it in perspective, Göbekli Tepe was 7,000 years old when Stonehenge and the pyramids were under construction.
In the outstanding archaeological museum in Urfa, we saw some of the finest Roman mosaics I’ve ever seen, rescued from Zeugma just before being claimed forever by the waters of the dammed Euphrates.
We visited paradise gardens
Conway-Gordon’s group holidays are Turkish delights
conjuring up ancient Persia, and explored the covered market, the best in Turkey, renowned for its regional specialities like isot, flaked chili and fat, juicy sun-dried tomatoes.
But it’s not just what we see and learn that distinguishes these trips. It’s also their bonhomie and sense of adventurousness – good for lone travellers who might not know anyone else.
Whether we’re scrambling over ruins, in a museum, boarding a boat or enjoying a delicious dinner at an authentic local restaurant, Jeremy and Yunus are taking care of us.
We are constantly fed and watered (included in the price), except for wine, which is annoyingly expensive and not always readily available.
Yunus likes his tucker, ensuring a running feast of culinary delights: pistachios, pomegranates, soups, flatbreads topped with spiced lamb mince, smoked aubergine in yoghurt, cheeses, salads, and divine desserts like baklava and kadayif. We’ve eaten in wonderful locations, drunk fragrant coffee made from menengic berries on the banks of the Biblical
Above: on Alettin’s gulet. Bay of Fethiye
Euphrates and enjoyed delightful Turkish hospitality.
A Kurdish curator invited us to his home, where his wife, resplendent in traditional, goldembroidered velvet, cooked us chicken stew, as our lunch’s relatives pecked around us in the garden and a large, apparently fearsome but soppy dog beguiled us.
I’ve been on two gulet trips with Somewhere Wonderful. The gulet is owned and skippered by Jeremy’s pal, Alettin, and comprises seven double cabins. Again, the deal is all in, with fresh, imaginative, delicious meals cooked by Alettin’s wife. Every night, the gulet moors in a different inlet along the Lycian Coast or Turkish Riviera, from where we swim in pristine waters and make expeditions to Roman and Greek theatres or rock tombs, before shopping in coastal towns.
One winter expedition began in Istanbul, where our hotel was a delightful converted tobacco factory, and continued to Capppadocia.
With pristine snow underfoot and dazzling skies overhead, we saw the painted rock churches and an underground city hewn deep into the rock. The trip included a private and thrilling boat trip up the Bosphorus to the mouth of the Black Sea. Another trip took us to the wonderful sites of Ephesus and Aphrodisias.
It’s hard to think of any region which compares with south-east Turkey for the sheer range of culture, cuisine and things to see.
It helps that our guides evidently take such pleasure in touring a little-discovered part of the world they have made their own. I wonder where in this remarkable country – in my view a match for any (when politics, earthquakes or other disasters do not intervene) – Jeremy and Yunus will take us next.
somewherewonderful.com
Jane Conway-Gordon is a literary agent
Right: tour leaders, Jeremy and Yunus – a ‘superb double act’
Central America
Guatemala gala
Supermodel turned photographer Pattie Boyd found new friends in street markets and 3,000-year-old Mayan ruins
The airport in Guatemala City was full of ghoulish deities. Even the T-shirts in the airport shops were emblazoned with ghouls.
I’d arrived the day after the Day of the Dead and All Souls Day. It was also the Kite Festival. Kites were flying above cemeteries to guide spirits back to their families.
I was travelling with my husband, Rod, and two friends. Our Airbnb on the edge of town had the promising name of Casa Velvet. But it was on a noisy main road and had no provisions whatsoever – not even tea or coffee.
Our spirits rose the next day exploring Antigua, arguably Guatemala’s most beautiful city. It’s encircled by volcanoes, notably Fuego, still active and spewing smoke. The town contained beautiful colonial Spanish architecture, brightly painted building and majestic – if crumbling – churches.
The city is laid out on a grid of cobbled streets and we passed
gardens, Christian edifices and Mayan figures with masks and horns.
We came to a vast cathedral, now a preserved UNESCO site. It had suffered an earthquake and stood surrounded by vast chunks of stone that had been heaved in different directions, as if by a vast Cyclops.
It was the day after the American election. We stumbled across the Antigua Bridge Club housed in a Thai restaurant called Thai Wow, run by Gavin, an American.
A mixed bag of people of a certain age, nearly all American, had gathered for their weekly Bridge game, but all everyone wanted to do was argue about Trump’s victory.
We went on to Chichicastenango, Guatemala’s famous, colourful market town. Here trestle tables were piled high with exotic fruits, vegetables and piles of spices.
Outside the main market, vendors were selling fabrics, beaded animals and birds, hats, wooden figures and buckets of chrysanthemums and
roses. On the steps up to the church, people were cooking over open fires.
One vendor, Rosa, twinkling with humour and laughing, persuaded me to buy a beaded dragon by insisting it could be as much a gift for an enemy as for my sister, mother or friend.
We continued to Lake Atitlan, in a massive volcanic crater – certainly the largest lake I’ve ever been on. We were taken by boat to Laguna Lodge, a thatched eco-hotel on the lake’s shore. Unprepared for oldies who relish a stiff drink at the end of a day, there was but one small tin of tonic to soften our four large vodkas. So we resorted to tequila slammers. Otherwise, the hotel was paradise.
Via boat, we visited the lake’s three main villages, Santiago, St Juan and St Marco. Santiago was low key, with a few traders but no tourists.
St Juan was extraordinary, with painted buildings lining cobbled streets down to the lake, under an array of multi-coloured upside-down umbrellas.
Even the ancient cobbles were a cheerful blue, built from stones coloured by furnace slag and ballast from Spanish ships centuries ago. Craftsmen had laid the stones to allow drainage and withstand hurricanes and earthquakes.
St Juan is also known for its artefacts, like its huge painted pots. Women were dyeing, spinning and weaving cotton to make beautiful fabrics and we bought some exquisite handmade scarves. We went on to St Marco to meet Tim, a friend of my nephew and a Guatemalan resident, who roasts coffee beans and sells them to local shops.
From here, we took a short flight to Flores, the starting point for visiting the spectacular worldfamous Mayan site, Tikal.
On the small bus into the jungle to see the ruins, I sat next to a smiling elderly couple of Mayan descent. Though we had no common language, they were happy for me to photograph them. Tikal, deep in the jungle and once the heart of Mayan civilisation, was occupied as far back as 1,000 BC. Most of the construction of its
monumental structures took place between 400 and 300 BC.
The extraordinary city of Tikal was discovered in 1848 and today comprises around 3,000 structures, some astonishingly still intact. In recent years, lodges have been built around the site to accommodate tourists. We stayed in a lodge with
bungalows scattered through landscaped grounds.
It was so deep in the jungle that electricity was still rationed. Power is switched off at 10pm, making oldies’ nightly visit to the bathroom fairly treacherous.
Leaving Flores for Belize was a rather desolate experience. Vehicles are not allowed to cross the border.
So we said goodbye to our car and driver, gathered up our luggage and walked across a short stretch of no man’s land feeling like refugees.
As we continued our journey on through Belize and Mexico, I reflected on what a friendly country Guatemala was – and so rich in culture, history and beauty.
While its world-renowned sites, like Tikal, are attracting more and more tourists, the country still feels somewhat undiscovered. And the towns, though learning to accommodate visitors, continue to feel authentic.
Go now before all that starts inevitably to fade.
Sixties supermodel Pattie Boyd is a photographer and author of a new memoir, Wonderful Tonight
Far left: Pattie and friends. Above left: one of Tikal’s Mayan temples. Below left: children in St Juan, famous for its umbrellas. Above: Chichicastenango market.
Pattie and George Harrison sign the register at their wedding, Epsom, 1966
Let the train take the strain
Jonathan Ray boarded the Eurostar for a night at the opera in Lille
I don’t care what you say. I love Eurostar. I blooming well love it. It’s a wonder of the modern age and –almost always – a joy to travel on.
That’s not to say Eurostar doesn’t wind its passengers up just as much as any cheap, crappy airline does.
Don’t get me started on my seven-hour delay to Rotterdam a month or so ago.
Don’t get me going on Eurostar’s maddening, tone-deaf, bloodyminded refusal to resume services post-Covid from Ashford International. Ashford International?! Was any station less appropriately named?
When it works, though, Eurostar is bliss, and I forgive it everything.
Just think about it: you can get to Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and Rotterdam direct, in no time, and all manner of other places – such as the ABCD of Antwerp, Bruges, Cologne or Dusseldorf – with just one change.
Thanks to Eurostar, Europe is most
Minibreak
definitely our oyster, be it for a week, a weekend or just for the day. Check-in is easy (well, sort of, more of that later). Time spent hanging around is minimal. There’s no nonsense at security about not being able to take liquids on board. The staff are multi-lingual and helpful. The trains are spotless.
There’s a well-stocked café on board and the loos work. You’re guaranteed a (very comfortable) seat. You walk straight out into the heart of whatever city you arrive in.
Unlike travelling by air, you’re not herded hither and thither like sheep and constantly kept queueing by people who despise you. Stress levels remain resolutely rooted at zero and, usually, Eurostar makes travel a relaxed pleasure, just as it should be.
And you don’t even need to go far to enjoy the benefit. Get off at the first stop, Lille, I say – yes, Lille. Don’t laugh. It’s a wonderful town. And you can have an absolute blast for peanuts, with one-way tickets starting at £38.
It takes just 87 minutes from London St Pancras International to Lille, which is only six minutes longer than it takes me to get from Brighton to St P. Only the other day, it took me exactly four hours from shutting my front door in Skid Row-on-Sea to walking into Room 101 at Grand Hotel Bellevue, Rue Jean Roisin.
Four hours, during which I had a coffee, a very tasty lunch, read the papers, sent some emails, stared out the window at northern France passing by at 185 mph and, well, simply daydreamed.
They recommend you check in an hour before departure. On a quiet day, it’s possible to cut it much finer, with the gate shutting just 15 minutes before the off.
An absolute blast for peanuts, with one-way tickets starting at £38
Having had my trip pimped up to Eurostar Premier (£208 one-way), I got there in good time, determined to make the most of their swanky lounge.
Being a complete technophobe and travelling alone, without the through-gritted-teeth good offices of Mrs Ray, I couldn’t for the life of me work out how to get the tickets off my email and into the wallet (whatever that is) of my phone, so that I might scan them at the gate.
Casting feebly around for help, I found a kindly Eurostar lady who laughed when I told her that I was the most stupid person she was
Minibreak
likely to meet all day. Having tried and failed to get me to grasp the complexities of my phone, its settings and the beauty of QR codes (uh?), she quickly agreed that, yes, I was the most stupid person she was likely to meet all day.
She said it nicely, though, and finally conceded that it would be simpler if she just went away and printed a paper ticket.
Whizzing through security and British and French passport controls, I made straight for the lounge. What I found was more a corridor with chairs than an actual lounge and it was already packed with passengers without much to offer us. It had few pastries, a too-complicated coffee machine and a stack of freebie magazines and that was about it.
My tip is to head upstairs where the chairs are both more plentiful and more comfortable, with the added benefit of a juice bar which, apparently, turns into a cocktail bar later in the day.
Eurostar has recently revamped its food and drink offering, overseen by Michelin-starred chef Jérémy Chan, pastry chef Jessica Préalpato and much lauded sommelier, Honey Spencer.
Lunch on board, served soon after departure, was heralded by a very welcome glass of Champagne Fleury Rosé Brut NV with regular top-ups.
The meal itself comprised of a minuscule and rather dreary starter of potato salad with green goddess dressing; an excellent (but, again, tiny) plate of oxtail ragu, horseradish mash and mushrooms; a nugget of decent cheddar with quince jam and some sort of yoghurt and lemon pudding which didn’t grab me.
Although hardly a shirt-popping feast, it filled a gap and was much enjoyed, comparing favourably with anything you’d get at 35,000ft.
We arrived bang on time at 13.27 and, a gentle 15-minute stroll later, I was checking in at Grand Hotel Bellevue, overlooking the very handsome Place du Général-deGaulle, known more usually as La Grand’Place.
It’s a decent spot – quite trad and old-fashioned. I was just thinking how nice it would be with a bit of a refurb when I discovered it had just had one. Heck, I’m only nitpicking.
It’s in a perfect location and boasts a cool cocktail bar on the roof, Le Toit-Terrasse, with a fine cityscape view and tempting cocktails. My pick of the pops is the Fever, a toothsome blend of Santa Teresa Rum, ginger syrup, fresh lime juice and sugar.
Lille has a complicated history. It has been, at different times, part of the Holy Roman Empire, the Burgundian State and Habsburg Spain. It has been occupied by the Dutch and the Germans and besieged by the Austrians.
As a result, the architecture is a bit all over the place, from the glorious Spanish Vieille Bourse to the Flemish Old Town, Belle Époque Opéra de Lille and the Art Deco L’Huitrière, Louis Vuitton shop. And, crikey, there’s so much to do. In little over 24 hours, I managed to take in a cracking performance of Die Fledermaus in the jaw-droppingly exquisite gem that is the Opéra de Lille.
I visited the beautifully curated birthplace/museum of Charles de Gaulle. I spent an hour or so in the gorgeous Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, the largest art gallery in France after the Louvre.
I gawped inside the striking Lille Cathedral. I devoured a plate of oysters in La Chicorée and another in L’Atelier Iodé. I had two absolutely belting meals in shabby-chic La Petite Cour and the shiny modern NU Restaurant, just yards from Lille Europe Station.
I had a hoot and, in less than three hours after leaving NU, I was back in London having a 4pm cuppa with a chum.
Jonathan Ray is Drinks Editor at The Spectator and the author of numerous books on wine
Jonathan saw Die Fledermaus at Opéra de Lille
Above: Palais des Beaux-Arts Right: Place du Général-de-Gaulle
Rail travel
Murder on the Wigan Express
Simon Bradley on deadly Victorian railway compartments
We grumble about our railways, believing that the Golden Age of rail travel is long behind us.
Despite strikes, delays, cancellations and a general slump in the standard of service, it’s worth remembering that, even in the late 20th century, closed compartments, without access to corridors, gave passengers, especially lone travellers, justifiable anxiety – as the extract, below, from Simon Bradley’s book demonstrates.
On 21 September 1871, passengers in a second-class carriage of a Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway train between Wigan and Liverpool overheard an argument in an adjacent compartment, followed by some loud bangs.
When the train stopped at Kirby, the guard and a porter opened the door of the compartment, which had its windows closed and was full of gun smoke. Inside were the bodies of Robert Wanless, a 31-year-old colliery overseer, and his estranged wife, Anne. She had been shot several times by her husband, who had then turned the pistol on himself.
Britain’s first murder of a passenger on a moving train occurred seven years before, on a London suburban train. The victim was a wealthy banker, the killer a young tailor desperate for money.
Suddenly, the humdrum railway compartment presented itself to the public mind as a space of potentially fatal encounters.
The murderer’s subsequent escape to the New World, followed by his capture, trial and public execution, all contributed to make the story one of the sensations of the day.
The Wanless case, the second recorded instance of murder on a British train, created only a modest stir by comparison. The inquest heard that the male subject was a heavy drinker with a jealous nature and a record of threatening violence.
With no suspect on the loose and no mystery about the course of events, the press could find little with which to amplify the marital tragedy.
The trashy Illustrated Police News did its best, placing on its front page an imagined view (pictured above) from within the fatal compartment at the moment the door was opened. Anne Wanless is falsely depicted with her face exposed rather than concealed by the veil of her bonnet, as witnesses described.
One of the passengers was asked at the inquest whether he had tried to communicate with the guard after hearing the suspected gunshots. He replied that he had no means of doing so.
When the jury’s verdict came, it included the recommendation that ‘there ought to be a means of communication between passengers and guards in all trains.’
The issue of internal communication when a train was on the move was a well-worn one by 1871. With braking under the control of driver and guard, the solution required every compartment to be equipped with some apparatus for raising the alarm, so that the train might be stopped for investigation.
Several different systems had been tried by that time, one of which was recommended by the Board of Trade in 1868.
The main problem – an all too familiar one with the various systems – was that its combination of a tuggable rope linked to a bell (for the guard) and gong (for the driver) didn’t work very well. In 1873, the Board quietly dropped its endorsement.
Other systems involved push-buttons linked to an electric bell, and a cord below the carriage floor, reached through a hole between the seats. There was even a proposal for an iron speakingtube running the length of the train, with flexible rubber links between the carriages.
Resolution finally came after the Armagh disaster. It prompted the authorities to demand that continuous automatic brakes be provided on all passenger trains across Britain and Ireland.
Rather than communicating an alarm signal to the driver or guard, the cord could now be made to activate the braking system directly instead. Yet the phrase ‘communication cord’ still lingered in use, an echo of the unsatisfactory systems developed in the 1860s and 1870s.
Bradley’s Railway Guide (left), published by Profile Books (£30), is out now
Wanless killed his wife and then himself, Illustrated Police News, 1871
Camping
Happy camper
Glamping? Ugh! Give me a tent and a smelly old sleeping bag any day, says Sam Leith
At home, I sleep swathed in a thick duvet aboard a deep pocket-sprung mattress and rest my weary head on the most luxurious pillows John Lewis has to offer. My linen has a high thread count and smells of White Company Christmas presents.
And, reader, I toss and turn every night like Lady Macbeth.
But put me in a tent in one of those old sleeping bags that smell a bit of hamsters, with nothing between me and the pebbly slope on which my tent is pitched but a half-deflated roll mat and my head on a rolled-up pair of jeans, and I sleep the sleep of the just.
You can keep your six-star slave-built Gulf hotels with their acreage of fluffy towels, white beaches and swim-up bars in azure lagoons. Keep your Mediterranean cruises and your Tuscan villas. It’s a camping holiday for me, every time.
Glamping – of the sort which has enjoyed a huge boom in this country over the last couple of decades – is something I greet with a little suspicion. I, too, can see the attraction of a good solid yurt with a blow heater, a proper bed and duvet and a set of USB ports from which you can charge your phone and run the inevitable fairy lights.
But it’s not exactly camping, is it? Not camping like I have been doing it and you, reader, have been doing it since the 1970s. Not camping as described in Emma Kennedy’s likeable memoir, The Tent, The Bucket and Me. Not camping as Barbara Windsor and Sid James would recognise it, or as my children – who have spent hours playing ‘it’ in confederation with an ad-hoc gang of children on a campsite, or amused themselves decorating pebbles with felt-tip pens – would recognise it.
For me, austerity is part of the
appeal. The point of camping, in my view, is not to pretend you’re in a hotel. Camping should be cheap.
You should travel light. For happiness, you do not want a portable kitchen, a gazebo, a rack of chef’s knives, a fancy four-ring stove with overhead grill, adjustable table and set of six folding dining chairs, inflatable double-mattress with duvet and all that malarkey.
You don’t want – and, for God’s sake, you can find these in camping shops – collapsible kitchen cupboards. Simplicity is the thing. A one-pot dish – a bean chilli, or a potato-and-pea curry, say – tastes the more ambrosial for having been cooked squatting on your hunkers beside a single blue tin of camping gas in a fold-out stand.
I’m no Luddite, though. I embrace, as we all should, the miraculous new technologies of the pop-up tent, or of the six-man which a single person can carry.
The tents that we grew up with were nearly impossible to put up (all those clanking aluminium poles, those fly-sheets and buttons). They were so heavy that you needed at least one more person to carry a tent of any given size than it could accommodate. And remember how, if the flysheet so much as brushed the inner tent, frigid water would cascade into your sleeping area?
Tents are not only more waterproof than they used to be, but they are cheaper. You need only visit a big branch of Cotswold Camping or Black’s to have your faith in human progress restored. These days, you can stroll into the wilderness with your accommodation for the night in one hand, weighing little more than an umbrella. Freedom!
My hunch is that, even though it’s nicer to camp in the warm south, it’s
Northern Europeans who take the most pleasure in camping. We are still half in love with the austerities of the Reformation – and we show it by spending our leisure time making it harder to be comfortable than we do our working weeks. The compromise we make with the counterReformation is to go to the warm south, now and again, to do it.
For the last decade, my family and I have spent two or three weeks every summer in a blissful little campsite by a burbling river in the Cevennes. I won’t name it, because then you’ll all turn up and ruin it.
There’s nothing to do but read, swim and potter into Florac for an ice-cream, your days given rhythm by buying bread, preparing and washing up your meals, and the passage of the sun across the sky.
When it rains – which won’t usually happen more than once a fortnight – it gets on with it. There will be an astonishing, terrifying, apocalyptic thunderclap from what
Camping
seems to be a blue sky. A few fat drops will fall. Then, for an hour or two, the campsite is Bangladesh in the monsoon. Camping stoves, deckchairs, unattended children – all are swept into the river. But then, bang, the sun comes out again and within an hour everything is bone-dry and it’s as if it has never happened. When the weather is against you in England or (shudder) in Scotland, you have a problem. You’re damp. You’re cold. The tent fills with mud. The tent’s damp. The tent’s cold. You wriggle into your sleeping bag. Your sleeping bag is damp. Your sleeping bag is cold. The drizzle continues. Patches of the campsite become Passchendaele, and stay that way. Your wife books herself into a hotel. Depending on how you’ve performed over the previous 24 hours, she may or may not let you accompany her. And yet adversity is what bonds us. On a jolly kids-and-parents weekend with other parents from school, I forged unbreakable
Keep your Mediterranean cruises and Tuscan villas. It’s a camping holiday for me, every time
alliances with the other dads attempting to barbecue frankfurters in a storm, while rainwater poured off the hoods of our macs.
I’ve helped my wife dry out our nephew’s tent in a muddy field after his half-open water bottle fell over at 3am. I’ve bailed out of a field in the small hours of the morning after a posse of angry farmers in LandRover Defenders, lamping for rabbits, have woken us with roaring engines and full-beam headlights. Stuck in my tent in an Isle of
Wight downpour, I’ve peed into an empty prosecco bottle at a music festival. This is the stuff of which memories are made.
And, just sometimes, there’s a gap in the rain. Sleeping under canvas not only connects us to our hunting fathers, way back in human history. It can produce moments of peace and beauty like nothing else.
You spend the middle of the day watching beams of sun lancing across a forest clearing redolent of the smell of pine and mulch.
You drowse before sleep, sitting on a log with a glass of red wine, staring into the still glowing embers of a campfire. Or you step out of your tent at dawn onto a meadow glittering with dew, unroll your pillow and pull it onto your legs. And bliss it is, in that dawn, to be alive.
Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator and author of The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading
Carry On Camping (1969)
Left to right: Bernard Bresslaw, Sid James, Joan Sims, Dilys Laye
Russian roulette
In Communist Russia and Ukraine, film director Bruce Beresford dodged spies – and a honeytrap
In November 1979, probably because of my fragile position as a director in the emerging Australian film industry, I was asked if I was interested in a ‘cultural’ visit to Russia. I was accompanied by an Australian actor and an official from Canberra, both of whom expressed enthusiasm for the Russian system of government.
Moscow was freezing. We were met at the shabby airport – which I’m sure has now been redesigned to international standards – by a middle-aged, chain-smoking official, who looked quite like Mr Khrushchev, and a young driver who resembled Rudolf Nureyev.
We were taken to a huge hotel, the Odessa, where, despite an apparent absence of guests, we were told two of us had to share a room. We tossed a coin and I shared a spartan room with the actor.
The following morning, I woke early with jet lag and decided to go for a walk.
Despite some voluble but
incomprehensible protests from a uniformed guard, I went out into the city. It was a cold, bright morning as I walked through the empty streets down to the river.
Returning after an hour or so, the hotel was in chaos. I was surrounded by a group of men and quizzed, in English, by the Khrushchev lookalike.
‘Where did I go?’ ‘Who did you meet?’ and so on.
They all seemed to realise eventually that nothing sinister was involved and the group drifted away.
The Khrushchev clone lit yet another cigarette. I commented that he was a heavy smoker and that smoking was bad for his lungs. ‘Who told you that?’ he replied, clearly doubting the validity of the information.
A tour around Moscow with two young female English-speaking guides was fascinating. There were remarkably few pedestrians, although there didn’t seem to be any stores or shops that would attract clients. Even the massive Victorian GUM department store sold only badges of Lenin and Stalin.
Oddly, despite the intense cold, ice-cream sellers (with only one flavour – vanilla) were on a few streets and, more oddly, there were a number of men dispensing glasses of champagne from small wagons that resembled hot dog stalls.
We saw the Kremlin and the extraordinary St Basil’s Cathedral (pictured above), though were not allowed inside either. I was told that Stalin issued orders for this bizarre, colourful 16th-century church to be
Bruce Beresford, right, directing today
St Basil’s Cathedral, Red Square, built by Ivan the Terrible between 1555 and 1561
Russia and Ukraine
demolished, but that bureaucrats had managed to find excuses to delay the destruction – until finally Stalin’s death presented a reprieve.
On our first night at the hotel, I was handed an immense menu in the sparsely populated dining room. I hungrily flicked through the pages and ordered. The waiter carefully wrote down my order then said in guttural movie-Russian English, ‘We haff not got zeez things’.
Further, they had no ‘things’ at all. I had to settle for a glass of kvass – an unappealing drink, which I believe was made from bread and sugar.
The next morning, when there was nothing for breakfast, I somehow managed a call to the Australian Consulate. They didn’t seem surprised to hear from me. I was invited to dinner the next night.
The Consulate was in a magnificent old house that had belonged to a theatrical producer prior to the revolution. I asked the Consul why there was no food in the hotel and where did he get hold of the impressive meal we were demolishing?
He replied that he had no idea why the Moscow hotels were short of food but – perhaps – there was a transport problem. The Consulate brought their food in from Finland.
A few nights later, with the young lady interpreter, I attended a production of Aida in a vast theatre.
The audience seemed to consist largely of North Korean military personnel. Just before the interval, the interpreter nudged me and whispered, ‘Follow me, no matter where I go’.
The lights came on shortly after this command. The interpreter leapt from her seat and ran up the wide aisle toward the lobby. I followed her as she dashed through the lobby and up two flights of an elaborate staircase.
At the top, she rushed to a set of huge double doors and pushed them open. I followed her into a vast room on which tables were laden with masses of caviar and all kinds of delicacies. By the time the Korean army arrived, both of us had dined.
A couple of days later, it was announced we would not be flying to St Petersburg, as promised, but to Odessa, in Ukraine. No explanation for the change was offered. I was fascinated to realise that our bizarre Russian experiences did not dim
enthusiasm for the Communist political system by my two Australian travelling companions.
The two-hour flight to Odessa was in an old plane with canvas seats. The other passengers were all uniformed soldiers. There was no in-flight service but the interpreter thoughtfully brought some biscuits and water. She read Pravda during the flight. I pointed to some headlines and asked what the news items were. All were reports of official speeches. I asked about news of everyday life and naively suggested, ‘Traffic accidents, robberies, murders and so on’.
The girl was shocked: ‘Who would want to read about such things? Who would want to read bad news?’
Odessa was an attractive if rather decrepit city. Many grand but derelict
I was surrounded, and quizzed by a Khrushchev lookalike
houses were strung along the seafront. As we stood at the top of the Potemkin Stairs (pictured), famous for starring in Battleship Potemkin (1925), an elderly couple approached me and asked, in English, which country I had come from.
Before I could reply, they were curtly chased away by the Khrushchev lookalike.
The highlight of my Russian visit was a production of Don Giovanni in Odessa’s magnificent 19th-century
opera house. The packed audience, clearly all local residents, were captivated by the music and singing, and rewarded the cast with fervent applause and yells of delight.
In my Odessa hotel, not a shared room, I woke up in the middle of the night to find one of the young interpreters sitting on the end of my bed. ‘You are a nice boy, Bruce,’ she said. I thanked her but suggested she return to her own room. She stood up quietly and left.
Just before leaving Moscow for Sydney, I told the interpreters I would send them a postcard from Australia. Both became agitated and said this was not to be done as it would cause problems for them.
Problems? A postcard of Sydney Harbour? Those young women, like me, would now be in their 80s. They would have seen a lot of changes in Russia in the past 40 years –culminating in the tragedy of the invasion of Ukraine.
Bruce Beresford directed the Oscar-winning film Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
Potemkin Stairs, Odessa, in Battleship Potemkin (1925) Right: President Gerald Ford greets President Brezhnev, Moscow, 1974
Lisa St Aubin de Terán tried – and failed – to bring tourism to her home on a virgin beach in Mossuril
Paradise postponed
I grew up in London as a mixed-race child with a nagging curiosity about my African roots.
At 40, I promised myself that at 50 I’d go to Mali and set up a chain of libraries (a win-win situation, as most of the books would get stolen but still circulate widely).
But then I fell in love with Mees van Deth, who’d chucked in filming to pioneer luxury tourism on a virgin beach opposite the 1,000-year-old Mozambique Island. I ditched my Mali plan and became his groupie.
After camping for months on the lagoon’s edge, feasting on lobster, staring at the Indian Ocean while lolling on powdery sand, I woke up one day, like a restless Happy Valley dweller, to ‘another f**king day in Paradise’. I had to find something to do, especially as I tend to wake up at 4am, write for a couple of hours and then have the whole day free.
Mossuril District is 1,300 square miles and had no secondary school, 98% unemployment with 85% of its 110,000 souls under 25. A library was out. Sixteen years of civil war had destroyed a lot of infrastructure.
Nearby Cabaceira was full of lovely, friendly Makua people, with grinding poverty and bad diets lurking behind their smiles.
We leased a magnificent but ruined Portuguese Naval Academy to convert into the training college. Some 47 villagers rebuilt it, while a second team tackled termite hills, the giant Ficus growing out of the ballroom’s walls, and a yellow acacia rooted in the well.
A bigger problem was the spitting cobras and tiny, deadly coral snakes in the historic rubble. No one was bitten, but we lost days as everyone took off screaming each time anything remotely like a snake was spotted. Once scattered, the work force rarely returned before lunch.
They always materialised as our cooks heaped more than 100 plastic plates with mealy-maize, fish and beans. Despite only having 67 workers, dozens of extras always joined the queue.
Meanwhile, Mees and I lived in a safari tent, adding a palm-thatched sitting room with furniture lugged in from Nampula in our trusty Land Rover. I found hundreds of hand-cut limestone blocks stashed under a Baobab and made a mosaic floor.
long green serpent slithered along the thatch directly above her. It dangled in graceful curves, swaying slightly each time she tossed her lacquered hair.
Her husband spotted it and started gurgling so wildly that, embarrassed, she cut their visit short.
When the college was restored, Mees and I moved into the ballroom with two tiny bush babies. At night, they leapt and wailed and hid by day inside places like my handbag, Mees’s hat and the printer.
We shared our splendid room with Al Pacino, a severely maladjusted orange baboon I’d bottle-fed since he was about three days old. Pacino (with a striking resemblance to the star) required round-the-clock nursing. He lived strapped onto my hip until he became too heavy and was relegated to my left foot.
So, given the area’s enormous tourism potential, and with Mees already setting up his lodge, we decided to start a community college of tourism.
There are loads of magic wands out here – our village chief’s is made from a lion’s tail. But you can’t wave one to cut through gruelling Portuguese red tape. Months of bureaucracy, kowtowing and schlepping 160 miles to Nampula city followed.
As Mees developed Coral Lodge, we set up Terán Foundation, a charity to help the local community help itself. We were the only foreigners, apart from Falcão. A former Portuguese mercenary, he settled in nearby Chocas-Mar where, when sober enough, he ran a little bar. Word spread and visitors started arriving at our make-shift home. A Dutch engineer arrived with his dainty wife, who descibed her snakephobia while a
We also shared our room with Al Pacino, a severely maladjusted orange baboon
Pacino screamed hysterically whenever I left him. So we went around like conjoined twins for his first five months. But he was so jealous and possessive that we built him a pergola to live in before he killed any of the staff or students he’d started biting.
From May 2005, my youngest daughter, Lolly, headed a team of 15 international volunteers and six teachers to help teach 53 villagers about tourism, hygiene and the 3 Rs. The hardest thing for the students to grasp was what tourism actually was.
‘So no one is forcing them or chasing them, but people actually choose to go and sleep in a strange place surrounded by strangers and pay for that?’
‘Why? What is wrong with them?’
‘Don’t they have witch doctors in their villages?’
And the students found the idea of peeing or doing a ‘major necessity’ inside a house disgusting. They explained:
‘When Charifo, Lord of our ancestors, provides endless beaches, why sully your own home?
‘Not even animals do that! And you want us to don those rubber
Bush babies hid in hats, the printer and Lisa’s handbag
things and stick our hand in and clean it!’’
Leading by example, I cleaned countless loos. Dozens of our former students still find it gross, but they humoured me.
By 2010, 150 locals had tourism diplomas and another 80 had graduated from our agricultural faculty, which we started because you could have died of scurvy, such was the lack of fresh vegetables.
Coral Lodge opened and a few hotels followed. But I felt like Monty Python’s sergeant major marching up and down the square alone, as the rush of like-minded investors we’d envisaged failed to arrive. Tourism simply didn’t take off as we’d hoped.
Many of our graduates left the village to find work – even though they have a horror of leaving home.
We closed the college but kept Sunset Boulevard, a training restaurant and backpackers’ pension
in the district capital. Over the years, 200 volunteers have ventured out to help us. My son, Alex, and eldest daughter, Iseult, have dropped their anchors in Mozambique.
My half-sister’s DNA shows that she is 26% Mozambican. Every time I walk down the Ramp of Slaves to catch the local dhow ferry, I imagine our ancestor being dragged down the same ramp in chains to be sold into slavery. Maybe that’s why I feel so bound to Mossuril.
Or maybe it’s because of my lovely garden that rolls down to the beach. Or being surrounded by people who love life, look out for each other and whose poverty has, coincidentally, made this one of the few unpolluted places on the planet.
With hindsight, I see that our College of Tourism gave local youths more of a sense of self-esteem and filled in gaps in their basic education rather than any actual tourism-
training. Besides, only working hands-on in the hospitality sector really leads to the silver service we aimed for.
Yet, today, in a place with virgin beaches and up to 90% unemployment, tourism is slowly but surely taking off. There are 500 new holiday homes in Chocas-Mar and about a dozen new B&B’s.
A crowded beach full of deckchairs and sunshades isn’t my idea of paradise, but it can put a lot of food on plates.
And, as a visitor, albeit a longterm one, I don’t feel it’s for me to decide the shape of things to come.
www.teranfoundation.org
Lisa St Aubin de Terán’s latest novel is The Hobby
Lisa with her dogs in her garden in Mossuril on the Mozambique coast
Holidays with The Oldie
Around the world in 50 trips
Paul Canham and his wife have been on more Oldie tours than anyone else. He adores his seasoned travel companions
Lunching outdoors with a group of oldie travellers at Villa Cetinale on a cloudless November day, I found myself musing upon what it is about Oldie trips that brings me and my wife Dawn back time after time.
We’ve just done our 50th trip in little over a decade – record-holders.
In 2012, I first mooted an Oldie trip to Dawn: ‘The good news is I have booked a holiday, a wine tasting trip to Burgundy. The bad news, it’s with The Oldie – so we will probably be with a bunch of crusties.’ How wrong I was. Some we met became, – and remain – good friends.
The trip did get off to a somewhat inauspicious start. A ten-hour coach trip from central London to La Maison du Chateau in Cry, with lunch in Calais, turned into a 14-hour marathon, with two brief comfort breaks. The 18 unhappy travellers were still waiting aboard our coach at Folkestone when we should have been departing Calais.
Eventually arriving at Cry at 10.30pm, Dawn started plating up the buffet left out for us: Quiche Lorraine, a dressed salad, and tarte tatin to follow. A tired and irritable group of strangers tucked in.
Minutes passed, and someone piped up, ‘This quiche tastes a bit odd.’ The quiche was rhubarb tart, the tarte tatin a caramelised onion tart! The ice was broken.
A week of wonderful visits, meals and wine tastings later, the return schedule having been suitably amended, we enjoyed a night in Rheims with champagne tasting followed by an eat-what-you-like dinner. The next day, following lunch at the restaurant in Calais which we’d missed on our outward journey, we arrived in London at 6pm.
In the early years, the accommodation and dining experience were occasionally hit and miss. But the company and places visited were invariably excellent.
They were made memorable by the occasional tendency of an oldie traveller to go off-piste. In Lecce, following a visit to the cathedral, one
traveller stayed on for Mass without telling anyone. In Paris, en route to Tours, another got lost at Gare du Nord, causing all of us to miss our connecting train from Gare Montparnasse. The Oldie sorted things out excellently.
In Vienna, after a rather too good evening out, someone forgot their room number in our apart-hotel. Only after 30 minutes of watching me try various floors and rather too many doors for comfort, did they finally recall where it was.
The oldies are occasionally forgetful, but always of independent mind and can-do spirit. So ‘herding cats’ often comes to mind when they are free to roam.
Of course, today anyone can visit pretty much anywhere independently. But to do it on an Oldie holiday, with like-minded travellers, offers an opportunity to get below the surface, to visit places and meet people independent travellers would be hard-pressed to find.
We’ve been to the Baron Six
They can be forgetful, but always have a can-do spirit
collection in Amsterdam. We came face to face with Doubting Thomas’s digit in a reliquary in Santa Croce in Rome. There were canapés in Palestrina with Prince Barberini.
There was the unexpected delight of Pol Roger Winston Churchill Reserve 1997 at Chateau Langoa Barton, provided by Eva Barton – all thanks to our fellow traveller Serena Soames knowing the family.
Having a Spanish sister-in-law, I was delighted last year when Oldie publisher, James Pembroke, asked us to curate an Oldie trip to central Spain. James bravely agreed to let it be to a less travelled part of Spain, Extremadura, a poor and primarily rural region, home to the Dehesa (think cork oaks and Pata Negra pigs). It was our 40th trip and our 40th wedding anniversary.
It was at the time of the King’s Coronation. Thanks to the influence of our sister-in-law’s family, we were able to take-over a small bar-restaurant in Guadalupe where we all watched the Coronation, followed by lunch.
I am often asked which is my favourite trip. I honestly cannot say. So many have had memorable moments and allowed us to meet people with wonderful stories.
We will always remember Peter Cobb, who captained the UK’s first Nuclear Submarinem HMS Dreadnought. He was so quiet and unassuming that I had to drag from him the story of how he held the record for the fastest underwater crossing from Rosyth to Singapore.
Occasionally a sense of entitlement leads some to treat Oldie staff as servants and fellow travellers with disdain.
But they are rare. Most are kind, excellent companions for a week of delicious food and wine, and expertly curated tours.
Oldie editor, Harry Mount, once said, ‘Oldies are travellers, not tourists.’ I will drink to that.
Sign up for one of our trips on theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours
Trojan effort: Paul and Dawn Canham, third and fourth from left, Troy, 2024
Even though most oldies have spent half their lives without them, it becomes increasingly difficult remembering how we coped before mobiles.
Today we rely on them when late, lost, stranded or in similar stressful situations. Yet it was precisely the lack of that instant fix that could lead to extraordinary adventures and certainly honed our now dwindling capacity for initiative.
In the late 90s, I made documentaries in Africa. Early one morning, I’d flown into Uganda’s capital, Kampala, to make a BBC film in Kapchorwa, a remote northern region. After a long day procuring permits, booking transport and making arrangements, I set out with Okulu, a local driver, to pick my Zimbabwean crew from Entebbe airport. He’d been briefed by Philip, his boss – so I sank into my seat and quickly dozed off.
I wake with a jolt. We are driving along an empty country road. I look at my watch. We should have been at Entebbe half an hour ago.
‘Where’s the airport?’ I ask.
Okulu nods, smiling broadly. I repeat myself slowly. He still doesn’t understand.
‘Airport?’ I repeat, panic rising. ‘Airport!’
‘Ah, airport!’ he laughs, relieved. ‘It is very far.’
‘How far?’
‘Oh, very, very far.’
‘Stop the car,’ I shout.
Okulu doesn’t understand immediately, but when he does, he brakes so suddenly that we both lurch forward. There is a noise of metal rattling.
‘Okulu, where exactly are we going?’
Philip had not made him understand that we were to pick up the crew. We are well on the way to Kapchorwa, now two hours the wrong side of Kampala.
‘Turn round fast,’ I yell.
Okulu switches on the engine. It sputters and dies. Fifteen minutes later Okulu ventures out from under the bonnet with two chunky bits of oily metal. Night is falling fast, thick as a blanket. We need a telephone, a town. He doesn’t understand. I wave my arms and yell, ‘Town! Town!’ Anything is better than being here in the middle of nowhere.
We push the brute of the vehicle to the side of the road and I heave my luggage out of the back seat. A white woman lugging her bags along this rural road is a rare sight and so the first pick-up that passes stops immediately. Okulu and I climb up into the back among sacks of maize with six farmworkers who stare at me with friendly curiosity.
We reach a scruffy little town, where we
Africa
Analogue travel
When Charlotte Metcalf ’s car broke down in pre-mobile Africa, she depended on the kindness of strangers
Africa
trawl busy streets full of kiosks selling everything from soap, biscuits and Fanta to sewing machines and car parts. Oil lamps flicker. One vendor knows a mechanic; another fetches a pick-up truck. Focusing on the car, we fail to find a telephone. Three men armed with spanners and rags arrive. We climb into the commandeered pick-up and return to the broken car.
We bowl along in companionable silence under an inky sky, the breeze whipping my hair, which makes the mechanics giggle sympathetically. I feel a surge of gratitude towards these strangers. Would people in England ever be this generous and helpful?
We reach the car and the men set to work. After half an hour, there’s a pile of twisted metal on the road. Hopeless. By now I am demented. What if my crew leaves the airport to look for me? They have no way of getting hold of me. We drive back to the town and finally find the only public telephone. It needs a card. A man in the queue offers one for a wedge of dollars that he counts agonisingly slowly. At around $50, this is one of the most expensive calls I’ll ever make.
I’m alone in the middle of nowhere with my luggage.
Yet I feel safe; even content
I connect to the car hire company but a woman informs me Philip has just left. I beg her to run after him. She succumbs to my desperate entreaties with an irritable sigh. I wait, worried that the card will run out of credit.
Then I hear footsteps and Philip is on the line, calm and helpful. He was on his way home but offers to drive straight to the airport instead. I hand the phone to Okulu, so Philip can tell him what to do next but Okulu hangs up before I know what’s been arranged. I dial back but now the lines to Kampala are busy.
There’s nothing for it but to follow Okulu. We pick up my bags again and trudge to a garage on the edge of town. It’s shut for the night. Okulu signals me to stay. There’s nowhere to sit. So I resign myself to standing in the dark forecourt for the next few hours.
Okulu leaves in search of a towtruck and then I’m alone in the middle of nowhere with my luggage. Yet I feel
safe; even content. There’s nothing to do except admire the stars. It’s really quite relaxing.
A few cars drive by and slow down, surprised to see me alone in the dark. Word filters round and soon cars drive into the forecourt to look at me. One, full of men, stops.
‘Are you alright?’ asks the driver, eyeing me quizzically.
‘Oh yes, I’m having a wonderful time,’ I answer.
He grins broadly at my sarcasm. ‘Do you need help?’
‘No, I’m waiting for people.’
‘Here? In the dark?’
I shrug and grin like a lunatic as the men laugh uproariously.
‘Well, if you’re sure you’re OK,’ he says doubtfully and drives off.
Minutes later, he returns. ‘Are you certain you don’t need help? Water? Food?’ His face is kind, concerned. ‘I can drop you somewhere?’
I am glad it’s here we’ve broken down. I’d have been far more anxious in other parts of Africa; certainly in England. We have a bit of cheerful banter and the men leave, promising to come back and check on me.
Eventually Okulu arrives with a tow-truck and the car. In the car is the food I’d bought earlier which we spread out on the bonnet and devour. Okulu then stretches out on the car’s back seat, his legs outside of the open door. He snores mightily. I walk to where I can see the road better and squat down. It’s cold now – so I occasionally stand up and pace. At last, a car sweeps up, containing my crew.
Our reunion was so hysterically joyous that I judged it worth all the drama preceding it. I felt so grateful and well-disposed towards the Ugandans for their kindness that the film was one of the most enjoyable I’ve ever made and even won some awards.
We do all seem to have been a lot less selfish, less inward-looking and generally nicer when engaging more fully with the people around us.
Looking back at my documentaries , I now think they’d have been less interesting, had I spent time, as we all do nowadays, checking my phone and connecting with people elsewhere.
Yes, a mobile enables us to call for instant help, but at the cost of discovering the best in people.
Charlotte Metcalf is The Oldie’s supplements editor and author of Walking Away, a book about her time making films in Africa
Charlotte with a tribesman and his son above the Rift Valley
Spaghetti
Cinema Paradiso Bolognese
Hugh Thomson loves the gentler pace, cheaper tickets and old movies at the annual Bologna Film Festival
I’ve always liked the idea of film festivals more than the reality.
All that queuing and pressure for tickets for some hyped new film you won’t get into unless you happen to know somebody from the studio.
But at the Bologna Film Festival, there’s none of the razzmatazz and paparazzi of Cannes or Venice or Berlin. As befits the city’s distinguished calm, this is an altogether more peaceful festival.
It brings considerable advantages – not least because tickets are cheap and you can get in to any movie you want, as they have a civilised queuing at the door system which always seems to yield returns on the day. And an even more civilised half price for over-65s.
It’s partly because this is a festival
exclusively of old movies, often ones which have been specially restored for the occasion. And that’s another great advantage, in that time has filtered out all the froth of films that have just been released and you’re left with only the really good stuff.
Il Cinema Ritrovato, ‘Retrieved Cinema’, sounds better in Italian –just as ‘Ti tengo d’occhio, ragazza!’ is such a brilliant subtitled translation for ‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’
There’s nothing quite like being under the stars and a midnight sky at the Piazza Maggiore in the very centre of the city with an audience of thousands – and a few fireflies – watching the screening of some old classic.
When I was there, they showed
the 50th anniversary restoration of Coppola’s great masterpiece The Conversation, a film all about recording sound. It was fun to have the urban city noises of Bologna –sirens and passing conversazione – blending into the complicated soundtrack of the actual film.
The cinemas are all relatively close together in the historic centre of the city, with a well-designed hub at the Cineteca di Bologna.
There’s an international crowd of old movie buffs like myself –embarrassingly, I remember seeing The Conversation when it first came out, having bunked off school to do it. Is there any greater pleasure than watching a film when you’re playing truant? But there’s also a younger crowd attracted by the lure of old
Western: John Wayne in The Searchers (1956) in Piazza Maggiore, Bologna
Bologna
analogue prints, just like vinyl, and by the affordability of it all compared to your average film festival.
Charged up with excellent doppio espresso and something from a pasticceria, festival-goers can wander in a delighted daze from movie to movie, starting first thing in the morning. It’s a long time since I’ve seen four films in a single day – if ever. It’s more likely to be four films in a month. But rather like getting stuck into a box set, once you get used to the metabolic change, it starts to come easily.
I also found myself getting attuned again to the benefits of cinema-going. There are several films which I know,
if watching on a small screen, I would have got bored and given up. In the comfort of a cinema, I stuck at it and recouped the rewards. That intriguing revisionist early seventies Western McCabe and Mrs Miller had all the occasional longueurs one might expect of Robert Altman but concomitant rewards if you stayed.
Just the names of the cinemas are alluring: the Modernissimo, the Scorsese and Mastroianni theatres of the Lumière, the Jolly and the Arlecchino, with open-aired screenings in the Piazzetta Pasolini.
And then there’s the food. Not just ragù Bolognese – please don’t call it a ‘sauce’, considered a solecism locally – but also graminga clasica, a delicious sausage dish served at Da Bertonis, a regular favourite for cinema-goers as it happens to be beside one.
The house red wine is so cheap at a tenner a bottle, it would be silly just to have a glass even if you risk sleeping through that next silent classic. Although that could be a shame as some of the silent films have piano accompaniment, as with the revelatory early Marlene Dietrich movies they were screening in a Dietrich season.
These ran the gamut from the early German films to her late memorable appearance in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil and her famous last line: ‘He was some kind of a man... What does it matter what you say about people?’
I was staying in the long-arcaded street of Via San Felice, which is a dead ringer for the set Orson Welles used in that film. I could imagine Charlton Heston skulking in the deep shadows as I headed home.
Along with the Dietrich season, there was a showcase of the (to me) unknown director Anatole Litvak. His film on post-war Germany was startling for its documentary
realism. There were also strands celebrating black and gay cinema.
Around 400 films are usually screened – so there really is something for everybody. Since the festival was started in 1986, they’ve had time to fine-tune the organisation and expand the amount of screening venues, including a spectacular new one underground below the Piazza Maggiore, in case it rains for the big, free outdoor screenings.
I went for just a couple of days, which did me fine as a spring break, but some friends attended for the full week and considered me lightweight.
As they might have said in Mean Streets, shown in a fabulous new print overseen by Scorsese himself to preserve details in the blacks otherwise crushed by digital versions, you won’t get to be a ‘made man’ – or woman – unless you put in your time working the screens.
There may not be starlets on red carpets. But intriguing directors like Wim Wenders and Alexander Payne introduce old movies they feel have been great influences on them in a charming and personal way. Payne talked about the movies that inspired him to make The Holdovers. Online streaming can sometimes give the illusion that the whole of movie history is out there at the click of a button. But, as others have pointed out, there are surprising gaps in the online catalogue for all sorts of copyright or commercial reasons – gaps that a festival like Bologna triumphantly fills.
It’s part of a growing trend –Perugia likewise has a smaller festival with the charming name of il cinema fuori moda, ‘out of fashion cinema’; ie films that are old.
Special
oldie rates
l Festival Pass
An inclusive €120 pass is discounted to €60 for over-65s, or €30 for students.
Booking opens two weeks before the festival (21-29 June, 2025)
How much more enjoyable to watch a real film print being beautifully screened in an Italian cinema, or under the sky, with a salted pistachio cremino from the corner gelateria, than to be sitting at home wondering what Uber Eats to order while everyone talks over the movie or – even worse –munches Pringles.
And do people turn off their mobile phones when watching movies at home? I rest my case.
I’ve already booked my flights for next year’s festival.
Hugh Thomson is an awardwinning travel writer. His latest book is Viva Byron!
James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again (1939)
Overseas Travel
To advertise, contact Monty on 0203 8597093 or via email MontyZakheim@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £48+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 16th December 2024
Winter sports
Break a leg!
Geoffrey Wheatcroft got a bargain hip replacement –thanks to a skiing accident in the French Alps
‘You ’ave a new ’eep!’
I’d just been turned onto my back when I heard the surgeon’s stirring words. We all know people who’ve waited months or even years for a hip replacement. One friend recently gave up and paid £13,000 to have hers done.
My hip replacement was effected within 24 hours for a trifling sum, although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend my method.
My eight-day skiing holiday in St-Martin-de-Belleville had begun badly, with two charming compatriots, Matt and Ellie, rescuing me after a tumble in falling snow – for which I never really thanked them properly. But after that it was plain schussing, and on my last morning I thought I’d have one more session in the sunshine.
My skiing is straightforward and uncompetitive. Some years ago, I skied the famous Inferno run at Mürren, where a huge race is held every January, finishing in not quite twice the time the professionals take.
So, on that last morning I was merely pottering down into Méribel when I fell for no obvious reason. A helpful skier summoned the mountain ambulance, which took me down to Méribel’s Cabinet Medical, which summoned an ambulance to the hospital in Albertville.
There I learnt that I’d fractured my femur. To repair it would mean giving me a prosthetic hip, done the next day with expedition and efficiency. I chose an epidural – so was conscious from the waist up.
Lying on my left side, I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear, and awe-inspiring it was to listen to the electric drill – which seemed like a hammer and chisel – and then the electric saw, chopping up my bones.
After this successful, painless procedure came two days of mental torment, with nothing to read, watch or listen to. All my belongings were in my hotel bedroom. So I stared at a blank wall while waiting for them to be packed and sent by taxi.
When my things did arrive, a pair
Before the fall: Geoffrey Wheatcroft, St-Martin-de-Belleville, 2024
of embroidered velvet slippers was missing and a shopping bag full of cheese and terrines from the marvellous charcutier in St Martin.
As I prodded the unappetising slabs of cod I was given, I thought how wonderful it could be if I had those goodies to supplement my diet.
And it turned out that the book I’d brought with me was Jonathan Steinberg’s Life of Bismarck, a formidable work but not quite what I wanted as I lay there disconsolate. Oh, for The Code of the Woosters. This might sound like a sob-story, but it has a heroine, heroes, a happy ending and a moral. The heroine is Sally Muir, my wife and nanny. Years ago, I took her to St-Martin, hoping she’d share my enthusiasm, but after two hours on skis, she said, ‘Never again.’ While sad for me then, this
The £280 I paid Staysure was the best money I ever invested
time she was at home and able to coordinate everything needed.
Having already told me to get a GHIC (said gee-hick) card which replaced the European health card after Brexit, she informed them of my plight, and gee-hick took over, settling my medical account.
I’d grumbled to myself at the price of my holiday insurance. As it proved, the £280 I paid Staysure was the best money I ever invested: full insurance and gee-hick are my story’s moral. Once Sally had alerted Staysure, they arranged my brilliant repatriation.
The hero is Simon, my medical assistant, who arranged my hospital discharge and then returned with two ambulance drivers, who took us to Geneva Airport. At Gatwick, Simon handed me over to an ambulance and two very jolly Londoners, Lee at the wheel, Joe at the back.
There was an awkward moment when Joe gave a histrionic cry, ‘Oh God, no! Lee, you know what? We’ve got an Arsenal supporter here.’
For a moment, I thought these two Spurs fans might stop and deposit me on the A303, but they relented and drove me to my front door in Bath.
Thanking them profusely, I said I hoped that Spurs would win all their remaining games, except against Arsenal (the last wish was granted).
When I explained to people why I was on crutches, I saw a faraway look, as if to say ‘At your age?’ Well, I’m 78, and my role model is the late Peter Lunn, a fascinating figure who spent an eventful life in SIS, and was still skiing at 90 when I met him in Mürren.
At the Royal United Hospital in Bath, my amiable orthopaedic consultant examined me and the C-rays, complimented his French colleagues on a first-rate job, and said, as a keen skier himself, that he hoped I’d soon be back on the piste.
That’s what I hope myself. What otherwise is the point of my new eep?
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is author of Churchill’s Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill
My definition of a friend is somebody who adores you even though they know the things you’re most ashamed of.
Jodie Foster
When I ascended from the depths of the working class to the middle class, the higher I got, the more dishonesty I found.
Steven Berkoff
Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.
Mel Brooks
Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Gladstone was not the first Prime Minister who lacked a sense of humour. But he was the first one of whom this was said.
Harold Nicolson
Mr Tibbs was to his wife what the 0 is in 90 – he was of some importance with her; he was nothing without her.
Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, 1836
Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water.
W C Fields
Tuning the radio
I had to calm an unusual source of road rage the other week.
‘I can’t find Radio 4!’ hollered my wife from behind the steering wheel of an ancient hire car that had only an old analogue tuner rather than a modern digital receiver. ‘Where do they keep it on the dial?’
As I spanned the tuner to the right place – 93.9FM – it struck me how what was
Commonplace Corner
I think the silent films were more effective for Laurel & Hardy, but the sound was of great value in enhancing the effects – dialogue eliminated a lot of action and sight gags. I always feel that ‘action’ speaks louder than words.
Stan Laurel
In Britain, girls seem to be either bright or attractive. In America, that’s not the case. They’re both.
John Cleese
At the Opera, saw Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) the first time it was ever acted, a play the worst that ever I heard in my life. Midsummer Night’s Dream
recently a universal skill was now becoming a forgotten art.
Nowadays, we just choose a radio station from a menu.
Before, we had to know about different bands and frequencies: how some worked better in different parts of the country, how long wave was easier to pick up and had a lovely rich timbre in comparison with FM, which was more refined but prone to interference in difficult terrain.
Tuning radios and televisions used to be a real challenge. I remember in my youth trying to catch a TV signal by waving one of those little set-top aerials about like a Morris dancer and then suddenly freezing
(Shakespeare), which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.
Samuel Pepys’s diary, 1662
We think too much and feel too little.
Charlie Chaplin
Vanity working on a weak head produces every sort of mischief.
Jane Austen
Papas and mammas sometimes ask young men whether their intentions are honourable towards their daughters. I think young men might occasionally ask papas and mammas whether their intentions are honourable before they accept invitations to houses where there are still unmarried daughters.
Samuel Butler
Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
C S Lewis
London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
Arthur Conan Doyle
when a picture emerged out of the snow.
Some may remember the old ‘cat’s whisker’ crystal sets, with lids that stopped the highly sensitive apparatus from being disturbed.
In some ways, it’s no bad thing. You can find the new Radio Oldie station without sweat.
SMALL DELIGHTS
Boarding a budget airline flight and the seat in front is not designed to recline.
JOHN MEGORAN, LARGS
Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk
Yet we are paying for ease with a loss of romance. As a child, when I looked at a short-wave dial, I felt like stout Cortez beholding the Pacific. You never knew what evocative snatches and strange songs might appear unannounced from any corner of the world, not to mention the mysterious ‘number stations’ used by spies.
As Dr Johnson might have said, ‘That which is tuned without effort is heard without pleasure.’
If we had to work as hard to tune our radios as we once did, we would expect better stuff from our broadcasters.
Would you ever tune in to a modern Radio 4 comedy if you had to hunt for it with the cat’s whisker?
BIJAN OMRANI
Laurel (1890-1965) & Hardy (1892-1957)
The last Cinderella
ROGER LEWIS
Bonjour, Mademoiselle! April Ashley and the Pursuit of a Lovely Life
By Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts
Scribe £22
Sympathetic as we all must be towards the trans mob, how often is actual thought given to what’s involved surgically?
The authors of this book describe the ‘brutal incisions along the scrotum’ and
the ‘massive cut across the urethra’. The testicles are removed, the spermatic cord severed and the penis chopped off.
A space is scooped out between the rectum and the prostate to create a vagina – a vagina which, in the words of a doctor friend of mine, cannot fail but to resemble ‘an elderly arsehole with third-degree piles’.
Well, perhaps they’ve got better at performing the operation in recent years, but April Ashley, who went under the knife in 1960, had no qualms.
‘I wanted proper fulfilment,’ she insisted, even though when she came
round after the seven-hour ordeal, ‘her body was bruised and swollen and foul-smelling with clogged blood’.
Yet April was nothing if not tough. She was arrested in Rome for punching a policeman, and she also clocked a copper in London who’d sneeringly addressed her as Mr Ashley.
She was born in Liverpool, in 1935, as George Jamieson, theoretically male but always effeminate, ‘like a young Audrey Hepburn’, with rounded hips, soft breasts and neither facial nor pubic hair.
George was (predictably) bullied at school and beaten by his mother, but resilient enough to join the merchant navy, where as a deck hand ‘he learned to tie knots’.
George also laboured as a delivery boy in the market, as a waiter in Rhyl (sharing digs with John Prescott) and, on moving to London, as a bacon-slicer and a switchboard operator.
All the while, ‘I felt myself to be essentially female,’ and such was the mockery and abuse, ‘to dull the frustrations and misery he felt about his life’, George jumped in the Mersey.
He ended up in a psychiatric unit, where he was administered electroconvulsive therapy.
Deciding to find ‘the strength to carry on, regardless of what people think of me’, George saved up for ‘genderaffirming surgery’, available in Casablanca.
He moved to Paris and, as Toni April, earned money by appearing in a transvestite cabaret, where Salvador Dali sat in the front row every night.
Back in England, after having his knackers off, George became April by deed poll. April was looked after by Julia Lockwood, an actress, and Churchill’s alcoholic daughter, Sarah. She became a model and was given a tiny role in Bing and Bob’s The Road to Hong Kong.
Honourable Lady: April Ashley receives an MBE, Buckingham Palace, 2012
Nevertheless, it is hard to see how April survived financially, save for by scrounging off rich idiots.
One such had been gunrunning in the Middle East when ‘his plane exploded’. Another sank with his yacht. ‘All that was found was a floating mattress.’
In September 1963, in Marbella, April married Arthur Corbett, son of the Chief Scout and heir to the Rowallan barony. ‘Arthur’s infatuation with April grew with the passing of time.’
The relationship didn’t last long, even so. It wasn’t that Corbett liked to wear women’s clothes, which upset April; what she really couldn’t stand were his false teeth. She also refused to have sex, citing ‘vaginal abscesses’.
There was a court case, as April wanted maintenance. The judge said that as she, April, was born male, April’s marriage was invalid – ‘a sham because she herself was one’.
Chromosomal tests revealed ‘all the cells were of the male type’ and the Casablanca surgeon piped up to say, ‘I don’t change men into women. I transform male genitals into genitals that have a female aspect. All the rest is in the patient’s mind.’
April’s mind had long been made up. Calling herself, with understandable bitterness, ‘a freak who lives in exile’, she became a recluse in Hay-on-Wye, where an admirer usefully bequeathed her his house and Richard Booth anointed her as Duchess of Offa’s Dyke. She ran an art gallery in San Diego. She was with Terry-Thomas and Denholm Elliott in Ibiza.
Until she fell down the stairs and broke some bones, April was a hostess in a Kensington restaurant, where Placido Domingo ‘sang Neapolitan love songs until one in the morning’.
Money came in from press interviews (‘No fee, no me’) and, ‘in short, April Ashley had become a personality – even a celebrity.’
Yet it was a precarious kind of celebrity. As Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts say in this intriguing and first-class biography, if April had a unique status – unique at least until Jan Morris came along – it’s because she was ‘neither a sexually functional man nor any kind of woman’.
It took a long time, until 2012, to gain genuine establishment acceptance, when April was made an MBE ‘for services to transgender equality’. She was awarded two honorary doctorates, and Liverpool granted her honorary citizenship. In 2018, The Oldie gave her the Woman Ahead of Her Time Award. April died
in 2021, aged 86. She was buried with full mercantile marine honours.
I can’t help wondering, however, how much of everything was theatre; this ‘haughty approach to life’ of hers? April loved clothes as costumes; the jewels and accessories. She affected an absurd grand voice ‘that had nothing to do with her birthplace’ in working-class Norris Green, Liverpool. She adored making an entrance – everything was high camp.
Jan Morris, too, struck me as a Rank starlet, with her pearl-clutching, her twinset and giggles.
The re-invention was total. So, was the ‘lovely life’ she pursued totally true? I have my doubts that April ‘went to grotesque, weird parties night after night,’ as she claimed. Did Elvis really flirt with her in Paris? Did she really sleep with Omar Sharif and Michael Hutchence? And all that bantering with the Beatles – did it happen?
The authors of Bonjour, Mademoiselle! take April at her absolute word, whereas to me she is a fascinating, courageous instance of the ancient metaphysical conundrum: reality is a fabrication.
Roger Lewis is author of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor
Private Eye’s patron saint
PETER MCKAY
Believe Nothing until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism
By Patrick Cockburn
Verso £30
A cynical title, designed to lure lefties?
Wikipedia says that Believe Nothing is widely quoted in journalistic studies. Really?
Nor am I familiar with the boastfulsounding ‘guerrilla journalism’. These people sound like journalists who think they’re more important than the stories.
However, I enjoyed Patrick’s admiring portrait of his father, Claud, an upper middle-class, Oxford-educated Communist who – ditching a plum job on the Times – set up the Week, a leftish magazine he more or less wrote himself with the purpose of sowing public doubt and disbelief in the actions of our government and its allies.
Patrick admits the Week was designed as a one-man band in which all instruments could be played by Claud.
Subscriptions were 12 shillings a year
and Claud would not accept ads, fearing advertisers might seek to rein in his leftish enthusiasms.
One investor stayed with the project for three weeks after it launched but, recalled Claud, ‘he went out of his mind outside the Army & Navy stores, where he knelt on the pavement one morning, addressing me as his Brother in the Sun’.
As we might accept, the spooks at MI5 kept an eye on the Week but were never, it seems, interested in obstructing its activities. They’ve shared with Patrick for his book some of their material on Claud and the Week, including a note saying, ‘TBF Sheard [the manager] is no longer employed.’ He had a particularly sharp bout of what is known as ‘financial irresponsibility’, in the course of which he removed the funds.
MI5 intercepted a begging letter from Claud to Nancy Cunard, an heiress with radical sympathies, asking her to make up the loss. (Whether she did or not we’re not told.)
MI5’s view was that Claud got much of his inside information from ‘Kingsway’ – a reference to the two or three times a week that American correspondents, and Claud, met there in the central London offices of Negley Farson, of the Chicago Daily News, to share political gossip.
Unable to send some of their best political juicier stories to their papers –they couldn’t ‘source’ them by revealing their moles – they fed them to Claud and later quoted the Week’s version in their own papers.
The formula was adopted by The Oldie’s founding editor, Richard Ingrams, who idolised Claud as he was setting up Private Eye in the 1960s.
He established a weekly steak-andchips lunch at Soho’s Coach & Horses pub at which around a half-dozen newspapermen (and women) fed the Eye with stories they couldn’t – usually for legal reasons – print in their own papers. ‘Does your story have the ring of truth?’ Ingrams would puckishly enquire,
producing a tiny bell which duly tolled the never-in-doubt answer.
Patrick writes, ‘He conducted his journalistic guerrilla warfare, as relevant today as in his era, with courage, originality and intelligence, demonstrating how those in authority can be challenged and harassed by a determined and serious journalist, even one almost entirely without resources.’
Wiry, unkempt Claud declared that, ‘as a Communist’, he was opposed to capitalism, imperialism and fascism?
The rakish, enthusiastic womaniser smoked several packets of cigarettes a day and consumed industrial quantities of Irish whiskey.
He was shot at in Spain fighting for the Communists in the Civil War and, before the Second World War, infuriated the Nazis in Berlin by disclosing their true intentions. He ridiculed the Cliveden set of British appeasers of Hitler. He wrote about the looming abdication of Edward VIII before Fleet Street rivals got their boots on.
The story of Claud could make an amusing, informative TV series, particularly his cat-and-mouse antics with MI5 while he was running the Week Born in Peking in 1904, he died in Cork in 1981. Married twice (Patricia and Hope), long-time partner of Jean, and a father of five, he spent his final years in a rented country house in Ireland.
A friend visiting the old Communist asked why he kept getting up to look out of the window. Was he being spied on?
Not at all, said Claud, ‘but I need to keep an eye on the gardeners in case they shirk’.
Peter McKay worked for the Daily Mail and Private Eye. He wrote Inside Private Eye
‘No, no! Don’t step on it –it makes people cry!’
King of the country
HARRY MOUNT
Blythe Spirit: The Remarkable Life of Ronald Blythe
By Ian Collins
John Murray £25
Ronald Blythe (1922-2023) was the greatest writer about the English countryside of the 20th century.
The author of Akenfield (1969) –which has now sold more than 400,000 copies – was also the greatest of driving companions.
When I drove him and his friend, my aunt Francie Mount, around his native Suffolk, he donned rural X-ray specs.
Sitting in the passenger seat, he’d pick out a dried-up horse pond in a passing field. Or tell you about the Suffolk of his youth, when the copses were full of cavorting couples – there was nowhere to do it at home. ‘All country children were conceived in woods,’ he said.
He was softly spoken, with impeccable manners. But, as his friend Ian Collins writes in this revelatory biography, he had ‘a skin of disarming diffidence covering a core of steel’.
That steel – along with his formidable intelligence – propelled him out of a background of back-breaking poverty. The Blythes, named after Suffolk’s River Blyth, had been wandering shepherds for centuries.
Ronnie may have been rocket-boosted away from the shepherd’s path but, still, he never chose to live as much as 50 miles from his birthplace in Acton, Suffolk.
His rural youth underpins the razor-sharp memories in Akenfield and his other books. He was the last living connection to several centuries of country lore. His grandmother, Martha Blythe, born in 1866, would put black crêpe on her beehive after a death in the family to warn the bees of the sad news or they would die, too. Martha lived to see the 1953 coronation on TV. While watching the ceremony, she said, ‘I have to ask a question: can they see us?’
Ronnie wrote enchanting stories of country life, not least in his mesmerising Church Times column – which lasted for 24 years and begat half a million words.
But he also told the romance-free truth of farm labour – of farm hands sugar-beeting at New Year, ‘chopping and kicking roots from the iron ground – the last of the unmechanised agricultural workforce… It was killing.’
Those exceptional manners and
gentle, unobtrusive presence made his elusive character hard to pin down, as he well knew: ‘My best-perfected art was the vanishing trick,’ he said of his childhood ability to escape the tyranny of household chores for the refuge of reading in the long grass.
Reading the King James Bible and childhood church services were the bedrock of Ronnie’s faith – he was a lay reader and a lay canon at St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Bury St Edmunds.
He also picked up a peerless knowledge of churches from his youthful church-crawling: ‘Churches were like stories which one could actually enter.’
In joining the worlds of John and Christine Nash, Maggi Hambling, Benjamin Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival and the Benton End circle presided over by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, Ronnie lost his Suffolk accent. But it wasn’t through snobbery. As Collins writes, ‘Above anything and anyone, he desired the classless anonymity of the observer, recorder and artist.’
Ronnie was a good looker, in both senses of the word. And it’s gripping to hear how much sex shy, polite Ronnie indulged in. As he said, ‘I would go with almost anyone, really.’
He wasn’t exclusive. He had a brief affair with Patricia Highsmith when she was living in Suffolk. He even had a fling with a stand-in postman delivering to his Wormingford house.
Sex, though, took a back seat to writing – and friendship. He said himself, ‘Sex meant nothing to me: being a writer was everything.’ With his curious, charming, well-read, unegomaniac character, Ronnie was a friend to all ages. The artist John Nash and his wife Christine, 30 years Ronnie’s senior, were so devoted to him that they left him their medieval yeoman’s house, Bottengoms Farm, after their deaths.
Ronnie’s supreme sense of style extended to interior decoration. The sitting room at Bottengoms was one of the great rooms of the world: the ancient timbers were dotted with John Nash landscapes, a Paul Nash picture of the trenches and a drawing of the Cerne Abbas giant by Eric Ravilious.
Ronnie was the Zelig of East Anglican literary and cultural life, cropping up in all the most interesting circles. He was also the classic intellectual introvertextrovert, heading out into the world for pleasure and friendship, then making for home to top up the bulging library of his mind.
That explains, too, why he never had a long-term companion. As he said to
A Life in Books – Lady Antonia Fraser Santa voted for Clem Attlee
‘Christmas comes but once a year,’ my mother was apt to sing out on Christmas Eve, ‘but when it comes, it brings good cheer.’
Since this was 1945 and my father (the politician Frank Pakenham) was due to stand for Parliament in the coming summer general election – in the Labour interest, in Oxford – I though it tactful to ask, ‘Will Father Christmas vote Labour?’
My mother did not seem to like the political question very much. ‘Of course he will vote Labour,’ she snapped, ‘and bring us a lot of good things, just as Labour will.’ Clem Attlee duly won.
That night, our uncle John Harman arrived for Christmas: he was our mother’s unmarried brother. He later went on to marry and become the father of the distinguished Labour politician Harriet Harman.
He tended to sleep in a bachelor bedroom in the attic. I happened to be rooting about there, seeing if I could
Patricia Highsmith, ‘We are both fundamentally on our own in life.’
On another occasion, he said of any putative companion, ‘I always knew that in the end I would be the one washing the socks.’
The natural world was where he was happiest. He even consulted the lunar calendar when answering invitations. A full moon was best for bicycling home to his single bed and his books.
Harry Mount is author of How England Made the English
Right royal tragedies
HUGO VICKERS
The Lives and Deaths of the Princesses of Hesse Frances Welch
Short Books £25
In 2011, I was employed to comment for an American outlet on Prince William’s wedding to Catherine Middleton. I envisaged being stuck in a van in the compound opposite Westminster Abbey, able to see only the occasional plume passing over a high fence. However, I managed to get myself onto a platform early in the morning, and I pointed out to
add to my own presents in advance, when I heard familiar voices: our mother and Uncle John.
‘They won’t show,’ said our mother.
‘It’s important,’ said Uncle John. He seemed to be wrestling with something.
Then I fled and began wrapping my presents for the next day. But I managed to leave a vital object upstairs, and it was in that way – another secret creep – that I came on a garish pair of tartan trousers lying half-hidden by his bed.
Imagine my amazement, on the next day, as Father Christmas danced in the drawing room, to see, clearly visible, another pair of garish trousers beneath his scarlet robe.
Another pair? Surely it must be the same pair – but that was impossible. How could Uncle John manage to get hold of Father Christmas’s trousers?
I decided to find out by cunning questioning.
‘Do you know Scotland, Uncle John?’ I asked in a voice of casual politeness.
a security guard (who looked like Robson Green) that there was a little veiled figure above the door of Westminster Abbey. That, I told them, was one of the 20th-century Christian martyrs and the groom’s great-great-great-great aunt, the Grand Duchess Ella. As a result of imparting this obscure information, I was allowed to be on the platform the entire morning (except when needed in my van). I saw everything. The Grand Duchess rescued me.
‘Not for nothing was the Grand Duchess made a saint in the Russian Church,’ commented Prince Philip’s archivist, Dame Anne Griffiths, when I told her my story.
There were four Hesse princesses. The best known are the Tsarina Alix, and her sister Ella, who married the rather disagreeable Grand Duke Serge. Victoria, Marchioness of Milford Haven, was the eldest and was the grandmother of Prince Philip.
Less well-known but very much key to this story, I am glad to say, is Irène, Princess Henry of Prussia. The stories of the first three have been told before –sometimes well, sometimes ploddingly.
This book brings them vividly to life, approaching them from the perspective of sisterhood.
They all started life in the relative
‘No,’ he said firmly.
‘What about tartan?’ I persisted.
‘No, I can’t bear tartan.’
It was a tremendous relief. Father Christmas was real.
‘Christmas comes but once a year,’ declared my mother again at the end of the year. ‘And next year it’s going to provide more cheer than ever. Your father and I have bought a little cottage in Scotland. The only thing is that the Scots don’t really celebrate Christmas. It’s New Year up there.’
‘New Year!’ I cried with horror. ‘But what about Father Christmas?’
‘Oh, Father Christmas is coming too,’ said Uncle John casually. ‘A real opportunity to wear my new trousers. I love dressing up and Christmas is the perfect opportunity. Did you think they suited me?’
Horrors! Father Christmas really was just playing a game. I muttered to myself, ‘When Christmas comes, it brings a tear.’
informality of Hesse Darmstadt but, because of their marriages, ended up in foreign lands. Two of them were murdered in Russia. Victoria remained in the calm of Kensington Palace, and Irène in Northern Germany.
As the biographer of Prince Philip’s mother, Alice, I confess I have explored these lives. I have been several times to Wolfsgarten, and I have twice visited the Grand Duchess Ella’s convent in Moscow (once when Prince Philip went there in 1994). It was a tonic to find their lives so well told by Frances Welch, who has made a name for herself in the Russian imperial field, with books on the Russian court at sea, Rasputin, and Sydney Gibbes, English tutor to the
‘Norman is inoffensive and a bit dull. I’m entering him for the Turner Prize’
JUMPING ON THE US BANDWAGON
There were numerous elections in 2024, but the most important, from a global economic perspective, was November’s presidential election in the US. While commentators predicted that it would be too close to call, in the end, Donald Trump recorded a resounding victory. Not only did he secure the most electoral votes, but he also won the popular vote. The Republican Party also has a majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives, giving him a strong mandate to push through his policies. Love him or loathe him – and there does not seem to be much middle ground – there is no denying that he ran a very effective campaign. He kept his message simple. He would “Make America Great Again”. To do this, he would take an “America First” approach to foreign policy and trade, enforce stricter immigration policies and border security, and implement economic policies aimed at job creation and prosperity. In polls, the economy was often ranked as the top issue by voters. He used the question famously posed by Ronald Reagan during his 1980 campaign against Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Trump encouraged voters to compare his previous term with the Biden-Harris years, drawing attention to recent issues like high inflation and the cost of living. Trump’s vision for the economy appears to
have been a significant factor in his recent victory. Whether he can deliver or not is yet to be seen. US stock markets rose immediately after the result, anticipating a lowtax, regulation-light, and pro-business environment for the next few years. On the day that his victory was confirmed, the S&P 500 rose by 2.5%, the Nasdaq went up by 3.0%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 3.6%. All three indices closed at alltime highs.
This was immediately reflected in the regular fund analysis that we provide to our members. Each week, we highlight which sectors have the wind in their sails and which are languishing in the doldrums. We then go on to list the bestperforming funds in each sector.
The North America and North American Smaller Companies sectors had performed well in the first three months of 2024, but struggled during the second and third quarters of the year. However, in the weeks after the election, they climbed back to the top of our tables, with the Baillie Gifford American fund leading the way.
This is an old favourite
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of ours. We know that it can be very volatile, but when it does well it does really, really well. It was the best performing fund in 2020 with a one-year return of 121%; however, it then fell by 3% in 2021 and 51% in 2022. If something goes up by 100%, and then down by 50%, then it ends up back where it started, which is basically what happened.
Any ‘buy and hold’ investors, who were holding this fund, would have seen their investment more than double in value, only for it all to be lost again.
At Saltydog Investor, we don’t believe that it has to be like that. With a little bit of time and effort, and a regular supply of up-to-date information, it’s possible to track these market trends as they develop and then fade away. That then makes it possible to change tack as market conditions vary. We run two demonstration portfolios to show how our data can be used to build and manage a fund portfolio. The week after the election one of them invested in the Baillie Gifford American fund. Having rallied in recent weeks, it could now run out of steam; however, it’s also still got a long way to go to get back to where it was when it peaked in 2021. Fortunately, we don’t have to second guess which of these is the most likely outcome. We’ll just keep monitoring its progress and can then act accordingly. www.saltydoginvestor.com
Tsar’s children. And we learn a lot about the elusive one, Irène.
The sisters were close and their early lives were relatively happy – though not for long. One brother fell to his death from a window, and a sister, May, died of typhoid, as did their mother, Alice.
At this point, the mighty figure of Queen Victoria took over, scooping them under her copious wing, and trying to control their marital futures as if they were figures on a chessboard.
They revered her, but they did not follow her advice. As the author points out to considerable effect, had they done so the course of history could have been very different.
Queen Victoria did not want Ella to marry Grand Duke Serge. Had she escaped that rather dubious and unpleasant man, Alix would never have come so sharply into the orbit of the Tsarevitch and would not have wound up as Empress of Russia.
On account of haemophilia, which was present in the offspring of both Irène and Alix, the problems of Tsar Nicholas II were greatly increased, Rasputin arrived on the scene with his evil menace, Alix succumbed to a serious nervous condition – and the rest, as they say, is history. It seems to me evident that it was caution about Alix (along with extreme xenophobia) that hindered George V from rescuing the Russian imperial family.
The book is a gripping read, but also a harrowing one. Welch has new and concise information about how the Russian sisters died, in particular Ella. Inevitably, their deaths clouded the later years of Victoria and Irène; first with the vain hope that they might survive and then with the gruesome reality, none of it made easier by the family taking sides over whether Anna Anderson could have been the Grand Duchess Anastasia.
I always admired Victoria’s stalwart approach to life, and how she stepped in to be the key figure in the life of her grandson Prince Philip, when his parents flaked. It was interesting to learn how Irène kept in touch with Queen Mary who, from the sanctuary of Great Britain, nevertheless took a keen interest in the later lives of her German relations.
Frances Welch brings the saga right up to date, to the sainthood of both Ella and, more surprisingly, Alix, and to the eventual burial of the imperial Russian family in the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg.
Hugo Vickers is author of Clarissa: Muse to Power – The Untold Story of Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon
Cleopatra’s clan
DAISY DUNN
The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra
By Toby Wilkinson Bloomsbury £25
Incest was prevalent among the rulers of ancient Egypt.
The marriage between Ptolemy VIII and his sister, Cleopatra II, needn’t have attracted much scandal had the king not gone on to seduce his wife’s daughter – his own niece – the future Cleopatra III.
Ptolemy’s act of bigamy led to civil war in 132 BC, with mother and daughter on opposing sides. The elder Cleopatra gained the upper hand, and Ptolemy and his new family were forced to take refuge in Cyprus. It was a peculiar kind of victory for the thwarted former queen.
The Ptolemaic dynasty, for all its explosive drama, has been comparatively overlooked by modern historians.
Spanning the period from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to the suicide of the most famous of the Cleopatras, Cleopatra VII, in 30 BC, it is typically ‘too late for Egyptologists, too early for Roman historians’, as Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson puts it.
Following hot on the heels of Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’s The Cleopatras in 2024, Wilkinson’s fascinating book fills the gap and explores why this dynasty was destined to be Egypt’s last.
The first Ptolemy came to power amid the turmoil that followed the death of Alexander the Great. Alexander had established a mighty empire, but left
little plan for what to do with it after he died. Ptolemy, one of his most trusted generals, had accompanied him to Egypt and seen him conquer the territory in 332 BC. By bringing Alexander’s body back to Egypt and establishing his capital at Alexandria, Ptolemy began to establish his credentials there as his successor.
Ptolemy I did much to bolster the defences of his new kingdom. Egypt grew increasingly wealthy as he brought Greek ideas to bear on the economy. A state bank was established at Alexandria. Gold was mined with fresh vigour in the Eastern Desert, using Greek processing equipment. Ptolemy’s son and successor, Ptolemy II, added to the gold rush by founding a settlement at a mine-rich area, Berenice Panchrysos (‘All-Gold Berenice’), named after his mother.
The early Ptolemys further enriched Alexandrian culture. The famous Library and accompanying Mouseion (temple of the Muses) were established during the reign of the first Ptolemy and expanded under his successor.
Ptolemy II, says Wilkinson, left Alexandria the equal of Athens and Pergamum. You can’t help but smile at the contemporary critic who mocked the scholars of these institutions as ‘cloistered papyrus-warblers quarrelling endlessly in the Muses’ birdcage’.
The Library was accidentally burned down by the Romans in the time of Julius Caesar. It was, perhaps, to compensate for this loss that Mark Antony wooed Caesar’s former lover, Cleopatra VII, with a present of 200,000 scrolls from Pergamum.
Women had been able to rule in their own right since the beginning of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Cleopatra VII,
however, ‘epitomised the magnificence of monarchy’ in a way her predecessors had not.
Wilkinson’s pages on the notorious queen are among his best. Pleasingly, he eschews specious modern questions, such as whether Cleopatra was ‘a fearless defender of women’s rights or a lascivious whore’, in favour of exploring her ‘unique bond’ with her people.
Wilkinson does a splendid job of situating Cleopatra in relation to her predecessors. She was, he shows, the most skilled at maintaining the trust of her Egyptian subjects while appeasing outsiders who potentially threatened their dominion.
One of the many delights of Wilkinson’s book is his illustration of cultural differences via quotation from a wide assortment of classical authors.
There’s a report by the Greek historian Diodorus, for example, of a Roman being slaughtered by an Egyptian mob for killing a cat. The Romans, notes Wilkinson, viewed the Egyptians’ worship of cats as ‘downright bizarre, atavistic and ridiculous’.
The episode nevertheless had farreaching consequences. Cleopatra’s father had handed over a vast sum to be recognised as a friend and ally of the Roman people. Rome’s growing influence over Alexandria – and apparent disrespect for its customs – contributed to his downfall. Cleopatra’s clever manipulation of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony may have made her unpopular, especially in Rome, but it profited her in the short term.
It is heartening that she emerges from Wilkinson’s book as so much more than a tragic victim of Roman might.
Daisy Dunn is the author of The Missing Thread: A New History of the Ancient World Through the Women Who Shaped It (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)
OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH
Depraved new world
NICHOLAS LEZARD Gliff
By Ali Smith
Hamish Hamilton £18.99
It is a truism that, still, even so long after they were published, dystopias take after either Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World. That is, either things are so grim that life is horrible, or things are so superficially cushy that things are horrible.
Ali Smith’s latest, set in the near future, name-checks the latter repeatedly but her reality is definitely on the grimmer side. It’s a two-tier society, of which we get to see only the lower rung: the unverifieds, who are obliged to go off-grid and scratch a living somehow from a world that denies them credit, or agency, or anything like a decent job.
If you do manage to get some kind of employment, chances are it’ll be scraping the lithium out of batteries, which often as not causes horrific injuries to face and hands.
If you were asked to imagine a dystopian novel by Ali Smith, this is more or less how you’d expect it to be. There are elements from her previous work: the child’s perspective, the delight in wordplay, the fear and hatred of surveillance technology; the creeping dehumanisation of society, which here reaches a kind of logical end point.
The story is told by a boy called Briar, who, with his sister Rose, is left in an abandoned, thoroughly empty house by Leif, their mother’s latest partner, along with several tins of meatballs and creamed rice, until his return. He does not return – but this might not be his fault.
Outside are people who paint red lines around buildings and sometimes vehicles which betoken impending doom. The buildings are demolished; if a line appears around a vehicle, it would be advisable for that vehicle to move on before the paint has dried.
This has happened around Rose’s and Briar’s and Leif’s camper van, which is why they’re now hiding in the empty house. Behind the house is a field containing horses earmarked for the abattoir; Rose befriends one of them, and christens it Gliff, although she doesn’t even know whether the word has a meaning. (Rose, curious, clever and given to saying cute-clever things, is not a million miles away from the template of other young heroines of Smith’s.)
This is all ticking along quite nicely, until Briar and Rose are welcomed into an abandoned school populated by unverifiables. We are told how they became so.
‘They were largely unverifiable because of words. One person here had been unverified for saying out loud that a war was a war when it wasn’t permitted to call it a war. Another had found herself declared unverifiable for writing online that the killing of many people by another people was a genocide. Another had been unverified for defaming the oil conglomerates by saying they were
directly responsible for climate catastrophe. Another had been unverified for speaking at a protest about people’s right to protest.’
I think we can see what’s going on here. After all, dystopias are always about what is happening now. The story goes that Orwell wanted to call his novel Nineteen Forty-Eight.
So: calling a war a war when you’re not allowed to recalls Putin; the business with the oil companies and the right to protest is about Just Stop Oil; and the bit about genocide … well, let’s just say that a novelist who makes so much of the importance of words, of the meanings embedded within them, should maybe be a little less sloppy with her language.
If genocide is ‘killing of many people by another people’, then the Allies in the Second World War were as guilty of genocide as the Nazis. But you know what Smith is driving at.
From this point on I started looking a bit more quizzically at Smith’s intentions. As it happens, I am pretty sure that if she and I were to have a political discussion, we would have very few points of difference. I, too, am no fan of the idea of removing the rights of dissenters, of having smartwatches – called ‘educators’ – that function more or less like Orwell’s telescreens. And my ideal job does not involve scraping the lithium out of batteries. Also, I write these words after – as Ali wrote hers before – the vile anti-immigrant riots of this summer. Should that kind of protest be tolerated? Or only the right kind of protest? And yet, do I want to see my own beliefs served back up to me so neatly in a fiction? By people with names like Rose and Briar?
Or even, come to think of it, Lief?
Nicholas Lezard wrote It Gets Worse: Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury
FILM
HARRY MOUNT CONCLAVE (12A)
Latin fans will love Conclave, the adaptation of Robert Harris’s 2016 film about the battle to become a new pope.
Not since Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) has there been so much Latin in a big feature film. Pope Francis, who has restricted the Latin Mass, won’t be booking a seat at the Vatican Odeon.
At St Peter’s, there’s a sede vacante – an empty seat – after the death of the last Pope. All the cardinals vying for the top job are horrified by a last-minute rogue candidate, the Cardinal Archbishop of Kabul. He’d been appointed by the Pope in pectore (‘in the breast’, or in secret) – so none of them has ever heard of him.
Ralph Fiennes, who plays CardinalDean Thomas Lawrence, the man overseeing the papal election, speaks Latin like a Caesar, without showing off or over-enunciating. He is subtle and
Arts
understated in the way he tracks down and expels the dodgy cardinals in the running.
All the while, Lawrence gives the impression that, like Julius Caesar, he is openly not keen on supreme power, while secretly plotting his journey to the top.
With all this Latin floating around, you can’t accuse the writer, Peter Straughan, or director, Edward Berger, of dumbing down.
In fact, the greatest pleasure in this slightly disappointing film is the way it gets all the little details right, thanks to Robert Harris’s meticulous research for the novel.
After the Pope’s death, his papal ring has its seal sheared off to stop anyone from forging it. The cardinals are locked into the Vatican with a key – con clave; thus the word conclave.
And how intriguing to read the little voting cards the cardinals use, inscribed with the words Eligo in Summum Pontificem (‘I elect as Supreme Pope’).
Once those votes are counted, the little cards are burnt in the Vatican fire (along with the right sort of dye) to produce black smoke or the white smoke that signifies Habemus papam – ‘We have a pope!’
The various voting rounds are peppered with all the delicious plot twists Harris devised. One cardinal candidate turns out to have had a secret child 30 years before.
Another has been using that information to get him out of the race.
Behind the scenes, Isabella Rossellini delivers a cameo masterclass as Sister Agnes, the wily, clever nun on the side of the angels, assisting the search for the ideal pope.
The film is also convincing in depicting the real-life split in the Vatican between the hardline and liberal wings of the church.
The traditional candidate is Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto, a marvellously diabolical baddy, with a whiff of sulphur). And the right-on candidate is Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci, a fine essay in sly virtue-signalling).
So it’s all there. A dream Robert Harris plot. All the gloriously abstruse Vatican details. Plenty of Latin.
But … but … It’s all a little too correct. Ralph Fiennes is brilliantly convincing but he’s a little too understated, talking in a sotto-voce, boring monotone most of the time.
The complex plot is delivered in too plodding and linear a way – with each revelation dropped between each round of papal voting.
And the zinger of an ending – when (Latin spoiler warning!) the Cardinal Archbishop of Kabul turns out to be a dea ex machina rather than a deus ex machina – is so awkwardly handled as to become preposterous.
Robert Harris’s scaffolding is all in place to put the thrills in the thriller – but they are lost in the direction and in the film’s overlong two hours.
Given the admirable efforts to get the details correct, a right level of seriousness is established. But, against that serious background, there should have been room for a little humour in opposition, too, if not quite on the sublime level of Father Ted – or Padre Edoardo.
Latin lover: Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence
THEATRE
WILLIAM COOK
THE RED SHOES RSC, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 19th January
Always read the small print.
When I heard the Royal Shakespeare Company were mounting a new show called The Red Shoes, I blithely assumed it’d be a theatrical version of Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 movie.
That masterful film, about an innocent ballerina who’s destroyed by her untamed talent, remains a byword for all that’s best in British cinema. What a brilliant idea to adapt it for the stage!
In fact, this is a reinterpretation of the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, upon which Powell and Pressburger’s movie was (very loosely) based.
This Red Shoes wasn’t what I expected, but it was still a very nice surprise. Nancy Harris’s retelling of Andersen’s fable is engrossing and entertaining. It also does something rather brave. Instead of sweetening his disturbing tale to suit the tastes of namby-pamby modern audiences, it remains true to his original vision, which is very dark indeed.
‘Fairy tales are often more brutal than we remember,’ says Harris, in a perceptive essay in the programme, ‘which has led to a lot of whitewashing over the years.’
She’s dead right. After I’d seen her eerie play, I dug out my old edition of Andersen’s children’s stories and was surprised to find that his Red Shoes reads more like a horror film than like a fairy tale. When Karen, a blameless orphan, puts on some magical red shoes, she finds she can’t stop dancing. Eventually, she begs an executioner to cut off her feet with an axe.
Harris’s poetic adaptation doesn’t pull its punches and nor does Kimberley Rampersad’s suitably spooky production. It’s a black comedy full of malice, bereft of any sort of happy ending. I adored it, but some of my fellow oldies at this midweek matinée (a far better test of a play’s appeal than a first night full of fawning luvvies) seemed distinctly unimpressed.
‘I didn’t know what to make of that,’ muttered one of my neighbours at the interval. ‘It’s all very clever,’ grumbled another (as the Hungarian humorist George Mikes observed, in English the word ‘clever’ is really a veiled insult).
Fair enough. This menacing show certainly won’t be to everybody’s taste. But no one can complain that Harris has
Red-hot: Sylvestor (Sebastien Torkia) and Karen (Nikki Cheung)
been gratuitously cruel. If anything, she’s rather toned down the malevolence of Andersen’s grotesque story.
‘Dance in your red shoes until you are pale and cold, and your flesh shrivels down to the skeleton,’ says Andersen’s heartless avenging angel, punishing poor Karen for simply wearing her best shoes to her confirmation.
This scary show would probably be better suited to Halloween than to Christmas. However, having sat through so many saccharine pantomimes, full of forced jollity and false sentimentality, I felt that this ghostly, witty fantasy was like a fresh blast of salty sea air.
The cast is full of baddies – the roles all actors relish. James Doherty and Dianne Pilkington are hilarious as Karen’s ghastly, nouveau-riche adoptive parents, shamelessly exploiting her as a charitable entrée into high society. Joseph Edwards is wonderfully demented as their sadistic, psychotic son.
The show’s undisputed star is the wolflike Sebastien Torkia, who doubles up as the sinister shoemaker (did you know Andersen’s father and stepfather were both cobblers?) and the duplicitous, sanctimonious priest.
Colin Richmond’s creepy sets and costumes create an ideal canvas. The dreamlike pictures he draws are potent and alluring, reminiscent of the troubled paintings of Paula Rego. I was also reminded of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes
At its heart, this profound, disconcerting play is about the true meaning of fairy tales. Anyone who’s actually read Andersen (or the Brothers Grimm, for that matter) can confirm that these archetypal stories expose and exorcise our deepest fears. Often, as in The Red Shoes, they’re about the trauma of adolescence, the peril that ensues when a girl becomes a woman.
Thankfully, however, that message never becomes too heavy. Harris’s script is full of morbid humour, and these actors all have a ball. This is a Marmite show – you’ll either love it or hate it – but if you’re sick of fake Yuletide cheer, as I am, it should be right up your street.
And when I saw Powell and Pressburger’s film again, just the other day, I realised this new play and that old movie have more in common than I first thought.
RADIO
VALERIE GROVE
Now that The Oldie broadcasts Radio Oldie, with its own Top of the Pods hit parade, which I warmly welcome, I will mention just one pod.
The globe’s most influential podcaster, Joe Rogan, in his pre-election chat to Donald Trump definitely swung the young men’s vote. The savvy, articulate Joe knows the 24-year-old (average age of his subscribers) American male better than anyone.
‘You have been so insulted,’ Joe told Trump. ‘I’ve never known anything like it. Tell us why that happened.’
Talk about opening the floodgates! Trump’s fantasy-laced, self-absorbed version of his story was chiefly about his triumphs – ‘I made my money on luxury’ – ‘great guy’– ‘great person’ – ‘he’s a good person’ – ‘it was just surreal’ – lasted three hours. And life’s really too short.
Famous last words was a fruitful theme for an Archive on 4. Melvyn Bragg recalled his interview with Dennis Potter just before Potter’s death from cancer in 1985. With his flask of morphine, he had the champagne he’d requested. It was spring, and Potter described gazing in awe at the plum tree in the garden, which had produced ‘the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be’.
It was a significant TV moment: the first dying interview. Bragg got 5,000 letters; Potter got 20,000.
Clive James followed, with Mary Beard: ‘I’ve been shameless,’ said Clive. ‘But I’m a performer! “Look at me. I’m over here. I’m dying!” Tune in next week – I’ll still be dying!’
He recommended imminent death for any writer: ‘good for the concentration’. (And always mention a tree. Clive had a maple.)
RIP Timothy West (1934-2024)
– with Prunella Scales, 1977
So what’s the next big thing? After-death recordings, of course. Some people already do this – make a video/audio of themselves to astonish the mourners. Diana Athill did one. Hunter Davies has made his in advance. The need for attention carries on well beyond the grave.
The late, wonderful Timothy West –radio’s latter-day Rumpole, as well as four times King Lear – was a doyen of the spoken word, most notably of the entire canon of Trollope. It was a question of phrasing, he said, and giving each sentence its correct emphases.
‘The key elements of phrasing can be taught in an afternoon,’ he once told me. ‘Stress the noun, never prepositions, which they do all the time on Radio 4. Never emphasise pronouns. They think stressing gives extra power. It doesn’t. When in doubt, go for the noun.’ Fifteen years later, it still needs saying.
Nobody, other than The Oldie, cares more about birthdays ending in 0 or 5 than the BBC. They are reviving ten plays for Noël Coward’s 125th birthday. They are repeating Soul Music on his mostrecorded song – originally for a female voice – ‘Mad About the Boy’.
And there’s a great episode of The Reunion featuring the Ab Fab characters, perfect for Christmas Day. Also an 8th January tribute on Radio 2 to 90-year-old Elvis – and, on New Year’s Day, a whole day’s celebration of The Shipping Forecast, first aired in 1925.
That reminds me. The new Radio 3 extra strand called simply Unwind has begun, unashamedly aping the original Classic FM – sending us into the land of nod. It plays its bland bedtime music along with background voices of Viji Alles or Neil Nunes warning gently of gales in Forth, Tyne, Dogger, etc – and they call it The Sleeping Forecast
The music is just the kind you might play over the cradle to send a baby to sleep. Most welcome here today, as our new grandson was born (8lb, no name yet) this very afternoon.
Happy New Year!
TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON
In The Story of Panto (Sky), Gyles Brandreth (as he writes in his Oldie column) shares his love of the 300-yearold uniquely camp Christmas tradition.
As someone who finds pantomime numbingly dull, I watched this cheerful programme with anthropological interest. Would Gyles, with his infinite charm, manage to persuade me there is more to panto than smutty innuendo and audience participation?
Not really, because The Story of Panto is not an apologia but a celebration of those who have panto in their DNA. This, for the Brandreth family, is literally the case. It was in a student production of Cinderella that Gyles met his wife, Michèle, in 1968, and they have since been, as he puts it, ‘breeding’ in their children and grandchildren ‘the future audience of panto’.
Together, Gyles and Michèle attend the auditions for Mother Goose at the Broxbourne Theatre Company in Hoddesdon. Maybe, says Gyles as he bounces up to the church hall, another young couple will meet today who will still be together in 56 years’ time! ‘Already I feel sorry for her,’ Michèle replies, before laughing rather too gaily. Gyles also visits the Nottingham Playhouse as they prepare their elaborate sets for Jack and the Beanstalk, and the Catford Broadway Theatre, whose director is making Sleeping Beauty relevant to the 21st century. The princess, kissed awake after 100 years by her nanny, then becomes the strong woman who rescues the prince. She is ‘empowered’, Gyles explains, ‘by a mother figure who is interestingly played by a man’.
‘We’ve got to move with the times,’ says director and writer Joyce Branagh. ‘I don’t want to offend people. I do want to be woke.’
The reason panto survives, Branagh continues, is because it reflects back the views of its audience. But panto has always been transgressive, giving us, every December, a topsy-turvy alternative world.
‘Why was cross-dressing so big in Victorian England?’ Gyles asks Simon Sladen, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Performance at the V&A. Sladen stresses the restrictions of Victorian social etiquette. Was the whole point of panto, we are left wondering, to allow closeted gay men and lesbians a temporary refuge? Professor Louise Peacock from De Montfort University,
who specialises in the history of clowns, explains that panto’s cream-cake and custard-pie scenes ‘provide an opportunity for the dame to make an enormous mess’. Mess, another talking head tells us, is what children are not allowed to make at home.
Despite being a very British pleasure, this peculiar mix of filth, fairies and family fun has its roots in commedia dell’arte, a 16th-century Italian entertainment composed of music, dance, acrobatics and stock characters. Aside from learning that the word slapstick derives from an actual stick that made a slapping sound, we discover that an early form of panto was first staged at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1702.
The first Christmas panto was on Boxing Day 1750. And the king of the visual extravaganza that is modern British panto was Augustus Harris, who took over the management of the Theatre Royal in 1879. It was Harris who invented the interval, so that he could sell ice creams.
The first pantomime dame, in 1886, was Dan Leno; the first London Palladium panto, in 1914, was Dick Whittington. For 30 years in the 20th century, panto was displaced by the popularity of musical – until Andrew Lloyd Webber brought it back with an over-the-top, multimillion-dollar variety-show production of Cinderella
The revenue brought in by the Christmas panto apparently subsidises the theatres for the rest of the year. Panto
is therefore the magic money tree. It is also, like I’m a Celebrity …Get Me Out of Here!, the home of the washed-up soap star, although Gyles is too tactful to mention this side of its appeal.
It is the big names, however, that lure the London audience. Julian Clary, who has been in pantos since 1998 and played seaman Smee in Peter Pan last year, discusses the part over Earl Grey tea and scones.
‘Did you fly, Julian?’ asks Gyles.
‘I flew,’ replies Julian. ‘Seaman Smee doesn’t normally fly, but to see seaman flying through the air, Gyles! A distant memory for you, I expect.’ Oooooh!
MUSIC
RICHARD OSBORNE
DONIZETTI, MASCAGNI AND STANFORD AT THE WEXFORD FESTIVAL
There’s been no shortage of entertainments that take us backstage into the world of dream and disillusion where theatre folk live out their lives.
Watched from the safety of a stalls seat, they can be a particular pleasure. I think of the Prologue to Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Or there was the joyous evening nigh on 60 years ago when the Bristol Old Vic opened its bicentennial celebrations with a double bill.
It featured Sheridan’s The Critic and Terence Rattigan’s Harlequinade, that timeless comedy in which a pair of superannuated luvvies attempt to play the leads in Romeo and Juliet for one last time.
I hadn’t seen The Critic since – until a staging of Charles Villiers Stanford’s rarely-seen operatic version at this year’s
Mr Puff (Mark Lambert, centre), in Charles Villiers Stanford’s The Critic, Wexford, 2024
Wexford Festival. And there was more, with artistic director Rosetta Cucchi unearthing a pair of ‘theatre within theatre’ operatic rarities by Donizetti and Mascagni. It completed what would prove to be another vintage season for this 73-year-old gem of an Irish opera festival.
Sheridan’s play centres on Mr Puff, the critic-turned-playwright who’s invited fellow writer Sir Fretful Plagiary and theatre critics Dangle and Sneer to a rehearsal of his new play, The Spanish Armada
As well as lampooning theatre folk and the love of pseudo-Shakespearean bombast to which English theatre had become addicted, the play mocked the mix of panic and Rule Britannia! jingoism. It had been inspired by Spain’s declaration of war on Britain in the summer of 1799.
This was potentially subversive stuff in a time of war, as was the Stanford, premièred in London in 1916. In reality, the opera-obsessed Stanford’s ninth attempt at writing a successful stage work had a lot going for it. The libretto by D’Oyly Carte veteran Lewis Cairns James is a brilliant distillation of the Sheridan – something that can be enjoyed in its own right, even by anyone who’s largely innocent of Stanford’s dazzling array of musical jokes.
Not since those wonderful Gerard Hoffnung concerts appeared on LP in the 1950s have I heard so much high-quality spoofery. Stanford’s turning Sheridan’s parody of the death of Ophelia into a send-up of the mad scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor sits side by
Julian Clary as Seaman Smee in Peter Pan, London Palladium
side with more recherché jests – such as the cry ‘O cursèd parry!’ uttered by Sheridan’s captive Spaniard Don Ferolo Whiskerando as he’s run through by a trusty Beefeater. Cue a quotation from Hubert Parry’s Blest Pair of Sirens, which Stanford had premièred in 1887.
Equally, who can forget the exquisite meditation for solo cello in the scene in which Elizabethan spymaster Lord Burghley enters, thinks for a couple of minutes, then leaves without saying a word? Conor Hanratty’s staging of all this was inch-perfect.
Mascagni’s Le maschere (The Masks) was the connoisseurs’ piece among the three operas. This tribute to Italian theatre, in which members of a commedia dell’arte troupe introduce themselves before switching costumes and performing a modern comedy romance, was a daring departure – both for Mascagni, who’d recently taken the world by the ears with Cavalleria rusticana and for the show’s originator, Luigi Illica. He’d already written successful libretti for Catalani, Giordano and his close collaborator, Puccini.
Sadly, Italian audiences in 1901 were not yet ready for that re-engagement with commedia dell’arte which Stravinsky and Richard Strauss would later exploit to such effect.
Mascagni’s score is a delight, despite the fact that the big romantic numbers miss memorability by a whisker. That said, after hearing gifted young American tenor Andrew Morstein singing Mascagni’s Act 3 serenade, I was left wondering why Caruso (who sang the role on stage) never recorded it.
Like The Critic, Donizetti’s Theatrical Conventions and Inconveniences lays bare the inner workings of a theatre company, while mocking outmoded 18th-century styles of composition. Famous for its central drag act – a buffo baritone playing the unruly mother of the company’s mouse of a second soprano – it’s often revived in over-the-top adaptations trading as Viva la Mamma! (Munich 1969, Vienna 2015) or Viva la Diva (Buxton, 2022).
Though the opera was advertised by Wexford as Donizetti’s original 1831 two-act Italian version (available on DVD in an excellent Opéra Lyons production by Laurent Pelly), the festival did the dirty on operatically literate old-stagers like me. It turned the opera into an interminable gag fest, complete with interpolations from operas as remote from Donizetti as Bernstein’s Candide. Both Donizetti and Stanford warned that their burlesques needed to be played
straight. Orpha Phelan’s production did the opposite.
Still, it was a palpable hit, causing the late-October Irish Bank Holiday audience to go wild with excitement. Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.
GOLDEN OLDIES MARK ELLEN
HAROLD WILSON V THE MOVE
Rock stars are always attacking the Government, but it’s not often that Prime Ministers bite back.
Tony Secunda (1940-95), flamboyant, paisley-shirted manager of the Move, T Rex and Motorhead, died 30 years ago this month. As did Harold Wilson, three months later.
The court case between them in 1967 ticked every box – fizzing political scandal, a red Rolls-Royce, flower power in the dock – and the nation ordered popcorn and pulled up a ringside seat.
Secunda practically invented the world of stunt-filled publicity, and this was the first time things had gone wrong.
To attract attention to his psychedelic minstrels, The Move, he got them to smash TV sets with axes and set fire to the stage. He had them wander the streets of Manchester carrying a fake H-bomb in the hope of being arrested. He made them chop up an effigy of Harold Wilson at a fundraiser for the threatened pirate radio stations Wilson was trying close.
A clunky but unambiguous message is spelt out in swirling sixties typography: ‘Disgusting, Depraved, Despicable though Harold may be, Beautiful is the only word to describe Flowers in the Rain by The Move, released Aug 25th.’
Secunda printed it on 500 postcards to accompany promotional copies of the single he sent to radio and the press. And Private Eye ran one. At this point, Wilson instructed Quintin Hogg QC to give the irksome Brummie oiks a damn good legal kicking.
The band were mortified, as Secunda had never consulted them or even told them he was doing it and, as the BBC had chosen their record to launch the new-fangled Radio 1, they’d sensed a huge potential payday.
Tony’s instructions as to how the group should dress and behave at the hearing only made things worse. They arrived in a crimson Roller wearing ‘the gayest garb ever seen in this court, m’lud’. The judge took one look at this shower of over-ornate, scandalspreading goons and channelled all the royalties in perpetuity into the Harold Wilson Charitable Trust (as they go to this day).
But his next manoeuvre was a bridge too far. Gossip columns crackled with the rumour that the PM and Marcia Williams were having an affair. And so Secunda commissioned a cartoon of a naked Wilson on a bed beside the figure of his alleged paramour in a diaphanous nightie and holding a fan reading ‘Mrs Williams, Harold’s VERY personal secretary’. Mary Wilson peers, wideeyed, from behind a curtain.
The Move were trailed for weeks by cars with blacked-out windows.
‘We were very scared. This was the Prime Minister and we were very naughty boys.’
Secunda was unrepentant, claiming they were all over the front pages in Britain, Europe and America. With a record that would earn them nothing. They sacked him a few weeks later.
For the still aggrieved, now 78-yearold Roy Wood, who wrote it, it won’t go away.
Nor will the scurrilous postcards, all over the internet and, occasionally, even up for sale. Have a look.
Harold Wilson and Marcia Williams in flagrante
EXHIBITIONS
HUON MALLALIEU
CHARLOTTE JOHNSON WAHL
Bethlem Gallery, Beckenham, 11th December to 29th March 2025
AND UK WINTER ROUND-UP
Charlotte Johnson Wahl (1942-2021) was Boris Johnson’s mother.
In 1974, she spent eight months at the Maudsley Hospital, now linked with Bethlem Hospital, or Bedlam, in an NHS Foundation Trust. She was suffering from OCD, sometimes a precursor to Parkinson’s.
While there, she produced 78 paintings, and was given a sell-out exhibition. Mostly on her own, she brought up four children of diverse talents, and continued to paint.
In 2015, she had her only other exhibition until now. This one, titled ‘What It Felt Like’, has assembled as many Maudsley works as possible. They
are of their time, flat and pop-art influenced, but emotions come through. Sometimes there are echoes of Claude Flight’s tube woodcuts.
Autumn and early winter bring a rush of exhibitions, a few of which garner all the attention. This year, it has been the Courtauld’s Monet, Van Gogh at the National Gallery and the Old Master drawings at the King’s Gallery and the Royal Academy. Here are several that are open and will continue to give pleasure into the early months of 2025. As it happens, several also feature women artists.
The Barber, Birmingham (to 26th January), has ‘Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites’. It’s a fascinating linkage of the senses, which includes Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale and Evelyn De Morgan, along with Millais’s Blind Girl and Lewis’s Lilium Auratum. The show goes on to the Watts Gallery, Surrey (12th May to 9th November).
In 1907, Wolverhampton Art Gallery devoted a show to Evelyn De Morgan, wife of the potter William. In ‘Painted
Dreams’ (to 9th March), the gallery revisits it with 30 works which ‘layer contemporary issues into mythological tales’ with remarkable invention and technical skill.
Another woman artist who was much more than an adjunct to a gifted husband was Tirzah Garwood (1908-51), Eric Ravilious’s wife. The show of more than 80 paintings and 3D constructions at Dulwich Picture Gallery (to 26th March) is the first since 1952, the year after her death.
Train
A continuing male exhibition is ‘Emissaries of the Land’ at Brantwood, Ruskin’s Lake District home. It’s organised by the Art Space Gallery in Islington. Very effectively, it puts Ruskin ‘in conversation’ with Derek Hyatt (1931-2015) and Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), both lovers of the Lakes. It is a marriage of truth to nature, sensitivity and clear-sightedness, which Ruskin termed ‘heartsight’.
The Oldie
Above: Day Room, 1974. Left: What It Felt Like, 1974. Both by Charlotte Johnson Wahl
Above:
Journey, c 1935, by Tirzah Garwood, Dulwich Picture Gallery. Left: The Blind Girl, 1956, by John Everett Millais, Wolverhampton Art Gallery
GARDENING
DAVID WHEELER
SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL
Fair-weather gardeners anxious to do something – anything – in this low month should think small. Think indoors. Think bonsai.
Recovering from my first cancer treatment 16 years ago (I’ve had four serious lots since), I discovered the joys of miniature gardening. Prolonged bouts of blessedly potent chemo and radiotherapy so shrank my energy levels that a teaspoonful of compost and a 4-inch seedling were the most I could handle. All these years later, the plants I then raised remain lovingly tended and, despite their squat prison quarters, are probably in better health than me.
Pleasure comes from the quotidian ritual of fussing: watering, clipping, shaping. None takes long and satisfaction levels are immense.
The ancient Japanese craft of bonsai has worldwide aficionados. In China, where it probably originated and remains equally popular, it’s known as penjing meaning ‘diminutive landscape’, with pots artfully displaying a combination of rocks, trees, moss and, sometimes, figures or architectural doll’shouse-size follies. Scope is infinite.
Plants given the bonsai treatment equate with those born of seeds that might have blown into a rocky crevice, germinated in situ and been forced to live out long though dwarfed lives starved of root freedom, mithered by grazing animals, gales and drought.
The cultivated bonsai technique mimics that ‘cruel’ trick of nature by setting small woody plants into small, ideally ceramic containers (the collecting of these alone has its own delights), where the roots are confined. Fed well but sparsely, and occasionally (at most, annually) repotted, they’ll flourish for years … decades … possibly centuries.
Go online to see venerable exhibits, none of which we could hope to match if starting from scratch today. Best, then, to elect someone to look after your babes when we eventually trip off to that great compost heap in the sky.
Unlike for other horticultural pursuits, you don’t need anything more than a tabletop upon which to create your mini arboretum. What, then, to plant?
Supremely, I’d say, Japanese maples – Acer palmatum varieties. They’re easily raised from seed or sourced from the garden centre. They adapt well to the bonsai’s harsh treatment, tolerating scissored limbs and the wiring of supple branches into weird and fascinating shapes. Come autumn, their foliage is transformed into miraculous shades of red, orange and purple.
Then, obligingly, like all deciduous trees, they shed their leaves to reveal alluring skeletal shapes, signalling the opportune (dormant) moment for repotting, if deemed necessary.
My own collection also includes oak, birch, hawthorn, yew and hazel – mostly dug from the garden as skinny youngsters. I did no research (but bonsai books are plentiful), experimenting instinctively with whatever little sprogs could be found for me. Admittedly, my prize bonsai’d ginkgo (ah,
pure golden autumn foliage) was raised from bought seed.
I’m now chasing floriferous plants: ornamental quince (Chaenomeles japonica), flowering cherry and azaleas. Camellias, too, and – for scent – lilac and privet. Sight of their brave, miniaturised blossoms on bare or newly leafed twigs each spring guarantees a rare and life-enhancing skipped heartbeat.
Bonsai clubs thrive in Britain (see ukbonsaiassoc.org), and suppliers of the right kind of aesthetically pleasing ceramic pots and associated sundries do brisk business. Try bonsaidirect.co.uk if your local garden shop fails you, or an internet search will bestow many more mail-order outlets. Online twiddles will also pinpoint any bonsai clubs in your area.
I’m lucky. Near home, we have Aberglasney Gardens in Carmarthenshire, where, on Sundays, the appropriately named Dragon Bonsai Club (founded in 2010) regularly exhibits.
Members sell a few modestly priced plants and essential miscellanea, show glorious mature exhibits and – most importantly – are on hand to shower you freely with advice and encouragement.
David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal
KITCHEN GARDEN
SIMON COURTAULD MELONS
It may seem an odd time of year to be writing about melons, but I do want to celebrate my first melon, grown last summer. I have to say that the plant, which I trained up to and along the roof of the greenhouse, produced only one edible fruit, which I supported with netting. But its orange flesh was sweet and delicious – and I was proud of it.
Bonsai ginkgo
The Royal Horticultural Society says that melons are ‘not the easiest fruit to grow’. But I will try again this year and hope for a better summer and more success. The seed requires at least 20ºC to germinate, ideally in a propagator.
Warmth, regular watering and feeding are all-important, and the plants should not be grown outdoors. Pollination is the tricky bit: it needs to be done by hand, not brush, and you will have to distinguish male from female flowers.
My melon was a variety called Emir F1: it is a charentais, a type of cantaloupe, and has an RHS Award of Garden Merit. One is advised that a plant should not be allowed to bear more than four fruit. Will I be that lucky this year?
parsley, garlic and a scrap of butter. To finish: prune and walnut tart from the best patisserie in town. Vive la France.
Melons are closely related to cucumbers, which I grew successfully in the same greenhouse as the melon. Two all-female varieties produced a dozen fruit. Many vegetables in the garden, however, suffered from the miserably wet, cold summer.
Courgettes, spinach beet, beetroot and kalette sprouts were all disappointing, and I heard that my farmer neighbour had had a very poor crop of Brussels sprouts. Slugs got fatter, and caterpillars stripped the leaves of sprouting broccoli and kohlrabi.
On the plus side, we had a good crop of beans – runner, yellow French and broad – and plenty of peas from a small sowing. The cut-and-come-again lettuce kept coming throughout the summer.
Among the herbs, parsley and dill grew well, and we had more chives –thriving in the rain and not going to flower – than in previous seasons. Coriander, sown at the end of July, has had good leaf growth and should last almost until Christmas.
COOKERY
ELISABETH LUARD CHRISTMAS IS COMING...
Christmas is all about the bird.
In Britain, it’s goose or turkey, the bigger the better, fortified by as many extras – roasties, brussels sprouts, chestnuts, gravy, mashed swedes, bread sauce – as the cook can handle.
In France, the festive bird of choice is feathered game – partridge, pheasant, quail – none of which is as plentiful as they once were in the vineyards and orchards of rural France. This explains the popularity of guinea fowl, a barnyard bird native to African savanna which never really lost the wilderness urge, and prefers, somewhat inconveniently, to roost in trees.
As a starter: oysters blitzed under the grill with a crisp little hat of breadcrumbs,
Slow-roast guinea fowl with apples
A sumptuous Christmas dish from Normandy, land of Calvados and cream. Guinea fowl, like pheasant or any feathered game of uncertain age, needs gentle braising in plenty of cooking juices, rather than the high, dry heat of the roasting oven. Serves 6-8.
2 fine, plump guineafowl
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 tbsps butter
150g minced pork
150g minced beef
1 small glass Calvados (or white brandy)
6 eating apples (preferably yellowfleshed Reinettes)
1 tsp dried thyme
1 medium egg, forked to blend
Salt and pepper
To finish
About 200ml crème fraîche or double cream soured with a little lemon juice
Wipe the birds, singeing off any stray little hairs or feathers over a flame, and prepare the stuffing.
Fry the onions in half the butter, stir in the minced meat and fry gently till it changes colour. Add a couple of the apples, peeled and diced. Sprinkle with Calvados (or any other fire-water), lid loosely and leave to stew gently for about 15 minutes, until the apple pieces have not quite collapsed. Season, allow to cool a little, then beat in the egg.
Preheat the oven to 400°F/200°C. Divide the stuffing between the birds, and tie their little drumsticks together with thread to keep them neat. Place the birds in a buttered roasting tin, breasts downwards. Season, dot with the remaining butter and a sprinkle of thyme. Roast at high heat for 10 minutes. Turn the birds breast-side up, dot with a little more butter, cover with foil, and reduce the heat to
275°F/150°C to allow the birds to cook slowly and make plenty of juice. Allow an hour’s gentle cooking, until the birds are perfectly tender and the drumsticks pull easily away from the body. Leave to rest for 10 minutes or so, scissor the birds neatly into quarters and pile onto a warm serving dish with the stuffing in the gaps. Transfer the pan juices to a small saucepan, skim off and save the layer of butter that rises to the top, and reserve.
Peel, core and quarter the rest of the apples. Sauté the pieces in the skimmedoff butter till they brown a little (you may need extra butter) and add them to the dish. Reheat the reserved juices in the saucepan and bubble up fiercely for 3-4 minutes to reduce to a strong, sticky gravy, then stir in the crème fraîche
Just before serving, gently reheat the sauce (don’t let it boil), taste and season – more pepper, a little butter to bring out the creaminess – and trickle a little over the quartered birds, handing the rest out separately. That’s it. Joyeux Noël!
RESTAURANTS
JAMES PEMBROKE DINNER FOR IMMORTALS
It was inevitable after all this gourmandising: the health check-up everyone dreads.
The appointment with fate; the long walk to the guillotine; the beating of the puritan drums; the tricoteuses, who have just seen off Sidney Carton, knitting a tapestry of my liver and stomach.
I climbed the steps to eternity … when suddenly, the Scarlet Pimpernel, aka Dr MacLaren, whisked me away, singing his diagnosis of my health: ‘Blood pressure: perfect; cholesterol: excellent; liver: very good; kidneys: very good.’
Yes, fellow bons vivants, you might make 120 but I am here for good.
So, with this new mandate, I have been making whoopee … but without breaking the bank. It’s the bistro era. First stop: Rabbit in the King’s Road, part of the Gladwin Brothers’ British farm-tofork empire which includes The Shed off Notting Hill Gate (The Ark to you and me).
Rabbit excels at fun. They even have a Daily Loosener – far more accurate than a ‘stiffener’. My fellow clean livers and I feasted on scallops. (Why are they always ‘hand-dived’? Can it really be possible that British waters are awash with frogmen submerging with scalpels and carrier bags?)
I went for the beetroot-cured trout. Then a perfect-cholesterol rump steak, while my guest devoured most of her venison haunch, allowing me to tidy it up. And then British cheese, helped down with a kidney-delighting Primitivo.
I then took my immortality to Cloth, behind St Bartholomew’s in what must be London’s prettiest acre. This racing-green, candle-lit burrow has justly had glorious reviews. It’s intoxicatingly romantic.
After a half a dozen oysters, we shared delicious trout rillettes (chalk stream, again) before challenging even my perfect blood pressure with an oxtail boudin noir with radicchio. My guest had a plump pork chop, while suggesting I get a second opinion.
‘Maybe they swapped your results with a 12-year-old gymnast’s.’
I suppose I will have to get used to such scepticism. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’ll be mixing negronis at her gathering. My only quibble with this egalitarian hang-out is how can they charge £18 for a 125ml glass of Fiano? Especially now my liver has been given the keys to the city.
And this brings me to the star of the show: Josephine, the new bouchon in Chelsea. It would win ‘People-watching Restaurant of the Year’ hands down. All everyone does is gaze at each other’s lips, an almost religious homage to the Bride of Wildenstein.
We took French Sophie and British Dan with us – not because of their pouts – and we had the best ever night, aided in no small way by the waiter’s telling us they sell their house wine (just £29) ‘au metre’. Yes, they have my favourite ruler: no inches or tiresome centimetres, but ‘une verre, deux verres, trois verres’ etc … to measure the damage done at bill time.
The menu is Lyonnais heaven: Cuisses de grenouilles à l’ail; Oeuf mollet en gelée, Poireaux vinaigrette, Ris de veau aux morilles, Perdreaux aux choux vert, Lapin à la moutarde, Choux farci aux truffes d’automne. They offer a threecourse dinner menu for just £29.50.
We would have made it to the taxi unaided, were it not for their coup de grâce in the shape of a rum baba. Were I mortal, I would die happy there.
DRINK
BILL KNOTT
REVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
Forgotten grape varieties are all the rage these days, in part at least because of the need to find grapes that can withstand the rigours of global warming. Take Carménère, for example – one of the six grape varieties allowed in red Bordeaux. Wiped out by phylloxera in the late-19th century, it was thought too difficult – late-ripening and prone to disease – to bother replanting, and more obliging Merlot and Cabernet Franc vines
generally replaced it. Carménère, so everybody thought, had died an ignominious and unlamented death.
Except that it hadn’t. Exactly 30 years ago, French vine expert Jean-Michel Boursiquot was shown a new Merlot vineyard Viña Carmen had planted in the Alto Maipo Valley in Chile. He spotted that the stamens of the vines’ flowers were twisted, not straight – a defining characteristic of Carménère.
DNA tests proved him correct, and the world quickly realised that many of the wines that had been labelled as Chilean Merlot were at least partly made from Carménère, cuttings of which had been imported from France more than a century before and bundled together with cuttings from Merlot.
Happily, despite some initial consternation amongst wineries that had put huge efforts into making Chilean Merlot an international brand, Carménère is now rightly celebrated as Chile’s most distinctive grape variety. Unwittingly adopted though it may have been, the country now grows more than 80 per cent of the world’s Carménère.
I tried a few of the best examples at a recent dinner hosted by Sebastián Labbé, the talented winemaker at Santa Rita. He believes the herbal, fresh character of Carménère is best preserved by picking early, not super-ripe. This philosophy also drives his excellent Chardonnays from the northern Limari Valley.
Santa Rita’s wines are tricky to find in the UK. But Hedonism Wines (hedonism. co.uk) stocks a clutch of them, including the dense and complex Casa Real, made from 100-per-cent Cabernet Sauvignon, and one of Chile’s very best wines.
And what of the future for Carménère? There are significant plantings in the US, and in Italy. And there are rumours that it will make a return in Bordeaux. Its previously unwanted characteristic of ripening late may well be exactly what winemakers want in the dry, sweltering summers that are now commonplace beside the Gironde.
Trying to maintain Bordeaux’s trademark fresh, balanced and aromatic style is becoming increasingly tricky as temperatures rise. Many of the region’s vignerons are trying to freshen the Bordeaux blend. Plantings of the late-ripening Petit Verdot, for example, have risen dramatically over the last two decades. Both Château Clerc Milon, in Pauillac, and Château Brane-Cantenac, the famous second-growth Margaux, typically feature a splash of Carménère in the blend. Perhaps the lost child of Bordeaux will return as the prodigal son.
For those of you eschewing the self-denial of Dry January, this month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a crisp white from the south of France, a classic Aussie Shiraz and a red from the Dão region that shows just what great value Portugal can offer the discerning wine-drinker. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.
Chants du Closeau Vermentino, Pays d’Oc, France 2023, offer price £9.50, case price £114.00
Fresh, bright, grapefruit-and-greenapple white from Vermentino (aka Rolle): great value.
Big Rivers Shiraz, Murphy Vineyards, Australia 2021, offer price £9.95, case price £119.40 Rich, brambly fruit with a hint of the herbaceous and a hint of spice. One for the Sunday roast.
Dão Tinto ‘Gandarada’, Boas Quintas, Portugal 2022, offer price £10.50, case price £126.00
A winter warmer of a wine: medium- to full-bodied, with ripe tannins and a pleasingly long finish.
Mixed case price £119.60 – a saving of £25.79 (including free delivery)
HOW TO ORDER Call 0117 370 9930 Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk
Quote OLDIE to get your special price. Free delivery to UK mainland. For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 4th February 2025
JIM WHITE
GET YOUR RUNNING KIT OFF
My friend John is a big enthusiast for running naked.
This doesn’t mean he terrifies the neighbourhood by heading out to the park bereft of clothing, delivering a full moon with every stride.
Rather it means leaving his phone behind, not taking his Fitbit or his Garmin Forerunner fitness watch, dispensing of his headphones and just going out running, nude of tech. That, he tells me, is the way to have fun after slipping on your trainers.
Don’t worry about your time, stop checking your heartbeat or pace per minute. Forget about the voice in your ear informing you about your cadence or stride pattern. Strip yourself of nagging data and instead just look at the sky, the trees and the grass. Then, he says, you can better feel the endorphins flow.
He has a point. Going for a run these days involves engaging with Silicon Valley at its most pernicious. When I do my local Saturday-morning parkrun, I am struck by how obsessed everyone is with tech.
Even we oldies, trailing in the wash of the sleek, fit young runners, are fiddling with our watches on the start line, firing up our measuring devices, trying to remember how to access the Strava app.
I have a patch on my arm to hold my mobile, which I plug into some tracking site recording everything I do, from the distance covered to my blood glucose.
When I finish the run, my immediate priority is to check how things have gone. Not how I feel, where I am or where I have been, but seeking technological verification of how I have done.
As with a lot of aspects of our lives, we have become highly dependent on tech to validate our exercise. We use it to scrutinise our every step. We measure and record, comparing our step count and analysing our data. We are in a never-ending pursuit of the personal best, as determined by our devices.
We are addicted to tech. And, in the process, we have lost sight of what we should be doing: enjoying ourselves.
Like many an addiction, the one to tech starts apparently harmlessly. Thousands of oldies have begun our return to exercise thanks to the brilliant Couch to 5k app, promoted by the NHS.
This involves a gently persuasive voice – maybe that of the former Olympian Denise Lewis or the DJ Jo Whiley –slowly encouraging us into a routine by constant prompting. We can’t just go for a run or a walk; we have to be listening
through our headphones to the comedienne Sarah Millican telling us, ‘Now try to jog for two minutes, pet’, rather than taking in what is around us.
We don’t talk to anyone or see what is going on; we become cocooned.
So, encouraged by John’s Luddite evangelism, the other day I decided I too would try this naked running business. It wasn’t easy, not least in the realisation that I would immediately be cutting myself off from the possibility of adding to my daily step count.
But I took a deep breath and left my phone on the kitchen table. Out on my usual route, I found myself noticing things I hadn’t before: the fact there was scaffolding up round my local pub, the progress of the nearby roadworks, the roaring height of the river. I even said hello to a couple of people.
Liberated from my tracking devices, I was less self-obsessed. And, best of all, when I got home I discovered I had missed two calls from the office.
John could be right: there might be something to this naked running business.
MOTORING ALAN JUDD BUDGET SUPERCARS
Alex Robbins of the Daily Telegraph recently did the car-buying public a favour. He wrote about cars that most people want and can afford.
That is, cars that are neither superfast nor super-expensive but are reasonably reliable, with enough room for families and clobber and don’t cost a fortune to run. All – like the great majority of cars traded – are used.
What’s more, they’re SUVs, the sports utility vehicles that have largely superseded estate cars. They’re often referred to dismissively by petrolhead writers because they’re high, upright and capacious and don’t handle or perform like the cars petrolheads like to drive. But they do what very many drivers want.
Robbins surveyed seven models for under £10,000, starting with the SEAT Ateca from 2016. He praised its roomy practicality, its wide-opening doors –which make it easy to belt in children – and its value for money. He recommended the smaller-engined two-wheel drive versions from about £7,000.
The 4WD Kia Sorento of 2010-15 is even roomier, if noisier, and very reliable and comfortable. Its chain-driven 2.2- litre diesel won’t, however, be ULEZ-friendly. Pay from £3,000.
Being a Honda, the 2012-18 CR-V is
very well built, with an excellent reliability record and high-quality interior fittings. The two diesels are frugal; the petrol less so but still good. Prices start at around £4,000 but you’ll probably pay more for a ULEZ-friendly model.
My choice would be the budget-priced 2017-24 Dacia Duster – a robust, good-value, down-to-basics car that does the business without fripperies. Interior plastics won’t be the smartest but the engines are good, the seating comfortable and, by paying from £6,000, you can get a later model than any of the competition.
The Škoda Yeti of 2009-17 is similarly basic and also good value. The flexibility of its seating makes it more capacious than anything else here. It has a good range of petrol and diesel engines and you can pick one up for from about £2,500.
Toyotas are rightly famed for their top-scoring reliability, not to mention their ten-year warranty if they’re serviced by Toyota. The C-HR of 2017-23 should be available with that warranty from about £9,000. It will handle and perform well, but the low, swoopy styling means it offers less room than the others.
I agree with Robbins that the one to avoid is the 2011-18 Range Rover Evoque. These cars handle and drive well, off-road and on, and they’ve proved a life-saving seller for Land Rover, but they’re cramped in the back. Over more than two decades, Land Rover has developed a patchy – high-maintenance, to put it kindly – reliability record, often through over-complicated electronics.
I attended the launch of the Evoque and, given its subsequent popularity, was probably alone in thinking it looks like a squashed fag packet. So much for my entrepreneurial insight.
With all these cars, check first for electronic niggles – handbrakes, warning lights, boot-closing etc – and if it’s a low-mileage diesel that puts out occasional gouts of smoke, suspect a clogged particulate filter.
Check the paperwork and service history – actually read it – and if it’s due a service in the next 2,000-3,000 miles, make that part of the deal. Check tyres, too. A new set can knock you back the best part of a grand.
That said, I’m tempted by a larger proposition than these, a local, one-owner 2010 Volvo XC60 with 68,000 miles and full Volvo history for £8,995. This model is good to drive, reasonably economical, reliable, superbly comfortable and about as safe as cars can be.
The trouble is, we have one the same age but with higher mileage and the cost to change it isn’t worth it. Tempting, though.
Capercaillie
by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd
The capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus) is the largest and most forest-dependent of the grouse family (Tetraonidae). The name ‘capercaillie’ is an anglicisation of the Gaelic capull coille, ‘horse of the woods’ – from a ‘trot’ sound in the cock’s elaborate mating call.
Today in perilous decline (with a population of 542), it is confined to the Cairngorms National Park. Nevertheless, what native bird could do more splendid justice to Christmas than the turkeycomparable cock ‘caper’ (pronounced ‘capper’)? It weighs up to a stone.
Capers prefer pine forests; the hen’s plumage blends with the ground where it nests. In this, it resembles the black grouse – the black cock’s mate is wellnamed a grey hen. The similarity of the hen caper – half the size of its mate – to the grey hen has occasionally led to black cock/hen caper hybrids.
The parlous state of Britain’s capers is not unprecedented. Once widely distributed, by the 19th century they were extinct. The 1830s saw the bird reintroduced, thanks to a Quaker sporting writer, Llewellyn Lloyd, who lived in Sweden.
He knew captured capers could be bred and suggested their re-introduction in coniferous Scotland, their final British abode. His friend Sir Thomas Buxton, kinsman of John Buxton (1927-2014), re-introducer of the crane, persuaded Lord Breadalbane to breed capers from Sweden on his Perthshire estate. Caper introductions on Highland sporting estates became fashionable. The record bag remains 150 at Kincardine in 1908.
From this peak there has been a steady decline, primarily due to the loss of sporting estates caused by both world wars, and widespread commercial forestry, with capers preferring heathery woods. In berry-free winter and spring, their diet is the leader buds of conifers.
Cocks can also be threateningly
territorial. In Mark Cocker’s Birds Britannica, a photograph shows one assaulting a manned Land Rover. Foresters shot cock capers as pests for both attacking vehicles and damaging conifers. Even in the 1960s, when a 20,000 population still made capers a legitimate sporting bird, one could buy them at Harrods food hall.
In Britain, the caper was shot, driven by beaters from winter woods. On the Continent, it is still legally stalked in spring by a single hunter with a rifle at dawn – as the notoriously wary cock, perched in a tree and momentarily self-deafened, utters its mating call.
As Sir Francis Lindley wrote (A Diplomat Off Duty, 1928), capers are polygamous – so spring shooting of cocks does not reduce the stock. Moreover, in
Britain, game-shooting is primarily a test of marksmanship. On the Continent, the stalk is the ultimate test. Lindley described the excitement of darknessdeepened silence and purer dawning air; the thrill of the peculiar call; and the stealth required to arrive close enough to the caper’s tree in the dim light to be sure of a shot.
Latest British research reveals that a fall in the vole population leaves capers endangered by hungry foxes and pine martens. The reintroduction of the latter is a source of pride to conservationists.
Swoop Sing Perch Paddle by Carry Akroyd and John McEwen (Bloomsbury) is available at www.theoldie.co.uk/ readers-corner/shop. The 2025 calendar is available at carryakroyd.co.uk
Matthew Webster: Digital Life Embrace the Ghost of Internet Future
At Christmas, the Ghost of Internet Past sweeps me back to 1997 – when I first connected myself to cyberspace.
It was at home; not at work. The large company I worked for at the time did not have a website. We didn’t use email; none of us had a computer.
I dictated letters to my secretary, who typed them up on what we quaintly called a ‘word processor’, put them into an envelope and posted them.
Motorbike couriers roared around,
Webwatch
For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk
White Christmas askwebster.co.uk/white-christmas
An annual treat – Father Christmas and his reindeer singing the only version of White Christmas worth listening to.
The history of Christmas english-heritage.org.uk/christmas/ the-history-of-christmas/ From English Heritage – Christmas through the ages, starting 5,000 years ago.
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
taking documents to lawyers and clients, people still rang each other up – and we even used foolscap paper.
The ghost might also remind me of the sense of rather chaotic idealism that suffused the internet in those days (few adverts; no ‘influencers’). We naively thought it would lead to the refinement of humanity by the sharing of all human knowledge.
Then the Ghost of Internet Present would show me the reality, good and bad: hugely improved access to the internet, Wi-Fi, films on demand, families separated by thousands of miles able to see each other as easily as if they were next door.
Sadly, I’d also be shown data-driven social-media sites poisoning minds; algorithms deciding what we should see; people being attacked online by anonymous thugs; whole families disappearing into their phones rather than engaging with one another; and Bob Cratchit unable to afford the technology his children need at school.
Then the dread Ghost of Internet Future appears. Dickens’s version was a forbidding figure, and I think mine might very well be just as bleak. The ghost might lead me through streets lit only by the glow from phones, in a world where every action is monitored, recorded and stored, and where this data is bought and sold with scant regard for the consequences.
It might be a world where all entertainment and literature is
autogenerated by soulless artificialintelligence machines, where memories of human joy, community and creativity are fading fast from the collective consciousness.
I might then be shown a graveyard filled with my own obsolete technology and forgotten computer programmes, in the shadow of huge, blind warehouses that contain the computers on which all the world’s data is stored; warehouses that are behemoths bestriding the land like an occupying army, gradually soaking up all the available energy and leaving humans shivering.
Now, despite this unhappy prospect, be of good cheer; the Ghost of Internet Future shows us only what might be, not what will be.
In the end, the human spirit will triumph, even if it takes a little time and encouragement, as Scrooge needed.
We should wake up on Christmas morning with a mission to do what we can to encourage proper use of the many benefits of the cyberworld; to make excessive screen time as unacceptable as smoking; to place a true value on privacy and above all to encourage off-line gatherings in the real world.
They are a human necessity and will be the key to our avoiding the dreadful prospect the ghost showed me.
So I wish you a merry, hopeful and, as far as possible, off-line Christmas, enjoyed in person with as many friends and family as you can, and a happy New Year.
Neil Collins: Money Matters
Gold, the barbarous currency
Quick: which dollar bill is most numerous?
If you answered $1, you were not paying attention. The commonest dollar bill is the $100. The US Treasury has printed 19 billion of them. In the past ten years – the decade that saw increasing replacement of paper money by electronic transfer – the total outstanding has doubled. So what’s going on?
Simply, the $100 bill has become the world’s cash currency. For anyone from drug dealers to arms salesmen, despots to petty fraudsters, it is a convenient
blend of value, anonymity and portability. More than four out of every five Bens, these scraps of paper bearing the portrait of Benjamin Franklin, are held outside the US. You may even have a few yourself, in case your plastic lets you down when you’re abroad.
It all adds up to an interest-free, irredeemable $1.5 trillion loan to Uncle Sam from the rest of the world, giving the US an invaluable competitive advantage everywhere. Unsurprisingly, the rest of the world resents this, and every now
and then groups of countries get together to try to find other ways to trade and hold reserves.
In October, these countries met in Kazan, in Russia. Between them, they accounted for 37 per cent of world GDP, compared with 29 per cent for the G7 countries.
Of course, there is an alternative world currency, that barbarous relic – gold. It’s nothing like as convenient as the bundle of Bens, but since it can’t be printed, it can’t be counterfeited. In theory, the
price should go down as interest rates rise, since it pays no income. In 2024, though, it shot up. Indeed, it has quintupled in the last decade.
Predicting future price movements has confounded experts for centuries. At least part of the latest rise has been from the central banks in the countries meeting in Kazan, apprehensive about
the power of America to try and cut their countries out of world trade.
The rise also reflects the financial incontinence of successive US administrations, which have behaved as if they believe they can just keep printing money without limit.
For us non-bankers, the best way to think about gold is to view it as an insurance
The Oldie Trip to
Seville & Andalucia
policy. As a store of value, it will outlast the greenback – but jewellery is a poor policy, since the gold content may only be a fraction of the purchase price.
The Royal Mint sells sovereigns at a fixed mark-up to the bullion content, and they are widely traded. They are not as pretty as a gold necklace, but, after all, they serve a different purpose.
With Huon Mallalieu 7th to 13th November 2025
Seville is the warmest city in Europe – the perfect destination for a holiday that combines late-autumn sunshine with delicious food, exquisite local wines and fascinating history, art and architecture. We shall sample traditionally produced sherries in the bodegas of Jerez and visit historic cities including Seville, Cordoba, Ronda, Jerez and Cadiz – as well as enjoying a private flamenco performance.
Our base is the award-winning Hacienda de San Rafael, once a thriving olive estate, now meticulously converted.
This privately owned 18th-century hideaway is perfectly positioned between Seville and Jerez de la Frontera and has views of the Andalusian plains.
Rooms are laid out around a courtyard, and there are extensive gardens with an outdoor swimming pool as well as a cosy lounge and dining room where we will dine each evening with host – and owner of the Hacienda – Anthony Reid Mora-Figueroa.
Friday 7th November – arrival
Depart London Gatwick for our flight to Seville. We will be met and transferred to the Hacienda de San Rafael.
Saturday 8th November – Seville
This morning we will be collected at the Hacienda and taken into the centre of Seville where we will enjoy a walking
tour of the old city centre with an expert local guide. We will pause for lunch at a tapas bar and explore much of the Barrio Santa Cruz district, as well as the Giralda, the Cathedral and the Alcázar. Dinner at the Hacienda.
Sunday 9th November – Ronda
We start our day at the oldest bullring in Spain, where our guide will explain the origins and evolution of bullfighting in Spain. We’ll walk around the old town to get an overview of the Hispanic-Muslim origins of the city. Later we’ll return to the Hacienda for some free time and dinner.
Monday 10th November – Jerez
Tour of the city’s old town: we learn about its Hispanic-Muslim origins and the city’s transformations first with the Christian conquest in the 13th century, and later in
the 18th and 19th centuries, when the local wines became probably the most fashionable drinks in the world. After visiting the local market, we will have a tasting in a sherry bodega. Dinner at the Hacienda.
Tuesday 11th November – Córdoba
We will visit the stunning Mezquita – a vast mosque so cavernous that it conceals an entire church within its colonnaded hall. We will also visit the synagogue and the baroque Casa de las Bulas de la Santa Cruzada, which now houses the Bullfighting Museum on Plaza Maimónides, and stop for lunch at a local restaurant. We return to the Hacienda after lunch.
Wednesday 12th November – Cadiz
We will see the city’s colonial defensive architecture and focus on the foundation of the city by the Phoenicians 3,000 years ago, and its monopoly of trade with the Americas. In the afternoon we return to the Hacienda, where we will enjoy a private flamenco performance in the garden before dinner.
Thursday 13th November – Departure
After breakfast we shall return to Seville airport for the flight home.
HOW TO BOOK: Call Kirker Holidays on 020 7593 2284, or email oldie@kirkerholidays.com.
Price per person: £4,785, which includes return flights, six nights' accommodation with breakfast, six lunches and dinners with wine at local restaurants , all sightseeing, entrance fees and gratuities and the services of the tour lecturer. Single supplement: £968. A non-refundable deposit of £500 will be required, with the full balance due on 28th July 2025.
Above: Seville Cathedral
Right: Hacienda de San Rafael
Travel
King of the Road
Norman Lewis was the doyen of travel writers, says John Hatt, his friend, publisher and editor of a new collection
After I had founded the publisher Eland in 1982, with the purpose of reviving exceptional travel literature, my earliest ambition was to bring Norman Lewis (1908-2003) to a wider readership.
Therefore Eland’s first publication was A Dragon Apparent, his wonderful account of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia before those nations were engulfed in the Vietnam war, originally published in 1951.
I went on to republish what I considered to be Norman’s three other best books: Golden Earth (originally published 1952), The Honoured Society (1964) and Naples ’44 (1978).
When in 1981 I bought the world English-language rights in perpetuity for A Dragon Apparent, Norman’s stock had fallen so low that they were sold to me for £250. And when his agent sold me those rights, he never told me that they were also available for Norman’s masterpiece, Naples ’44
Three ingredients are necessary for an author to be great. To use a well-worn metaphor – from the era of gambling on fruit machines – you need all three lemons in a row to hit the jackpot. With two lemons, the author may write an adequate book, but for a book to be great, all three lemons must swing into view. What are these three lemons?
The first is obvious: content. Many
travel writers manage only one good book, at the most. And if it is a successful book, their subsequent ones are all too often the result of discussion with a publisher who is eager for a subsequent success. The writers may have no genuine communication with the
people they travel among –perhaps because they are constantly on the move, or because they don’t speak the language, or because their curiosity isn’t sufficient. Too often, their prime reason for travelling is solely to produce a book.
Norman was the very opposite: his addiction to travel preceded any idea of writing about his journeys. In his foreword to The Changing Sky (1959), he wrote, ‘Travel came before writing. There was a time when I felt that all I wanted from life was to be allowed to remain a perpetual spectator of changing scenes. I managed my meagre supply of money so as to be able to surrender myself as much as possible to this addiction; and charged with a wonderful ignorance I went abroad by third-class train, country bus, on foot, by canoe, by tramp steamer, and by Arab dhow.
‘When I began to write, it was probably, at least in part, an attempt to imprison some essence of the experiences, the images which were always slipping, fading, dissolving, taking flight.’
The second lemon is the possession of
Norman Lewis, 22, and his boat-shaped Bugatti Type 30, 1930
a literary gene – something that is, so to speak, God-given, rather than learnt. Even a combination of cleverness and hard work can’t guarantee writing that sings.
Take academics: although mostly clever, they can rarely produce prose that is a pleasure to read. And if one of their number succeeds in writing a bestseller, the others get crazed with jealousy.
Of course, Norman was a painstaking writer, who wrote almost every morning of his life, but he had an innate skill that was dazzling.
Naples '44_13.5 16/03/2016 17:06 Page 1
One sign of a born writer is their use of metaphor – a metaphor that manages vividly to sum up a concept, without being strained.
Consider Norman’s description of a Latin American tyranny: ‘The Paraguayan dictatorship had not been above sending planes and tanks to kill a hundred or so, but for the moment it had fallen like a digesting crocodile into a kind of watchful inactivity.’
Left: a Ghanaian chief’s retinue, taken by Lewis. Below: his most famous book, Naples ’44
journeys. Norman formed notably warm and strong bonds with all his accompanying photographers (with the sole exception of Lord Snowdon).
One aspect of character is what one might call soul. Soul overlaps with empathy but it is something more. Perhaps it also overlaps with another hard-to-define word, duende, so cherished by Lorca, Norman’s favourite poet.
I can think of travel writers who produce elegant, impeccable prose, but their cold heart or mundane brain results in a lack of soul, which means they produce books that are adequate, sometimes admirable, but never great. Thirty years after publication, they will mostly be forgotten.
But Norman did have soul, and when, for instance, he writes about genocide in South America, the reader can sense that this isn’t mere journalism; he is motivated by a fiery passion.
So the three lemons for writing to be great are content, inherent writing skill and the author’s character. These are essentials. Now let me mix the metaphor – as Norman would never have done –and claim that the three lemons are the ingredients of a cake, and add two cherries to decorate its icing.
‘Two lean, hip-swinging American soldiers, sharing a bottle of wine, passed down the street, and the girl at the table looked up and followed them with her eyes until they turned the corner and disappeared from sight.’
NORMANLEWIS
Naples ’44
The third lemon, as intangible as the literary gene, is the character of the writer. So much of writing is ultimately autobiographical, whether camouflaged or overt. In Norman’s case, his wisdom, passion and wit shine through.
A revealing test of character is the relationship between travel writers and their photographers, which can often be fraught, especially during testing
Norman Lewis arrived in war-torn Naples as an intelligence officer in 1944. The starving population had devoured all the tropical fish in the aquarium, respectable women had been driven to prostitution and the black market was king. Lewis found little to admire in his fellow soldiers, but gained sustenance from the extraordinary vivacity of the Italians around him – the lawyer who earned his living by bringing a touch of Roman class to funerals, the gynaecologist who specialised in the restoration of lost virginity, and the widowed housewife who timed her British lover against the clock. ‘Were I given the chance to be born again,’ writes Lewis, ‘Italy would be the country of my choice.’
The first cherry is Norman’s magnificent sense of humour. It is easy to miss because his humour is often subtle, deadpan, dry and sometimes nearly invisible; but it is there on almost every page – even the darkest ones.
‘One goes on reading page after page as if eating cherries’ luigi barzini new york review of books
‘reads like prose, but sings like poetry’ cleveland plain dealer
‘Norman Lewis is one of the greatest of twentieth-centuryBritish writers and Naples ’44 is his masterpiece.’ will self
ISBN 978-090787172-9 Travel/Italy
uk price £12.99
The second is his acute power of observation. Norman’s son Gawaine, who travelled with him along the Sumatran coast, was astounded by what his father noticed on a
journey that Gawaine had considered unfruitful; even boring. I had my own similar experience.
Norman once told me that he was going on a holiday with his wife, Lesley, to Andalusia. Because I had recently made a similar trip, I advised them to visit an unusual nobleman’s castle that was open to the public. When Norman returned, he described his visit to the castle with such vividness that I felt ashamed by how much I had failed to notice.
Ian Fleming spotted Norman’s power of observation, and in a BBC conversation with Raymond Chandler said, ‘Norman Lewis has got an extraordinary visual eye. Photography is one of his main hobbies and he’s got this astonishingly clear eye for detail and situation. A very remarkable man.’
Another striking aspect of this anthology is Norman’s unbeatable range.
Can any other travel writer compete with this man who interviews Castro’s executioner, investigates bandits in Sardinia, exposes genocide in Brazil, issues one of the earliest warnings of a climate calamity, lampoons tourism in Panama, provokes Ernest Hemingway in Havana and spends whole summers among the fishermen in a still-traditional Ibiza?
Julian Evans interviewed me for his biography of Norman. This is what I said:
‘I had these long, long telephone calls with Norman. He was the master of the fruitful telephone conversation; there would always be interesting or wise things to come out of it. He was one of the most remarkable people I ever met.
Naples ’44
An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth NORMAN LEWIS
‘I think that often one’s interest in somebody or affection, or whatever, can be gauged by how often you say to yourself, “Oh I’d like to tell some particular person that; it would interest them or make them laugh or they would be able to top it with something interesting themselves.”
‘And very, very often I thought I must tell Norman something. He was completely unlike anybody I had ever known, and a tremendous addition to my life.’
John Hatt is the editor of A Quiet Evening: The Travels of Norman Lewis (Eland Classic), published on 16th January 2025
Norman Lewis Naples ’44
John
Humphrys’s youth in Cardiff was scarred by poverty, his father’s blindness and his baby sister’s death
A Welsh elegy
Ah … the smells of childhood.
Twice a week, the bread baking gently in the oven. On Sunday mornings, the promise of the slowly roasting leg of lamb. In summer, fresh strawberries. And, every evening, the joy of bedtime cuddles with my sweet-smelling mother.
So much for the dream. The reality?
My own mother was about as likely to bake bread as she was to settle down with Proust while the butler uncorked the ’47 Château Lafite. A sporadic income, five kids and an absence of luxuries such as vacuum cleaners or washing machines do not permit leisure. And anyway I never saw her read. Ever.
The fruit was only what was in season: preferably the apples we kids stole on forays into the posh areas of Cardiff, where they had gardens and walls you could climb over. We weren’t often caught. Our meat was mostly the scrag end of neck. Cheap and delicious after many, many hours of boiling and it had a lovely smell.
But it was the rather less lovely smells by which my childhood was defined.
My mother was a hairdresser; she did the neighbours’ haircuts and perms. It didn’t exactly pay for fine wine but it helped. The drawback was the ammonia stench from the perm lotion – as harmful as it was unpleasant. I’m convinced it destroyed Mam’s lungs over the years and contributed to her early death.
Sometimes the perm smell was overpowered by the fumes from the acid crystals my father boiled in a bakedbeans tin on the stove. He needed it because he was a French polisher and the standard ‘stripper’ was sometimes not powerful enough to return the wood to its original colour. It, too, was vile and probably even more harmful.
The kitchen was not just where my parents worked. It was also where we washed, ate and lived. It could have done with being a bit bigger – especially when Dad had a piano to polish. He dealt with this by dismantling it, separating every single individual bit (try counting them)
and assembling them again after they’d been stripped of their old polish and re-polished. I think multi-skilled was an appropriate description for him.
Multi-skilled and tough.
He went blind when he was a small boy. Like most kids in those pre-vaccine days, he got measles. Every mother knew the golden rule: you had to be kept at home in a room with the curtains drawn, because bright light could damage the optic nerve.
But when his mother popped out, Dad escaped to throw snowballs – how could he resist? He paid a terrible price.
Though his sight never fully recovered, which stopped him driving, it didn’t stop him working. He used Mam’s eyes to tell him whether he’d got the colours right.
He was self-employed because he’d been sacked from his job after
completing his apprenticeship. At the end of his first week, he punched the foreman on the nose. He was never employed again.
Dad was a Tory, which was odd. He hated trade unions but hated the upper class and the monarchy more. If he was told to use the servants’ entrance when he showed up to do a job at a very posh house, he would walk away.
He was the only person in our street who didn’t go to watch the Queen drive by when she visited Cardiff. And he walked out of the Tory club when he showed up one night and the only vacant seat was beneath the obligatory portrait of the Queen. He refused to sit in it and was thrown out. He never went back.
Christine was my little sister. My big sister Anne worshipped her. She was her baby.
I learned that something bad had
happened to her on a Friday – a special day because we were sometimes allowed fish and chips from the chip shop for dinner. Not ‘lunch’. Only the posh had ‘lunch’.
I had been sent to the chip shop and when I got back, a car was parked outside our house. A vanishingly rare sight. It was the doctor’s.
He had come to tell my parents that Christine was dead at seven months. I missed his announcement by a few minutes. And, anyway, at the age of five, death isn’t really something you can grasp. Is it ever?
What puzzled me was that nobody showed any interest in the fish and chips and they were growing cold. And that my mother’s lovely black hair went white almost literally overnight.
Had I been old enough, I would have been outraged that my parents were not at Christine’s bedside to hold her hand when she breathed her last. She’d had gastroenteritis, which was not a killer disease, but obviously something had gone horribly wrong with her treatment.
Yet the hospital had not thought to tell my parents that she was critically ill and so they would be allowed to see her outside the official visiting hour.
You’ll have gathered by now that I have always deeply resented our poverty; call me pathetic – I resent it still. Those who talk about its so-called ‘dignity’ should be dealt with the way my father dealt with his foreman.
The dignity of poverty is a myth and always has been. It is at best degrading and at worst brutal.
Not that my father would have accepted what he regarded as charity from the state.
Many of our neighbours – some
John, 23, reports from Aberfan after the disaster killed 116 children and 28 adults, 1966
John’s parents, George & Winifred; Catherine & Christopher, his children. Washington, 1975
of them even worse off than we were –would receive frequent visits from ‘the man from the welfare’ with his clipboard and sneer (real or imagined), but our threshold he was never allowed to cross.
I remember one neighbour – a war widow – telling my mother the welfare man had read her the riot act for wasting money. He’d spotted four chairs at her kitchen table, even though she had only two kids – so she needed only three.
Dad gave me my first (unpaid) job when I was ten: pushing leaflets through the letter boxes of posh houses advertising his availability as a French polisher.
But there was light in this gloom. Perhaps because they’d had almost none themselves, my parents understood that education mattered and Mam made us kids do homework. Every night.
And it paid off when we sat the eleven-plus. I managed to get into the best grammar school in Cardiff. I hated it – largely because it was boys only and very posh (we were required to doff our caps to ladies in the street) and I was the poorest kid in my year.
The head, George Diamond, seemed not to like poor kids. He once beat me for being late – even though I explained that I’d had to do my usual paper round before school and the man who delivered the papers to the shop had been delayed getting to the shop because of heavy snow overnight.
He was not impressed when I told him we needed the money I earned.
I left school at 15 and got my very modest revenge on him a few years later when the school invited me to make the speech at the annual prize-giving day.
By then, I had a modicum of fame because I was on the telly. I wrote back, accepting the invitation, and helpfully
outlined what I planned to say about Mr Diamond in my speech. The invitation was withdrawn. Holidays were rare and brief –perhaps a week in a boarding house. As for going abroad: unthinkable.
But when I was posted to New York by the BBC and earning lots of money, I brought my parents out to stay and then, years later when I was in South Africa, I took them there too.
Even before they landed they had been struck dumb.
Because of apartheid sanctions, passengers flying to Johannesburg had to switch to South African Airways in Rhodesia, South Africa’s only friend in the region. A jumbo jet was waiting – the first my parents had ever seen.
It was almost empty, and the lovely crew insisted they move into first class. They had it to themselves. They never stopped talking about it.
The dignity of poverty is a myth. It is at best degrading and at worst brutal
But their trips almost got them into big trouble. I learned about it from my mother’s closest friend many years later.
Because he was self-employed, Dad obviously had to send in a tax return every year, telling the Inland Revenue how much he had earned.
He was a scrupulously honest man, and all was fine until the day he and Mam (who kept his books) were summoned before an inspector. The great man sat behind his large desk, my parents in front of him on hard-backed chairs. There were no pleasantries.
‘Is this really the total of your earnings?’ he barked.
‘Yes.’
‘But we are informed you have been making hugely expensive foreign trips. Explain!’
My usually timid mother stood up.
She said, ‘Our son is John Humphrys, the one on the television, and he paid for them!’
She told her friend later it was the proudest moment of her life.
I hope she knew it was she who made it possible.
John Humphrys presented the Today programme, 1987-2019
Portuguese Potter
In Porto, J K Rowling created a young wizard. James Pembroke follows in their footsteps
In 1974, the Carnation Revolution took place in Portugal. The signal for the tanks to go in was the opening bars of their entry in the Eurovision Song Contest. It’s impossible not to love a country like that.
Aside from visits to the Algarve, Lisbon and the Douro Valley, my experience of the country was scant. Spain has always overshadowed it, almost blocking entry. But a recent Oldie trip to northern Portugal convinced me that this gentle nation of just over ten million souls is more subtle and much more beautiful. And, often, surreal.
The Carnation Revolution was typical of the peaceful nature of the Portuguese, who sidestepped both world wars. As dictators went in the last century, António Salazar (1889-1970), who ruled from 1932 to 1968, was the least murderous among his fellow monsters.
This former economics professor at
Coimbra University’s main ambition was to balance the books.
He often managed a budget surplus, thus starving the country of the loans it needed to develop. Such stagnation incited mass emigration. Even now, the average wage is 800 euros a month.
Unlike Franco, the ascetic Salazar for the most part referred to exile his opponents to the delights of East Timor or Cape Verde, rather than exterminate them. That said, his secret police (the PIDE), were ultra-efficient at quelling dissent, not least the opposition candidate in the 1958 elections, Humberto Delgado, who turned up dead seven years later.
He distanced himself from Nazism
Above: Livraria Lello bookshop, Porto. Its architecture is said to have inspired the Harry Potter bookshop, Flourish and Botts
and fascism, which he described as ‘pagan Caesarism’. His pro-Semitic regime was instrumental in issuing Portuguese travel documents to hundreds of thousands of Jews and other refugees fleeing through Europe.
The tradition of protecting the afflicted goes back to the 14th century. Then, instead of persecuting the Templars after their order was dissolved by the Pope in 1312, the King allowed them to re-establish themselves as the Order of Christ. Subsequent kings, including Henry the Navigator, were its Grand Masters.
Much to the benefit of sightseers like us, medieval towns such as Coimbra, Guimarães and Braga were preserved, owing to emigration, desertion and Salazar’s dislike of concrete.
Olá, Harry Potter!
Back in 1991, Porto was the perfect escape for an unhappy would-be writer J K Rowling arrived that November as a language teacher. By the time she left two years later, she had a draft of Harry Potter in her suitcase.
What she’s less willing to admit is that a great deal of her inspiration came from her sojourn in this often bizarre country. And I am not just talking about the wicked co-founder of Hogwarts, Salazar Slytherin.
Porto is a little ambivalent about JK, now that a cup of coffee in the Majestic Café, where she wrote, costs €6.
It’s absurd that she denies ever having visited Porto’s Livraria Lello, the most Gothic bookshop in the world, a template for her own Flourish and Botts, where Harry Potter’s parents bought his books.
It must be the only bookshop in the world that can charge an entry fee of €8, confident this won’t deter its 3,0005,000 daily visitors.
The Belomonte broom shop waits to be credited with being the inspiration for Broomstix and Quality Quidditch Supplies on Diagon Alley. And what of the Casa Escondida, sandwiched between the Church of Carmel and the Church of the Carmelites? It has to be the inspiration for 12 Grimmauld Place, Sirius Black’s hidden family home which serves as the headquarters for the Order of the Phoenix. It was forbidden to build churches bang next door to each other –so the architects built a very tall house between, which is only three feet wide.
The Biblioteca Joanina at the 13thcentury University of Coimbra might just be the most beautiful university library in the world. It’s a baroque fantasy, with sky-high gold-embossed shelves where bats are encouraged to live on a diet of insects. There’s also a little door for cats to enter to kill any book-eating mice.
Life was tough for students, even after 1769, when Latin stopped being the lingua franca. Until 1834, they could be sent to the prison below the library for anything –mainly for being students, ie being out after the 6pm curfew, missing or arriving late for class, cheating or
declaring against the university or he royal family. I fear Sebastian Flyte and Anthony Blanche would have served the maximum term of six months.
You won’t be amazed to learn that the uniform of all Portuguese students (the capa e batina) is a Hogwartian floor-length black gown, white shirt and black tie.
‘Portugal was born here,’ boasts the welcome sign to the absurdly pretty town of Guimarães, 20 miles north of Porto.
Here the first king of Portugal, Afonso Henriques, was born in 1110. Until then, Portucale was a distant and obstreperous county in the Kingdom of Léon. But, after the battle of São Mamede, near Guimarães, in 1128, in which Afonso defeated his own mother, he declared himself king of this new country.
His castle, which was the bedroom of Catherine of Braganza, is the town’s pride but not its joy – which can be found in the endless little squares of lopsided coloured houses, often embossed with shields. No other country does medieval with such gaiety.
Turning its back on Spain, Portugal decided to look west out to the Americas. In 1494, with the Treaty of Tordesillas, their maritime prowess allowed them to split the world in two with Spain. Four years later, Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape to India, giving the Portuguese a monopoly in the spice trade.
Ships returned to Lisbon and Porto full of gold, silver and spices, which financed the building of towns, such as lovely Braga, which has 35 churches rammed into its Roman walls.
More importantly, there was still enough gold to pay for the embellishments of the CounterReformation in the 17th century.
Braga Cathedral alone has a working, heavily gilded, double Iberian pipe organ, with horizontal as well as vertical pipes. Even the nearby Benedictine monasteries of Tibães and Bom Jesus, with its external Baroque staircase, are extravagantly endowed.
It’s not unfair to say that the menus of central and southern Spain are identical. Same old albondigas; just priced differently. After 12 years, old friends of mine recently moved from Andalusia to near Lisbon and are astonished at the variety of the menus and the quality of the seafood.
We had lunch in the old port of Viana do Castelo in the sort of melodramatic rainstorm only the Atlantic can throw up. We feasted on the best seafood lunch of the year, at Tasquinha da Linda, in a converted fisherman’s hut. The clams were the sweetest and largest I have ever known. Happily, we were forced to shelter (with wine) for hours.
And this is the other miracle of Portugal. Cast aside memories of sickly hangovers caused by port, sales of which are declining so fast that the Portuguese are desperately trying to market white port as a cocktail. The lunar Douro Valley is fast turning its vineyards over to still wine. And it’s incredibly good quality at very low prices.
It is truly a country of spells. Sadly, it has all the makings of a fashionable destination.
James Pembroke is author of Growing Up in Restaurants: The Story of Eating Out in Britain from 55BC to Nowadays
Right: Afonso Henriques, first King of Portugal. Far right: Nossa Senhora da Oliveira Church, Largo da Oliveira, Guimarães
Portuguese students in their Potteresque gowns. Right: Braga Cathedral
Overlooked Britain
Fit for a Cornish Pharaoh
The Egyptian House, Penzance, was built in 1835, at the height of the British obsession with ancient Egypt
lucinda lambton
The Egyptian revival style was the most daring and the most dashing of all the architectural oddities that raged through 19th-century Britain.
And rage they did, from Piccadilly to Penzance. The Egyptian House is one of the most appealing buildings in the country ever to have been created.
All of them were built with the marvellously full-whack glory of the oddities of the style, along with its splendid colours and contours.
The Egyptian House was built in 1835. It was almost an exact copy of London’s 1812 version – only fractionally less flamboyant – which stood bang in the
Top and opposite: the Egyptian House, Penzance (1835), was modelled on (above right) the one in Piccadilly (1812)
middle of the capital. In London, the window frames were sprinkled with hieroglyphs, with two naked figures, Isis and Osiris, standing over lotus columns. In Penzance, there are two draped female busts on plinths. Quite a glorious pair!
Piranesi brought the Egyptian style to
architectural attention in the mid-18th century. It was to become popular during the next 50 years. James Playfair and Joseph Gandy, influenced by antiquities in Rome, were by the 1790s using Egyptian motifs, with Gandy even suggesting ‘pyramids for pigs, poultry and their keepers’.
Thomas Hope popularised the taste in an elegant Egyptian room in his house in London, which he opened to a discerning public in 1804.
With Napoleon’s campaigns in Egypt, the fashion was fuelled in umpteen directions.
Robert Southey wrote, complaining of the craze in 1807, ‘At present, as the soldiers from Egypt have brought home with them broken limbs and ophthalmia, they carry an arm in a sling or walk the streets with a green shade over their eyes.
‘Everything must be Egyptian: the ladies wear crocodile ornaments and you sit upon a sphinx in a room hung round with mummies and the long, black, lean-armed, long-nosed, hieroglyphical men who are enough to make the children go to bed.
‘The very shopboards must be metamorphosed into the mode and painted in Egyptian letters, which as the Egyptians had no letters you will doubtless conceive must be curious. The strokes are of equal thickness so that those that should be thin look as if they had elephantiasis.’
The Rosetta Stone, which broke the hieroglyphic code, was not to be deciphered for another 15 years.
Egyptian was thought to be a barbaric style by many and, very sadly, few of its buildings have survived to this day.
The severely sober Temple Mill in Marshall Street, Leeds, is still standing. Designed by Joseph Bonomi in 1838 and based on the temple in the Egyptian city of Edfu, it had the particularly rare element of sheep being kept grazing on its roof – most marvellously convenient for the flax-spinning mill.
There were, though, I fear, occasional and terrible accidents – such as when the creatures crashed through one of the 66 glass domes on the roof on to the working machinery below.
There were other and glorious Egyptian buildings in the country. But it is the Egyptian House in Penzance that sings its original song so well.
It was beautifully restored in 1968 by the Landmark Trust. Both London’s and
Two draped female busts on plinths –quite a glorious pair!
The Temple of Hathor, Dendera, Egypt, inspired the Egyptian style in Britain
Penzance’s Egyptian houses were inspired by the Temple of Hathor at Dendera. With their great coved cornices, winged discs and lotus columns, all of them blazing forth from their elegantly tapering façades, they personified the splendid Regency dreams of Egypt.
Most important, with its grandiose presence heralded by two giant black cats, is the former Carreras Cigarette Factory in Camden. It still looms large
over the road near Mornington Crescent tube station in London.
Here were created the first machinemade cigarettes in the land. Set back on its own driveway, it was easy to admire as you negotiated yourself away from the traffic.
Then there is the East Farleigh Waterworks, originally the Maidstone Waterworks, with its slanting Egyptian walls.
Then there is the Carlton Cinema, Islington – another beautifully-built affair with a quantity of Egyptian detailing. It was built in 1930 by George Coles and has now been transformed into a church.
In other words, there is a veritable showcase of Egyptian architectural finery – invariably a joy to behold.
Join us for a tour of
Madrid, Toledo and environs
With
Gerard McCullough
Gerard McCullough, who has lived in Spain for 25 years, has devised his dream trip of Madrid and Toledo, and will take us to his favourite tapas bars and restaurants. We will spend four nights in Madrid and three nights in Toledo, the former capital, and visit the iconic Manchego windmills and the 14th-century town of Chinchón.
All this will be accompanied by excellent food and paired wines as part of our foray into central Spain.
Full itinerary at www.theoldie.co.uk/ courses-tours
Wednesday 1st October – depart Depart London Gatwick with BA flight BA7195. We drive to our hotel, the Villa Real, located next to Congress, opposite the Prado and close to the buzz of the Santa Ana square. Tour of the historic centre, starting in the Letras neighbourhood.
Thursday 2nd October – Prado and Naval museums and Royal Tapestry Factory Morning tour of museums; local taperia lunch; afternoon tapestry-factory visit.
1st to 8th October 2024
Above: Madrid skyline
Right: Hacienda del Cardenal
Friday 3rd October – ThyssenBornemisza and the Reina Sofia
Sunday 5th October – Villa Real, Aranjuez and a winery
A guided visit of the Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Reina Sofia to see Picasso’s Guernica, and works by Dalí, Miró and others. On to the Liria Palace, close to the hotel. Saturday 4th October – the Museum of America, Casa Botín and flamenco
We dine tonight at Casa Botín, the world’s oldest continuously open restaurant. After dinner, we head to our favourite flamenco tablao, Las Carboneras, to enjoy spontaneous music and dance.
We head south to the 12th-century town and World Heritage Site of Aranjuez. We visit El Regajal winery, set on a butterfly reserve, then enjoy a superb late lunch at Carême, overlooking the Palace gardens. We go on to Toledo and check in to the Hacienda del Cardenal, a 15th-century residence of Cardinal Lorenzana in the 19th century. Local tapas dinner.
Monday 6th October – Toledo
A tour of the former capital.
Tuesday 7th October – La Mancha
Today we head to Consuegra, then on to a local cheesemaker and the village of Tembleque before returning to Toledo. Wednesday 8th October – Hacienda del Cardenal and Chinchón
Tour of the Plaza Mayor, the castle and clock tower, then lunch. BA flight BA7198 at 6.40pm; arrive Gatwick at 8pm.
HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 or email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Price £3,495, excluding flights. Non-refundable deposit £750; balance by 1st July 2024. Single supplement: £725. Includes all meals, wine with meals, transport and entrances.
How to write for magazines and newspapers
13th March 2025
Marx Memorial Library, 37 Clerkenwell Green, London EC1R 0DU
The Oldie has always encouraged its readers to write for the magazine. Here’s your chance to learn the ropes and develop a new pastime.
10.15am Coffee/tea and welcome
10.30am Harry Mount on the dos and don'ts 11.30am Tea/coffee break
11.45am How to write a column with Mary Kenny, regular Oldie columnist
12.45pm Light buffet lunch and glass of wine
1.45pm How to write a review with Sam Leith, the Spectator’s literary editor
2.45pm How to write a travel feature with William Cook, Oldie contributor
3.45pm Tea/coffee break
4.00pm Elisabeth Luard on Substack, a new way to publish your articles and make money
HOW TO BOOK: Price: £225 per person to include all the above and VAT. Do book with Katherine to guarantee a place by emailing reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Her number is 01225 427311
Harry Mount
Taking a Walk
Call of the wild in north Norfolk
patrick barkham
Yes, you can take your walk in midsummer meadows of knapweed and butterflies!
You can enjoy your easy stroll through the delicious shade of a wood in high summer, or your springtime delight when the air is filled with birdsong!
But if you’re seeking a truly transcendentally stupendous walk, you cannot beat a dry winter’s eve on the north Norfolk coast.
Dusk is the key that unlocks this magic door.
I first stepped over its threshold with my friend Nick Acheson, who wrote The Meaning of Geese, a fabulous book. We set out from Burnham Overy Staithe on a simple out-and-back walk, north on the sea bank beside Overy creek.
It was a short journey into a miraculous bowl of space and peace: salt marsh on one side, grazing marshes on the other and sea ahead, beyond some of the tallest dunes in Norfolk.
It was a dark, dank, bone-chilling midwinter gloaming and we timed our walk for 3pm, so we would encounter vast flocks of pink-footed geese, who fly in great skeins, their high-pitched, dog-like yelps singing of the Arctic.
At dusk, they usually head from inland sugar-beet fields they’ve been enjoying by day for the security of a night massed together on the marsh.
To watch them whiffling their way down all around is a great wonder of nature. I returned this late autumn with two of my children, so they could enjoy the spectacle, too.
My kids are on the cusp of teenagehood, and there was initial reluctance. But it dissipated as soon as we strolled down the track, pockets of warm air still lurking between tangled hedgerows, as the coolness of dusk fell. They ran ahead, Esme grabbing my phone to take pictures of the belted Galloways posing beneath the setting sun, its last rays turning wispy trails of cloud a brilliant yellow in this endless arena of soft blue sky.
Our presence on the track disturbed a small gaggle of Brent geese. We first heard their wings – a swishing sound so
unearthly it might’ve been a UFO rising – and then the birds appeared, calling in their native tongue: a deep, throaty, melodious, rolling song that is the most beautiful of goose honks.
That, I was sure, was a little appetiser for the grand drama to come. Meanwhile, a small murmuration of starlings entertained us as we stepped onto the sea bank.
The light lowered, redshank piped up and a curlew added its soothing, bubbling call from the darkening salt marsh. On one creek, the mud glowed pink and silver in the sunset, tiny bubbles quietly popping on its surface. On another, it reflected the blue and yellow of the sunset sky as clearly as water. The salty mud smelt delicious.
Further along the bank, a kestrel perched on a post, head tilted quizzically as it scanned the grass for the whisper of a vole.
We reached the dunes with the sun already beyond the horizon, but our world was still illuminated by sunlit clouds. Pink-glowing planes on implausible journeys – Toronto to Delhi,
Manchester to Antalya – laid trails up high. Gun Hill was a mountainous dune – we climbed it and enjoyed expansive, westward views as fine as from any grander hill. And then we hurtled down its sandy face and up again, racing in pairs, legs flying cartoon-quick, so fast that Ted tumbled head over heels and got up dripping with sand, laughing.
The glow was fading from the world and its pink had moved to our faces. A long dusk became darkness as we marched back, assailed by mysterious rustlings from the hedges and ditches. Two plaintive, scratchy mewing calls were grey partridges, hidden in the reed beds.
This stroll was a failure. No great skeins of geese flew in. But it was honestly one of the best walks of my life. I hope my children remember it, as I will, for as long as we can enjoy this blessed earth. Park at crossroads east of Burnham Overy (What3words: item.wished.shook). Follow public footpath north to join sea bank and on to Gun Hill sand dunes
Genius crossword 447 EL SERENO
Some clues will lead you to the answer to 1 Across
1 See preamble (7)
5 Incredibly legitimate proposition (7)
9 & 12 Long country, long 1 Across (5,4)
10 Strange angle adopted by continent showing lack of feeling (9)
11 Share given to manager in disgust (10)
12 See 9
14 People mature – or it’s a disastrous sort of relationship (6,1,5)
18 Poorly back feeding face with a brown soup (12)
21 Clever – going naked for shower (4)
22 Thus covering poor match is divisive (10)
25 Starts off breaking regulation – that does it! (4,5)
26 & 12. Working in steps to hold firm 1 Across (5,4)
27 A short hearing covering American nation (7)
28 Unremitting return of marijuana after French denials (7)
Down
1 Long to be in court – it’s the kudos (6)
2 Secured new cook needing a lift (6)
3 Plastic filler used in heraldic device (5-2-3)
4 Show response time after order of care (5)
5 Programme like this on a religious leader and artist (4,5)
6 Convicts from France not featuring in highlights (4)
7 Very strong club supporting players (4-4)
8 Cross as partygoers seen in theatre after vacation (8)
13 Rock artist’s singular sound, supported by two family members (10)
15 Gold vehicle featuring in song for 1 Across (9)
16 Protection from developing rubella and measles originally (8)
17 Some drinks I spilled upset ... (8)
19 ... just occasionally and the majority greatest (6)
20 Goes wrong, seeing legislation on drink (4,2)
23 Article written in support of Channel island statesman? (5)
24 Borders of Thebes after Peter the Great for example
How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. Deadline: 8th January 2025. 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.
Bear witness (6)
half of the Bible (3,9)
pushes violently (7)
(5)
(3-9)
(3)
Nearly (6)
(6)
Runners-up: George Hart, Rickmansnworth, Hertfordshire; Mrs E Fletcher, Lochgilphead,
On this month’s deal from a supervised practice session at the ARBC in southwest London, how would you play six spades on the passive eight-ofdiamonds lead – which you win?
Dealer South Neither Vunerable
8 5
Q 10 8 3
10 8 6 3
K J 6
The bidding
K J 10 6 4 3
6 4
A K
9 5 3
A Q 2 ♥ A K 7 2
J 5
A Q 7 2
9 7
J 9 5
Q 9 7 4 2
10 8 4
South West North East
2NT Pass 3 ♥ (1) Pass
4 ♠ ( 3) Pass 5 ♦ (3) Pass
6 ♠ (4) end
(1) Transfer to spades. (2) It pays to break the transfer liberally after opening two notrumps – in order to clarify that spades are trumps. (3) Control bid, looking for a spade slam. (4) Controls everywhere else. Give yourself one mark if you drew trumps and led a club to the queen, the 50-50 approach, unsuccessful here as the king is offside.
Give yourself two marks if you played the elimination and throw-in line, drawing only one trump, then playing ace-king of hearts, ruffing a third heart, crossing to a trump (noting the twotwo split), ruffing a fourth heart (to eliminate the suit), cashing the other top diamond (to eliminate that suit), then leading a club, planning to duck the trick to West, endplaying him.
This line will be successful if East sleepily plays the four of clubs; however, if he inserts the eight, you are doomed to lose two club tricks to West.
Give yourself three marks if you drew one of trumps, played ace-king and ruffed a heart, cashed the second top diamond, crossed to a second spade and then led the fourth heart, discarding a club from dummy on West’s queen. This – key – loser-onloser play endplays West; you can ruff his third diamond in hand while discarding another club from dummy; while a club lead from West runs round to your ace-queen. Slam made. ANDREW ROBSON
Competition TESSA CASTRO
IN COMPETITION No 313 you were invited to write a poem called The Closed Shop Ted Lane remembered one that had sold antiquities ‘at Seven Dials,/ which had a faded note: “Back Thursday” on the door’. David Dixon’s poem featured another door sign: ‘Just popped out for a second to pick up my cat./ I’ll be right back in no time at all.’ Peter Hollindale wrote of a long-gone wheelwright: ‘what they made/With hammer, compass, chisel, saw and plane,/ Was drawn by horses past the shop each day.’ Commiserations to them and to Albert Caton, Dorothy Pope, Toddy Hoare and Iris Bull, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to G M Southgate.
The little wool shop at the top of the town Has finally closed. Ancient blinds are pulled down, And signs say ‘We’ve moved’ and ‘We’re sorry to go’.
The bank shuts its doors; it seems footfall was low.
The customers stray into charity shops, Look at coffee-stall cakes with fluorescent pink tops, Replace their old glasses, receive plastic nails, But they can’t buy a mousetrap or galvanised pails Or keys for the door, or a fat tube of grout. Estate agents shrug; they need never move out.
The chemist survives on prescriptions for flu, But who wants to shop? Very likely, not you. Now the great British High Street, where everyone went, Is closed down, undersought, underused, underspent.
G M Southgate
Four or five estate agents, And not a single baker. The butcher’s shop shut down And the draper two weeks later. My bank is now a Wetherspoon’s, The tea shoppe is a Gregg’s, The supermarket’s out of town, Too far for ‘oldie’ legs.
My chemist is a ‘Far Ma See’ –I don’t know what that means, And why does my old record shop, Sell discount shirts and jeans? And finally, the pound shop –No need to ask the prices, But I’d gladly pay a tenner … For some long-gone Toni’s Ices.
Tom Welch
Something weights my footsteps and I stop To look in the window of an empty shop –The closed sign still hangs inside the door, It must have been there for a month or more.
Did I help to close this little store?
Deserting it for supermarkets, more Convenient, with choice, and parking free. What’s not to like? Except what now I see:
From one small shop the story has been spread,
The beating heart of town could soon be dead. I turn my steps away from these dark things: Come! It’s a lovely day! A blackbird sings!
Ann Beckett
For thirty years the paper came – Phil brought it rain or shine;
He thrust it through the letter box, quite often before nine.
I’d pay my bill in person as soon as it was due; He always called me General – just why I never knew.
He ran the sub post office from a tiny armoured booth;
The little wooden rack of coins had been there since his youth.
His shelves were rather dusty bare; some very old digestives,
Mars Bars, buns, the local rag, some male contraceptives.
He gossiped with his clientele, his profits non-existent;
We wondered at his lack of verve, but he was most insistent:
The village shop’s main purpose was not what we supposed;
He cared not for the money, and now that it has closed
His raison d’être is very clear – he was the social hub,
Since we lost the village school, the church and then the pub.
My paper comes to me online; it’s easy to peruse,
But now I live in ignorance – no village shop, no news.
Anthony Young
COMPETITION No 315
The man from Ocado seems to arrive in the street at all hours, and when he’s gone a youth arrives on a bicycle with a square pack on his back. So a poem called The Delivery, please, 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 315’, by Thursday 9th January.
On the Road
Maestro’s greatest hits
Antonio Pappano tells Louise Flind
about conducting at the Coronation and at the Royal Opera House
Anything you can’t leave home without?
My music – and, believe me, I’ve done that before. Also, a notebook that I write into sometimes.
Do you travel light?
I’ve got concert clothes, concert shoes, rehearsal clothes, millions of black T-shirts and rehearsal trousers that I go through like nobody’s business. Then you’ve got to dress up for dinners and meetings, you need normal clothes, and then there’s the music bag. So I don’t travel light and neither does my wife –but that’s for different reasons…
Your earliest childhood holiday memories?
Mainly Italy, visiting my grandparents, or driving to Margate and sitting on a very cold beach with rain threatening.
Did you grow up in a musical house?
My father was a voice teacher, and from the age of ten I learned to play the piano well enough to accompany his students.
When did you realise you wanted to become a conductor?
I became a répétiteur and started working in the opera houses. I had no ambition to become a conductor, but singers wanted me to accompany them in concerts with an orchestra. I was working for Daniel Barenboim, and then started getting offers to conduct. When I was unleashed for the first time on an opera, my true self came out, and I saw that making opera was going to be my world.
What was the first opera you conducted? La bohème in Oslo.
Who was the biggest influence on you?
Partly Daniel Barenboim and partly my piano teacher in America, Norma Verrilli. She moulded me into a real musician.
What’s the effect of your Italian background on you and your musical tastes?
That Italian, semi-chaotic, loud, passionate, emotional world is very known to me from my early years, but I always felt that I had to find ways to mitigate that. So I studied
French in school and I desperately wanted to learn German for musical reasons. I didn’t go to music conservatory.
I studied privately and stayed with my parents at home.
We spoke patois: a southern dialect mixed up English words. I speak that to my mother today.
What was your first big break?
Oslo was a breakthrough in selfknowledge. The biggest break was becoming music director there, and when I jumped in at the Vienna State Opera for a new production of Wagner’s Siegfried at the dress rehearsal.
What’s been your favourite company? Covent Garden.
What period of music do you specialise in?
Late-19th and early-20th century and Rossini. In the symphonic repertoire, I do the early-20th century and contemporary stuff.
Do you have a favourite piece? I have to be in love with what I’m doing at the moment.
Favourite composer?
I’ve focused on Wagner, Verdi and Puccini, and love Bellini, Rossini and Mozart…
What was it like conducting at the Coronation?
It was one of the toughest gigs because we were in the organ loft, squeezed like sardines, 40 of us, plus the organist, and all the numbers that I did had chorus, and the chorus was downstairs.
The chorus master and I had a screen and I had to follow him and learn the timing of the acoustic. We had two days. It was well-nigh impossible at first, but then we got the hang of it and I timed it surprisingly well.
What nationality do you feel you are?
I’m English-born, Italian-raised and partly American.
Is England still the land without music?
I think London and other cities in the UK are cultural meccas. English people are inherently musical and knowledgeable – so I think I’m where I should be…
What were the highlights of your time at the Royal Opera House?
Starting with Ariadne and finishing with a tour to Japan – and everything in between. And the final gala, when the King walked on stage – that was pretty good.
What was it like saying goodbye?
I’m feeling it more now, missing certain people with whom I worked every day.
Where did you go on your honeymoon?
We had a small wedding in Brussels and went to Bruges, and brought our friends [he laughs] on our honeymoon.
Are you brave with different food?
I’m not into eating worms, but I love different cuisines.
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?
Raw pheasant in Japan.
What are your top travelling tips?
Don’t overpack. And you have to be a bit Zen in an airport nowadays.
You’re the chief conductor of the LSO. What are your other plans?
I will continue with orchestras that I’m close to, and I’m trying to figure out the rhythm of my life with the LSO, which travels a great deal.
Antonio Pappano is touring Europe in January and February
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Ask Virginia
virginia ironside
Stop my son relapsing
QTen years ago, when my son was a chef, he got into drugs – cocaine. Eventually it all became too much for him, he got into terrible debt, and finally we bailed him out and got him into rehab – and he’s been clean ever since. He’s had a lot of odd jobs and remains clean after five years, and he still goes to NA – Narcotics Anonymous. We’ve been so proud of him because we know how difficult it is. Now, at 57, he’s got a new job – which suits him and gives him a steady income. The only problem is that it involves working in a kitchen. My wife and I are sick with worry that he’ll get back into drugs. Is there anything we can do? I don’t want to bring the subject up, because he gets very angry if we mention it. Name and address supplied
AYou’re right to be worried. It sounds – since he gets angry – as if it’s still a raw subject, and he’s still quite sensitive around this area.
And it’s true that some kitchens are awash with cocaine and other drugs. But there is nothing you can do. He’s a grown man, for heaven’s sake. You have to leave him to make his own mistakes.
He has lots of sources of help – his friends in NA, for a start; and presumably the people at the rehab organisation.
If he wanted a refresher course in rehab, he could turn to you and I imagine you would cough up if you could afford it, if his GP couldn’t refer him for help.
Agony of computerphobia
QI’m 85 and I have come to the limit of my understanding of computers. Now a hospital has
0965-2507.
Seymour
sent an ‘encrypted’ letter, which means I can’t open it until I’ve filled in various details about myself. I am so confused by all this, I’ve actually cried. I couldn’t care less who knows what my blood pressure is, or sees a copy of a scan. What can I do? Anna, Cornwall
AI agree it’s infuriating. I wish one could opt in to these things rather than opt out. But opt out you can. Ring whoever sent you the letter and insist they send you all correspondence unencrypted. They should oblige.
Lodging complaints
QI have had a long argument with my lodger about who should pay for some damage he’s done. Of course he argues that most of the damage was already done before he arrived. I’m sure it wasn’t. We had quite a stand-off about who should pay for this, but finally sat down to discuss it as rationally as we could, because we’re basically friends.
In the end we agreed on a compromise, but I’m not really happy with the result and I can feel that he isn’t either. How can we reach a really harmonious result? Name and address supplied
AIt may be that you can’t. People say that if after an argument you both go away feeling 50-per-cent resentful, you’ve reached the best result you can. I remember my father saying that, in a marriage, if each partner thinks they’re contributing 150 per cent, probably each is contributing their fair share.
There may be no ‘right’ answer. If you can’t live with the decision you’ve come to, ask a mutual friend to judge. But I suspect that even then, one of you will think your
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friend is being unfair – and even if not, and the friend comes up with much the same resolution as you have yourselves, yet another person will have been dragged into this vortex of anger. You’ve reached a compromise. Stick to it. If it’s ‘wrong’, it won’t be by more than a little. You’ve both done your best to be fair. Congratulate yourselves. Friendship is much more important than a small sum of money.
A couple of corrections/ clarifications relating to my answer to a problem in the November issue, ‘Update your will’:
Ian Stevenson, a financial planner from Norwich, points out that though a correctly signed will is legally binding, it is up to the executors whether the particulars in a letter of wishes – usually small bequests to friends – are observed or not. If you want to leave your treasured collection of old school reports to a particular grandson, say, the executors can overrule this once you’re dead.
Gifts in wills, if you want them to have any legal validity, can be formalised as legacies. And this can be done by any solicitor – and don’t need to involve the expensive re-writing of the whole will.
As for advance decisions or directives – instructions on how you’d like to be treated before your death – these are legally binding and need no renewing.
Ian adds that some 50 per cent of the population do not have a will – and an even greater proportion do not have an enduring power of attorney (EPA).
‘These documents,’ he says, ‘are essential.’ So get these sorted soon.
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.
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