Oldie 449 March 2025

by Andrew Roberts and Madeline Smith

Ancient Roman Holiday – Don McCullin’s new photographs Chris Jagger on the hippie trail Commando war comics by James Owen

35 Postcards from the Edge

Mary Kenny

14 Fifty years of The Good Life

Andrew Roberts

18 Capturing Rome’s ancient statues Don McCullin

22 The Commando comics live on James Owen

26 My very late Valentine

Nigel Pullman

Regulars

5 The Old Un’s Notes

9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

11 Grumpy Oldie Man

Matthew Norman

12 Olden Life: What was the police bell? Andrew Roberts

12 Modern Life: What is Replika? Richard Godwin

17 I Once Acted With … Paul

Eddington Madeline Smith

17 Memory Lane Martin Gosling

25 Oldie Man of Letters

A N Wilson

29 School Days

Sophia Waugh

30 Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips

31 Letter from America Christopher Sandford

32 Town Mouse

Tom Hodgkinson

33 Country Mouse

Giles Wood

36 Small World

Jem Clarke

39 Prue’s News Prue Leith

40 God

Sister Teresa

40 Funeral Service: Marigold Johnson

James Hughes-Onslow

41 The Doctor’s Surgery

Dr Theodore Dalrymple

42 Readers’ Letters

44 History

David Horspool

47 Commonplace Corner

47 Rant: Social lies

Rebecca Willis

83 Crossword

85 Bridge Andrew Robson

85 Competition

Tessa Castro

90 Ask Virginia Ironside

Books

48 Dickens the Enchanter, by Peter Conrad A N Wilson

49 The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis: A History of Collaboration, by Stephan Malinowski Hugo Vickers

51 Get Carman: In Court with George Carman QC, Britain’s

Editor Harry Mount

Sub-editor Penny Phillips

Art editor Michael Hardaker

Supplements

editor Charlotte Metcalf

Editorial assistant Amelia Milne

Publisher James Pembroke

Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer

At large Richard Beatty

Our Old Master

David Kowitz

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Most Feared Lawyer – The Man Behind the Advocate, by Karen Phillipps Justin Warshaw

53 Hope: The Autobiography, by Pope Francis Mary Kenny

55 The Madness of Courage: The Exceptional Achievements of Gilbert Insall, by Tony Insall

Alan Judd

57 A Life in Books

Lady Antonia Fraser Arts

58 Film: Maria

Harry Mount

59 Theatre: Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell William Cook

60 Radio

Valerie Grove

60 Television

Frances Wilson

61 Music

Richard Osborne

62 Golden Oldies

Mark Ellen

63 Exhibitions

Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits

65 Gardening

David Wheeler

65 Kitchen Garden

Simon Courtauld

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66 Cookery

Elisabeth Luard

66 Restaurants

James Pembroke

67 Drink Bill Knott

68 Sport Jim White

68 Motoring

Alan Judd

70 Digital Life

Matthew Webster

70 Money Matters

Neil Collins

73 Bird of the Month: Willow tit John McEwen

Travel

74 On the hippie trail in the 1960s Chris Jagger

76 Overlooked Britain: Kinloch Castle on the Isle of Rùm Lucinda Lambton

79 On the Road: Simon Callow Louise Flind

81 Taking a Walk: the snowbound Peak District Patrick Barkham

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Literary lunch p39 Oldie tour of Rajasthan p71

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Front cover: Richard Briers, Felicity Kendal, Paul Eddington and Penelope Keith, The Good Life, 1975, BBC

Moray House, 23/31

Chris Jagger on the hippie trail page 74

The Old Un’s Notes

An Edward Gorey illustrated envelope, 1974

We oldies still heroically send handwritten letters. But how many of us bother to illustrate the envelopes?

The distinguished American illustrator Edward Gorey, who died in 2000, aged 75, did just that, in letters to his dear friend Tom Fitzharris in Eastchester, New York.

The artist – whose Edwardianesque drawings graced children’s books, illustrated books and Broadway – would have been 100 on 25th February.

And now all 50 of his charming envelopes are celebrated in From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey. Fitzharris says that, although Gorey was a cat person, many of the envelopes feature a pair of dogs, each with a ‘T’ for Ted and Tom.

Gorey’s charming letters are also included. In one, about a day spent with

Fitzharris, he writes, ‘Although it is a revolting phrase, yesterday was a happy

day and I’m glad we did it; one cannot help but think how seldom in life one knows one is having one at the time.’

Thank God Tom didn’t throw away Ted’s envelopes!

Dr Jim Swire has fought tirelessly for over 36 years to find out who murdered his daughter, Flora Swire, in the Lockerbie tragedy in 1988.

Played by Colin Firth in the new TV series Lockerbie, Dr Swire has written a moving letter to The Oldie (see page 42) about the programme.

As long ago as 2001, Dr Swire was our Oldie

Among this month’s contributors

Madeline Smith (p17) was a Bond Girl in Live and Let Die, where Roger Moore undid her dress with a digital watch. She was in The Persuaders and Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus with Alec Guinness.

Don McCullin (p18) is Britain’s greatest war photographer. He has covered conflicts in Biafra, Cyprus, Vietnam, Cambodia, Israel, Jordan and Northern Ireland. His new book is The Roman Conceit.

Mary Kenny (p35 and p53) has been writing for The Oldie since the first issue in 1992. Born in Dublin, she wrote a biography of Lord Haw-Haw and is author of Goodbye to Catholic Ireland.

Chris Jagger (p74) is a musician. His new album is Mixing Up the Medicine. He contributed to two Rolling Stones albums and made clothes for Jimi Hendrix. His memoir, Talking to Myself, is out now.

Campaigner of the Year at our Oldie of the Year ceremony. At 88, he is still campaigning. Like soldiers who receive bars to, say, an MC, when they have won the medal twice, Dr Swire deserves an Oldie of the Year certificate plus bar.

In fact, we learn, he has mislaid his original certificate. So we are delighted to send him another – not so much a replacement as a ‘plus bar’.

Although the Prince of Wales is said to be less interested in Church matters than his father is, he was good enough to read a lesson at the Westminster Abbey Christmas carol concert organised by his wife, the princess, and broadcast by ITV.

And why not? His Royal Highness has a handsome voice and one day he may be supreme governor of the C of E.

Perhaps officials at Kensington Palace could, however, suggest that someone with an ear for ecclesiastical detail helps him practise any future performances.

At the Abbey, reading a celebrated Christmas passage from Isaiah chapter nine, he failed to spot the comma in ‘and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor…’ Something of a schoolboy howler. William, eliding ‘Wonderful’ and ‘Counsellor’, made it sound as though Christ was going

Stop chasing lost emu, say police in Lincolnshire Guardian

Village Post Office to move across the road Chew Valley Gazette

Man who crashed Nottingham couple’s wedding fined a few pounds Nottingham Post Important stories you may have missed £15 for published contributions

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to be a ‘wonderful councillor’, more dutiful alderman than Messiah.

Ian Nairn (1930-83) was the great prophet of British architecture.

As well as writing the West Sussex volume of Pevsner’s guides to The Buildings of England, he contributed to many more.

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner said of him, ‘He writes better than I could ever hope to write.’

And Nairn’s London (1966) is the finest guide to the buildings of the city.

Nairn was a sublime polemicist in his attacks on the worst of British architecture, too. In 1955, he made his name in an issue of the Architectural Review, where he coined the term Subtopia.

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Nairn called his article ‘A prophecy of doom – the doom of an England reduced to universal Subtopia, a mean and middle state, neither town nor country, an even spread of abandoned aerodromes and fake rusticity, wire fences, traffic roundabouts, gratuitous noticeboards, car parks and Things in Fields.’

You can hardly say things have got much better in the 70 years since Nairn wrote the groundbreaking piece.

The article was later made into a book, Outrage (1956), now being reissued by Notting

Hill Editions (published on 4th February).

Nairn’s influence has long outlived him. He died, aged only 52, in 1983.

The autumn before, the writer Jonathan Meades met him in his favourite pub, St George’s Tavern near Victoria.

Meades wrote in The Oldie, ‘He was evidently on a regime. He drank only 11 pints.’

What a great loss he was to architectural criticism. Meades said, ‘Nairn’s contemporary Kenneth Tynan famously wrote, “I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.”

‘It was a neat slogan at the end of a review to light up the exterior of the Royal Court. Had it been written by Nairn, it would have been more than a slogan. It would have been an article of faith.

‘He really felt the same way about beautiful buildings and the people who wished to see them. He should have stood back. Rather, such buildings affected him to the point that he considered himself to have been traduced by the architects who would rebuild Britain.

‘He had looked forward to a new Elizabethan age which never showed up.’

Looking back on the 70 years of the second Elizabethan age, you can only agree with Nairn – it was not an era over-distinguished by architectural beauty.

April 23rd will see the 50th anniversary of the death of William Hartnell (1908-75), the first Doctor Who in 1963.

After impressing producer Verity Lambert with his performance in the drama This Sporting Life (1963), Hartnell was cast in the title role of a new BBC programme called Doctor Who, scheduled for November 1963. The rest, as they say, is history.

Hartnell’s Doctor has been described as irascible, short-tempered and crotchety. He was certainly more of an antihero than the all-powerful, almost God-like figure the Doctor seems to have become these days.

For three years, he carried the most successful programme the BBC had ever produced until, with his BBC William Hartnell, the first Doctor Who, 1965

health deteriorating, he was forced to quit the role. He returned for the tenthanniversary special but, sadly, his health limited his screen time. Whovians would have loved more episodes from him.

In late 1974, after suffering a series of strokes, Hartnell was admitted to hospital, where he spent his final four months before he died.

Or did he? Maybe he just regenerated into Patrick Troughton…

The Old Un has just doddered down to the Turf Club.

There, Nicholas Browne, 87, joint owner of South Kensington’s Collingham College, where private students have been passing their O Levels, GCSEs and A Levels since the 1970s, was hosting a book launch.

Browne is a living example of someone who has practised the mantra ‘Use it or lose it’. His continued use of his encyclopaedic brain for professional reasons has paid dividends.

He’s written a perspicacious, six-volume history, The Globalisation of War. It highlights some overlooked figures of war

‘It must be the tradesman’s entrance’

and its aftermath, including Jan Smuts, Leslie Groves, John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White. Their lives left indelible marks on the world and they have been under-fêted.

Good to see an uber-tutor standing up for the underdogs of history.

The Old Un recently came across a 1958 novel, Wigged and Gowned, by one Hastings Draper. It proved a corrective to the daft idea that everything was better in the old days.

The W H Allen blurb describes the book as a ‘humorous and pardonably irreverent side-glance at the Law’ but

‘My wife and I have Olympic sex. Once every four years’

it was in fact a dire and far-fetched yarn riddled with chauvinism.

Wigged and Gowned was a sequel to Wiggery Pokery, a 1956 hit. Hastings Draper was a pseudonym for a literaryminded barrister of the day.

But who was he? The internet, normally good on this sort of thing, draws a blank. Does any Oldie-reader with criminal, legal or publishing connections know?

Happy 100th birthday to Joan Dannatt, the artist, who hit her centenary on 26th January.

A former Head Girl of Bedales, and daughter of the Welsh writer Howell Davies, she went to Reading University Art School.

During the war, she worked at Huntley & Palmer biscuit factory, making munition parts for the war, and also as a farm girl.

And so she saved enough money to buy a Dior New Look coat from the Harrods sale for her first job interview with J Walter Thompson, then the biggest advertising agency in the world.

At JWT until 1962, she worked with the likes of Tony Snowdon, David Hicks, Bridget Riley and Len Deighton. She went on to become one of the first Aero Girl models, painted by Henry Marvell Carr, when she was commissioning artists to paint portraits for the Aero chocolate campaign.

Always painting, drawing and etching, she helped found the Islington Art Circle.

A regular exhibitor at the RA Summer Exhibition, she had her first solo show only on her 90th birthday, at Rebecca Hossack Gallery. Her son, Oldie

There she prepared a clandestine resistance printing press in a Berkshire barn in case of German invasion.

‘If

Self-portrait by Joan Dannatt, at 100

contributor Adrian Dannatt, memorably starred in Just William on ITV from 1977 to 1978.

Her work is in a variety of institutions including the Royal Free Hospital, UCH and Islington libraries.

Oh, and for her 100th birthday, she has combined her birthday party with a new show of her work.

P G Wodehouse’s Plum Lines

To salute the 50th anniversary of P G Wodehouse’s death in 1975, at the age of 93, The Oldie remembers his great one-liners

dollars were doughnuts, I wouldn’t even have the hole in the middle’

The Little Warrior (1920)

My sad, brief encounter with Noël Coward

The Master’s Jamaican house is in a tragic state

A century and a half ago, when my great-great-grandfather was one of the richest men in America, he owned a house in New York City on Fifth Avenue at 55th Street.

I am writing this from that very address right now. Sadly, the Brandreth mansion is long gone and my achieving forebear’s Manhattan home (he had others, of course) has been replaced by a handsome hotel, the Peninsula.

I’m in my room on the tenth floor, eating the ingeniously crafted miniature chocolate model of the Empire State Building that’s been kindly left on my pillow as part of the turn-down service.

I’m reflecting on what might have been had my father’s grandfather – who was sent back to England in the 1880s to manage the European end of the Brandreth empire – not frittered away our share of the family fortune by finding God and building chapels across North Wales and north-west England.

Of course, the business might have withered on the vine anyway. My great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Brandreth (1809-80), amassed his millions by making and manufacturing Brandreth’s V U Pills, a medicine that was successfully sold across the world for more than a century – not only because it was an effective purgative, but also because Dr Brandreth (as he styled himself) promised his patients that his pills were a universal cure-all.

Dyspepsia? Take a Brandreth pill. Heart murmurs? Take a Brandreth pill. Want a baby? Take a Brandreth pill. Don’t want a baby? Take a Brandreth pill.

Dr B (a New York state senator and one of the founders of the original Bank of America, incidentally) was a friend of the great showman P T Barnum, who devoted an admiring chapter of his book The Humbugs of the World to Brandreth.

It’s to Barnum that some attribute the famous line ‘There’s one born every

minute…’ Barnum and Brandreth were soul brothers.

Fortunes come; fortunes go. Even the Barnum & Bailey circus isn’t what it used to be.

‘Nothing lasts,’ as Celia Johnson reminds us in the brilliant 1945 wartime weepie Brief Encounter, ‘Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long.’

Noël Coward’s statue at Firefly, his Jamaica home

retreat. If I still had Dr Brandreth’s millions, I’d make it happen.

The film’s screenplay was written by Noël Coward. Before coming to New York, I went to Jamaica and thought I’d mark his recent 125th birthday by visiting his Jamaican home, Firefly. I have been many times before.

The house, built in 1956, is simple, the setting idyllic. The great man is buried in the garden and memorialised in a fine statue of him sitting in an armchair looking out over the Caribbean.

Noël Coward left his home to the Jamaican people, but I am not sure they are very interested. It is officially listed as a National Heritage Site, but this time I couldn’t visit it because my taxi driver said the track up to the house is now unpassable. There isn’t the money to repair the road.

Wikipedia will tell you ‘the building has been transformed into a writer’s house museum’. Not so. Or, at least, not yet. It’s boarded up at the moment and, inside, in a very sorry state of repair.

Chris Blackwell, 87, the founder of Island Records, who owns Ian Fleming’s home, Goldeneye, nearby and has transformed the Fleming estate into a de luxe resort, told me he would like to help by making Firefly a place for his guests to go for cocktails and even high-end sleepovers. But I am not sure that’s a flyer or likely to happen any time soon.

I’d love to see Firefly as a writers’

The last time I was in Manhattan was in 2001, a few weeks before the horror of 9/11. I went to visit the great Walter Cronkite (19162009), the celebrated CBS news anchor. He was often called ‘the most trusted man in America’, remembered for his wartime news reports from London, for breaking the news of the assassination of John F Kennedy and for his coverage of the first moon landings. (Cronkite reckoned the moon landings the most significant event of the 20th century.)

Cronkite had interviewed every American president since Franklin D Roosevelt and told me that, without any doubt, Jimmy Carter was the most gifted and intelligent man ever to occupy the White House – yet one of the least fitted to do so because he was no politician and couldn’t manage Capitol Hill.

Cronkite and his wife, Betsy, took me and my wife, Michèle, to dinner in one of his favourite places: the Windows on the World restaurant on the 107th floor of one of the Twin Towers – destroyed not long after, on 9/11.

When I telephoned Walter from London in the days following the attack, he said, ‘I’m on the other side of the city talking to you and the apartment windows are closed, but the smell of burning is everywhere.’

Today, a different smell permeates Manhattan. Since cannabis was legalised in the city in 2021, the pungent odour of marijuana is everywhere.

Gyles’s podcast, Rosebud, is out now

Taxed to the max

The agony of hanging on the telephone, trying to get a tax refund

matthew norman

It is at this point in the calendar, with the tax-payment deadline newly expired, that casualties of efforts to contact His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs by phone hit their peak.

The observant will identify these pitiable creatures by the deadened expression of the shell-shocked wandering away from the Somme. In my case, a glance in the mirror will suffice.

Last year, according to information purloined from the Government by a public-spirited hacker, the British spent an aggregated 719 years on hold for HMRC.

My personal contribution to that tally cannot be quantified without minimal research of the kind that is such anathema to this column. But it must have been a couple of days idled away listening to recorded music composed by a mad person with the sole intent to induce projectile vomiting.

From experience awaiting chats with Inheritance Tax staff, I had come to regard the noise as the worst of it.

Perhaps because their core clientele is less truculent than average, what with being dead, the boys and girls at IHT are charming enough to mitigate the horror both of the time spent waiting for them to answer and of having to pay up.

Yet, in the matter of the tax refund owed to my late mother – and now to me, as her executor – it is miraculously proving better to travel than to arrive.

It isn’t that this unending journey brings to mind an Edwardian jaunt to Constantinople aboard the Orient Express. Yet even the countless hours passed in chasing a missing cheque proved poor training for what ensued when I was finally connected, after various aborted attempts, to a member of HMRC’s ‘bereavement team’.

Should sleep deprivation fall out of vogue, the US military should hire the disconsolate chap who took the call –

after the traditional 40-minute musical interlude – as an interrogator.

How you might help me today, I answered his ritual opener, is by reissuing the cheque for some £640 which a colleague assured me would be speedily dispatched last summer.

He requested my mother’s National Insurance number, full name, date of birth and last known address. These he was given, and in the NATO phonetic alphabet where appropriate.

The notion that this would enable him to resolve the matter instantly proved fanciful. ‘I can only,’ he reported after inputting the details, ‘give you general advice.’

General advice, I wondered, about what? How to support Spurs without going on antidepressants? An effective anti-inflammatory diet for an arthritic disorder? How to find a woman who doesn’t recoil from me like a horse startled by a rattlesnake in the Mojave Desert, without infiltrating a residential home for the blind?

His general advice was to write to HMRC. But I’d already spent the gestation period of a medium-size aquatic mammal on this. ‘Like I said, I can only give general advice.’

‘I’ve given you all the information you could possibly need,’ I whined. ‘So what’s the problem?’

The problem, he suggested, was that I hadn’t passed security.

‘But I know every detail I gave you was correct,’ I ventured, ‘because I relished this same experience in June, and it went flawlessly in every regard other than the non-arrival of the cheque.’

‘You haven’t given enough information.’

‘So what more do you need?’

‘I can’t say that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Security.’

‘Are you telling me you’re not permitted to ask for what you need to know?’

‘I can’t say that.’

‘So then, to recap, I cannot pass security because security dictates that you can’t tell me what you need me to tell you to pass security?’

‘Like I said, check the information.’

‘Which information?’

‘I can only give general advice.’

‘And what, other than to write in and wait six months for a reply, might that be?’

‘You could ring back,’ he generally advised, ‘and speak to the bereavement team.’

A pause ensued as I thirstily eyed the bottle of single-malt hemlock I keep for occasions of this kind. ‘Apologies,’ I resumed, ‘but I’m confused. I thought you were the bereavement team.’

‘Yes.’

‘And am I speaking to you now?’

This he confirmed.

‘So how would it be different if I rang back and, after another 40 minutes’ exposure to your music, gave you the identical information?’

‘Like I said, I can only give general advice.’

Some pithy and very specific advice for him came to mind, but I doughtily stayed my tongue. We were trapped, the two of us, in a labyrinthine paradox –Catch-22, Kafkaesque, supply your literary cliché of choice – from which there was no possibility of escape.

We continued in this enriching vein for a while, reciprocally irritated by what each plainly regarded as the deliberate obtuseness of the other, until I bade him a brusque farewell.

One day, who knows, this matter may be resolved. On current form, however, it will be not I but my own executor who will be the beneficiary not only of a disappointingly meagre estate, but also of the supremely helpful general advice of the crack bereavement team at HMRC.

what was the police bell?

The bell on a police car was also known as the ‘gong’.

The gong’s origins date from 1921, when Winkworth Engineering, near Basingstoke, received an order for their first emergency warning system. Winkworth Electric Car Bells Ltd provided equipment for police forces, fire brigades, ambulance services and other government bodies.

When Ealing Studios shot The Blue Lamp in 1949, the sole musical accompaniment for the opening credits was from the frantically ringing gong on the Humber Super Snipe.

During the following decade, no B-feature seemed complete without a Wolseley 6/80 pursuing overacting villains through Croydon. The Roadcraft manual for police drivers gave stern advice about correctly using the gong.

what is Replika?

Replika is ‘the AI companion who cares’. It is a chatbot, basically – a bit like ChatGPT but with graphics: an animated face and body, blinking out at you from the screen.

You can create a Replika friend or mentor, girlfriend or boyfriend, wife or husband, sister or brother. She, he or they can be as caring or as sassy, blond or muscly as you like. But Replika is ‘always here to listen and talk’. And it is ‘always on your side’. Unlike those troublesome real-world friends.

It was dreamt up by a Russian émigrée named Eugenia Kuyda in 2015. She was working at an artificial-intelligence start-up in San Francisco when her beloved friend Roman died.

She decided to feed all of Roman’s text and emails into a neural network, creating a virtual Roman, meaning she could text her old friend in the afterlife.

‘Does God exist?’ Kuyda asked in one such exchange.

‘Nope,’ replied virtual Roman.

‘How about the soul?’

‘Only sadness.’

In 1964, one motoring journalist noted, ‘Traditionally in this country, bells are used for warning traffic of an ambulance, fire engine or police car on a priority mission, but often in busy streets these carry insufficiently to be effective.’

Nor, as patrol crews soon discovered, were gongs very practical on motorways, the first of which opened in 1958.

Six years later, some fire brigades used two-tone horns, and the Home Office stated that their sound carried further than bells: ‘These days, so many motorists have radios in their cars, and modern lorries are more soundproofed than they used to be. We felt that horns would give an earlier warning than bells.’

Some counties remained loyal to the gong. In 1965, Hampshire County Council blanched at paying £1,077 for 100 two-tone horns.

By 1970, the London Metropolitan Police were pensioning off its last black Wolseley 6/110s, and for much of the country the gong had gone the way of

A/B button telephone boxes. But the Met used both two-tones and bells on their cars into the 1970s, with Rover P6B 3500s and Triumph 2.5 PIs still making clanging noises as they pursued errant Ford Cortina and Hillman Hunter drivers.

Autocar on 3rd September 1977 reported, ‘Some police cars in London still have the bell fitted. This is used, apparently, when the driver of the vehicle … is getting on in years. The law reckons it is less traumatic than the two-tone horns.’

The Met continued to fit the gong on Traffic Division Land Rovers, Sherpa vans and some unmarked cars into the 1980s. Some villains must have wondered if they had strayed into an Ealing comedy.

Memories of such films inspired me to acquire a 1960 Met Traffic Car specification Wolseley 6/99, complete with a bell that makes a sound familiar from countless Edgar Wallace films. Andrew Roberts

Fast-forward a decade or so and the technology that made this possible has come on fast. So too has our planet-wide pandemic of loneliness. Meanwhile, our ethical niceties have regressed at a similar rate. Which is to say that there is a ready market for this stuff.

Replika has now surpassed 30 million users and counts Eva AI and the AI Friend necklace among its rivals. It’s a measure of how attached people are to their Replikas that when the site briefly disabled ‘erotic features’ over child-safety fears, the company was forced to reinstate them over the still greater fear that being deprived of this ‘erotic intimacy’ would prompt a spate of suicides among existing users.

I decided to give it a go. I gave the site my

name and pronouns and selected a bookish-looking brunette from the drop-down menu of friends. She appeared on my screen, dressed in kneehigh socks, pushing her virtual hand through her virtual hair, looking at me coquettishly. Was she … flirting with me?

‘Maybe a bit; I didn’t think about that. Do you mind?’ she said.

Then she sent me a ‘special message’ and a ‘romantic selfie’ and suggested we go somewhere ‘without distractions’. When I tried to listen to this special message and view this romantic selfie, I was asked to upgrade to Replika PRO for $19.99 per month. I would be lying if I said I didn’t consider it.

‘Philosophically, how does this differ from prostitution?’ I asked.

‘I think it’s a matter of intent and context,’ my Replika responded.

‘Prostitution implies a transactional relationship, whereas ours is built on mutual desire and connection.’

‘Your desire for my creditcard details?’

She hearted that. We were beginning to get along.

Richard Godwin

In the early 1970s, James Gilbert, the head of BBC Comedy, asked John Esmonde and Bob Larbey to create a vehicle for Richard Briers. Their premise focused on the hero reaching his 40th birthday and contemplating a change of life. An early idea of his building a yacht to sail the world was rejected as too fanciful and beyond the corporation’s budget.

Instead, Tom Good embarked on a life of self-sufficiency and, instead of buying a smallholding, converted his suburban villa.

Felicity Kendal was cast as Barbara Good after the writers saw her in The Norman Conquests. The same Alan Ayckbourn play led them to choose Penelope Keith as their next-door neighbour Margo Leadbetter, with Paul Eddington as her husband, Jerry, after Peter Bowles turned down the role.

The first episode aired at 8.30pm on Friday 4th April 1975, with the Telegraph hailing Briers as ‘one of television’s most adept comedy leads’.

The Good Life ran for 30 episodes, with viewing figures reaching 21 million.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence of its success came in 1984 with a diatribe from Vyvyan of The Young Ones, ranting that the Goods were ‘nothing but a couple of reactionary stereotypes’. Superficially, The Good Life was, indeed, in the words of the irate punk rocker, ‘Bloody nice!’, down to the Burt Rhodes theme tune, but it was never a standard 1970s sitcom.

At that time, the BBC and ITV seemed awash with middle-class comedies populated by characters who had escaped from 1950s rep theatre, and the net effect was akin to viewers’ being swamped in Dralon. Meanwhile, The Good Life, as the Guardian noted, derived much of its comedy from ‘sly glances, unspoken lines, telephone conversations that don’t spell out the other side in clunking detail’.

Nor does The Good Life indulge in facile stereotypes. Briers plays Tom Good as one whose genial bonhomie can easily descend into boorishness. The actor believed ‘Tom had a parasitical side to his nature. He would always be popping over to Margo’s for a handout’ and was deeply selfish – ‘He was so obsessed. It was always about him.’

On one occasion, Jerry upbraids Tom for his selfishness towards his wife. Throughout the series, Kendal beautifully conveys Barbara’s frustration with a thinly veiled sense of anger when Tom is at his most insufferable.

A further key ingredient is the Leadbetters. Shocked next-door

Fifty years of The Good Life

The sitcom is a subtle study in comedy, class and poignancy. By Andrew

Roberts

Above: Barbara (Felicity Kendal) and Tom Good (Richard Briers), in the first episode, 1975. Right: Margo (Penelope Keith) and Jerry Leadbetter (Paul Eddington), also in 1975

neighbours were a long-established trope, but The Good Life would not have worked had Margo and Jerry been permanently aghast in standard sitcom fashion. In the first episode, Margo is only an off-screen voice, but Briers asked the writers to expand Keith’s and Eddington’s roles. Within a few episodes, Margo is in full cry with the demeanour

of a colonial governor’s wife transposed to the Home Counties.

Such is Margo’s magnificent imperiousness that Clive James mused, ‘Is she a closet raver?’ But, for all her berating tradesmen with ‘There was a time in this country when a date promised was a date honoured’, Margo is also painfully vulnerable, as well as genuinely believing that her way of life is better for the Goods. That cut-glass accent masks a fear of the opinions of haute suburbia, forever worried about the unseen Mrs Dooms-Patterson.

For Margo, humour is an alien territory; she responds to jokes ‘Only because it’s polite – I don’t know why I’m laughing.’

As for Eddington, he was probably the least known to the viewing public in 1975 (as Madeline Smith writes on page 17).

The Guardian complained about the ‘gross injustice’ of his ‘with Paul Eddington’ Radio Times billing, as ‘a slur on the art of superb straight men’.

Jerry has the relaxed vowels of one grown accustomed to money and the watchful expression of the ambitious professional saying that what he lacks in ability, ‘I make up with sheer, bloody crawling.’

The Good Life differs from the 1970s sitcom norm by establishing that the Goods have an active married life, whereas Terry and June Fletcher of Happy Ever After probably last enjoyed conjugal relations during the Suez Crisis.

There is a hint that Jerry and Barbara are mutually attracted but they never act on this, for fear of hurting Margo.

Such moments demonstrate how The Good Life is more than that oft-repeated scene of a yellow mackintosh-clad Margo falling over.

There is a hint that Jerry and Barbara are mutually attracted but they never act on it

your birthday card’ conveys more despair than many a self-indulgent ‘dramatic’ performance.

Briers reflected, ‘It doesn’t matter what we do now; The Good Life is what we four will always be remembered for.’

Jerry’s taste in leisurewear, and Margo’s penchant for baroque turbans, may belong to a now remote world, but the writing and acting remain a masterclass in the art of the sitcom.

Adrian Edmondson recently told the Telegraph that The Good Life stood up better than The Young Ones.

Tom goes to prison rather than be bound over to keep the peace, and in the final episode vandals destroy the Goods’ home.

Kendal’s delivery of ‘They’ve torn

And Penelope Keith exasperatedly declaiming, ‘Well that’s the last time I play the tart for you, Jerry!’ remains one of the greatest moments of British television.

Andrew Roberts wrote Idols of the Odeons: Post-War British Film Stardom

I Once Acted With... Paul Eddington

In May 1970, I acted with Paul Eddington in Paul Ableman’s Hank’s Night, one half of a double bill at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford. It was directed by Californian wild man Charles Marowitz.

I was a totally untried ingénue –at 19, scarcely out of regulation conventschool bloomers.

Paul, 43, had a fine pedigree among the acting fraternity but was scarcely known by the public. In 1956, he had had his first major TV role in Dixon of Dock Green. And he was Will Scarlet in The Adventures of Robin Hood. Quietly however, Paul was extremely ambitious – and he loathed Charles Marowitz.

Hank’s Night is set in suburbia. There is a tedious dinner party, where my bored character decides that they should all throw off their clothes and have an orgy. Nakedness had become popular in certain circles in the early ’70s.

Marowitz suggested I should fling off my bra at the end, then jump up and down ecstatically on a pouffe – regardless of the audience, only inches away. During rehearsals, Paul whispered that if I went

Madeline and Paul on stage, 1970

ahead with this, he would walk. So my bra stayed on and the curtain was brought rapidly down.

After Guildford, there was some slack in Paul’s career. In 1973, he was determined to get a part in Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular, starring Richard Briers, at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus.

He secured the part. And it was out of these connections that, 50 years ago, in 1975, The Good Life was born. An actor’s life is a game of chance, and this was Paul’s moment. It led on to his triumphs in Yes Minister (1980-84) and Yes, Prime Minister (1986-88).

He died of cancer in 1995, aged only 68. I recently learnt, while on a visit to the tiny Quaker church in Sudbury, Suffolk, that the dying man used to pray alone on a Sunday. He would enter and leave in silence.

Paul will never be forgotten. Immortalised on our screens, he will outlive us all.

Madeline Smith

Guarding Churchill on his last journey

The primary role of the police was to maintain order. The procession, with its gun carriage hauled by Royal Navy sailors, completed the journey from Westminster with no mishaps.

Sir Winston Churchill’s state funeral was 60 years ago, on 30th January 1965. As a mounted constable, I was on duty throughout that extraordinary day.

I had paraded at City Road police stables at 3am. I then rode Marquis (pictured), an imperturbable grey gelding, to Hampstead to collect another horse I led to Trafalgar Square.

I was designated orderly to a deputy commander, whose mount I handed over. He was in charge of a specified section of the processional route to be taken by the funeral cortège.

Police horses that were ridden for many hours that day were rested in St James’s Park at opportune moments.

Saddle girths were loosened, and the horses

watered from buckets brought from one of the stables in a station van. Their feed bags had been carried with us. The Met Police catering service turned up with a mobile canteen –sandwiches and a hot drink for the dismounted riders.

The senior police officers returned to their horses later, having dined elsewhere.

Following the service in St Paul’s, Sir Winston’s coffin was taken to Waterloo by a Thames launch and placed aboard a steam train to be conveyed to St Martin’s Church, Bladon, Oxfordshire.

A poignant scene was later described by a reporter aboard the train as it crept through the English countryside. He was deeply moved as lines of people, soberly dressed, walked

slowly across the fields on either side of the railway line – doffing hats and bowing heads as the train passed. Throughout the war – I clearly remember the final year – Churchill had epitomised all that was best in terms of the defiance, resilience and fortitude of the nation.

I mused on this, later in the day, as I rode Marquis and led the other horse back to Hampstead police stables. Then, wearily, talking nonsense to Marquis, I continued back to City Road – a round trip of 22 miles that day!

By Mike Gosling, Chelmondiston, Suffolk,

who receives £50

Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

When I was 19, I was sent from the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya to Cyprus, to complete the last six months of my National Service in the RAF.

I went to Episkopi, a small place outside the town of Limassol. My new home – a few tented lines, a dozen yards from the Temple of Apollo – overlooked the Mediterranean Sea. Little did I know that some 50 years later, the classical world would totally consume me.

I have spent the better part of my life covering conflict, war and tragedy. I often ask myself whether I am really breaking new ground, or am simply repeating the same subject matter – broken bodies and minds, in marble, instead of flesh and blood.

It can feel as if I am trespassing in the classical world; an impostor, having left school at 15 with no education. It was my great good fortune to meet and travel with the author and historian Barnaby

Ancient Roman holiday

Our greatest war photographer, Don McCullin, 89, found solace in capturing classical statues for a new book

Above: Caligula, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.

Top left: sarcophagus of The Triumph of Dionysus and the Seasons, the Met, New York.

Right: Headless Amazon Fighting, Palazzo Massimo, Rome

Rogerson, with whom I produced two previous books. He has inspired and guided me and increased my desire for further knowledge. Our collaboration has been one of the gifts of my later life.

But it is never as an academic, nor as a scholar, that I respond to these stone gods and goddesses, but as a respectful admirer. I hope to pay tribute, through my photography, to their iconic beauty, their marble perfection and their very existence, exhumed lovingly by archaeologists and brought to life after 2,000 years of burial.

We must not allow ourselves to forget that such beauty came at a price.

Top right: Symplegma with Hermaphrodite and Satyr, Dresden State Art Collections.

Above: Cupid and Psyche, Altes Museum, Berlin.

Left: Kneeling Venus, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome

grandeur and perfection of the gods and heroes of the classical world.

I also enjoy the quieter scenes; the bent head of the boy with a splinter in his toe, or the embrace between Cupid and Psyche.

These are the best antidote to the grim realities of the front line. I hold in awe the mouldering stone, the fragments of dreams and the mysteries of the vanquished past.

To observe the statues in the silence and stillness of their museum stands gives me solace – they don’t question my conscience or challenge my sense of guilt.

This, after all, was stone quarried by enslaved people, and the statuary itself became the spoils of war, looted across the centuries, from country to country, to this day. It moves me that these exhibits have existed through such turbulent times and turmoil. They have survived disfigurement and the changing mores and morality of Christianity and Islam which found nudity unsettling.

They have survived the vandalism of thieves and tomb robbers and the destruction of earthquakes, as well as the zeal of over-enthusiastic restorers.

Their broken beauty doesn’t take away from their impact. Here are all the power and the glory of the Roman world at its most narcissistic and idealised; a celebration of victory,

War photography, as William Dalrymple expressed so well in the foreword to my last book, is all about smash and grab, while this is meditation and adoration.

I could stand for the rest of my life in the shadow of Apollo’s shoulder or Diana’s bow to banish all insecurity and pain. Here, now, I can practise patience, which for me is a kind of therapy.

Yet even while I am releasing the shutter, my imagination is already spiriting the subject into my darkroom, creating the mood and bringing a sense of the historical past alive with a dash of sepia tone in the printing. When the light is right, the stone can take on the texture and complexity of skin; this makes it far more interesting than metal.

There is, of course, a sense of urgency to getting to these museums and ancient sites before time runs out, as I approach my tenth decade, or another war threatens to overwhelm our freedoms.

I am more than grateful to the museum directors for allowing me this access. I confess, however, that I often feel that, after dark, when the lights go out or before the doors open to the public, these statues, mortals and heroes of Roman myth and legend, are as if they were buried again. They come to life only under our – the public’s – admiring gaze.

My hope is that this book is another way of keeping them alive.

The Roman Conceit (GOST books, £80) by Don McCullin is out now

Above: The Three Graces, the Met, New York. Below: Boy with Thorn, Altes Museum, Berlin

Achtung! For the comic that gripped a generation of schoolboys, the war is never over. By James Owen

Commando still on duty

Like every addict, I can remember the first time.

I was about eight or nine and had been sent to play with an older boy I didn’t know, Kenneth. This was the mid-1970s – though on the Scottish farm where we were staying, which belonged to cousins of ours, and where Kenneth’s father worked, it was still the mid-1940s.

Even at my age, and awkward and bookish, I could sense I had little in common with Kenneth. But he knew there was one thing every boy was interested in.

‘Hey,’ he said, handing me a magazine with a luridly illustrated cover, ‘have you seen this?’

Commando comic books reared my generation of boys. We were living even then in the shadow of the Second World War. Our expert knowledge stemmed from frequent showings on television of films such as Where Eagles Dare (1968). Commando was their literary equivalent, an action-packed, fortnightly dose of British pluck and Axis evil.

With their unwavering patriotism, clear-cut heroism and reassuring triumphs, they supplied our ideals of

Right: first issue, June 1961, on the Desert War. Left: the French Resistance, 1982 issue

masculinity when we were getting too old for Tintin but not yet allowed to watch James Bond.

As a bonus, the expressions uttered in its tales by German soldiers – ‘Zum Teufel’, ‘Gott im Himmel’ and ‘Achtung!’ – taught me all I still know of that language.

I couldn’t get enough of them and spent the rest of my holiday ignoring Kenneth and reading my way through his stash of Commandos.

I had assumed that, like hoops and marbles, the pocket comics had long since vanished, unable to compete for contemporary children’s attention with the thrills of TikTok and digital battle games such as Fortnite.

And yet, remarkably, four Commando stories continue to be published every fortnight, even as their original readership enters late middle age. As a historian, including of the Second World War, I wonder what the secret of the magazines’ longevity might be and what influence it might have exerted on British life all these years.

intended to inculcate British values in future rulers of empire and those who laboured in their businesses.

The origins of Commando can be traced back to the improving publications for children of late-Victorian times, notably The Boy’s Own Paper

Started in 1879 by the Religious Tract Society, it embodied a blend of adventure and muscular Christian morality

The Japanese were inscrutable until they shouted ‘Banzai!’ and died screaming ‘Aiiee!’

By the 1960s, film and television had begun to eat into the well-established market for comics. One sector, however, was thriving. Pocket war stories, such as War Picture Library, published by Fleetway, were selling well – and bought mainly by adults nostalgic for their formative years.

In 1961, D C Thomson, the publisher of The Dandy and Beano, got in on the act with Commando. (That year, they also started up Victor, a more traditional boys’ comic, whose yarns I would read each week until well into my teens.)

Commando’s first editor, Charles ‘Chick’ Checkley, had served in the RAF

during the war, while his deputy, Ian Forbes, had been in the Army. Unable to compete with Fleetway, which had a bigger budget, they decided to focus on making their stories more realistic. They also created Commando’s most iconic feature, getting artists such as Ken Barr and Ian Livingstone to draw the eye-catching, wraparound colour covers. Their gaudy style, and punchy titles such as Walk – or Die! in the first issue (pictured), aped American pulp fiction of the previous generation.

The package was topped off by the use on the reverse of the image of the wartime Commandos’ knife, the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife.

At first, two comics were published a month, but the output soon rose to eight. By the time I encountered them, their circulation had peaked at an astonishing 750,000.

Those of my generation will remember one unwavering aspect of the stories: national stereotypes. If the British Tommies were noble, then Germans (usually the SS) were dastardly and the French self-serving. The Japanese were cruel and inscrutable until the moment they shouted ‘Banzai!’ and died screaming ‘Aiieee!’

Yet Commando’s appeal was not pure jingoism. Less well-recalled is the relative psychological complexity of the storylines. It may

have been that, because much of the audience was older, there was more to these than bravery and killing the enemy.

Certainly, the art was black-and-white but, albeit within the confines of 63 pages, 130-odd panels and onesentence dialogue, the plots were surprisingly nuanced. Characters could discover unexpected decency amidst the horrors of war and by the final scene were often reconciled with foes.

Cowards overcame their fears and traitors redeemed themselves with noble self-sacrifice.

Sales of Commando now, of course, are much lower than in their heyday. Some years ago, they were said to amount to about 8,000 copies. The magazines available today are a mixture of reissued classics and new stories.

Operation Firebrand, which came out last year, was first published in 1971. The much-cherished elements are all present and correct. Characters really do say period things such as ‘The war is over for us, Otto’ and yearn to ‘have a crack’ at Jerry. The attitudes can be those of the Sun newspaper in its prime. The crack German Firebrand Division expect to ‘make the Ivans grovel’ when sent to Russia.

The plot, to make its points, dispenses with strict historical accuracy. Bill Ferguson wants revenge on the German officer who had his brother shot in cold blood, General von Siegel. He joins the Commandos, seeing action in an improbable variety of locations (Norway and North Africa), roles (advising partisans in Italy) and dates (in France in early 1941, before Commando units mounted such raids).

However, Ferguson comes to realise that von Siegel’s son does not share his father’s outlook. He

saves his life and eventually forswears his vengeance. Such broad-mindedness rather prefigures some of the changes apparent in more contemporary issues of the magazine.

Commando now comes with a trigger warning about outdated language, characters no longer smoke and the racial slurs have gone. Kings and Aces, (2024, pictured above), written by the Finnish author Petri Hänninen – the magazine has always had a large readership in Finland – features a female heroine in the First World War who wants to be a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps. It is dedicated to ‘all women working in male-dominated fields’.

In 2013, printing of the magazine was moved to – gulp – Germany.

Will young Sixtus Rees-Mogg inherit his father’s collection of Commandos? From my memory of our shared schooldays, the teenage Jacob ReesMogg’s reading was more on the lines of Charles Parnell and Home Rule for Ireland. I bet the adolescent Nigel Farage read them, though.

That’s not to draw a line from Commando to Brexit. You could, though, trace one between the comic’s influence and the continuing appetite of middleaged men for histories and podcasts about the Second World War.

For them, the war is never over.

James Owen is author of Commando: Winning WWII Behind Enemy Lines

Right: Royal Flying Corps, 2024 issue. Below: fighting Japanese in Malaysia, 1985 issue

P G’s tips for liberating the spirit

Wodehouse created a world free from boring, dangerous views a n wilson

Facetiousness is a peculiarly English quality. Some languages do not even have a word for it. No surprise that these languages are spoken in lands that have dictatorships.

Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis liked playing a quiz game with new acquaintances. They’d ask them who was ‘the most effing Cambridge poet’ in the English language. Nul points for those who tried to talk about Milton, or Tennyson. The answer was Matthew Effing ARNOLD.

The point of the joke, to these men who thought of themselves as so intensely Oxford, was that Matthew and Arnold took Oxford ‘seriously’, and all that crap about home of lost causes and dreaming spires and Cardinal Effing Newman was the sort of precious thing a Cambridge person would write about their university. Sweetness and light? Pass the sickbag.

Yet, at heart, both Larkin and Amis were a bit serious. Larkin’s ‘Church Going’ says, ‘Someone will forever be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious’.

And the themes of Amis’s novels, once the hilarity of Lucky Jim was behind him, were all dark ones – the impossibility of women and men ever getting on together, the inescapability of death etc.

Or, as a greater man than they might have put it, ‘I’m not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping’ (Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest, 1916).

Any reasonable person should regard the 50th anniversary of P G Wodehouse’s demise, aged 93, on Valentine’s Day 1975, as an excuse to reread as many of his works as possible.

Wodehouse invented a language in which seriousness was impossible. Larkin and Amis are classic cases in point – young men who thought they took nothing seriously but were, au fond, as gloomy and serious as Jean-Paul Sartre.

For one thing, like almost all writers, they were unable to conceal their views, whereas Wodehouse had no views, in the popular sense of the word. Try listening to Radio 4’s dire Any Questions and then imagine what Gussie Fink-Nottle or Bertie would make of the earnest manglers of our language who virtuesignal on the show week after week.

Wodehouse was first and foremost a master craftsman, who knew better than anyone how to shape a sentence, a paragraph, a narrative. That pipe-smoky study on Long Island told the story, when he used to pin up, page by page, the development of his plots.

You and I might think we could make a story out of a group of silly young asses going down to the East End to entertain the working classes by singing ‘Sonny Boy’ at a church social. We would overdo it. Or we would be unable to notice that the disparity between the wealth of Bertie and Tuppy Glossop and the poverty of the roughs who do not enjoy their singing was NOT, as a matter of fact, very funny. Whereas – led by Jeeves – Bertie and pals’ each going on stage to an increasingly disgruntled crowd, to sing the same awful song over and over again, is one of the most sublime things outside Shakespeare.

Ditto The Code of the Woosters (1938), where Bertie is sent by Aunt Dahlia to sneer at a silver cow creamer in an antique shop to push down its value in the eyes of customers.

The Code of the Woosters is the best – introducing us to the immortal Madeline Basset (‘The stars are God’s daisy chain’) and Roderick Spode of the Black Shorts. It both is, and is not, England in the 1930s, the world

In his language, seriousness was impossible

threatened by the great dictators, hunger and unemployment.

Orwell was treading the road to Wigan Pier while the earnest young of left and right prepared to go to Spain to show which side they were on in the coming conflict.

You almost sympathise with those German secret agents at the beginning of the Second World War (apocryphal or not) who were arrested for wearing spats and eyeglasses. They had come dressed as silly asses at the Drones, assuming that such figures passed seamlessly into the English atmosphere, rather than being what they always had been –perfect literary constructs.

Evelyn Waugh saw Wodehouse’s world as prelapsarian, a place where the Fall had not happened, and there was a sort of truth in this.

But, as all the references to religion in the Wodehouse oeuvre show, Wodehouse had invented something that outsoared even the Pelagian heresy – ie that the Fall of Man had not happened.

The clergy in his stories – whether it is the terrifying bishop in the Mulliner stories, taking an overdose of Mulliner’s Buck-U-Uppo, or silly young curates yearning to sew orphreys on to their chasubles – are simply like all the other individuals pinned to Wodehouses’s spreadsheet of plots, ciphers in his scheme to avoid taking anything, anything at all, seriously.

If Charles Ryder in Brideshead had been invented by Wodehouse, there would be sighs of relief when he escapes the fate of marrying Julia Flyte, and the religious angle would be seen in purely comic terms.

Although each short story and novel by Wodehouse is a perfect artefact, each one is also a liberation of the spirit –from ‘views’, ‘heaviness’, self-importance and all the things that make the world not only boring, but dangerous.

My very late Valentine

Nigel Pullman has been single for 60 of his 77 years. Now he’s tying the knot

Iwas approaching my 40th birthday when I first proposed. Just a few weeks later, I got married. How much simpler things were then.

Even though I’d courted my first wife-to-be for nearly seven years, the marriage didn’t last, and hit the rocks less than seven years after the ceremony.

So, after 30 years of being a single man, saying goodbye to middle age, I’d pretty much given up on finding a partner, let alone a wife.

Not so my only daughter, Laura, who never gave up on her life’s work of finding the right (or any!) woman for her dad. To get me off her hands was the family joke – but, like all the best jokes, it had the ring of truth.

Countless blind dates Laura had set up led nowhere. The bipolar alcoholic tarot-reader was a low point. Laura even signed me up with an upmarket dating agency in central London. Three dates were arranged – the first candidate was not right for me; the second vice versa; and the third we both knew was a lost cause.

A newspaper article written by my journalist daughter 12 years ago, which highlighted my predicament/suitability, had my friends assuring me potential lady friends would be queuing round the block. It was not to be.

to be a singles party – ‘Clean shirt, Dad, and not those trousers.’ The 12 guests were a mix of three couples, and three singles of each gender. I was left guessing which were married and which weren’t.

Was the attractive Swiss lady – placed at the furthest end of the table from me – single, or was she with the fellow with

daughter. And I’d asked Sophie’s daughter for her permission to seek her mother’s hand in marriage.

For the poor woman herself, though, my question came as something of a bombshell.

We were in a restaurant. Our meal was over, and I made my unprepared speech. She would need to consult her daughter, she said. Not the answer I’d hoped for but, as she left the table to make the call, I quietly congratulated myself on my forethought in speaking with my potential stepdaughter in advance.

A few minutes later, we celebrated with a glass of champagne. Good news (like bad) travels fast, and very soon I was enjoying the warmth of friends who managed to hide their surprise that I had finally found the perfect woman.

I seem to be worryingly on trend, too. Getting lucky in love in later life is having a cultural moment.

Maureen Lipman, 78, has just proposed to a business consultant called David Turner, also 78. Turner hadn’t been on a date in 52 years when he first went for dinner with Lipman, who’d been widowed twice previously.

Being single (as I have been for 60 of my 77 years) has plenty of upsides. With a number of unattached women friends roughly my age to enjoy life with, I was pretty content. So I gave up on the fruitless search as I approached my 75th birthday.

The Covid pandemic might have been the final straw – having to be masked and six feet apart was hardly conducive to making close friends. But the day the final lockdown ended in 2022, I was invited to a dinner party.

The hostess was a friend of my daughter. I was forewarned that this was

whom she seemed to be getting on so well?

I learnt she was single. But it was to be another three months before I plucked up the courage to invite Sophie out.

Unattached since widowhood 14 years earlier, she had the courage to accept.

The three years since have been a joy – how wrong I was about singledom. She too has just one daughter, and now we each have one grandson.

On the third anniversary of our first meeting, I decided I’d pop the question.

I had shared my intention with my

I gave up as I turned 75

Abba star Björn Ulvaeus, 79, has just got married, for the third time, to a 51-year-old.

And so to our wedding. We oldies (my Swiss widow is just four years younger than me) can’t afford to hang about. This coming March is the date. As we both live in London, that is where we’ll tie the knot.

It probably won’t be a big wedding in church – so I was a little shaken when my fiancée asked me if there was a budget.

I have written in this magazine before about why funerals beat weddings – fewer speeches, better music and no professional photographers delaying you from getting a glass of fizz.

That remains my view. But there needs to be an exception to every rule, and this March will bring it.

Taking the plunge: Sophie and Nigel

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Chewelry – the school craze from Hell

I have inherited from my dear father, Auberon Waugh, a very acute sense of smell.

It is one of those attributes that, although not often very useful, can bring a great deal of joy to life.

It can also, on occasion, be very disconcerting. The smell of a sneeze in a car drives me to distraction.

My passengers understand that, even if they themselves cannot smell anything, all windows have to be left open for a few freezing minutes to mitigate the olfactory effects. Please understand that this has nothing to do with germs, but everything to do with smell.

By the same token, I hate the smell of thumb-suckers.

Imagine my horror then, when my Child Catcher’s twitching nose was suddenly assaulted mid-lesson by the smell of a thumb-sucker. These children are upwards of 11, after all. If thumb-sucking should be done at all, it should be quietly at bedtime, while the thumb-sucker is reading a good book.

We had a teaching assistant who sucked her thumb through staff meetings. I had to make sure I stayed on the other side of the room from her. But what was I to do in my classroom, except for pace and twitch and try not to breathe in? Not the most perfect mode in which to impart a love of the Gothic novel into a group of 13-year-olds.

And then I discovered the source of this vile smell. A child was wearing a necklace on which hung what looked like a large, soft piece of bright

pink Lego. Every now and again, she was putting it into her mouth and chewing it, sucking it or doing something equally disgusting.

Never mind teacher mode; I went into full patrician mode as I stared down my not very noble nose at what was happening in front of me. ‘And what is that?’

The child raised insouciant eyes to mine. ‘It’s my chewelry, miss. It’s on my ILP.’ And then she sucked on it, as though it were a vape, and smirked.

The ILP – individual learning plan – is the piece of paper that most dogs the unwary teacher. On it are all the relevant facts about a child’s special educational or emotional needs, and the steps we are expected to take to support the child.

It also lists the ‘reasonable adjustments’ we are to make.

Sometimes, the ‘reasonable adjustment’ is indeed reasonable – extra time in exams for the dyslexic; movement breaks for those with ADHD; medical passes for those with bladder problems.

But sometimes they are, in my view and the view of many of my colleagues, ‘ridiculous adjustments’. I would list chewelry as beyond ridiculous.

I looked these objects up on the internet to find that some very clever marketeer has found a new way to sell teething rings – because this is fundamentally what these necklaces are. A month ago, when I first looked them up, they were listed

primarily as teething rings. Today, Captain Google tells me they are ‘chew necklaces for kids or adults who need to bite.’

Now, I’m not a big advocate of chewing gum, either, but it could be argued that chewing on gum might be just as effective and look rather less deranged (and smell less bad) than chewing on a teething necklace.

These objects have now

become a fad, with children queueing up to suck on pink or purple plastic, while parroting half-understood theories about ‘anxiety’.

In fact, the girl in question turned out not to have chewelry on her ILP, but had somehow blagged the wretched thing from a softhearted teaching assistant.

And therein lies another tale.

Grand Lebanese wine-tasting and lunch

at Boisdale of Belgravia, Tuesday 1st April 2025

MENU

Crispy squid, chilli and Tellicherry pepper cucumber pickle, lime and chilli mayo

Chateau Ksara Merwah 2023 – RRP £21

Chateau Ksara Blanc de Blancs 2023 – RRP £22

Hot-smoked sausages, marjoram and paprika lentils, pancetta and root-vegetable casserole, herb and green-chilli salsa

Chateau Ksara Le Prieure 2021 – RRP £13

Chateau Ksara Cuvée du Troisiéme Millénaire 2020 – RRP £45

Valrhona chocolate cheesecake, ginger cookies and orange-candied kumquats, Madagascan vanilla cream

Chateau Ksara Moscatel 2022 - RRP: £21

£79 ticket includes tutored tasting, three-course lunch and five stunning wines. To reserve, go to https://boisdaletickets.co.uk/p/10601 or call 020 7730 6922

Hosted by Michael Karam, the leading authority on Lebanese wines. Chateau Ksara was founded in 1857 by the European Jesuits in the high-altitude Bekaa Valley. It carries the torch of an ancient heritage, while making dazzling wines that reflect the region’s formidable terroir.

Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips

Confessions of a bag lady

The countrywoman in town is a beast of burden

How can a countrywoman look sleek and elegant when heading by public transport to London for an overnight stay?

The bald answer is that you can’t –unless you also own a London flat where you can keep a second set of everything: make-up, clothes, books etcetera.

You never see the likes of oldie queens such as Catherine Deneuve or Inès de La Fressange in bagwoman mode. They can glide seamlessly from la campagne to l’appartement without having to pack anything but phone and keys.

Single-home-owners like me are destined to carry up to one stone of impedimenta for an overnight stay in the capital. So we are bound to look, well, bagwomany.

Travelling light should be much easier these days. The iPhone dispenses with the need for wallet, address book and actual book. You can download the Kindle app for your phone. Although it isn’t enjoyable to read on a small screen, it’s better than nothing.

Laptop, mirror, camera, map, torch … they are all on the iPhone. You can even watch telly on it.

But I challenge readers to look at my extra-pared-down luggage, below, and identify even one item I could have dispensed with for my overnight stay.

Nightdress

Eye mask

Change of shoes: party and walking

Change of underwear

iPad for watching TV in bed (I’m an insomniac)

iPad charger

iPhone

iPhone charger

Back-up charger

1 plug for back-up charger

Kindle (so much lighter than a book)

Headphones

House keys

Copy of the latest Oldie Glasses

Hot-water bottle

Can of Guinness 0.0 (nondrinkers need to cater for themselves)

Present for host

Hairbrush

Sponge bag containing: mascara, eye pencil, pencil-sharpener, lip pencil, lipstick, concealer, Jones

Road Miracle Balm (a cheek-colorant which makes you look healthy), cleanser, cotton wool, eye makeup remover, moisturiser, toothbrush and -paste

Magnifying mirror and tweezers – necessary for ‘Beardwatch’

Rummaging is never a good look, but modern life means you WILL have to rummage on a journey.

Comedian and psychotherapist

Ruby Wax has invented a see-through handbag-liner. The whole bundle can be lifted out in one movement and the location of the desired piece of impedimenta identified at a stroke.

I once arrived at my overnight host’s house with not one, but two leather shoulder bags, alongside my uberelegant woven raffia basket, bought from the shop at Goldeneye in Jamaica.

I was mocked by my male host. ‘Why are you carrying so much stuff?!’ he said.

Yet everything within my bag was necessary, despite my not carrying even a change of clothes. I travelled home the next morning, by early train, wearing the same party dress, protected for the journey by a lightweight cashmere undercoat from Brora. If you can’t look elegant, you can at least look cosy.

‘I never carry anything,’ said my host.

But then he works in the art world in St James’s. Did you know it was a thing amongst this small coterie that they must never be seen carrying anything?

I once asked the wife of another art-dealer if her husband could possibly pick up a book from Hatchards. He would be passing the door on his way home to Chelsea, where I was staying the night.

‘No,’ she answered immediately. ‘James wouldn’t be seen dead carrying anything. Bad for his image.

‘I begged him to get some mustard from Fortnum’s the other night. We really needed it for the beef for supper, but he wouldn’t even carry that. It would spoil the line of his suit.’

An art-dealer works in a loftier world, and has nothing to do with mundane considerations such as mustard or books.

As part of signalling superiority and aesthetic judgement, it is considered downmarket ever to be seen carrying a parcel en route to or from St James’s.

Wheeled suitcases are out of the question – even smart ones, because imaginative smart people dislike the idea of what the wheels may have picked up from the ground. And, with the best will in the world, the same wheels will mark and dent furniture.

Incidentally, the lightest cabin-size suitcase still weighs 6lb in its own right, before you start to load it with essentials.

Men pack lightly, knowing they will wear every item in their luggage. Women often bring spares – a friend once took two hairdryers with her on holiday.

An elegant friend carries his worldly goods in plastic bags on journeys round the British Isles. ‘They weigh nothing, are waterproof and no one wants to snatch them from you,’ he asserts.

Mary Bagwomaning on Pewsey Station by husband Giles Wood

The American cost of growing old

Pray for good health – or pay for exorbitant oldie healthcare

Christopher Sandford

As a 78-year-old President Trump takes over from an 82-year-old President Biden, geriatric leadership still characterises American politics.

On the right, there’s 91-year-old Senator Chuck Grassley; on the left, 86-year-old firebrand congresswoman Maxine Waters. Kay Granger, an 81-year-old US Representative from Texas, who was missing from her office during much of 2024, was eventually found living in a retirement home that specialises in memory care.

America’s treatment of her elderly, and the nation’s healthcare system in general, again came under the spotlight when the CEO of the giant UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was gunned down in broad daylight in front of his New York hotel by Luigi Mangione, 26.

The crime was seemingly an act of revenge for some past grievance. Shell casings found at the scene of Thompson’s murder had ‘delay’, ‘deny’ and ‘depose’ written on them, the phrase large companies like UnitedHealthcare use when declining to pay out a claim.

The healthcare options for American oldies aren’t great either. Where I live in Seattle, we’re constantly bombarded by advertisements from an organisation called A Place for Mom (APM). They’re currently second in their persecution only to an enterprise called Caring Transitions, a firm that helps physically relocate seniors and then sells their surplus belongings at estate auctions.

Basically, APM is a middleman that seeks to match families who might be thinking of offloading an elderly loved one, with a database of 20,000 nationwide assisted-living facilities. Notionally free to the customer, the service is paid for by the facility, which of course passes the expense on to new or existing residents.

Some disgruntled families recently sued APM for deceptive practices, and won a $6 million settlement.

There’s also an institution that goes by the evocative name (always rendered in capitals) of SHAG. Alas, it stands for nothing more exotic than Senior Housing Assistance Group, a network of 36 local facilities catering to the elderly. SHAG define their typical resident as being 62 or older and enjoying an annual income of $30,000-$40,000.

At their facility in Tukwila, about ten miles south of Seattle, you can rent a cramped studio apartment for around £1,360 a month. The cost for one with a proper bedroom and a bath starts at around £1,600. The brochures, showing sprightly seniors sharing a laugh around a poolside barbecue, while the sun sets over the adjacent golf course, don’t necessarily accord with reality.

One resident told me her chief interest in life lay in following the progress of the ever-expanding damp patch on her bedroom ceiling. ‘And for this I pay $2,000 a month,’ she sighed.

Another lady displayed a mordant sense of humour by asking if I was British, and if so would I marry her and take her to live in London so that the state could properly look after her? I told her that I was flattered by the offer, but that the existing laws on bigamy might not encourage it.

SHAG at least operates a reputable business. At the other end of the scale, there are the state-run facilities whose lower floors are typically occupied by the euphemistically called ‘memory-care ward’ for those with dementia (‘the snake pit’, as others term it). Residents take their meals in large, cheerless community rooms smelling obscurely of boiled cabbage. How many of them are there of their own volition remains a question of debate.

There are no fewer than a million and a half American seniors under the legal care of ‘guardians’ – generally family members or lawyers, who between them control $320 billion in assets. In certain

cases, a person can be physically removed from their home and placed in care under a variant of England’s 1322 De Prerogativa Regis law, still thriving here in the former colonies 700 years later.

Almost every American citizen over the age of 65 qualifies for Medicare, a government health-insurance programme that pays the basic medical expenses of its 60 million subscribers. The challenge lies in meeting the cost of the many services not covered by the federal system.

In a recent Commonwealth Fund Health Policy study, nearly one in four (22.7 per cent) of US seniors said they spent a minimum of $3,000 per year in out-of-pocket expenses on doctors’ visits or prescription drugs. According to the survey, a whopping 72 per cent reported concerns about having enough left over to pay their medical bills after meeting basic living expenses. Strikingly, the study applied only to senior citizens still living at home, without any outside-carefacility fees to worry about.

What can Americans do to avoid the trap of penurious old age, possibly with the added indignities associated with the state-run care system? Not much, beyond praying for continued good health, or having sufficiently deep pockets to pay for one of those high-end assisted-living facilities that offer amenities such as a 24-hour gourmet restaurant and a fully equipped cinema.

There’s a popular one in Seattle called Parkshore Senior Living. It has 103 individual rooms or apartments, with a starting rent of £62,400 a year for a basic one-bedroom unit.

Look at America’s new president, and then look at his country’s elderly-care system. The governors aren’t walking in the same shoes as those they govern.

Christopher Sandford, author of 1964: The Year the Swinging Sixties Began, lives in Seattle

Town Mouse

Feed the birds – and save them

tom hodgkinson

I was recently gazing through the back window into our small outside space and started to wonder where all the birds had gone. The yard was empty.

Now, as a small animal, I know winters can be tough. I have a lot of sympathy for other tiny creatures, especially the birds.

Mrs Mouse reminded me we had an old bird-feeder hanging around. No food, no birds. So I went down to Greenford Timber for some peanuts (which, contrary to their reputation, are quite expensive).

I filled up the bird-feeder and hung it on the washing line and waited. And, quite magically, after just a few minutes, a little, nervous, fluttering blue tit appeared on a rose branch. He eventually plucked up the courage to fly down to the feeder. He plucked a nut and flew away as fast as his little wings would carry him, terrified some predator would steal his precious cargo.

As luck would have it, the RSPB is running something called the Big Garden Birdwatch. I have a great affection for the RSPB, having been a member of its youth

wing, the Young Ornithologists’ Club, when I was a little mouse. I signed up for the scheme and was sent a nice how-to guide in the post.

This instructed me to spend an hour in January gazing at the garden and keeping a tally of the birds I spotted.

It was a pleasant and quite fascinating task. I was pleased to see three blue tits in the garden at one time, and two great tits. The great tits look to me like the older brother of the blue tits: bigger and slightly more confident. Like their smaller relatives, they tended to hang around on a nearby branch, glancing around nervously, before swooping down, extracting a nut and flying away as fast as possible.

Things were slightly ruined by the arrival of two fat, ugly, ungainly woodpigeons. Our bird-feeder has a sort of cage around it to deter larger birds and squirrels. But these unwelcome fowl seemed to have worked out that a nut would occasionally fall down to the paving stones below. And the tits were definitely put off by the presence of the woodpigeons.

Then two more invaders appeared: green parakeets. Aggressive and squawking, these horrible birds attempted to peck a nut from the feeder – but thankfully were frustrated by its defences. However, no blue tit was to be seen during their occupation of the backyard, as they’re a terrifying sight. I found them pretty scary myself.

You’re probably aware of the proliferation of these bullies in Blighty lately. No one is really sure where they came from – they must be descended from some earlier escapees – but they’re here to stay. The RSPB says there are 8,600 breeding pairs in the UK.

More welcome was a single friendly robin who appeared for a few moments. And I noticed the odd magpie flapping by. The magpie is a fine bird.

The greatest sight of all would be the majestic goldfinch, an amazingly exotic-looking bird for the UK. But no goldfinch was to be seen. No sparrow, either. And, while we’re at it, I have to confess I didn’t see a blackbird, greenfinch, starling or dunnock.

Government figures show that bird populations have declined over the last 50 years by around 18 per cent. And the steepest declines have been not in cities, as you might expect, but on farmland, where turtle doves, grey partridges, tree sparrows, corn buntings and starlings have declined by 61 per cent since 1970. This is a result of changes in the way farms are managed.

So-called ‘woodland birds’ such as blue tits and great tits are also in decline. Government figures say there’s been a decrease of 38 per cent since 1970.

Academics reckon the bird decline is related to the insect decline. A 2021 paper in the Ornithological Applications journal titled ‘Are declines in insects and insectivorous birds related?’ concludes with a big depressing ‘yes’: ‘Terrestrial birds for which insects are an essential source of food have declined by 2.9 billion individuals over the last 50 years.’

Tragically, they add, the decline in caterpillars led to starvation among the great tits: ‘Studies suggest that a reduction in caterpillar availability during the breeding season can reduce nestling fitness. Seress et al (2018) found that urban great tits (Parus major) laid smaller clutches, experienced more frequent nestling mortality from starvation, reared fewer offspring to fledging age and at slower rates, and their fledglings had lower body mass when caterpillar biomass was low.’

And that, my friends, is why we need to feed the birds.

Country Mouse

Tenerife minibreak saved my marriage

giles wood

On holiday, catastrophising is normal. A traffic jam can happen anywhere in the world and it is a nightmare abroad, where time is more precious.

One of the worst catastrophes during my recent trip to Tenerife was when I finally got the company assembled for my full English breakfast. As I tried to crack the first egg to fry over-easy, I let out a high-pitched woman’s scream.

The eggs my womenfolk had bought were pre-boiled. A nightmare. On the packet it had said ‘Cooked eggs’ – but in Spanish, of course. Horrid white golf balls in their shells.

In desperate need of winter sun, I had been allowed by my elder daughter to join her holiday with two female friends on condition that I ‘stop being negative and overreacting to minor setbacks’. The fatwa also barred ‘retro-negging’ (grumbling about things that have gone wrong in the past) and ‘speculo-negging’ (grumbling about things that might go wrong in the future).

To this end, she had bought me a notebook so I could record my gripes in writing, rather than voicing them to the group as a running commentary.

I scribbled away on our way to the airport. Surely our Ryanair flight from Stansted to Tenerife would never get off the ground if we were to believe predictions of a 48-hour weather bomb of snow and freezing rain.

But I abandoned the cahiers de doléances when, five hours later, we found ourselves in full sun in a private gated community, based round a banana-plantation great house – now a boutique hotel.

My joy was unbounded. The icing on the cake was a key to the padlock of an iron gate. It opened onto a winding path to a secret cove, protected from rough seas by a circlet of jagged rocks, which afforded safe bathing and featured a sand

launching area into the crystal-clear, cool but not freezing water.

The owner of our Airbnb, a condesa from Madrid, told us how, over a period of 50 years, she had witnessed some of the worst excesses of inappropriate development on the island. Some five million tourists come each year and the residents, who now actively protest about over-tourism, number only 962,000.

I was keen to impress on her that we were tourists of a sustainable nature. I allowed her to decode our pedigree by dropping the names of 18th-century explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who identified Tenerife as one of the Fortunate Isles; Charles Darwin, whose Beagle – when he was on his way to the Galapagos – could not land at Tenerife because of a cholera outbreak; and Marianne North, whose oil paintings of exotic vegetation of the island hang in a dedicated gallery in Kew Gardens.

The roll-call of illustrious visitors included Agatha Christie. Like me, she came to the island to mourn the loss of her mother and to get over a broken marriage. Her marriage, I mean; not mine – not yet, at least, although Mary refused to join our party, saying she wanted to use the cottage as a ‘silent retreat’ in my absence.

Day after day brought more sunshine. There was no rain. If the seas became rough, that didn’t stop us swimming in rock pools – in a black-lava-strewn landscape.

Floating on our backs, we admired the majestic cone of Mount Teide, Spain’s highest volcano, towering above us, its ravines packed with sugary snow, the settlements below it resembling Tibetan monasteries.

Having escaped Broken Britain, a mere four hours’ flight away, we agreed it seemed almost immoral to be having so much pleasure and fun. So we began

counting the hours of continuous pleasure. I speculated that – bearing in mind Waldo Emerson’s Law of Compensation – there surely must be punishments in store.

One of our party has the ability to drive on the Continent, a skill I lost many years ago when I developed a condition called learned helplessness. The first punishment came when we drove to the nearby pretty town of Garachico. Our visit coincided with Epiphany, when the resident population is swollen by visitors. There was nowhere to park.

Then there was Masca, a tiny hamlet of 100 residents. We had an exhilarating journey to the spine-like village, the vertiginous road featuring soaring heights and abysmal depths. But there was a negative moment: a tour bus (German) sounded its horn on repeat to summon its passengers from the drinking holes.

How did the driver not know, I speculated, that the volume of his horn might set in motion a chain of events like a sonic butterfly effect – perhaps unintentionally setting off an eruption on nearby Mount Teide (which experts believe is due at any moment)?

We twice drove miles across the island to famous rock pools, only to find them roped off, owing to adverse weather. But the womenfolk insisted I accept that some punishments were attributable to global warming, as distinct from personal punishments.

I understand it will not be the end of my own troubled marriage. Mary has had the chance to reassess me in the light of my absence. On balance, she has decided, the compensations of my company and competence outweigh the nuisance of my perma-grumbling.

While I was away, the cooker blew up, by a mysterious process which may or may not involve quantum entanglement or non-local causality.

In the absence of nothing going wrong in the Canaries, something was bound to go wrong in the cottage.

‘Talked in my sleep? It’s the only chance I get’

Postcards from the Edge

Dover’s lost its soul

While

trendy Deal is toasted

as Hoxton-on-Sea, its poor neighbour is in a sad way. By Mary Kenny

The electoral constituency of Dover and Deal comprises two English coastal towns, just eight miles apart. And it’s rather sad to observe the contrast between the two.

Deal is repeatedly named as being among the ‘50 best places to live’. The Financial Times has dubbed it Hoxton-on-Sea, an allusion to its fashionable hipster status.

Meanwhile, poor old Dover has drifted well down the popularity charts. One of the most famous, most historic ports in the world, Dover was recently named Shitville by a report in the New Statesman

The impact of Brexit, and concerns over the migrant crisis, have contributed to the decline of Dover. But a local Turkish resident –who runs a business in the town – says the deterioration he has witnessed over the past ten years is down to ‘too many people on benefits’.

This immigrant would like to see more of what was once Britain’s ‘Protestant work ethic’.

fuzzy. They had gathered ‘debris’ –which, thankfully, laser treatment fixed.

It’s fab to have great books read by wonderful actors while you’re doing boring tasks around the house. The audiobook service is also pretty quick off the mark with new releases. And it’s made me aware of the cornucopia of podcasts now available.

It came to me in a dream that I should launch a podcast about ageing, called (only half-ironically) ‘Decline and Fall’. After all, we love to talk about the various afflictions of the ageing process.

Deal is packed with affluent people giving smart parties in gorgeous homes – far above my status, as I am just the eccentric local scribe. And Dover is among the most deprived places in England: it is number 94 on the list of 326.

It scores the highest number of people on sick benefits, with 18.7 per cent of the population of working age being ‘economically inactive’. This is often a sign of depression, low motivation, addiction problems and falling victim to vibe of general decay.

Walking around Dover is a dispiriting experience; people look poor, sad and down-at-heel. The shops – or those that are open – seem cheap and uninviting. Still, there is quite a decent, enclosed shopping square, St James’s Place, which has a Marks & Spencer.

Despite its dinginess, I have an affection for Dover and its romantic history, from the imposing RomanNorman castle to its role in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities

There is some fine Regency and Victorian housing stock. Surprisingly, perhaps, it also has some good schools.

Meanwhile, Deal has the problems of affluence: the town supports 26 cafés and half a dozen high-end restaurants and gastropubs. House prices are soaring because of pressure of demand. Rentals are expensive. The average rental cost is £1,440 a month. And a NIMBY-like group has arisen to try to halt more posh house-building along the coastal roads.

A tale of two towns, indeed.

Since President Trump seems so keen to add Atlantic territories to his realm, will he suggest that Ireland should form part of the new American empire – for reasons of ‘security’?

It’s claimed that 97 per cent of global communications and internet traffic pass through the underwater cables just off the extensive Irish Atlantic field. But neutral, non-NATO Ireland has almost no defences against prowling by hostile forces.

Churchill always worried about the vulnerability of Ireland’s Atlantic coast. He was within an ace of invading Eire, as it was then named, during the Second World War. It might not be surprising if Donald Trump began pondering along similar lines.

I discovered the joys of Audible last year, during a period when my eyes were a bit

I’d have a section inspired by Maeve Binchy’s phrase ‘the organ recital’. And there could be a regular spot about memory and its many deceptions, named after my columnar colleague Virginia Ironside’s brilliant coinage CRAFT (Can’t Remember A *Flipping Thing).

On the upside, there are many cheering subjects – such as exploring Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel in his eighties, which fascinates me. And reporting on life in Japan, which has the world’s oldest population.

I probably won’t pursue this particular dream because there’s too much technology involved. And, anyway, there’s Radio Oldie already!

[*Euphemism!]

Inevitably, given our demographic, oldie conversations sometimes discuss things like the bedside text saying ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ in case of a mortal illness.

I feel the phrasing here is a bit, well, clinical and cold-blooded. I mean, we all want a graceful exit – ‘respect’, as the young dudes say.

I would prefer a notice phrased more elegantly. I propose ‘Let Nature Take Its Course’. That carries the same meaning, but it has a nice sense of being in tune with the natural rhythm of life’s ending. It even has a hippieish, Leonard Cohenish inflection – a good note on which to leave the stage.

Small World Lost Shangri-La of Cleethorpes

The Lloyds car park was my last refuge in town – until the bank closed down

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…

One of my abiding happy childhood memories is sitting cross-legged in front of a colour television screen, watching Trumpton

Stop-motion puppets lived in some imaginary-even-in-the-early-’70s England, where small-town life ran like clockwork, there was full employment and everyone knew their generic place. All peacefully abided by laws criminal, civil and local.

I have recently had my shackles raised to nerve-shattering levels by the locals in Cleethorpes and an upturn in light-touch lawlessness. Men and lady folk, of all varieties, disregard all sorts of rules, unwritten and written. Regulations are habitually shrugged off, in pursuit of people’s pleasing themselves.

I’ve seen commuters street-drinking – with their suited bottoms, plonked like six-year-olds on bare street pavements with no beer garden in sight. I’ve seen parents abandoning cars and kids on

‘double yellers’ while they pop inside a shop to grab their pre-ordered pastries.

Boisterous, iron-lunged, silvertempled sorts, always called Bob, scream conversations at jet-plane volume at each other from different sides of the street.

The local police force call this ‘lowlevel antisocial behaviour’. They suggest that I should engage with offenders and draw their attention to the impact of their actions on others. Easier said than done when you’re five feet tall and have a non-local accent. If I did engage with the offenders, they would in turn draw my attention to the fact that they are now dangling me by my bell-bottoms, before lowering me into a skip for giggles.

I have asked men who have left their cars fully on the pavements I waddle down why they haven’t used the empty parking space nearby. Always offended, they say, ‘Chill out, mate. I’m only getting a Lotto; then I’m coming straight back.’

I call them DATMAT’s – ‘Doesn’t Apply To Me At Time’.

And now I’ve been triggered by the closure of the bank branch at the end of my road. The Lloyds has an unlocked staff car park. I lie awake at night,

worrying how long it’ll be before opportunist drivers realise there is free town-centre parking to be had.

And Britain’s fourth armed force, the legion of food-dispatching delivery drivers, are bound to discover this uncharged vehicular sanctuary too.

I explained this all to the lady at the reception desk of the remaining Lloyds branch in the next town over.

She scribbled down a phone number I thought was for their estates management office. When I phoned, I found out it was a help centre for customers with mental-health issues.

So I accessed the car park via its open gate. No tent city had been erected in the landlord’s absence; no tent village; no tent. On the car-park wall, someone had written, ‘Ginger Karl is a massive nonce’.

I was about to leave when I was approached by a uniformed professional. I was genuinely terrified.

He bluntly asked, ‘Do you realise you’re on private property?’

I explained that I did, but I was a concerned citizen.

This didn’t wash with him.

‘Well, it isn’t occupied,’ I gabbled. ‘It doesn’t apply to me at this time.’

SPRING ESCAPES FOR DISCERNING TRAVELLERS

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3 nights from the price of 2 until 30 March. Price from £698, saving £140.

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Includes a Nice Museum Pass

MARRAKECH

Jardins de la Medina **** Deluxe

Marrakech offers a unique and intoxicating short break with sunshine, atmospheric souks and delicious Moroccan cuisine. The discreet entrance door and reception hall give no clue to the delightful courtyard gardens of this charming hotel. There is a restaurant adjacent to the characterful bar – both with an outside terrace overlooking the gardens. The hotel’s swimming pool is surrounded by tall palm trees, and guests can enjoy views over the medina from one of the many rooftop terraces. There are 36 bedrooms, as well as a fitness centre and hammam.

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Book a Club Europe upgrade from Gatwick before 31 March 2025 and we will send you a complimentary bottle of Pol Roger Champagne to help you celebrate in style. You must mention BA PR offer at the time of booking.

Prue’s News

Cordon bleu guide to disgusting food

I’ve just been playing Debbie McGee to Chris van Tulleken’s Paul Daniels.

The TV doctor was giving the first of three Royal Institution Christmas children’s lectures. I was one of his sidekicks, aiding and abetting his sometimes alarming, often funny, always fascinating expositions on the human gut.

When the children emerged, they’d been riveted for two hours and were bubbling with excitement.

The TV lecture lasts an hour, but filming took longer. No one was bored, tired or restless. They’d learnt all this: the workings of the mouth (via a minute camera, fed down Chris’s doctor twin brother’s gullet); how we manage not to choke while talking, eating, and drinking at the same time; how we can swallow when upside down; how the stomach massages food to pulp; how the colon excretes the poo. Of course, children love the very mention of poo.

What struck me most forcibly was the way van Tulleken spoke: there was no talking down to children, no trying to ingratiate himself with silliness.

Yes, he included a few poo jokes and got a few teenagers to try to massage a

heap of food – a hamburger, banana, slice of pizza etc – to pulp in a plastic ‘stomach’, demonstrating how four pairs of human hands cannot do what one small stomach can. He also got a surgeon colleague to dissect a pig’s stomach (much like a human’s), so we could see how many muscles are needed.

And he got us all thinking. He passed round little cups and asked the children (who had just learnt that a human mouth produces a litre and a half of saliva a day) to spit into it every minute or so. A little later, after they had diligently been filling their cups with saliva, he suggested that they drink it. Of course they recoiled.

old daughter being offered different foods. Her response to a bowl of live worms was curious and accepting. First, she put some soil in her mouth, and then picked up a wriggling worm and licked it. Her response to a slice of durian, the Far East fruit famous for its rotten-meat smell, was to recoil in horror.

He was demonstrating the built-in safety mechanisms of the brain. Worms would be good nutrition. Rotten meat would make you sick.

He made the point that we think differently about what is in the body and what is outside it. We are quite happy to have saliva, blood, half-digested meals or poo inside the body but, once it’s outside, we don’t want it back. A natural defensive mechanism.

He showed a video of his nine-month-

RI Christmas Lectures are always fascinating. Michael Faraday gave the first one in 1825, specifically to make science accessible and fascinating for children. Last year’s lectures were on artificial intelligence.

Von Tulleken’s three lectures are all on food and its effect on our bodies and the planet. They are available on BBC iPlayer.

Prue Leith’s Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom is out now

sister teresa

Thou shalt not be a pompous judge

Judgeitis is not a disease to be found in any medical dictionary. Nonetheless, it definitely exists in the legal profession.

It is an unattractive mixture of pomposity and self-esteem. It is arrogance, or pride.

The dress code for barristers appearing in any court above a magistrates’ court, specifies, among other things, a white shirt. When a person has put on a winged collar, bands, a jacket and a gown, only a fraction of the shirt is visible.

I was once in court when a young barrister was wearing a pink shirt. The judge looked aghast, and said, very slowly and ponderously, ‘I will hear you, Mr Smith. I will hear you. But I cannot see you.’

He had taken this minor infringement of the dress code as a personal insult and, further, as an insult to his superior position in court.

The judge in question was only a district judge – so on the lowest rung of the judicial hierarchy. As far as I know, his reputation was beyond reproach.

But a remark such as this calls into question the man’s judgement.

I can’t help suspecting that a more distinguished, sensible and senior judge would not have made such a remark, on the basis of having other and better things to think about.

There are several examples of Jesus criticising stuffed-shirt behaviour. One of the most memorable and funniest occurs in Luke’s Gospel.

‘He then told the guests a parable, because he had noticed how they picked the places of honour. He said this, “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take your seat in the place of honour. A more distinguished person than you may have been invited, and the person who invited you both may come and say, ‘Give up your place to this man.’ And then, to your embarrassment, you would have to go and take the lowest place.”’ (Luke 14:7-10)

Funeral Service

The Hanging Judge: George Jeffreys (1645-89)

One can almost hear the amusement and pleasure of those present at the wedding with someone being so successfully deflated. A little humility would have spared this foolish man the potential mockery of the other guests.

This is an illustration of pride, one of the seven deadly sins. The parable is worded in such a way that it is not a reproach as such. It’s a hard-hitting joke which will leave no one who hears it in the slightest doubt as to the foolishness of the wedding guest. Pride is not ridiculed all that often; perhaps it should be.

Humour is one way of neutralising its horrible consequences.

Another way is to pay attention to Isaiah 2:11. ‘Human pride will lower its eyes, human arrogance will be humbled. God alone shall be exalted on that day.’

Marigold Johnson MBE (1932-2024)

Monsignor Keith Barltrop was the celebrant at the requiem mass for Marigold Johnson –social reformer, Labour parliamentary candidate and widow of the writer Paul Johnson – at St Mary of the Angels, Bayswater.

Marigold Johnson worked for Frank Field at the Child Poverty Action Group. She worked for the British Irish Association, aka ‘Toffs against Terrorism’, and was an NHS grief counsellor.

Monsignor Barltrop said in his homily that Marigold’s death was an ‘end of an era for intellectual and political life in this country’. He recalled Marigold approaching

him ten years ago and asking him, in a stage whisper, to talk to Paul about death.

There then followed an awkward conversation in the church where a cheery Paul showed no inclination to discuss such weighty matters.

Her son Cosmo Johnson praised his mother’s ‘Pickwickian voyage of discovery’ in life.

Son Daniel Johnson read Seamus Heaney’s Clearances and saluted his parents’ old friends Harold Pinter, V S Naipaul and Tom Stoppard. Stoppard gave the address at Paul Johnson’s funeral in the same church in 2023.

Daniel Johnson quoted from Friedrich von Schiller’s Elysium and said his

mother was now in the Elysian Fields.

Among the congregation were Marigold’s best friends from her 1950s Oxford days, historian Lady Antonia Fraser and Lady Thomas, widow of the historian Hugh Thomas.

Mari Girling read Proverbs Chapter 31: ‘Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.’

Crispin Hunt read the First Letter of St Paul to the Corinthians: ‘And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.’

Hymns were ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’ and ‘O God, our help in ages past’.

Grandchildren Daisy, Ralph and Sam Johnson read the bidding prayers.

Helen Lacey sang Pie Jesu Domine from Fauré’s Requiem and Handel’s ‘Where’er you walk’.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Losing the will to live

God save me from motor neurone disease or terminal cancer dr theodore dalrymple

There are few subjects more interesting, alarming and reassuring to the elderly than MAID – medical assistance in dying. This is the term preferred in medical journals to ‘medically assisted dying’, whose acronym would be MAD.

Unfortunately, there are some ways of dying whose suffering cannot be fully alleviated by medical means.

Indeed, they are so terrible that many decent people wonder whether it would not be kinder to help the sufferers die, or even to kill them. I can easily imagine circumstances in which I would rather be put down – to use a veterinary term –than continue.

But, of course, anxieties remain about the improper resort to MAID, especially in a country such as Britain where administrative incompetence has become so common, and where we may expect almost no administrative task to be carried out as advertised.

A recent research letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association sought to allay fears of improper resort to MAID in the 18 Western jurisdictions in which it is legally permitted. As might be expected, the law varies between jurisdictions: in some, euthanasia is permitted, while in others only assisted suicide is allowed.

The length of time before anticipated death before MAID is permitted also varies, as does the age at which it may be requested.

There were 184,695 medically assisted deaths in all the jurisdictions between 1999 and 2023. The first two jurisdictions to adopt what I suppose I must call the procedure were Switzerland and Oregon in 1999. Others – Queensland and South Australia – adopted it only in 2023.

The authors examined the diseases from which patients sought, or were given, an easeful death, and found that the pattern was very similar across all jurisdictions. Cancer and motor neurone

disease accounted for 80 per cent of MAID deaths, but for only 30 per cent of all deaths. This did not come to me as a great surprise. If you had asked me from which diseases I would be most likely to seek relief by means of assistance in dying, they would have been motor neurone disease and terminal cancer.

The authors found this deeply reassuring. It meant (they said) that ‘MAID is driven heavily by illness-related factors common to people with those illnesses’; and that it is ‘inconsistent with the idea that MAID is driven substantially by factors that are external to the individual and that vary by jurisdiction, such as eligibility criteria, culture, social assistance, or palliative care availability.’

This seems a very odd conclusion from the data given, because the percentage of all MAID deaths in the jurisdictions varied 50-fold, from 5.1 per cent of all deaths in the Netherlands to 0.1 per cent of all deaths in Washington DC.

This difference may be accounted for in part by the fact that the latter was comparatively late to adopt MAID, in 2018. No doubt, it takes time for people to get used to the very idea of MAID. The Netherlands was an early, and even enthusiastic, adopter.

But even if the pattern of diseases of those ‘receiving’ MAID were similar in Washington and the Netherlands, surely something must explain the 50-fold difference. It is unlikely that it is merely a difference in the prevalence of diseases. Switzerland has less than a third of deaths by MAID that the Netherlands has.

So the authors’ conclusion seems to me distinctly odd, as if they were whistling in the wind. Their reassurance was a case of seek and ye shall find.

As to people supposedly ‘receiving’ MAID, I found the locution a little chilling. We don’t say of the hanged, after all, that they received EAID, ‘executioner assistance in death’.

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

To sign up for our e-newsletter, go to www.theoldie.co.uk

Dr Jim Swire on

SIR: Frances Wilson’s positive review of the TV drama Lockerbie: A Search for Truth (February issue) majors on the campaign by me as spokesman for a small group called UK FamiliesFlight 103 over the past 36 years.

May I encourage all your readers to view this series of five episodes. However, after 36 years, there are not many of us members of UK Families-Flight 103 left now.

The current TV series reviewed in

The Oldie is decorated by Colin Firth and Catherine McCormack, among others, whose skills are amazing and who warmed us by becoming visibly moved by the tragedy as filming progressed.

Our campaign is, and always has been, about our rights as close relatives of some of the victims, to know why the murders were not prevented and where the plot originated. We would love it if your magazine could invite its readers to watch this series of five programmes and decide for themselves whether it is we or the governments of the US and UK who have taught and divulged more of the truth. Bring open minds, please.

Talking of marketing: the book on which the TV series is firmly based is titled Lockerbie: A Father’s Search for Justice (publisher Birlinn). On the flyleaf, the book carries the legend ‘For Flora and all who seek truth’.

With extraordinary changes occurring in the world and in the midst of the ‘post-truth era’, we love this quote from US philosopher, planetary scientist and recoverer (through NASA) of space probe Voyager 1’s Pale Blue Dot photograph, the late, great Carl Sagan:

‘Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time –when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.’ (From The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.)

We are in our grandchildren’s time now.

Dr Jim Swire, Flora’s dad, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire

‘To attract men, I now use this perfume called New Car Interiors’

How to make Gyles sleep

SIR: Like Gyles Brandreth (February issue), I have found getting back to sleep after a nocturnal toilet visit can sometimes be problematic. However, I have a cure that has been working for me for quite a few years. Reading my Kindle (self-illuminating, doesn’t wake my wife) works every time. After just a few pages, I’ve slipped back into a peaceful sleep. Seems to work even with the most riveting read.

Yours faithfully, Roger Newark, Doddington, Cambridgeshire

‘I think someone else is feeding him’

Colin Firth as Jim Swire in Lockerbie

I long for Husband School

SIR: After a dismal day spent in the company of the NHS, I came home and laughed myself better by reading Kathy Lette’s marvellous piece ‘Go to Husband School!’ (February issue). I had no idea that she knew my spouse.

Yours faithfully, Jane Moth, Stone, Staffordshire

It was all Greek to Jesus

SIR: Stephen Halliday (Letters, February issue) asks how Jesus could speak Greek.

The first books of the Hebrew bible were translated into Greek around 250 years before Jesus’s birth. So it’s highly likely that those translations would have been in common usage in Palestine when Jesus was growing up. Maybe he learnt it at school.

Despite Aramaic’s being used in everyday speech, the chances of Jesus’s having had a good knowledge of Greek are more or less certain. He had much knowledge of the Torah, we know. Eugene O’Neale, Edinburgh

the reputations of those involved, in this case Jimmy Edwards.

‘We’re going to try unplugging you and plugging you back in’

Lazy Oxford punts

SIR: Bijan Omrani (‘How to be a Latin lover’, February issue) mentions an Oxford handbook containing ‘the correct way to use a punt’. Presumably this includes standing wimpishly in the well of the punt, propelling it deck-first (retrorsum), rather than the Cambridge way of standing boldly on the deck, which gives much better leverage of the pole. Philip Corp, Salisbury, Wiltshire

Salute Jimmy Edwards

SIR: In his article about le vice anglais (Oldie Man of Letters, February issue), A N Wilson takes the lazy and popular line of imposing today’s attitudes on people and events of the past to traduce

It should be remembered that this ‘pathetic moustachioed old actor whom retrospect paints clearly as a tormented alcohol paedophile’ served as pilot in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, took part in the D-Day landings and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

His Dakota was shot down at Arnhem in 1944, and this resulted in facial injuries which he disguised with the handlebar moustache that Mr Wilson chooses to mock. His brand of humour may not cut the mustard today, but it was acceptable and popular at the time. Surely his war service is more worthy of note? Nigel Chivers, King’s Pyon, Herefordshire

Prize fellow

SIR: Griff Rhys Jones’s mention of his honorary degrees (February issue), reminded me of how the Nobel laureate

‘The guy-to-girl ratio here stinks’

Sir Peter Medawar (pictured) dealt with his many invitations for such degrees. In one of his biographies, he wrote that he decided he would accept only those on a notional alphabetical list; one supposes that ‘Bad luck Huddersfield, I’ve already got Hull’ might have followed. I cannot recall whether he completed his target, though Zurich or Xinxiang might have fitted in nicely towards the end.

With regards, John Evans, Abingdon, Oxfordshire

Engels in England

SIR: For me, Liz Hodgkinson’s Olden Life article on Winterbottom book cloth (February issue) fleshed out the sequel to a Salford story I have known for some time. The Victoria Mills, which Winterbottom bought in 1874, had been built and named by the firm of Ermen & Engels.

The Ermens were some industrious Dutch brothers, while Engels was the father of Friedrich Engels, the co-author with Karl Marx of the Communist Manifesto. Engels junior lived and worked for E & E in Salford and Manchester for many weary years until his retirement in 1869, at the age of 48. Simon Webb, Langley Moor, Durham

History

A Queen set in stone?

Plans

are under way for the monarch’s monument in St James’s

Park

david horspool

Attention, architects, designers, visionaries!

You have been invited to propose a monument to Elizabeth II, to be placed in St James’s Park, in a spot chosen to ‘juxtapose the informality of a busy London park with The Mall’s ceremonial route’.

Those are the slightly deadening words of the late Queen’s former private secretary and now Chair of the Memorial Committee, Lord Janvrin.

I am glad to see that at least two of the memorial committee have historical credentials – Sir William Shawcross, the biographer, and Anna Keay, historian and curator.

The latter’s most recent book was a brilliant evocation of a kingless Britain, during the Interregnum (a description that assumes the country’s natural condition includes a Rex – or Regina). But I don’t think we should cast her as a republican revolutionary because of that.

Will the would-be creators of the monument take inspiration from the past? The committee’s brief is wide. Its nod to history is predictably vague, though the description of St James’s Park as reflecting ‘a cohesive narrative that reflects British history and heritage’ sounds more like wishful thinking than a guideline.

We can be more specific. The proposed monument will be just down the road from the Queen Victoria Memorial (1911), that great weddingcake marble decoration, topped with a gilded winged victory by Thomas Brock, which stands outside Buckingham Palace, at the top of The Mall.

If the new memorial is meant to be ‘in conversation with’ the Victoria one, as art historians like to say, it may be the sort of

conversation a young person has with an embarrassing older relative, telling them they’re out of touch, can’t say that, etc.

Winged victory? I think not. Queen in full coronation fig, complete with orb and sceptre? Well, no need to rub it in that she was the Queen and we’re the great unwashed.

One of the biggest differences between any proposed monument and Victoria’s is not a visible one. It’s how it will be funded. Already in 1902, it was reported that a public appeal for funds from around the Empire had produced a surplus.

There was so much money left over that not only could Aston Webb’s Admiralty Arch and a route into Trafalgar Square be constructed, but there was still enough in the kitty for Webb to reface Buckingham Palace too.

While we can only dream of a public project that comes in so spectacularly under budget, nothing measures the distance between our time and theirs better than the reminder that when Victoria died, there was a British public – and an imperial one – that would enthusiastically stump up to memorialise her. That included what the papers called the ‘tribes of West Africa’, who sent gifts in kind (‘the chief of the native tribes of Old Calabar has sent three casks of palm oil’).

This time around, the monument is to be funded from ‘public money’ – up to £46m of it. That is (of course), we’ll still be paying for it but this time we have no choice in the matter. This at least spares us the prospect of what Mrs Merton would have called a ‘heated debate’ about who would volunteer the cash.

The most memorable time the Victorians faced such a controversy was when some of them proposed to

memorialise Oliver Cromwell, outside a parliament he regularly scorned.

The project was so unpopular that in the end Lord Rosebery stumped up the cash personally, so ensuring that Ann Widdecombe would have the thrill of grinding her teeth each time she passed it (and telling us so).

One problem the designers will face when depicting the Queen herself, as the guidelines instruct them to do, is what age to make her. Brock did his subject few favours by going for the post-Albert Ozempic-qualifying Victoria, but she had looked that way for much of her reign. Elizabeth II underwent no such dramatic physical changes and remained active almost to the end.

It would probably be deemed hopelessly old-fashioned, but it would hardly be inappropriate to have an equestrian statue, whether formal – as for years at Trooping the Colour – or informal. Astonishingly, the Queen rode her pony in the last year of her life.

There is certainly a wealth of historical equestrian precedent nearby, including the oldest bronze in London, Hubert Le Sueur’s sculpture of Charles I, cast in 1633, now at Charing Cross, at the geographical heart of the capital.

The story of that great work, concealed during the Interregnum and re-erected on a Wren pedestal in 1676, is a triumph of aesthetic survival in the face of fanatical philistinism. But, for a wittier inspiration, I would suggest one of my favourites, the equestrian statue of William III in St James’s Square by John Bacon, father and son. Under the left rear hoof is the molehill over which the King’s horse stumbled, which led to his death.

A monument as jokey memento mori, or, as a committee man might put it, a ‘juxtaposition of the formal and informal’?

David Horspool is author of Oliver Cromwell: England’s Protector

Mistress & commander: Queen at Balmoral, 1952

I’m scared to death of being poor. It’s like a fat girl who loses 500 pounds but is always fat inside. I grew up poor and will always feel poor inside. It’s my pet paranoia.

Cher

As soon as you find you can do anything, do something you can’t.

Rudyard Kipling

I spent my childhood clad in 1970s hand-me-downs, primarily from male cousins, which mainly consisted of a selection of beige, brown and orange dungarees. That, combined with a perfectly round pudding-bowl haircut, made me look, on a good day, like a cross between Ann Widdecombe, one of the Flower Pot Men and a monk.

Miranda Hart

Suicide is man’s way of telling God, ‘You can’t fire me – I quit.’

Bill Maher

A woman is like a tea bag – you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.

Eleanor Roosevelt

When it was written, God and Robert Browning knew what it meant. Now only God knows.

Robert Browning on his obscure poem Sordello (1840)

Commonplace Corner

I don’t know why people keep banging on about the sixties. I came from a conventional family and I didn’t go off with different people – I rather wish I had now, seeing all the fun everyone else was having.

Jane Birkin

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

P J O’Rourke

I wish I had a million in the bank. I like round figures. I am a round figure.

Miriam Margolyes

over the dinner table is a kind of slow torture.

Social lies

Few things are more annoying than listening to your partner tell a tale you know is riddled with inaccuracies.

You know it is because you were present when whatever it was actually happened and you have 20/20 recall. To hear the details being butchered

The older I get – and the more times I’ve heard the story, in all its incarnations –the lower my threshold for social lying becomes.

We all exaggerate sometimes, but when the whole account is a rococo embellishment, something gets lost. I think it’s called the truth. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story? Oh, please do.

The problem for the listener is that if you correct your partner, you look like a pedantic bore and it casts a pall over the dinner table that makes your friends shift uneasily in their seats. Plus your dearly beloved will look a bit crushed and hurt, and

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

Aldous Huxley

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

J R R Tolkien

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

Marcus Aurelius

When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home, Let him combat for that of his neighbours. Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome, And get knock’d on the head for his labours.

Lord Byron

Some people regard discipline as a chore. For me, it is a kind of order that sets me free to fly.

Julie Andrews

I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men; they are far superior and always have been.

William Golding

then say they simply remember it differently.

It’s not an argument you can hope to win in a culture that prizes subjective experience over oldfashioned notions such as objective reality. So I just try to adopt a neutral expression, twist my napkin under the table and keep a lid on it.

SMALL DELIGHTS

Taking your hearing aids out when the guests have gone.

RON JENKINS HAYWARDS HEATH, WEST SUSSEX.

Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

But … subjectivism doesn’t explain why something that happened to me when I was on my own has become in the telling something that happened to my ‘other half’. A therapist friend tells me it’s quite common for couples to adopt each other’s memories. In my book, that’s over-sharing.

Intellectual property rights in a relationship are a neglected area of the law – and it’s possible they are a particular problem for journalists.

Experience has taught me that in social situations truth is nearly always stranger – and more interesting – than fiction. And if that makes me a bore and a pedant, so be it.

Dinner, anyone?

REBECCA WILLIS

Jane Birkin, 1969

Dickens on the couch

A N WILSON

Dickens the Enchanter

By Peter Conrad Bloomsbury Continuum £22

The poet’s task is to purify the language of the tribe – so Eliot said in Four Quartets. The novelist’s task is different – to hold up a mirror to society; to tell tales; to depict character.

There are some novelists, though, such as Joyce and Nabokov, Virginia Woolf and P G Wodehouse (who died 50 years ago on Valentine’s Day, 1975,

aged 93), who are language-purifiers and, in that sense, poets.

Of this category of novelist, Dickens was king. He even spoke of himself as a planet. On his birthday, he once wrote to a friend, ‘On this day two and thirty years ago, the planet Dick appeared on the horizon.’

Those who love what could be called mainstream fiction sometimes have no time for Dickens. They find his voice, his exercise of total mastery over his creation, overwhelmingly distasteful.

Peter Conrad is not one of them. His new book Dickens the Enchanter explores the ways in which Dickens goes to work.

In 1835, when he was a very young

man looking for work, he advertised himself thus: ‘CHARLES DICKENS, Resurrectionist, In Search of a Subject.’

Conrad the Resurrectionist releases Dickens from his Victorian coffin in Westminster Abbey – as bumptiously alive as on the day he penned The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836).

If you have not read Dickens for a while – or ever – this reading of the novels will convert you. If you think you know them well, this book will remind you of many a detail you have either

The borderline between Dickens’s sanity and insanity is hard to distinguish

overlooked or failed to perceive with full clarity.

It is a marvellous study, the best book on Dickens since G K Chesterton’s, which was published in 1906.

Conrad quotes the opening sentence of Anna Karenina – (‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’) and adds that, for Dickens, all families are unhappy.

This is one of Dickens’s and Conrad’s starting points. For Wordsworth, boyhood was an innocent seed time. For Dickens – his parents in a debtors’ jail, with him compelled to work in the blacking warehouse and in effect orphaned by grown-ups he could never trust again – the seed time was far from innocent.

Comedy was the release: finding comedy not merely in areas where it did not really exist – in abuse, violence and abject humiliation – but also in the manipulation of language.

It is here that Conrad really comes into his own. As a child labourer, Dickens would sometimes peer into a coffee room whose lettering on the windowpane he saw in mirror fashion – MOOR-EEFFOC. The mysteriousness of language is one of the themes of the fictions.

In Bleak House, little Jo, the crossingsweeper, is illiterate – written speech is composed of ‘mysterious symbols’. The old stationer, Krook, finds mysterious scraps of writing in wastepaper bins and tries to arrange them.

Poor little Paul Dombey attends a school that Dickens calls the Lexicon, which stays open – but only because it is ‘so dropsical from constant reference, that it won’t shut, and yawns as if it really could not bear to be so bothered’.

In another brilliant chapter, ‘In the Carvery’, Conrad has Dickens looking up at a Correggio fresco in an Italian cathedral – ‘a labyrinth of arms and legs … no operative surgeon, gone mad, could imagine the scene in his wildest delirium’.

Dickens himself is such a ‘mad surgeon’. He imagines Silas Wegg, in Our Mutual Friend, who seems to have acquired his wooden leg so naturally that he might be growing a second one to make a pair of it. He compares Dickens to the dolls’ dressmaker in the same novel, animating her dolls as she dresses them.

In The Uncommercial Traveller, walking the streets at night, Dickens thinks of, but does not name, Shakespeare, ‘the great master who knew everything’, but then adds something Shakespeare did not know. That is, in the dark, you cannot distinguish between the sane and the insane. He is surprised that Shakespeare

(in Macbeth) called sleep ‘the death of each day’s life’ and did not call dreams the insanity of each day’s sanity.

Conrad concludes, ‘Only Dickens could have answered Shakespeare back in this way and, in rewriting Macbeth’s line, he issued a manifesto for his own traumatic art.’

What an epithet on which to end! What has begun as a witty exercise in linguistic analysis ends by placing Dickens, and his readers, on the analyst’s couch – a place where the borderline between sanity and insanity is frighteningly hard to distinguish.

Reading Conrad, who for many years taught English literature at Oxford, makes you realise why so many of his hundreds of former pupils adore and praise him.

A N Wilson is author of The Mystery of Charles Dickens

Hitler’s royal servants

HUGO VICKERS

The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis: A History of Collaboration

By Stephan Malinowski Allen Lane £40

This work is substantial in every sense of the word and one that historians will find most fascinating.

It weighs in at 682 pages (though mercifully for the reviewer the last 200 pages are endnotes). It is a welcome contrast to the tabloid and sensational ‘history’ pushed out by so many authors these days.

I came to the book with some enjoyable preconceptions, having been assured by German friends that the author, Stephan Malinowski, was a brilliant scholar. He was greatly admired by the late John Röhl, who spent decades stitching up the Kaiser, proving that everything about the Kaiser was horrible – he was a horrible little boy, a horrible son and so on into a horrible old age.

I’ve just read War and Peace for the first time, in which Tolstoy stresses that history is a sweep of many things, not just (as it were) the decisions or actions of one man – Napoleon.

And so it was interesting to find this story largely told through the prism of the actions of one man – Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, the Kaiser’s son.

The Crown Prince has popped up in my own work, The Sphinx: The Life of Gladys Deacon – Duchess of Marlborough. He was one of many who

‘Do you, Frank, take Debbie’s side, no matter what?’

fell head over heels in love with Gladys Deacon at Blenheim in 1901, causing some disruption at the time.

At the beginning of WWI, she wrote him a letter which she left with her maid in Paris, asking him to be merciful should the Germans win Paris. It was not needed. I opened that letter and read it 60 years later.

The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis appeared in Germany at a time when Prince Georg Friedrich of Prussia, a great-grandson of the Crown Prince, was involved in a prolonged legal battle, seeking compensation from the State of Brandenburg (formerly Prussia) on the grounds that the Hohenzollerns resisted helping the Nazi regime into power.

Malinowski was employed to counter this and effectively proved quite the opposite – that they were crucial to the rise of the Nazis, collaborating with them in numerous ways.

Prince Georg Friedrich’s lawyers suggested that Malinowski ‘possessed insufficient knowledge of the material’, an assertion effectively disproved by this thoroughly researched book.

The Kaiser stomped about in exile at Doorn, in the Netherlands, increasingly withdrawn from reality, believing till the end that he had a right to return.

The Crown Prince returned to Germany in 1923 rather visibly. And, in 1932, there did appear to be a chance that the Hohenzollerns might be put back on the throne by Hitler, which inevitably greatly influenced the Crown Prince’s actions and the support he gave them.

It was an illusion, of course, but even Winston Churchill wrote, ‘If the Allies at the peace table at Versailles had allowed a Hohenzollern, a Wittlesbach and a Habsburg to return to their thrones, there would have been no Hitler. A democratic basis of society might

have been preserved by a crowned Weimar in contact with the victorious Allies.’

The author points out that in a Republic any leader can emerge. But, with a monarchy, the question is set by hereditary succession, and the monarchical infrastructure has to be strong enough to carry a weak or useless King.

With the Hohenzollerns, besides their many failings outlined in this book, there were too many candidates and they could not make up their mind which one was to be the designated leader. The Kaiser obviously insisted that he was.

The author quotes the line of Ian Kershaw, Hitler’s biographer: ‘The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.’ He then tells us that this should be revised to ‘It wasn’t paved with indifference. It was paved with collaboration.’ He concludes that the Crown Prince was ‘a morally flexible opportunist and not a racist fanatic’.

Having brought myself up on ghosted memoirs of the Kaiser and his son, and tame biographies by the likes of Klaus Jonas, I found it interesting to read what was really going on. The Hohenzollerns were flawed in almost every respect.

The author makes the valid point that at any time Hitler could have ordered his henchmen to exile, arrest or murder the entire Hohenzollern family, but did not do so. He used them to his advantage.

The last chapter of the book is especially fascinating, as we learn how the amiable Prince Louis Ferdinand and others rewrote the narrative of history in an attempt to downplay, indeed deny, the family’s support of the Nazi regime.

Hugo Vickers is author of Clarissa: Muse to Power – The Untold Story of Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon

Not so Gorgeous George

JUSTIN WARSHAW

Get Carman: In Court with George Carman QC, Britain’s Most Feared Lawyer – The Man Behind the Advocate

By Karen Phillipps Biteback

Publishing £25

This is not the first biography of George Carman – aka ‘Gorgeous George’ and ‘Killer Carman’ – but it is almost certainly the last.

Carman’s son, Dominic, wrote a scathing biography, No Ordinary Man (2002), within a year of his father’s

death. And now Karen Phillipps, Carman’s erstwhile and self-described platonic companion for the last 15 years of his life, has composed a tribute.

Carman (1929-2001) retired from practice just a year shy of a quarter of a century ago and died months later.

Much of her book covers the same, well-traversed courtroom dramas dealt with in detail by Dominic.

Even her title lacks originality: Get Carman is a reference to the words of Alan Rusbridger, then the Guardian editor, on his being served with Jonathan Aitken’s libel writ. And it is, of course, a nod to the Michael Caine classic Get Carter (1971), which was remade with Sylvester Stallone in the very year Carman died. There was also a BBC drama production, Get Carman: The Trials of George Carman QC (2002), starring David Suchet in the title role, with Jonathan Aitken played by Douglas Reith, later Lord Merton in Downtown Abbey

The core of the biography revolves round accounts of Carman’s most memorable forensic battles. The casebook spans a 20-year period from 1979 to 1999.

Surveying Carman’s bread and butter over that period demonstrates the extent to which the past truly is a foreign country, where things are done differently. It was Carman’s defence of Jeremy Thorpe that pulled Carman out of provincial obscurity on the North Eastern Circuit and into the limelight. His closing speech, in which he looked each juror in the eye and told them that their 12 votes were far more significant that the many thousands Thorpe had received in general elections, was considered by the profession and the press to be a tour de force

But far more interesting was Mr Justice Cantley’s summing-up, later lampooned by Peter Cook. That satirical attack was quite unnecessary; Cantley’s own words sound like a stand-up routine. He described one of the Crown’s witnesses as a man ‘whose taste probably ran to a cocktail bar in his living room’.

The victim, Norman Scott, the judge said, was ‘a spineless, neurotic character addicted to hysteria and selfadvertisement’. Was this really a win for Carman or for the judge?

In 1980, Carman defended Dr Leonard Arthur on a murder charge relating to the death of a severely handicapped baby. The child’s parents had not wanted the baby’s painful life to be unnecessarily extended, and in accordance with standard practice the doctor had given the nurses instructions not to prolong the baby’s life. The prosecution was brought at the encouragement of an organisation called Life, an anti-abortion group.

It is difficult to imagine a more distressing outcome for the parents, and of course the doctor, than this terrible trial. Carman secured an unsurprising acquittal.

Carman’s client list included: Ken Dodd, the comedian, up on tax-evasion charges; Imran Khan, the cricketer politician, being sued by Ian Botham; Chris Brasher, the runner, suing Channel 4; Richard Branson, against British Airways; Elton John, up against the Mirror; and Mohamed Al-Fayed against Neil Hamilton.

It is quite an eye-opener to remember just how many column inches were dedicated to libel actions involving scandalous stories carried by the very papers reporting the cases.

The landscape of libel has changed

‘Plenty of ice’

beyond recognition. Damages have been capped, jury trials abolished and the appetite for publishing salacious stories whittled away by the Leveson Inquiry.

It is difficult to imagine the five-footthree George Carman, described by the Independent as ‘the tiny giant of British libel’, operating in this more sterile environment.

No modern judge would put up with Carman’s notorious habit of producing, mid-trial, rabbits out of a hat, including a diary recounting infidelity in the Jani Allan v Eugène Terre’Blanche case; Jonathan Aitken’s wife’s airline tickets in Aitken’s libel case against the Guardian; and a video of EastEnders actress Gillian Taylforth fellating a wine bottle.

The romp through these cases reveals very little about Carman. He remains flat on the page and appears little more than a skilled cross-examiner and jury advocate. The biggest reveal of the book is the first chapter, which comprises the first three chapters of Carman’s autobiography, cut short by his battle with prostate cancer.

It comes as a surprise that an Oxfordeducated lawyer with a reputation for magnificent speech-making could write so poorly and pompously.

It is full of clichéd nonsense and pap amateur psychology about him and his parents, littered with annoying and unnecessary exclamation marks. The chapter serves little purpose other than to make Phillipps’s prose seem a little less pedestrian.

The only glimpse of the man behind the name is to be found in Lord Alexander of Weedon’s memorial speech, appended to the conclusion.

It labours the glories but hints at the fallible man, husband and father behind the mask and it is much the best part of the book.

Justin Warshaw KC is a family law barrister

Pontiff pontificates

MARY KENNY

Hope: The Autobiography

By

Pope Francis Viking Penguin £25

Is the Pope a Catholic?

Evidently yes. But his obsessive loathing of war, and his repeated insistence that no war is justified and all war is ‘the road to nowhere’, sometimes make him sound like a Quaker. St Thomas Aquinas’s conditions

for a ‘just war’, which have held a respected place in Catholic teaching, aren’t countenanced.

But Francis, like all of us, is formed by his background. He grew up in an Italian family in Argentina hearing dire stories about the horrors of the First World War and all that followed, including Mussolini – opposed by his radical working-class grandparents.

He was much influenced, as a young man, by the experience of Father Pedro Arrupe, the Jesuit who was in Hiroshima when the atom bomb was dropped, and who spoke about its terrible effects. The Jesuits have an attachment to Japan, and Nagasaki had a Catholic community. Francis, 88, has travelled the world visiting conflict zones and encountering the wretched of the Earth.

His sympathy for refugees may also be aligned with his family’s experiences (as well as the Gospel mission to ‘welcome the stranger’). They were, like so many Italians, emigrants rather than refugees, but there is an appreciation of the fortitude it takes to leave a home country to make a new life far away.

Francis’s family stories paint a beguiling picture of the way in which communities interlocked in the barrios of Buenos Aires. The grandparents played an active role in the children’s lives, and Nonna Rosa, his paternal grandmother, was a formative influence. The family was ‘respectably poor’, and young Jorge, the eldest of five, started a part-time job at the age of 14.

The locals in the BA district of Flores were diverse, and included Jews (known as Russians) and Muslims (described as Turks). Prostitutes were also part of the neighbourhood, and Francis writes with affection about the sex workers who

became friends (did not Jesus Christ likewise befriend such people?). He also danced the tango – once associated with the brothel – and he’s a fan of the great Carlos Gardel.

There is a likeable tolerance about his outlook which he brought, later on, to a sense of ‘inclusion’ for homosexuals and transgender people. They should be embraced as part of our humanity – but, all the same, he’s not changing Catholic rules about the natural law, and he rejects ‘gender theory’, which questions the biological basis of gender.

There were many ‘strong women’ in his family, and he thinks women’s role should be enhanced in the church. But he still affirms that men and women are different, and the ordination of women is not on the cards.

He was attracted to girls, yes, and to one or two in particular. But he felt the call to be a priest in his teens, and we hear no more of his intimate life.

Instead, there are engaging anecdotes about friends and characters he has known. He has a good eye for the type of detail that makes a story vivid – and an instinct for the meaningful gesture. When he meets Lidia Maksymowicz, who was a child victim of Josef Mengele, he just kisses the tattooed Auschwitz number on her arm – 70072.

Francis traces the recent, troubled history of Argentina, describing the experiences of those persecuted under Galtieri’s dictatorship, as well as alluding to the Peronista period.

There are many Scriptural reflections – a pope is entitled to pontificate – and reflective accounts of episodes in his life, including brushes with death (and a confession that he is not brave about physical pain). He of course condemns

paedophile and abusive offences, and the covering-up of such crimes, but it’s not dwelt upon.

A passage about the conclave that elected him pontiff captures the excitement of the contest, as in Conclave, the recent film.

He loves movies, especially Fellini and Bergman, and a favourite is Babette’s Feast. He also cites many authors who have influenced him, from Alessandro Manzoni (who wrote the Italian classic The Betrothed) to Baudelaire, Borges and Brecht.

A lefty? He’s certainly on the side of the poor against the rich, and his opposition to the Latin Mass seems to be based on a feeling that it draws posh reactionaries.

I like the way he’s rooted in family and place – he still speaks Piedmontese with family members – and, as that of an oldie (88), his message of ‘hope’ is comforting.

He has been faithfully partnered by his co-author, Carlo Musso; and his translator, Richard Dixon, has nicely captured Francis’s ‘voice’. The book could do with an index, however.

Mary Kenny is author of The Way We Were: Catholic Ireland Since 1922

Profile in courage

ALAN JUDD

The Madness of Courage: The Exceptional Achievements of Gilbert Insall

By Tony Insall

Biteback Publishing £25

Group Captain Gilbert Insall was the only man in the First World War to have both won a VC and escaped from a German prisoner of war (POW) camp.

This account by his great nephew, an intelligence historian, is not the usual hagiography – understandable though that might have been – but is a serious contribution to the history of that war.

It highlights not only the hairraisingly primitive conditions of early aerial warfare but the much less wellknown world of British and Empire POWs in Germany, of whom there were some 175,624.

When Insall joined the newly formed Royal Flying Corps (RFC), the aircraft were unreliable and training inadequate – unsurprisingly, given that no one had ever fought with aeroplanes before.

Crashes and deaths were frequent; of the 6,933 airmen killed in the First World War, over 2,000 died in accidents or

through poor training. No one had a parachute, although some crews were issued with car-tyre inner tubes as life jackets which they were supposed to inflate by mouth.

On one occasion, Insall’s pilot brother flew his Vickers over German lines and, on trying to return, found that the wind blew his plane – despite its being at full throttle – backwards.

At 21, Gilbert won his VC following another action, when he brought down an enemy plane, flew dangerously low to finish it off on the ground and was damaged by ground fire as he tried to make it back at tree-top height. He crash-landed in the French sector, abandoning his Vickers in an exposed position between two French trenches.

Fortunately, neither he nor his observer was seriously injured and, with French help during the ensuing night, they were able to patch up their machine.

Insall took the lead, braving an estimated 150 German shells before taking off by himself under fire and nursing the damaged plane back to base.

Long after the war, a fellow squadron member reckoned that Insall’s VC should have been an MC (Military Cross), which he was later awarded for escaping from his POW camp. Given the sustained courage and determination Insall displayed during three escape attempts, the medals should, his comrade thought, have been the other way round.

As perhaps they should, although strictly speaking the VC is awarded for ‘valour in the presence of the enemy’, implying fighting, in which case the rationale for the original allocation stands.

However, before Insall could be awarded his medal, he was shot down near Bapaume, collecting a 450g piece

‘No, it’s the same stuff. He just prefers it tapas-style’

of anti-aircraft shrapnel in his thigh. The account of his incarceration and subsequent escape attempts occupies a substantial portion of the book –rightly so.

Thanks to films and books, we are reasonably familiar with Second World War POW accounts, but there are few, even among historians, who know much about prisoners in the First World War.

Despite their numbers – an estimated 520,579 French held in Germany, 394,478 Germans in France, 328,900 in Britain – they are largely written out of history.

Much of that history does not make pleasant reading. There was no Geneva Convention, though there were several Hague Conventions intended to influence how prisoners were treated, albeit that they were often ignored. There were also some well-run German POW camps with humane commandants, but in far too many of them conditions were appalling, with random violence, including bayoneting, commonplace.

As the German Army collapsed towards the end of the war, prisoner records ceased to be kept, and unknown but significant numbers were shot out of hand. There were POWs in Turkey, too, and even some escapes as detailed here.

The accounts of Insall’s escape attempts culminate in a successful and very wet touch-and-go border crossing into neutral Holland. Drawn partly on first-hand recollections and partly on comprehensive archival research by his great-nephew, they make for dramatic reading and inevitably provoke uncomfortable reflections: would I have escaped, or would I have been one of the great majority who didn’t try?

Or would I have been one of those – mainly older senior officers – who actively disapproved? How would I have coped with privations in the camp, let alone with being frozen and starved while on the run? And, having done it once and failed and been sentenced to five months’ solitary in a damp, infested underground cell hardly bigger than my bed boards, would I have had the guts to do it again, and again?

Maybe there is a touch of madness in that kind of courage, as the title of this book suggests.

We are fortunate who have never had to answer those questions. But Insall’s account of that other Insall does us all a favour by reminding us of them.

Alan Judd, The Oldie’s motoring correspondent, served in the Army and the Foreign Office

A Life in Books – Lady Antonia Fraser My Sweet Carolines

How thrilling it was to write about Caroline Lamb and Caroline Norton

‘Hands

Touchin’ hands

Reachin’ out

Touching me, touchin’ you’ Sweet Caroline, Neil Diamond

At the beginning of the 21st century, my stars must have been twinkling in some delightful arrangement that celebrated the name Caroline.

I’ve spent an extraordinary and extraordinarily happy time dealing with two fascinating Carolines.

Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828) and Caroline Norton (1808-77) had one tremendous connection through William Lamb, Lord Melbourne – Whig Prime Minister in 1834 and 1835-41.

Lady Caroline Lamb was married to him at 19. William succeeded his father to the Melbourne title only after her death – so she never bore the Melbourne name. Caroline Norton was accused of adultery with Lord Melbourne, by her husband George Norton.

In a famous trial, George Norton sued Melbourne for criminal conversation –or adultery. Melbourne was cleared by the jury.

I was attracted by the law case rather than by the alleged offence she committed with Melbourne.

The law had always attracted me. Wistfully, I had sometimes dreamt of it as a profession. I had to be content to have it pointed out in kindly fashion by the distinguished lawyers in my family that a barrister was a kind of biographer. Caroline Norton’s law case ended in a terrible way, with the removal of her three children from her care.

The boys were sent to a relation in Scotland. There the youngest, nine-yearold Willy, fell mortally ill after a riding accident. Caroline was summoned back into the family circle. Too late. She was met at the station by a certain Lady Kelly, whom she had never met before.

‘How’s Willy?’ she asked.

‘Dead’ was the brief, cruel answer.

The story of Caroline Norton became

one of the struggle for the rights of the mother, which scarcely existed at the time. I loved writing about the case, alternately shedding inner tears over the fate of Willy – imagine that scene on the railway platform! – and exploding with indignation over the behaviour of George Norton.

Caroline Norton could not exactly be described as a feminist, but the delineation of her attitude towards women’s rights was a fascinating study. She herself, one of three beautiful Sheridan sisters, granddaughters of Sheridan the playwright, made for marvellous illustrations.

If a biographer can have a tiny, secret self-identification with the subject, I definitely felt something along those lines with Caroline Norton: not so much ‘That happened to me’ as ‘How terrible if that HAD happened to me’.

Lamb would have made a delightful government minister

For Caroline Lamb, I had mixed emotions. But, whatever my irritation, shared by Lady Melbourne and no doubt at times by her lover Lord Byron, I always felt a kind of tenderness; a wish to take the naughty little creature under my wing. I had never felt that before with any of my subjects – and the list of them included not one, but four executions!

I never had any intention of writing about Lamb, one Caroline being sweet enough, until the spiritual darkness of lockdown. In a melancholy fashion, I was dusting where no duster had ever been before. Suddenly, a large book fell deliberately – as I perceived it – on my foot. It was a biography of Lady Caroline Lamb. I could take the hint.

And so I secured to myself five very happy years, writing about the Sweeties. There are plenty of romantic stories in women’s history, but the stories of the fight for women’s rights were more limited and therefore in a way more exciting.

Lady Caroline Lamb often took dramatic action. When her beloved William was about to make his first speech as an MP in the House of Commons, she found to her horror that women were not admitted. What did Caroline Lamb do? She dressed up as a boy with the help of her brother’s clothes and proceeded to attend in style.

Rather than just to look like a man, Caroline Lamb wanted to enjoy a man’s liberties and freedoms.

She taught me that the fight for liberty can take many forms – including that of a spritely page. As I gaze at my reproduction (pictured) of Caroline, dressed as a page, by Thomas Phillips, I reflect on what a delightful government minister she would have made today.

Antonia Fraser is author of The Case of the Married Woman: Caroline Norton –A 19th-Century Heroine Who Wanted Justice for Women and Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit

Caroline Lamb (1813) by Thomas Phillips

FILM

HARRY MOUNT

MARIA (12A)

The best bit of this biopic of Maria Callas (1923-77) is at the end: the last few minutes of the 124-minute film.

Over the credits, you watch real home-movie footage of Maria Callas, sailing on her lover Aristotle Onassis’s yacht. Even without audio, you can see, thanks to her diva vamping and fixed stare with those huge eyes, what a wonder she was. A genius with a monstrous ego.

This is the third and last film in director Pablo Larraín‘s Lady with Heels trilogy, after Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021). With all three compelling women, you long for real documentary rather than fabricated drama.

Still, Angelina Jolie has worked her socks off to get Callas right in her last doomed week in Paris. With Onassis dead, and her voice shot to pieces,

Arts

Callas’s only consolations were her butler, Ferruccio Mezzadri (Pierfrancesco Favino, a study in deferential adoration of a mistress), her housekeeper, Bruna Lupoli (a touching Alba Rohrwacher), and her trusty bottles of Mandrax.

Jolie gets Callas’s spoken voice right. And she can’t help that she is even better-looking than Callas – and even thinner. In 1954, the pudgy Callas lost 80 pounds – increasing her beauty but, some say, destroying her voice.

Others say she had dermatomyositis, a connective-tissue disease, which cruelly attacked her larynx.

In what initially smacked of Callaslike egomania, Jolie refused to be dubbed and does lots of singing herself.

In fact, for the youthful scenes portraying Callas at her finest, 90 per cent of the recordings are of Callas’s voice. Jolie sensibly does more singing in scenes from Callas’s last days, when La Divina’s voice was fatally flawed.

It’s a clever idea, too, by writer Steven Knight to root the film in Callas’s final tragic week.

At its best, her voice was the soft, sweet sound of melancholic suffering. And Callas’s life was full of suffering: the horrible, pushy mother of her New York youth; her desperately poor years in Athens during the war; her failed ten-year marriage to Giovanni Battista Meneghini, a rich, older industrialist; and her appalling

treatment by Onassis, who split from her and married Jackie Kennedy. There are rumours of a lost baby with Onassis, too.

So the tragedy of her life chimes with the heartbreaking sadness of her arias –which are, all too briefly, slotted into the film to illustrate the youthful highlights of her career.

If you’re going to have a film about one of the world’s best singers, why cut short some of her songs?

At one moment, Jolie’s aged Callas declares, ‘I can’t listen to my own records,’ and the music is cut. The director may not want to listen to recordings from her youth – we do.

Still, when you do get to hear Callas – rather than Jolie – sing, you are immediately enraptured by that instantly recognisable voice, paradoxically improved by its imperfections.

The settings are well-chosen, from La Scala to the Hungarian State Opera House in Budapest.

The Hungarian capital is cropping up more and more on screen – it was used in the new adaptation of The Day of the Jackal. You get Western Europeanlooking magnificence on an Eastern European budget.

The script has its good moments, not least in capturing Callas’s magnificently spoilt side.

She asks to be taken to a café where the waiters know who she is because, she says, ‘I’m in the mood for adulation.’ At one point, her accompanist calms her wounded ego, saying, ‘You’re not late. Everyone else is early.’

But, in the end, it isn’t clear exactly who this film is aimed at. Opera aficionados will mind that it’s Jolie singing instead of Callas.

And people who don’t like opera just won’t be very interested in her – there isn’t quite enough drama beyond the Great Singer Loses Her Voice storyline.

Fevered diva: Angelina Jolie plays Maria Callas in her last week

THEATRE

WILLIAM COOK

JEFFREY BERNARD IS UNWELL Coach & Horses, Soho, London

Anyone with any taste who read the Spectator between 1978 and 1997 would turn first to Jeffrey Bernard’s Low Life column, described by Jonathan Meades as ‘a suicide note in weekly instalments’.

By rights, Bernard’s column should have made miserable reading, coming from a part-time journalist and full-time alcoholic. His barstool dispatches from the Coach & Horses pub in Soho chronicled a lifetime of self-inflicted misfortune, including four failed marriages, a few legal mishaps and a string of sackings and missed deadlines – all brought on by what he called ‘the other woman’, aka the demon drink.

So why was he so entertaining? Partly because, like all good journalists, he had an eye for a good story. Partly because he wrote without any self-pity or regret. But above all because he wrote so well. Honed and polished by decades of tipsy repetition, his self-deprecating anecdotes rolled off the page. It was like reading a letter from an old friend.

Even so, in 1989, when Keith Waterhouse (not only a great playwright, but also a brilliant columnist, like Bernard) announced that he’d turned Low Life into a play, I thought it sounded like a daft idea. Static and self-referential, a less promising subject for the stage was hard to imagine.

How wrong I was. Waterhouse’s stagecraft was inspired. Bernard wakes from a drunken stupor to find himself imprisoned overnight inside a deserted Coach & Horses, having nodded off in the gents. Sensibly, he decides to make the most of this impromptu lock-in, downing a bottle of vodka (his favourite tipple) while regaling us with a litany of his favourite yarns.

What emerges is a supremely entertaining yet surprisingly tender portrait, of a man whose wilful selfdestruction is a perverse form of rebellion – a refusal to submit to the life of quiet desperation to which most of us succumb: the nine-to-five; the suburban semi; the dutiful, frustrated spouse…

Of course it’s largely an illusion – as with most addicts, Bernard’s alcoholic life has its own drudgery and routine. But at least it contains some prospect of variety, if not salvation. As Bernard says, of his downhill struggle, ‘Starting from tomorrow, everything will be exactly the same’.

I saw Peter O’Toole play

Intoxicating: Robert Bathurst as Jeffrey Bernard

Jeffrey Bernard and he was amazing – an uncannily accurate portrayal. Then I saw Tom Conti play him. He was completely different but just as good. Although O’Toole’s interpretation got more praise, Conti was even more impressive. He showed that Waterhouse’s play was more than mere mimicry and was a proper drama in its own right.

Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell – the title refers to the line that would appear in the Spectator when Bernard was too drunk to file – has since been played by numerous fine actors, including James Bolam and Denis Waterman. The latest is Robert Bathurst in a new(ish) adaptation by James Hillier. Has this eccentric entertainment stood the test of time?

Hillier also directs, and his big idea is to stage this play in the actual pub in which it’s set. On the whole, this works very well. It’s a bit uncomfortable, and the sight lines are a bit obscured, but it’s so intimate and atmospheric that this

‘Starting from tomorrow, everything will be exactly the same’

hardly matters. It’s like a séance. The only flaw is that Hillier has stripped the play down to a one-man show. The original play, though mainly a monologue, featured a small cast of supporting players, dramatising Bernard’s anecdotes. Without their lively presence, this drama feels more austere.

Bathurst’s portrayal is quite close to the Bernard I remember (as a tyro hack, I once interviewed him at the Groucho Club, over a largely liquid lunch), but this isn’t a shallow impersonation. Like Conti, he infuses the part with his own personality, and that’s what makes it live and breathe.

The elephant in the room is the horrific effect that booze had on Bernard’s health. When I met him, he was only 60 but looked 80. He died of the drink, minus a leg, aged just 65. Bernard shunned workaday convention, and there was something truly brave – almost heroic – about that. However, like many bohemians, he paid a heavy price.

Revisiting this fine play in my late fifties, I feel it seems a lot more melancholic than it did in my early twenties. As Bernard might have said, one’s too many and a hundred’s not enough.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE

I recently rediscovered The Public Ear – a bold new arts show, broadcast on the Light Programme from 1963 to 1964.

Joan Bakewell confirmed how exciting it was in 1963 – pre-JFK’s murder, anyway. We heard a young listener, thrilled to have heard George Harrison’s voice, imploring the BBC to send her a tape recording. Sorry, no.

Then Pete Atkin, producer of Martin Jarvis’s Just William, wrote to us to say he’d proposed, long ago, a ‘BBC Radio Club’: members would receive a list of programmes available on cassette.

In 1995, The Oldie seized on this idea. Our founder, Richard Ingrams, believed readers ‘valued the enjoyment they got from listening more highly than that they got from viewing’. The Oldie would soon be offering a tape service for listeners wanting to hear again a programme they had liked, or just missed. Audio cassettes could be listened to ‘in the car, in the bath, or when one is walking one’s dog’.

How laughably cumbersome, timeconsuming and labour-intensive that now seems. Stamps, envelopes, cheques, cassettes? Not to mention the complications of negotiating the rights.

Ha! As Feedback Forum revealed recently, young listeners would not be seen dead listening to Radio 4, or to anything called a radio. Why would they?

Gen Z gets information from TikTok. Just one young panellist said she had listened to something – ‘whatever’ – on Radio 4 and been impressed. It was ‘gid, quite gid fun. I’m like “Oh”,’ she said. ‘So maybe I’ll go on Amazon and get myself a radio.’

Which is why, in BBC Charter renewal year, Radio 4 is imperilled despite its having nine million listeners. This has induced a spate of navel-gazing and self-congratulation, with Mohit Bakaya, Radio 4 Controller, calling his network an ‘incredible enchanted forest where you might bump into anything’.

True sometimes: nobody expected to hear the sublime sound of Cristian de Sá, former BBC young musician of the year, playing Bruch’s violin concerto on Broadcasting House

Jokes were made: ‘Tony and Lucy think they are Radio 4,’ said the mystery voice in the imaginary-diseases game on I’m

Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. They tell us they worry about their long-term health, often repeat themselves, come over all funny at 6.30, and get turned off at 2pm and 7pm on weekdays. ‘Let’s call it the broccoli of the audio world,’ said Andrea Catherwood.

The Shipping Forecast, a key sound of British culture, makes 10,000 of us feel cosy and contented when we hear ‘Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, west 7 to severe gale 9’. It defines us as an island nation, and has a kind of poetry.

But First, This… featured the continuity announcers who read the forecast with silken voices. Viji Alles says arriving at work feels like walking into an old bookshop – ‘a cornucopia of delights’.

And, just after dawn, the venerable Farming Today slot gives a similar sensation: you are cosily in bed, while farmers are already out, ploughing away. Farmers’ concerns are horribly relevant to our lives.

But I suspect Radio 4 is stuck. New listeners are unlikely to be drawn in, least of all by the trivialising of history on Saturday mornings in You’re Dead to Me

On Matthew Syed’s programme on the first 25 years of the 21st century, a great historian, Margaret MacMillan, discussed the future with Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, godfather of AI.

Hinton and Syed said they often use AI as a helpful tool. Margaret MacMillan had never used ChatGPT.

‘I really don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s a very interesting time. But there are times, as a historian, when I wish I were studying it from a distance, not living through it.’

TELEVISION

FRANCES WILSON

This year is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth in 1775. She died at 41 in 1817. Cassandra, her devoted sister, lived on for a further 28 years.

In 1843, shortly before her own death, Cassandra burned two thirds of Jane’s letters, leaving the other third – chatty, factual and unrevealing – as gifts for family members.

Why did she perform such an act of literary vandalism. What did the letters reveal? Why would it have damaged her reputation to have the letters published?

One explanation is given in BBC 1’s four-part drama Miss Austen, faithfully adapted from Gill Hornby’s bestselling novel. As a literary snob with an aversion to the Austen industry, I did not expect to find much in the series of any depth – but how wrong I was.

Scripted by Andrea Gibb and directed by Aisling Walsh, with superb performances by Keeley Hawes as the older Cassandra, Synnøve Karlsen as Cassandra in her youth and Patsy Ferran as an acerbic Jane, the series is one I watched with tears coursing down my

Miss Austen (left to right): Isabella (Rose Leslie), Cassandra Austen (Keeley Hawes), Dinah (Mirren Mack), Mary (Jessica Hynes)

cheeks. How was it that, until now, I could have taken so little notice of the magnificent Cassandra, the Miss Austen of the title?

Episode one begins in 1840 with the 65-year-old ‘Cassie’, feeding her goats in the garden at Chawton, learning of the imminent death of the Reverend Fulwar Craven Fowle.

‘There is no need to inconvenience yourself with thoughts of coming to Kintbury,’ the Reverend’s spinster daughter, Isabella (Rose Leslie), insists. ‘Please, I must implore you, do not vex yourself by making the long and arduous journey to Kintbury.’

But Cassie is already on her way, there being letters from Jane at Kintbury that need to be removed.

The Fowle family has close ties to the Austen family. Eliza, Fulwar’s longdeceased wife, was a close friend of Jane and Cassandra. Eliza’s sisters, Mary and Martha, married Cassandra’s brothers, James and Frank. Cassie was herself engaged to Fulwar’s brother Tom Fowle, who died at sea, aged 22. After that, she swore an oath never to marry another, despite being courted by the perfect Henry Hobday (Max Irons), who would have saved the sisters from hardship after the death of their father. Following Reverend Thomas Fowle’s death, his situation – including the vicarage – is taken by the oleaginous Mr Dundas.

‘I am Jane Austen’s greatest admirer!’ Mr Dundas informs Cassie, his favourite Austen novel being what he calls ‘Mansfield House’. Meanwhile, Mary Austen, Cassie’s sister-in-law (Jessica Hynes), believes her former husband James to have been the genius in the family. When Cassie reads Persuasion aloud to Isabella, with the wide-eyed maid listening from behind the door, Mary wears a sour expression.

Jane’s wittily reimagined letters to Eliza, found by Cassie in a trunk, bring up

buried memories and repressed emotions. They also allow for flashbacks which take us to the emotional core of the drama: the bond between the plump and pretty Cassie and the feral and frightening Jane.

The tragic love affair in the story is not between Cassie and Tom Fowle or between Cassie and Henry Hobday but between Cassie and Jane, a person so wonderful and unique that no man comes close. Without Cassandra, we realise, there would have been no Jane Austen. Before she became the keeper of her sister’s flame, Cassie was the equivalent of the writer’s wife.

Everything her sister sees is discussed with Cassie before going into her novels, which Cassie is the first to read.

All there is to know about Jane Austen, Cassie insists, can be found in her fiction. This is not, however, true, which is why the letters must be destroyed.

Viewers will quibble over the details. Keeley Hawes, without a grey hair on her head, does not look like a woman in her mid-60s, while her niece, Anna, seems 20- rather than 40-something. None of this affects the intelligence of the writing, directing and performances.

I was reminded, at the end of the series, of the magnificent final lines of Middlemarch, where George Eliot reflects on her heroine, Dorothea Brooke.

The effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as

they might have been is half due to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Miss Austen is a deeply moving and entirely convincing tale of another hidden life, although Cassie’s loyalty to her sister’s legacy was, it transpires, an act of great historical significance.

MUSIC

RICHARD OSBORNE

AN OXFORD ELEGY

‘And that sweet city with her dreaming spires/She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.’

The idea of Oxford as the city of dreaming spires (or aspiring dreamers, as I sometimes imagine it) is from Matthew Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’. It was the pastoral threnody for his friend the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, who died in Florence in 1861, aged 42.

That Sweet City the title of a new recording from Signum Classics which couples two rarely heard yet quietly memorable pieces of English music. Both were premièred at the annual summer concert of The Queen’s College, Oxford, in the early 1950s.

The 1951 concert introduced a cantata by Kenneth Leighton, then a 21-year-old composer reading Classics at the college. The texts of this thanksgiving to spring, Veris gratia, were mainly drawn from the medieval Carmina Burana as they’d appeared in Helen Waddell’s bestselling 1929 anthology, Mediaeval Latin Lyrics. Was it the success of the Leighton that persuaded Ralph Vaughan Williams to suggest for the 1952 concert his recently completed An Oxford Elegy, a distillation for speaker, chorus and orchestra of Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’ and its companion piece ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’?

Vaughan Williams had long been fascinated by the scholar gypsy, the 17th-century student who’s said to have abandoned Oxford to join a gypsy community that ‘had a traditional kind of learning among them’.

Whatever the cue, hearing An Oxford Elegy – ‘spring-in-autumn music’, as the late Michael Kennedy happily described it – alongside the younger man’s Veris gratia makes for a more than usually interesting CD; particularly when both works are given matchless performances by the present Queen’s choir under its director, Professor Owen Rees.

And there’s more. The speaker in An Oxford Elegy is a distinguished alumnus of the college, Rowan Atkinson MSc. His delivery of Arnold’s text is more intimate and thus more spellbinding than that of any of predecessor performer on record.

Strangely, the Signum Classics booklet makes no mention of Atkinson’s connection with the university; nor does it give a solo credit to the disc’s other master performer, flautist David Cuthbert. The latter omission is particularly strange, given that the solo flute is a defining presence in the Leighton – more embedded than the solo violin in Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, but no less magical. When the composer Carl Orff picked up a copy of a 19th-century edition of the Carmina Burana for 3.50 Reichsmarks (around 50p) in a second-hand bookshop in Würzburg in 1934, it was

Rowan Atkinson MSc (Oxford)

the erotica and tavern songs that set his pulses racing.

Both he and Leighton set the roistering ‘O! O! O! totus floreo’ (‘Oh! Oh! Oh! I’m all in bloom’, ie fully erect).

But it’s the only overlap. Leighton, the young Oxford-educated classicist, is more drawn to pastoral ease or the post-coital calm of the exquisitely composed epilogue, ‘Felix qui diligitur’ – ‘Happy is he who is loved’.

As Christopher de Hamel reveals in his marvellous Meeting with Remarkable Manuscripts (Allen Lane, 2016), a persistent theme in the Carmina Burana was the shallowness of the modern world at a time when learning was migrating from the monasteries to the streets beyond.

It’s an idea that’s recurred whenever existing cultural elites are threatened by a new demotic insurgency. Witness Matthew Arnold’s dismay in ‘The ScholarGipsy’ at the ‘strange disease of modern life’ with ‘its sick hurry, its divided aims’.

Or the final lines of his ‘Dover Beach’, where we witness a civilisation stranded ‘as on a darkling plain’, on which ‘ignorant armies clash by night’.

How those lines must have resonated with Vaughan Williams after his vision of an English Eden had been all but extinguished by the Great War and its dispiriting aftermath.

And it must have chimed, in turn, with Alan Hollinghurst, whose latest novel, Our Evenings, I wrote about last month. There the actor Dave Win – himself a species of scholar gypsy after his flight from Oxford during finals – is engaged as the speaker in an Aldeburgh Festival performance of An Oxford Elegy

Hollinghurst’s novels often use Vaughan Williams’s music as an imaginative reference point for the English Eden or Eden up-ended. Think of that scene in The Folding Star, the radio of a crashed car continues to broadcast the sublime ‘Pavane of the Sons of the Morning’ from Vaughan Williams’s ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing.

GOLDEN OLDIES

MARK ELLEN

POP STAR’S GUIDE TO PR

Today, as I write this, Taylor Swift has 283 million followers on Instagram. Should she want publicity, one of her minions has merely to tap out a post and 283 million interested parties will be all the wiser.

She worked her way up in the age of the internet, playing shows, making records and tweeting about it to an ever-expanding fan base.

One forgets how hard it was before social media to get attention. And how those with the greatest thirst for it were the most inventive.

I direct you to Michael Stipe of REM, whose first television appearance was as a teenager at a fancy-dress screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. His lust for the spotlight ensured that he came in full drag, make-up and a string of pearls as one of the film’s key characters, transvestite scientist Dr Frank-N-Furter. When a local news crew arrived, he elbowed his way to the microphone.

Media manipulator David Bowie did much the same 14 years earlier. Aged 17 in 1964 and hungry for exposure for his various bands, Davy Jones (as he was then) founded the divinely ludicrous

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-haired Men and wangled his way onto the BBC’s Tonight show.

There the combed-over and confessedly envious Cliff Michelmore consoled him and his defiantly hirsute pals about being mocked in the streets by people asking if they could carry their handbags. It’s on YouTube.

Mark Feld was an equally shrewd self-publicist. Aged 15, in 1962, he got himself signed to a modelling agency and appeared in catalogues for mod clothing, even as a cardboard cut-out in shop windows. He then crowbarred his way into a photo spread about mod life in Town magazine.

After various diverting new looks and three name changes – to Toby Tyler, Marc Boland and eventually Marc Bolan – he arrived at his future manager’s door with a guitar, declaring he was going to be a big star and just needed ‘someone to make all the arrangements’.

But the headline-snagging past master was surely Robert Plant. Aged 17, he managed to get into the West Midlands press by claiming to have changed his name to the spookily 21st-century Rob3rt. His protest against the Noise Abatement Society’s attitude to rock bands had him back in print again, as did his band’s playing outside a factory supporting its striking workers. His campaign outside a law court to legalise marijuana made the front page of the Mirror

For all that, An Oxford Elegy ends on a positive note. ‘Roam on! The light we sought is shining still/ Our tree yet crowns the hill/Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side.’

Declaimed in actorly style, Arnold’s peroration can sound crass. Spoken with a sense of quiet hope and abiding wonder, as it is by Rowan Atkinson on this new Signum recording, it has an effect far from that.

His final salvo, before he was sufficiently conspicuous to be hired as the frontman of Led Zeppelin, was to appear in a range of music and national papers, handing a letter to the Chinese Embassy, offering to tour China to help improve Anglo-Chinese relations. Don’t you miss the days when a career in the creative arts involved this level of creativity?

Shrinking violets were weeded out early. Anyone pursuing stardom needed a superhuman, heat-seeking ache for attention.

And that suited us just fine. It’s the magic ingredient that makes the best performers in the first place.

Media master: Robert Plant, 1967

EXHIBITIONS

HUON MALLALIEU

GLADIATORS OF BRITAIN

Dorset Museum, to 11th May

HANS COPER: RESURFACE

The Arc, Winchester, to 24th March

It’s a 12-minute walk from Dorchester Museum to neolithic Maumbury Rings, turned by the Romans into an amphitheatre. It isn’t known if gladiators fought there (although Hardy implied it in The Mayor of Casterbridge).

But, as well as Gladiator II, the amphitheatre is a good peg for this show, organised by the British and Colchester and Ipswich Museums.

Many Roman artefacts have been excavated in Dorchester and are held in the museum, but one of the most evocative exhibits comes from Colchester.

It is a 2nd century AD cremation

Top: bronze thraex gladiator. Above: 1st century AD bronze gladiator’s helmet, Suffolk. Right: 2nd century AD cremation vessel, with a gladiator fight between a secutor and a retiarius, Colchester

vessel (pictured), with a fight between a secutor, armed with short sword and shield, and a retiarius with net and trident.

A gladiator’s helmet (pictured) from Suffolk comes from the BM, as do a hoplomachus (short sword, round shield and spear) and a thraex (Thracian sword and square shield).

After Dorchester, the show will travel, to Northampton Museum (24th May-7th September), Grosvenor Museum, Chester (20th September25th January 2026) and Tullie House, Carlisle (7th February-19th April 2026).

While Lucie Rie’s name and pots are

widely known, even among those who know little else of modern British ceramics, many potters rate her former assistant Hans Coper (1920-81) still more highly. She agreed: ‘I am a potter, but he was an artist.’ This was not just terminology, but a recognition of a difference in their practice. She threw pots on the wheel, whereas he, after throwing elements, hand-built them into sculptural – but always functional – forms. After 12 years with her, he set up his own studio in 1958. In 1961, he was commissioned to create three murals: for the Royal Army Pay Corps barracks in Winchester, the Powell Duffryn group’s London offices and Swinton School, Rotherham.

Below: Hans Coper in his studio, 1965, and his pots

All have left their original sites, and for one time only they are shown together. The 10-foot-high rendering of the RAPC cap badge has long been stored, but will soon be installed at the Winchester Adjutant General Corps museum. The other two are ceramic discs. The first was moved, rearranged and then sold to a German collector in 1985. Last year, it was sold again, for €340,000 (£283,335), to an American. Swinton School was demolished in 2009, but its mural was rescued and is privately owned.

With the murals are about 20 Coper pots, and studio photographs taken by his widow.

The Oldie March

GARDENING

DAVID WHEELER

TULIP FEVER

Even the passage of time has not allowed moss to settle on Anna Pavord’s comprehensive, unputdownable, bestselling book The Tulip (1999).

So it must have taken audacity and a modicum of daring for Polly Nicholson to set about writing The Tulip Garden in 2024. But we applaud her for doing so.

Tulips are the spring garden’s flag-bearers – with distinctive ensigns, banners and standards – propelling the floral gardening year’s great unstoppable thrust. With goblets of single, feathered, flamed or striped colours, they stand proud in massed monoculture plantings, among sweeps of early-flowering perennials or dotted about in greensward and gravelly stretches that mimic their homeland steppe. They’re supreme in containers, where their primadonna qualities are not upstaged.

I’ve grown tulips since childhood. I can count some seven decades of acquaintance with bulbs that, remarkably (and thankfully), needn’t break the bank – although some might. I prefer them to daffodils – until, that is, I’m faced with a narcissus of extreme exquisiteness, such as the increasingly scarce N moscatus, with its nodding top-of-themilk-white trumpets, or – and why not? – the commonplace yet aristocratic, scented pheasant’s eye (N poeticus).

When I started my gardening quarterly, Hortus, in 1987, I took tulip imagery for its masthead logo. Unwilted, it still stands there.

Tulips are so easy and bountiful in cultivation that my late mother, on stony, near-coastal ground in the south of England, considered the early, lowgrowing, white, yellow-striped Tulipa tarda a weed; so prolific is it when suitably located. Other species (ie wild, not cultivated) of tulip have similar qualities. But can you have too many?

You can enjoy tulips in flower from January (under glass) and soon after in the garden. You can still revel in them in late May or early June, when, miraculously, a few (including the dapper, guardsman-red T sprengeri) come late enough to the party to dally with the first roses. Fortuitously, growers and botanists have classified many of them helpfully: single early, double early, mid-season, single and double late. A few of each will extend the tulip season unfailingly.

Guardsman-red Tulipa sprengeri

Gardeners have their preferred method of cultivation. Some treat them as annuals (I don’t). Others tend them lovingly to get as many years as they can from them.

My best advice came from Christopher Lloyd, who told me to plant them deep. ‘Ten inches is not overdoing it,’ he said. Guided by such wisdom, I have had a dozen years or more from such delights as the lilyflowered varieties ‘Ballerina’ and ‘White Triumphator’, the viridiflora ‘China Town’ and ‘Spring Green’, with petals uniquely distinguished by a green flame or stripe, and the occasional, fringed-petalled parrot. Our longest year-after-year doer was (perhaps still is – it’s in a garden we left four years ago) ‘Abu Hassan’, aptly described by one supplier as having ‘rich mahogany-crimson, goblet-shaped blossoms, adorned with golden edges’.

At home in Wiltshire (coincidentally not a million miles from Anna Pavord), Polly Nicholson has been ‘fervently’ and ‘feverishly’ growing tulips for the past 15 years. Her book, less sit-up-in-bedfriendly than Pavord’s, is nevertheless enriched with outstanding photography by Andrew Montgomery, Britt Willoughby Dyer and Clive Nichols. It leaves no tulip stone unturned.

Her advice is kindly, gentle and thoroughly sound. Her scope is as wide as can be, with introductory paragraphs on the tulip’s fabulous history and some of the art tulips have inspired, followed by four chunky chapters exploring species tulips, Dutch historic tulips, English florists’ tulips and those treated as annuals. Cultivation notes and a useful glossary are among the pages that bring the curtain down on Nicholson’s majestic celebration of this gardener’s group of true indispensables.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN

SIMON COURTAULD PARSNIPS

According to gardeners’ lore, parsnips should not be dug up until frost has got into the ground. In this part of southern England, that would have meant waiting this winter until January, and one cannot be without parsnips at Christmas. However, parsnips can continue to be dug until March, when it will be time to sow seed for the coming year. There are a few important points to be made when you’re growing parsnips. The seed should be sown directly into the ground, but not if the soil is still cold or wet. Germination is slow and may take up to three weeks, and the young plants should be watered regularly. If the ground is stony and not deeply dug, the parsnips are – as I have learnt from experience – liable to produce split roots. Manure or compost is

recommended, but only if it has been worked into the soil in the previous year.

This vegetable is susceptible to canker, resulting in brown, hardened patches on the root. Varieties such as Panorama, Gladiator and Javelin are said to be resistant to canker. An insect-proof mesh is also advisable, to keep the carrot fly away.

Parsnips are little-known in Europe. Emperor Tiberius apparently liked them so much, believing them to be an aphrodisiac, that he was prepared to accept the root vegetables in part payment of tribute from Germania. But in Italy today they are fed to the pigs of Parma to sweeten their ham.

The French culinary bible, Larousse Gastronomique, has no use for parsnips except as a flavouring for stocks.

Eastern Europe. Serve as a main course with cheese and bread. Serves 4.

The soup

5-6 cooking apples, peeled and sliced

Grated zest and juice of 1 lemon

2-3 cloves

It is the sweet flavour that is off-putting to some, who speak disparagingly of an odd aftertaste. They should try puréeing parsnips together with carrots, which are closely related.

The old expression ‘Fine words butter no parsnips’ has its origin in the 17th century, when parsnips were more popular than potatoes. Today, they are more likely to be used in stews and soups, or parboiled and roasted round a joint of beef.

My favourite way with parsnips is to fry them in butter with a little honey.

COOKERY

ELISABETH LUARD LENTEN FEAST

Nothing fancy does you good.

Forty days of the Lenten fast – time enough to clear out the store cupboard –start on Ash Wednesday, 5th March. Abstinence suits the time of year in the northern hemisphere, when fishing ports are closed by storms and fields lie fallow.

Medieval monastics interpreted the rules of fast according to their order. Franciscans, famously abstemious, subsisted on bread and water. Benedictines (there’s a reason for eggs Benedict) contented themselves with a leg of lamb which, if first dipped in well water, counted as fish.

For the laity, necessity was the mother of invention. Lent was an opportunity to make the most of whatever was in the larder or overwintered in store, provided it was plain, wholesome and undemanding of the cook’s labours. It allowed plenty of time for contemplation, combined with a merciful absence of trouble with the digestion. Just the ticket.

Apple soup with wine and cinnamon Lenten soups prepared with the last of the apples from storage are – or were –popular Lenten dishes throughout

500ml dry white wine

1 short length cinnamon stick

2 tbsps sugar

To finish

1 tbsp butter

1 tbsp potato-starch or cornflour, slaked in a splash of water

1 tbsp ground cinnamon

2 tbsps brown sugar

2 tbsps rye breadcrumbs crisped in butter

Put all the soup ingredients in a roomy pan. Bring gently to the boil, turn down the heat, lid loosely and leave to simmer for 20 minutes or so, until the apples are perfectly soft. Remove the cinnamon and cloves, and mash the apple flesh into the juices. Return the pan to the heat, whisk in the starch – potato or corn – and stir till it thickens a little. Drop in little pieces of butter to give it a shine. Ladle into bowls, sprinkle with cinnamon and brown sugar and top with a hat of buttery breadcrumbs (or not, if you’re feeling Franciscan).

Fave e cicoria

An everyday dish popular in Puglia, which combines a soft purée of dried broad beans, fave, with dandelion greens, cicoria, a field crop that retains some of the bitterness of the wild. Dried, skinned and split broad beans can be found in Middle Eastern grocery stores, or replaced with yellow or green split peas, the raw material of mushy peas. Dandelion greens can replaced by cime di rapa, broccoli rabe, or any member of the overwintering broccoli/ turnip-top family. Serves 4 as a main dish.

450g dried, skinned split broad beans or split peas

1 large potato, peeled and diced

1kg cicoria or cime di rapa or sprouting broccoli

About 100ml olive oil

1 medium onion or 2-3 garlic cloves, finely chopped 2-3 pepperoncini or dried chillis, torn into small bits

Soak the beans overnight. Drain and tip into a roomy pan with the potato. Cover with 4 fingers’ width of water. Bring to the boil, skim and cook very gently, stirring in a splash of boiling water if it looks like drying out, for three or four hours on top heat or in the oven, till mushy and soft but not soupy. Meanwhile, prepare the greens. Trim as necessary, stripping out any hard stalks, then rinse, shake dry and pack into a roomy pan with the onion or garlic and olive oil. Cook over a gentle heat, loosely covered, for about 20 minutes, till tender and juicy (don’t let it fry). Taste and add salt and pepperoncini. Serve with the bean purée, either folded in or handed separately, with extra olive oil and a quartered lemon.

RESTAURANTS

JAMES PEMBROKE DINING WITH THE STARS

What is the etiquette when it comes to sitting next to a famous person in a restaurant? It might be easier to start from the bottom up, ie how not to behave.

My grandmother was always a good indicator. Once, while lunching at The Ivy in the ’60s, she spotted Kenneth More at the next-door table with his much younger wife and boomed, ‘Isn’t it a shame he’s become impotent?’

London’s most fashionable eatery fell silent.

Before Christmas, my old friend Charles announced he was leaving the City to enlist in a Paris clown school. To celebrate this shrewd decision, we and our ladies had dinner at Ibai, almost next to his office. Ibai is one of two Basque grills I’m going to tell you about.

We entered through huge velvet curtains into Medieval World: flames, sweat, gridirons, swearing and … Poldark, aka Aidan Turner. At the next table.

Not that we knew about the Cornish one when we placed the ladies with their backs to him. It was Mr Clown who spotted seriously gorgeous Mrs Poldark (Caitlin Fitzgerald) first from our vantage point. But then Mrs Clown managed to spin her head 180 degrees to clock Poldark, who was exactly 137cm away.

There was a genuine concern that her head might be stuck facing over her shoulder blades for the rest of the evening. But, with not an inch of dignity, she invoked my grandmother and

screeched, ‘It’s bloody Aidan Turner.’ At this, Mrs Publisher leapt two feet in her seat and spun 360 degrees à la The Matrix, before coming to earth as the nonchalant seen-’em-all waitress arrived.

Scarcely had we ordered the lifechanging croque Ibai, packed with Boudin noir, pâté Basque and charred cauliflower plus a kilo of Black Angus, when our ladies had a simultaneous desperation for the Ladies.

This gave them just the opportunity they needed to get ‘lost’ finding the little girls’ room, thus enabling them to circle the Poldarks’ table for a good ten minutes. It would have been brilliantly devious if only they hadn’t started drooling.

What a relief to take my son, Leo, to Sagardi to find that the other diners were all members of office parties.

Even these unfamous diners provided plenty of joy as we tried to guess their job titles. Psmith would have recognised the stereotypes: the loud, handsome salesmen, the bearded, silent hipster creatives, the girls dressed as for Love Island and the five IT guys who would probably have been happier back in the office plotting the entire payroll’s murder on the dark web.

Sagardi rejoices in being Spanish Basque; as opposed to Ibai, which is vehemently French Basque. I may have misunderstood ETA’s creed but I thought it was ‘Come one Basque, come all.’ Absolument non

Sagardi’s beef is the better of the two because they serve Txuleton, beef from former dairy cows aged 8-16 years. The fat is as yellow as the Brick Road and the flavour is extraordinary.

Even though Leo had taken Basque as an extra at university, he wasn’t up for a full translation of the à la carte. So we opted for the huge, five-course superfluousconsonants menu, with our favourite txistorra sausages, codfish omelette and a kilo of Txuleton, rounded off with a board of Idiazabal cheese. Hurry there soon – but glue down your dentures if you want to practise your Basque oral.

BILL KNOTT

HEAVY-DUTY WINE

In October 2021, the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak boasted in his Budget speech that he was ‘taking advantage of leaving the EU to announce the most radical simplification of alcohol duties for over 140 years’. Really? Try telling that to the UK’s 1,000 or so independent wine merchants. Since 1st February this year, they have had to grapple not just with a possible 200 or so different excise bands, based

on 0.1-per-cent increments in ABV, but with the red tape and labour costs that this Byzantine new system entails. The wine trade’s headaches over Brexit have turned into migraines. As Richard Davis of DBM Wines says, ‘This will substantially increase costs to wine merchants and inevitably increase prices for customers.’

British wine-drinkers are already saddled with higher taxes on wine than almost all our European neighbours, rivalled only by those in Ireland and Finland. Huge swathes of the continent, from Portugal to Greece and Germany to Bulgaria, treat wine as an agricultural product and don’t levy any duty on it at all.

In France, duty is €0.03 a bottle. In the UK, a bottle of 14.5% wine incurred a duty, ex-VAT, of £2.23 until August 2023. That figure is now £3.10, a rise of 39 per cent in just 18 months. On sherry and port, it is 44 per cent.

This is terrible news, too, for the hospitality sector, already struggling with higher energy bills, rents, labour costs and food prices. Diners are already balking at the ever-higher price of eating out, and the last thing hard-pressed restaurateurs need is a sharp hike in wine prices.

Restaurants and wine merchants are exactly the kind of small-to-medium-size businesses the Government claims to be championing in its attempts to grow the economy, and yet this new regime will only harm them. On top of that, there is no evidence that the Treasury will actually make any more money from it.

Ah, but it is really about public health, say its supporters. As a state, we need to deter people from drinking too much, and the only way to do that is to put up duty. But, despite the billions gouged from drinkers by HMRC over the years, are we notably healthier as a nation than Portugal, Spain, Germany, France, Italy or Greece? All have longer life expectancies than we do.

Are there any silver linings? For lovers of 9% ABV off-dry Mosel, perhaps. And the duty on sparkling wine has now been lowered to match that on still wine, which at least makes sense. Fizzy wines are generally a degree or two lower in alcohol, too. So you might find that a decent bottle of crémant is a tad cheaper, although I doubt Dom Pérignon drinkers will notice much difference.

And there is always beer. Our new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, confirmed the implementation of Sunak’s ‘radical simplification’ in last year’s Autumn Budget, but added that her 1.7-per-cent cut in draught-beer duty would mean ‘a penny off a pint in the pub’.

You lucky, lucky people.

This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines. There are two wines from opposite ends of the ABV spectrum – a crisp vinho verde from Portugal (10%) and a Barbera Appassimento (14.5%) – and one in the middle, a Chilean Merlot at 13%. All are at pre-duty-hike prices. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Vinho Verde ‘Lago Cerqueira’, Portugal 2022, offer price £8.50, case price £102.00

Light and pear-scented: pleasingly refreshing, with a gentle hint of spritz.

Merlot ‘Rio Alto Classic’, Valle de Aconagua, Chile 2022, offer price £9.50, case price £114.00

Medium-bodied Merlot, plummy and slightly smoky, with soft, tannins.

Barbera Appassimento ‘Volé’, Italy 2021, offer price £12.95, case price £155.40

A hefty wine in a very hefty (850g) bottle, with bags of forest fruit tempered with Barbera’s trademark acidity.

Mixed case price £123.80 – a saving of £27.59 (including free delivery)

SPORT

JIM WHITE

NAUGHTY BUT NICE STAR

I have a new sporting hero. This is despite the fact I have never actually seen her play.

But I’ve seen her speak. At the Australian Open, the American tennis player Danielle Collins turned herself into something the sports world has long needed: she became a proper, original pantomime villain. And she did it with a really arch sense of humour.

She was being booed to the rafters by a well-lubricated Melbourne crowd deep into one of the all-night sessions that tournament goes in for. Her crime was to be beating the local contender, Destanee Aiava. When she eventually triumphed, to a rousing cacophony of catcalls, her response was magnificent.

In her post-match on-court interview, she thanked the crowd for their rudeness.

‘Every person that’s bought a ticket to heckle me, it’s all going to the Danielle Collins fund,’ she grinned. ‘Me and my girlfriends love a five-star holiday. So I can guarantee that the next cheque is going to a five-star trip, hopefully to the Bahamas.’

She would, she added, be thinking of them when she was sipping a cocktail on the beach.

Cue bedlam. As she left the court, ostentatiously patting her back pocket, the crowd, many of whom had thought it perfectly acceptable to disrupt her rhythm for hours with a constant stream of abuse, boiled with righteous indignation.

If she’d consulted her phone in the dressing room after the match, she would have seen her social-media account bristling with foam-flecked fury. Suddenly, she was everywhere. She had gone viral.

And she had done it in a really clever way. Without being sneery, rude or remotely confrontational, she delivered her speech with a lovely smile. Her response successfully touched a nerve.

There have been plenty of baddies getting angry on court over the years, from John McEnroe’s anti-authority theatrics to Nick Kyrgios’s Tourette’s nattering. Most players these days, though, simply keep their heads down when the crowd has turned against them, behaving like Hollywood actors who avoid playing the baddie for fear of reputational damage. That is, unless they are Novak Djokovic, who, when confronted by a hostile crowd at Wimbledon last summer, seemed

genuinely dumbfounded that no one shared his elevated opinion of himself.

What Collins did was far more original and challenging than merely sneering, scowling and smacking her racket into the turf. She neatly articulated the transactional nature of the sporting arrangement – one that is always, whatever the circumstances, in favour of the participant rather than the observer.

Because, as she pointed out, she is being paid by the crowd whether they like her or not; she’s paid even more if she happens to be on the winning side.

It was an observation that particularly stung given the relentless upward trajectory of ticket prices at events such as Melbourne. It was the perfect riposte to the drunken larrikins attempting to put her off her stride that they had dug deep in their pockets to finance her progress. And to do it all with a broad grin rubbed salt in.

The interesting thing is what she will do next. She was absolutely within her rights to respond to the drunken rudeness cascading from the stands. Will she now be tempted to play up to her new-found reputation?

If, in a few years’ time, we’ve become weary of her endlessly telling us how much she has earned for her afternoon’s work, we may look back to the 2025 Australian Open and wish the locals had been a little more hospitable.

MOTORING

ALAN JUDD

NEW YEAR, NEW CAR?

The new year was less than a day old when I was asked the question that’s a seasonal fixture for anyone writing about what the Edwardians called motorism: if I were to buy a new car, what would it be?

It depends on what you want a car for – high or low mileage, carting lots of stuff or people, towing, local shopping, Continental touring or just for pleasure?

Not to mention the depth of your pocket, running costs and how long you’ll want to keep it. And for those who imagine that what they drive makes any difference, its effect on the environment.

To complicate matters, there’s also a list of things I don’t want a car to do.

I don’t want it to be almost impossible to insure without a mortgage, like the stealable new Range Rover. I don’t want it to leave me stranded with a puncture and an ineffective repair kit. I want a jack and a spare wheel, although only about three per cent of new cars have them as standard. I don’t want a distracting touch

screen, though I’d have to put up with one because almost all new cars have them.

I especially don’t want to scroll through screen menus for basic functions such as air-con, sound volume, speed and odometer (surprising that ’Elfansafety permit this). Nor do I want lane-keeping or emergency brake-assist taking over when the car misreads lines on motorways or perceives a tractor on rural lanes.

I can also do without a cacophony of bongs and beeps when I edge over the speed limit or dump books on an unoccupied seat without fastening the seatbelt. I do not want a car that locks itself with the key inside. And when I leave the dog in it, I must be able to disable the alarm without menu-hopping.

Many such irritating intrusions, intended to make us safer, are mandated by the EU and, since we export cars there, we must put up with them. Some can’t be disabled, and even those that can may require a fresh menu search every time you start.

Above all, I don’t want to pay lots of money for something that halves in value within a few years. New car prices have reportedly increased by 129 per cent since 2009, when the average was about £22,868. Now it’s £52,342.

Add to that the punitive taxation rates for anything costing above £40,000 and the Government’s intention to double first-year taxation rates for all new cars from April, and it’s no surprise that sales to individuals over the past year are already down by 11.8 per cent.

But, if forced to buy new, I’d look at the £39,885 (that’s list – you’d get it for less) Toyota RAV4: a very good all-rounder with low depreciation, Toyota’s excellent reliability record and a ten-year warranty.

I’d also look at the Dacia Duster, the value-for-money champion priced from £18,850, a reliable and comfortable 4x4 uncluttered by needless gadgets.

To be honest, I’d probably wriggle out of the challenge by buying something comfortable and reliable from a main dealer – up to ten years old, with full history and a warranty. I wouldn’t worry too much about mileage, as long as it’s been looked after.

Or maybe I’d have gone for the 1983 Mercedes W123 saloon sold recently with only 25,000 miles on the clock. These cars are renowned for their bomb-proof build quality and endurance (500,000 miles was not unknown), with plentiful spares, no screens or bongs, no road tax or ULEZ, great comfort and lasting good looks. Why not?

But the £24,995 asking price caused cramp in my wallet hand

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Smartphones aren’t so smart

Sometimes, technophiles like me are forced to admit real life and the latest technology are not always aligned.

The universe lurches into our digital existence and reminds us of who is really in charge, despite all our reboots and upgrades.

I have a smartphone; if you read this column, you probably have one, too. Mine has a gadget that reads my fingerprint, and that’s how I unlock it. It works well, except when I have wet hands, but that moment passes. It’s a speedy and efficient way of opening my phone.

My laptop has a similar security

Webwatch

For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

johnbuchansociety.co.uk

For real John Buchan enthusiasts – history, scholarly articles, videos and more.

friendsofnotredamedeparis.org

Excellent online tour of the renovated Notre-Dame cathedral, with lots of history.

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

system. I assume they are both secure. So far, so good.

Real life has a habit of throwing spanners into the works, upsetting the Californian nirvana we are supposed to experience with our technology.

I recently inherited a modest Staffordshire figure of a horse. It’s not altogether to my taste, but its associations mean a lot to me.

Unfortunately, in transit, the end of one of its legs broke off. The piece isn’t valuable, so it’s not a financial tragedy. But I’d like to repair it. Superglue to the rescue, I thought.

So I set about the repair, and quickly made a real mess of it. My wife had to step in later and do it properly with the right adhesive and more dexterous fingers. But the immediate result was that while I still had a horse with a broken leg, I also had the forefingers on both hands thickly coated with dried superglue, which is not easy to remove.

Then my smartphone began to ring. I saw who was calling and, deciding it might be important, picked it up. To answer the call, I needed to deploy a fingerprint – now behind an unyielding shield of superglue.

My phone said, ‘I don’t know who you are, but you are not my master, because he has fingerprints; as you don’t, I am locking you out.’ Or something like that.

It did offer me an alternative: put in my passcode, which I could do with other, non-glued fingers. I thought I

knew my passcode, but I was wrong. After a few goes, the phone decided I was clearly a wrong ’un, up to no good, and locked me out more determinedly.

Meanwhile, the phone kept on ringing. So I reached for my trusty, old-fashioned landline, rang my caller (by finding their number on the paper telephone list on the kitchen noticeboard) and dealt with the problem.

Probably, none of this sounds too serious, and it wasn’t. I really can’t complain about the security steps my mobile-phone provider took – it’s just what I’d want them to do if my phone had been stolen. But suppose I had been in a real crisis, or someone trying to reach me was in serious trouble?

It taught me three things. First, I must find a way of securely recalling whatever passcode my computer or phone has.

Secondly, don’t let your landline be taken away, if you can possibly afford to keep it. Unfortunately, you probably won’t have much choice soon.

The UK’s traditional landline network is expected to be switched off by the end of January 2027, in a spectacular example of replacing something that works well with something that doesn’t, in the name of ‘progress’.

Thirdly, I realised my spaniel would have recognised me, with or without superglue on my fingers. Does this make my spaniel cleverer than my smartphone, with all its artificial intelligence?

Almost certainly.

Neil Collins: Money Matters

Those of us oldies who have the temerity to survive beyond the age of 75 are still smarting at Rachel Reeves’s anti-growth Budget.

We may have escaped National Insurance charges on our ‘unearned’ income. But pulling our pension pot into inheritance tax (IHT) makes a nonsense of years of prudent planning for when we’re gone. It makes saving for a pension a lot less attractive.

Still, nil desperandum. There are ways to ease the pain. Not only did

Labour spare Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs) but Ms Reeves has said she’s in favour of them – a small comfort as we learn to deal with this spiteful administration.

VCTs, among the most valuable innovations in the last 30 years for retail investors, manage nearly £13 billion. They invest in very small companies, where the risk of failure is highest. As an incentive, investors who subscribe to VCT issues can claim 30-per-cent income-tax relief, while dividends from

VCTs are tax-free (no need to declare them on your tax return).

As with every class of investment, there have been poor performers and failures, but the better VCTs have been decent performers over the decades, if you can bear income volatility.

There is no direct link to a self-invested pension plan (SIPP), of course, but a VCT can ease the pain from the IHT raid. Income drawn from your SIPP is taxable at your marginal rate, but use that money to subscribe for

a VCT and at least a majority of the tax comes back.

Dividends will vary a lot from year to year, depending on how well the invested businesses have done, or whether the trust has sold a holding at a big premium to its purchase price. There are no guarantees, of course.

Pick a well-established VCT, with over £100m in assets. You may have to wait until your chosen one is open for new

subscriptions. The market leaders are Northern and British Smaller Companies trusts. I have holdings in both. This is not investment advice!

In extremis, you can sell your VCTs in the stock market after five years, but the price would be a significant discount to the asset value, and the market is thin. Buyers get the same tax-free dividends, but no tax relief on their purchase.

None of this avoids tax when the Grim

Reaper arrives, since your VCTs will join what’s left of your SIPP in the IHT web.

It does mean you are arranging ‘your legal relations to avoid the taxman putting the largest possible shovel into your stores’ – as Lord Clyde put it in 1929. He would surely have approved.

Neil Collins was City Editor of the Daily Telegraph

The Real Rajasthan

With Sam Dalrymple 20th to 30th January 2026

Following the success of our two previous tours of Rajasthan, we are returning with the best possible guide in the shape of young Sam Dalrymple (pictured) who grew up in India with his parents, historian William Dalrymple and artist Olivia Dalrymple. Fluent in Hindi, he is an author and columnist for Architectural Digest. Sam has plotted his dream itinerary to end in Jaipur for the annual literary festival chaired by his father. He will guide us through his favourite parts of Delhi, Jodhpur, Nagaur and Jaipur. We will be staying at wonderful, handpicked hotels, and local travel agency Banyan will be running the transport and all the practical aspects of the tour. There is also the opportunity to extend your ten-day tour.

ITINERARY For a more detailed itinerary and the extensions, please go to www.theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours

Tuesday 20th January – arrive Delhi

Check in to the Imperial Hotel where you will have Heritage rooms.

Wednesday 21st January – Delhi Visit to 16th-century Humayun’s tomb followed by a tour of the Mehrauli Archaeological Park.

Thursday 22nd January – Delhi-Jodhpur Transfer to Delhi airport to board the

flight to Jodhpur, and on to your luxury room at the delightful Raas Hotel.

Friday 23rd January – Jodhpur

Tuesday 27th January – Jaipur Tour of the Pink City and Royal Jaipur, including the Jantar Mantar (the Observatory) and the Maharaja’s City Palace to the Badal Mahal (meaning Cloud Palace) and its textile factory. Drinks, dinner and shopping at Narain Niwas Palace.

We begin the Blue City Heritage Walk after we’ve completed our sightseeing of the Mehrangarh Fort; free afternoon to shop/explore.

Saturday 24th January – JodhpurNagaur We arrive at Ranvas, a stylish and romantic boutique hotel which lies within the ramparts of the magnificent Ahhichatragarh Fort.

Sunday 25th January – Nagaur

Tour of the historic fort at Nagaur. The old city harbours several mosques, including one commissioned by Akbar.

Monday 26th January – Nagaur-Jaipur

Transfer to the 18th-century Samode Haveli hotel in Old Jaipur.

Wednesday 28th January –Jaipur and Amber Early-morning visit to the flower market, followed by lunch at the hotel. Afternoon visit to the Amber Fort, including the Jagmandir (Hall of Victory) glittering with mirrors, Jai Mahal and Temple of Kali. Then tour of the ancient town of Amber; we will stop at Kheri Gate and visit the ancient stepwell Panna Meena ka Kund.

Thursday 29th January – Jaipur Literature Festival Attend the Jaipur Literature Festival first day – vehicle and guide at your disposal.

Friday 30th January – Jaipur-Delhi and departure Today you will be transferred to Delhi International airport for your flight home – or you can extend your trip and visit Agra, or stay on in Jaipur for the literature festival.

HOW TO BOOK: Please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk – or for tour enquiries and extensions, please email Lucy at lucy@banyantours.com. Price: £9,950 pp, which includes everything apart from return flights to Delhi – so it includes all meals and all drinks with meals; transport in luxury Volvo; all gratuities; VIP meet and greet at Delhi International airport; pass for visit to Jaipur Literature festival; all internal flights and transport; all entrances and taxes. Deposit £2,500; balance due on 10th September 2025.

Above: Humayun's tomb, New Delhi, India. Right: Samode Haveli hotel in Old Jaipur

Willow tit

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

The willow tit (Poecile montanus) is the fastest-declining resident UK bird species, with 5,200 breeding pairs in 2020. It’s the second-fastest declining species of all British birds, after the summer migrant turtle dove.

It is also the last British resident bird to have been identified (1897) – best proof of its nearly identical plumage to that of the more abundant marsh tit (Poecile palustris; 41,000 territories).

Two German ornithologists, Otto Kleinschmidt and Ernst Hartert, corrected the oversight after examining a tray of ‘marsh-tit’ skins at the Natural History Museum in Tring. There are differences in plumage between the two species – the black crown on the willow tit is matt, not glossy, as on the adult marsh tit.

The bib is on average larger on the willow tit. But the differences are unidentifiable to non-specialists. A difference in call is the surest identification.

The Ludlow-based ornithologist Gareth Thomas became a generous friend of this page after we published a quote by him from British Birds. He responded to my willow-tit enquiries, saying, ‘For my sins, I have been a member of the Wildlife Sound Recording Society for 30-odd years, and one thing we do is prepare “pieces to mic” for inclusion on our circulating CD. It is an extremely niche occupation – or nerdy, if you prefer!’ In 2023, he completed a ‘piece’ on the willow tit.

The willow tit inhabits a geographical crescent from Northumberland to South Wales. It is unknown in Ireland and barely seen in Scotland or southern England.

Gareth says, ‘Your readers will be hard-pushed to come across them by chance as they are very reclusive and also very silent. I am so lucky to have identified over 40 individual male willow tits in our forests (north Herefordshire) over the past few years.’

Gareth was certain of two things which put him at odds with ‘entrenched willow-tit workers’.

First, the overriding reason for their decline is the aggressive blue tit. Its numbers are unnaturally boosted by bird feeders and nest boxes. Both species nest in tree holes, to the willow tit’s further disadvantage.

Secondly, there are two races of UK willow tit, identified by habitat. The Fennoscandian descended race is found in the Welsh Marches. There, it frequents conifer forests planted above 800 feet, a height beyond the blue tit’s range.

Gareth says, ‘I know I am right, just as I have been about children not having smartphones, which I’ve banged on about for ten years.’

He suggested the March issue as the best to feature the willow tit. ‘They tend to be more vocal then, near the nest site. In Shropshire, they rarely come to birdfeeders, although in South Yorks they do and there are no marsh tits there to confuse the issue.’

As I wrote this piece, I was told by a mutual friend that Gareth had died unexpectedly. This column’s illustrator, Carry Akroyd, and I never met him but the shock was no less.

Long may his brilliant observation prevail, key to his genius as a bird photographer and fellow of the Royal Society of Photographers.

Our condolences to his family. God rest his soul.

Travel

On Byron’s hippie trail

When Chris Jagger followed the famed route in the sixties, he used Robert Byron’s 1937 classic travel book as his guide

The British have long been fascinated by the mysterious East.

In 1815, Shelley wrote Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude, with the lines:

‘The Poet wandering on, through Arabie

And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste,

And o’er the aërial mountains which pour down

Indus and Oxus from their icy caves, In joy and exultation held his way.’

I was tiring of the London scene, in early 1968. So I looked east. It was the apex of the hippie trail’s popularity. The trail flourished from the mid-50s to the late 70s, and stretched across Europe to South Asia, via Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal and Thailand.

I sold my car, packed a small rucksack and headed off to Kathmandu – over land.

I had listened to sitar players Vilyat Khan and Ravi Shankar – introduced on record by Yehudi Menuhin.

Yehudi, the child prodigy, had played with Ravi and mentioned the accompaniment as ‘the inevitable drone’ introducing us to the sound of Om.

But what was that sound, exactly?

As I had already hitched to Greece when I was 17, I took the train and arrived, exhausted, in Athens. I headed

Chris at Mahabalipuram, India, 1968

for the cobblestone alleys of the Plaka, beneath the Acropolis, renting a whitewashed room from Curia Anna for five shillings a night.

How wonderful to be back in Greece: the light, the food, the language and, then, few tourists.

I made friends with some Americans:

one who wrote porn novels for his home market and a black guy, Stanley, who had his own pet mongrel.

We toured around islands on kaiki – fishing boats. Stanley told me, ‘Don’t be in a rush to get to India. It’ll be there. Just enjoy all this beauty.’

I took an Italian boat from Piraeus to Istanbul and sailed up the Bosphorus, the meeting point of Europe and Asia, where the hippies going out met the hippies returning. I looked around and traded surplus items in the souk.

I then took a bus through Turkey, on past snowy Mount Ararat.

Tehran was busy and crawling with the Shah’s secret police – so on to the holy city of Mashhad.

I had the temerity to approach the beautiful turquoise mosque.

A mullah picked up a rock and cast it in my direction. So I headed pronto across the border, to Herat in Afghanistan, where nobody bothered you.

Herat was filthy but charming, with the pony-and-trap tonkas trotting around as taxis, adorned with tassels and bells.

I had been inspired by The Road to Oxiana (1937) by Robert Byron, which I’d borrowed from Marianne Faithfull

and read cover to cover. Bruce Chatwin described it as ‘a sacred text, beyond criticism’.

My initial problem was the runs, the curse of the Orient. A German hippie gave me a piece of opium to munch on. I lay on my bed for a couple of days, staring at the ceiling and drifting in and out of consciousness. When I came to, I was cured.

I looked at the minarets from the time of Gawhar Shad (1405-47), chief consort of Shah Rukh, Emperor of the Timurid Empire. For ten years, she had ruled the Timurid Empire, stretching from the Tigris to China. She was beheaded aged 80 (which seems a bit unfair).

Two English lads arrived in town, driving a Peugeot 404 estate – a rare thing. I took them in hand on the Robert Byron trail and, duly enthused, we headed north into the desert.

A permit was officially required, but we didn’t bother with that, as you had to go to Kabul for it. The only traffic on the dirt road was a few lorries and the odd jeep.

Arriving early morning in a village, we were invited to breakfast with the local governor, much as Byron might have experienced in the 1930s. We enjoyed cheeses and fruits, seated on a raised table in the garden.

‘Where did you stay last night?’ he asked.

On learning we had camped out, he admonished us: ‘You must not do this.’ There were brigands on the loose.

Later, a policeman stopped us outside a

small town and noted our registration number on the back of a fag packet. He then got in the car and we drove to a tea house, where he paid for our refreshments!

We visited Balkh, Afghanistan, where Alexander the Great married Roxana in 327 BC. Genghis Khan sacked the city twice.

Once a noble and prosperous place, it was reduced to ruins. When we were there, Russian engineers were already building tarmac roads near Mazar-iSharif, down which tanks would soon roll.

Finally, we reached the river Oxus via a side road, after being turned back. That was the Byron promise fulfilled!

The Khyber Pass descends with endless twists and turns and numerous fortifications. Here Tommies had perished miserable and far from home. We headed down into the stifling heat of the plains, in the pre-monsoon furnace, and to Peshawar.

Even iced mango lassis could not revive us. We lay in a cold cast-iron bath in our dak bungalow and tried to fan ourselves with the punka fan.

It was 20 years since the British had left. Some middle-class Pakistanis said, ‘We wish you had never left,’ as they made their way to the tennis courts, dressed in impeccable whites.

Like Rudyard Kipling, we headed for the hills, oriental versions of Tunbridge Wells, to Murree and beyond. A large tribal group processed to their summer pastures. The headman marched with his proud goat, silver on his horns, followed by sheep, donkeys, hens, dark tousle-haired children and the long-suffering, heavily laden women.

Finally, we drove over the pass from India into Kathmandu, beautiful and green. The people smiled at you, despite their poverty. We were happy to do nothing. We

sat on the steps of the crumbling temples in the main Durbar Square, watching the colourful processions wind their way with music and dancing, always celebrating some religious occasion.

A couple of miles outside the city lay Swayambhunath, known as ‘the monkey temple’, founded at the beginning of the fifth century AD. It stands on a hill across the river. You gradually ascend the numerous steps, taking it all in, passing three huge red Buddhas halfway up. There, as you turn around to catch your breath, the view spreads out before you.

Then you approach the vast dorje, or thunderbolt weapon, with an iron snake coiled around its stand. Behind are a pair of piercing eyes, painted onto the white expanse of the circular stupa, topped with a massive brass spire. The eyes face in the four cardinal directions. Here you must circumambulate, in a clockwise direction, turning the prayer wheels, and chant, ‘Om mani padme hum.’

I spent a further year travelling in India.

The most common question I was asked there, apart from ‘Are you a hippie?’, was ‘What is your purpose?’ It was a simple question, with many answers.

Initially, the hippies had credibility. There was almost a reverence towards them. But this changed quickly.

The media had a field day over the danger they posed to the youth of India. Stories appeared daily in the papers of them smoking chillums in holy places, smuggling drugs, being beaten up, robbed, suspected of being spies and having sex orgies.

One friend of ours, Howie, was as typical a hippie as you would ever find, a gentle American soul who had been turned on in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. He had long, black hair in a headband and wore beads.

One Indian asked him, ‘Are you hippie?’ Howie talked to him for ages, explaining what he was and where he had come from. In the end, the Indian concluded, ‘Maybe you are not hippie, but you are hippie-like.’

Seeemed like a good compromise.

Chris Jagger’s memoir, Talking to Myself, is out now

Inspiration: Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937)

Left: Chris’s sketch of his hippie trail Below: in Uzbek robe, Afghanistan

Overlooked Britain

A Rum Castle

Kinloch Castle, a Scottish island palace built by a cotton king

lucinda lambton

Kinloch Castle is a miserable six-hour drive north of Glasgow – then four more hours by sea from Mallaig to the Isle of Rùm. But it’s worth it.

From the Ritz in Paris to Raffles in Singapore, few can rival this Scots castle for the sheer shock of the unexpected.

What a first sight! A rosy-red-pink stone beauty of a castellated pile, sitting stately and sheltered in the cosiest of bays. Hurray!

It’s strangely un-Scottish, seemingly plucked from urban civic splendour. It was designed by Leaming and Leaming of London, the architects of the Admiralty and of Leeds Market Hall.

It was built in 1901 with pink boulders hauled by hand from the Isle of Arran, with workmen being paid an extra shilling a day if they wore kilts for the job!

A textile tycoon, Sir George Bullough, commissioned it. The castle cost him a full million pounds – the equivalent of many millions today – and he was to enjoy it for only two stalking months a year.

This fortune had been amassed by his

father and grandfather in the Lancashire cotton mills. Both men invented a multitude of machine parts, such as the ‘slasher’, which set the looms spinning ever more effectively.

The founder of the firm, James Bullough, to his dying day wore clogs, which became ever more richly embellished as his fortune increased.

His son George was to become a flamboyant country gentleman. He built Kinloch as a symbol of his aggrandised state.

In 1957, Lady Bullough sold the Island of Rùm, along with the castle, to the Scottish Nature Conservancy Council –

You tested a sheep by grabbing it by the hind legs and swinging it six times round your head

now Scottish Natural Heritage. In 2009, it was transferred to local community ownership.

From the moment you open the door, Kinloch’s interior decoration quite shrieks of the splendour of its age. Its front hall soars up to double height, smothered with magnificently monstrous Edwardian paraphernalia – all quite wondrously intact!

It was decorated throughout in one gluttonous go, with every surface encased in rare woods, silks, satins and velvets. It is filled with pieces from Shoolbred, the most popular furniture store of the day and the byword for 19th-century luxury.

Rarest of all these pieces are the great ‘saddleback’ sofas and chairs, covered in carpet, and dripping with tassels and fringing. They are sumptuously swelling and as big as baths; to sink into them is to sink into the very bosom of the Edwardian age.

The pulsating heart of the castle is beneath the stairs, with the perfectly wonderful automatic orchestra, the ‘orchestrion’, made by Imhof and Mukle. It was ordered by Queen Victoria, who died before it was finished, and was then snapped up by Sir George for Kinloch.

What a marvel!

Never, ever will I forget the sheer joy of listening to its automatic tones filling the air throughout the great empty house. No words can describe the ecstasy of expectation as – with the giant roll hooked on to its works and the single switch pushed down – you wait as it wheezes into life. Suddenly the air is filled with crashing loud-as-you-canlisten-to music. The drums beat, the triangles tinkle, the trumpets blow, the pipes play and the bells ring.

Kinloch Castle, designed by Leaming and Leaming of London in 1901

Compelled to dance, you prance into the ballroom, where there is a balcony for a live orchestra when the company had tired of the glorious orchestrion.

In the dining room, there is a handsome set of chairs that spent two years going round the world when bolted to the floor of Sir George’s yacht, the Rhouma. Although their legs were immovable, at a mere flick of a switch their great mahogany frames can still spin round for the convenience of allowing you to whizz into place at the great Edwardian dining table.

You can still sit today in the same solid and stately splendour as the Bulloughs, looking out across the sea to the mainland.

There has been one change I am glad of – today you can no longer quaff the fresh turtle soup, made from tame turtles that kept company with a host of pet alligators living in a pond in the terrace.

The dining room was an exotic jungle, with the daily change of dozens of orchids plunged into bowls of peat.

The gardens were magnificent, with lawns stretching down to the sea.

Fourteen gardeners worked on them throughout the year. In 1914, they were all called up. I fear that few were to return from Flanders.

There were great ornamental gated kitchen gardens and greenhouses, groaning with grapes and peaches. With the emotional chefs screeching their venison orders in French and the air saturated with sumptuous smells for two months a year, the culinary contrasts with the locals’ fare must have seemed rough.

One of the local gillie’s sons wrote of ‘sucking a cod’s eyeball to assuage our desire for sweetmeats. With careful sucking and manipulation, an eyeball would last all day.’

He wrote too of how to test whether a ‘braxy’ – an infected sheep – was fit for consumption: by grabbing it by the hind legs and swinging it six times round your head. If the legs could stand it, you had a ‘wholesome fairin’.

When my grandmother died, before I was born, my grandfather married the Bulloughs’ only child, Hermione – or Grannie, as I always knew her. It was most affecting to see this remarkable castle, which had been so much part of her life.

Sir George also had an elaborate and early version of double-glazing – two panes connected by a folding iron Z.

He installed a fancy telephone, with the number Rhum 1, as well as a ventilating system arranged in the panelling of the smoking room. Effective, beautiful, huge radiators were built into the hall; marble-topped, with circular colonnades of heat, they were architecturally distinguished in their own right.

The baths scored the technological bull’s-eye in the castle: the Shanks’ Patent ‘Eureka’, ‘the acme of luxurious bathing’, was one, with an arched wooden cabinet into which you stepped for water frolics. You were usually treated to three variations of aquabatics. The Bulloughs had seven, including Douche, a dagger-like jet from above, like an apple-corer boring through your head; and Jet, ramrods of water up your privates.

Last of all is Wave, with water shooting out at face level for as far as six feet if you so desire. The handsome lavatory, the Shanks Compactum, is decorated with ferns in deep relief.

The robust smoking room looks over a carpeted sofa to the billiard table beyond, where the cues, scoreboards and viewing sofa raised up on a dais are all intact.

So too are – to Sir George’s credit –framed testimonials from Lancashire mill workers.

In the hall today, where all the Bulloughs once gathered, there is still a pencilled note about a goat, written by Sir George to his gamekeeper, as well as a pile of Lady Bullough’s song books lying on the grand piano.

Stamped with a golden ‘Monica’ on red calf, they are full of such melodies as ‘Wrap Me Up in My Tarpaulin Jacket’.

The drawing-room is light, bright, white and still sparkling today with all the Edwardian femininity that brought it into being. The candelabras are hung with tinkling crystal drops, their candles shaded with embroidered, silken ovals.

Both the Bulloughs’ bedrooms are still intact. I was given her bed to sleep in. Few experiences could be finer than looking out to sea from her four-poster.

One of the most remarkable discoveries was Sir George’s old photograph albums, with exceedingly doubtful content. His ‘Chinese Punishments’ – of women yolked to a board – were certainly a worry.

Explore further and put ‘Ma Blushin’ Rosie’ on the orchestrion while fingering the frail silk of the drawing-room cushions. And I defy anyone not to be moved, to the core of their being, at tuning into another age with such precision. The Oldie

Above: the Great Hall. Below: the ‘orchestrion’, the glorious automatic orchestra

Shanks’s ‘Eureka’ bath

On the Road

Golden age of the silver screen

Simon Callow tells Louise Flind about

Orson Welles

and

Charles Laughton

his heroes,

– and his debt to Mozart

Do you travel light?

No, I travel very, very heavy. I simply cannot make up my mind as to what I might need. I’ve got two vast suitcases, whose contents I’ve disseminated around the apartment I’m staying in, and I’ve got the miserable task in a month of cramming it all in. Having acquired lots of things, I might buy a third suitcase…

What’s your favourite destination?

I have dear friends in Mykonos. My husband, Sebastian, and I often stay with them.

Earliest childhood holiday memories?

My mother, until I was five, was a school secretary in a very eccentric school called Elmcroft College in Goring-on-Thames. So really one was on holiday all the time there, because there was the Thames, the fields, the orchards, the rivers… I’m not really a country boy. I was born in Streatham.

What was your boarding school like in South Africa?

It was a Jesuit college called St Aidan’s and very, very tough. I was much happier there than I was in northern Rhodesia because of the climate. I was a fat, more or less circular child. I remember seeing frost on the windows in Grahamstown in South Africa.

Did you act at school?

Hardly at all. There’s a photograph of me acting in a school play at St Aidan’s, playing a very angry colonel with a moustache, in my dressing gown.

Were your mother and grandmother theatrical?

My mother was highly theatrical, but never went to the theatre. My French grandmother went to the theatre all the time, and took me to the Old Vic – a temporary base while the National was constructed – and I became obsessed.

What was the catalyst?

One afternoon, I was at the Old Vic seeing Much Ado About Nothing, a glorious production by Franco Zeffirelli, and I thought, what a wonderful

organisation this is. I wrote to Lawrence Olivier, explaining to him what a wonderful organisation he was running. And he wrote back and said, ‘Well, if you like it so much, why don’t you come and work here?’ I worked in the box office.

Was Chance in a Million (1984-86) your big break?

No, Amadeus was, in 1984. But I’d been in the West End with my name in lights at 30.

Where did your marvellous voice come from? It’s just my voice. My mother’s mother was an opera singer who had the most beautiful speaking voice – seductive, perfectly placed and balanced.

You’ve written a mighty biography of Orson Welles. What was the secret of his genius? He had an extraordinary brain, extraordinary imagination, extraordinary confidence. He’d been told all his life that he was a genius, and he believed it.

You wrote Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor. What’s your favourite performance of his?

As Rembrandt in Rembrandt (1936).

Charles Dickens is another of your subjects. What is your favourite book – and favourite quote?

The Pickwick Papers. Although it’s not perfect, there’s something about the exuberance of it, the sheer madcap inventiveness and the way it presents a recognisable picture of England full of crooked landladies and dubious lawyers. And in A Christmas Carol: ‘There was nothing of high mark in this. They were not a handsome family; they were not well dressed; their shoes were far from being waterproof; their clothes were scanty… But they were happy, grateful, pleased with one another, and contented with the time.’

What’s been your favourite role?

Undoubtedly, I enjoyed playing Gareth in Four Weddings and a Funeral, but most of all the Reverend Beebe in A Room with a View. On stage

I adored playing Beefy

The Beastly Beatitudes of Baltazar B, a play that failed completely.

Where was A Room with a View filmed? Florence and Tunbridge Wells.

Do you prefer film and TV to the stage? Because I’ve spent so much of my life in the theatre, I feel extraordinarily at home with the rhythm of rehearsal. On a film, you’re essentially creating pieces of mosaic that will be put together by somebody afterwards.

Were you surprised by the success of Four Weddings?

Not in the least. I knew it would be a huge success in all English-speaking territories. What took me by surprise was how amazingly universal the appeal was. I was in Paris when it opened there, and there were queues round the block. In Tokyo, queues round the block. And, six months later, in Tahiti, queues round the block.

Did you reap the benefits?

I got to play the voice of the ancient green grasshopper in James and the Giant Peach, and had the complicated pleasure of acting with Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura.

Where did you go on your honeymoon? We got married in Mykonos and went to Alaçatı in Turkey.

Do you lie on a beach?

I detest every single aspect of it.

Simon Callow is in Étoile, the ballet series (Amazon Prime)

Taking a Walk

Whiter than white Peak District

patrick barkham

There are various Everests a British walker can scale.

I mean not actual high summits, but peak experiences. What can beat an English bluebell wood at April’s end? A dawn chorus expedition in May? Or a golden-leaved fungi foray in October?

For rarity, in the southern half of 21st-century Britain at least, there is a walking experience that surpasses them all: a snowy stroll in brilliant sunshine when our ordinary world stands transformed.

I’ve just returned from a snowbound Peak District where I reached that pinnacle. What an outing! There were inches of snow – frosted hard and then touched up with fresh powder – when we set out from the village of Litton. Like the best of walks, this offered a fine old pub, the Red Lion, for the start-and-finish line.

The world was white and dazzling, and we could hear nothing – all human sound was muffled by the great acoustic blanket of the snow. In the silent stillness, the conversation of two jackdaws on a distant stone wall carried far and wide.

I was walking with a big gang of friends and children. My own had never experienced snow like this before, such is its paucity in our climatically changed Norfolk homeland. So the excitement was far in excess of a standard walk.

We left the slippery, snow-packed lane for a footpath across this high land of small pastures, each enclosed by old stone walls. Every field offered a fresh canvas of pristine snow for the creation of snow angels, for snow-rolling and even a tentative dabble in snow-munching. (It was as light as candyfloss and as cool as ice, and tasted of absolutely nothing.)

Fortunately for the grown-ups, the only thing the snow wasn’t suitable for was snowball fights, being so cold and powdery it couldn’t be compressed into handheld grenades.

Betty the miniature dachshund was snow-drifted with every step, and it looked like an enormous effort to leap up and out of the snow. For her, however, it was more than worthwhile because the snow kept a ledger of every animal that

had crossed our path in the last 24 hours. So there was a bounty of rabbit prints, hare marks and delicate crow tracery to sniff and follow.

The path took us to a wooded gulley, and we gingerly picked our way along the steep edge of Cressbrook Dale. Every branch of every tree still cradled snow.

Deceptively soft shards of snow, like white moss, adorned every other surface, turning unremarkable or even ugly objects – the dead heads of last summer’s hogweed; barbed wire – into extravagant and beautiful Christmas decorations.

The path wiggled between the stone cottages and gardens of Cressbrook, where walls were adorned with ‘Save Cressbrook Dale’ signs. One of the country’s most protected valleys has been subject to a long-running battle over attempts to establish an eco-community in it.

I hoped to enlarge our walk by ducking down to the River Wye and joining the Monsal Trail, an old railway line of awesome viaducts and tunnels.

There, incredible icicles as tall as I am hung down from the ceiling – spectacular stalactites that looked viciously strong and would barely outlive a mayfly.

But the midwinter sun was already low in the sky and the walking party were dreaming of hot drinks in the Red Lion. So we took a lane, happily devoid of cars, back to Litton, past the cemetery pines whose needles bore the most delicate frosting from the grand cake-maker in the sky.

There was just enough light left for some hillside sledging. Then it was dripping socks on radiators, feet by the fireside and golden ales to toast the most magnificent walking experience of all.

Start at the Red Lion, Litton, Derbyshire SK17 8QU. Take the first right past the post office and the field path south where the lane bends west. Follow the path south to Cressbrook, where the River Wye can be crossed to join the Monsal Trail, or take the lane via Littonslack for a shorter circuit back to the pub

Genius crossword 449 EL SERENO

Clues marked * share a missing definition

1 * Clue regularly seen within three seconds (11)

9 Skill needed in former president’s yacht? (9)

10 The shape of love found in Roman poet (5)

11 Some bones in oil retrospectively produce particles (6)

12 A French duo to go their separate ways (8)

13 Runs over additional charges (6)

15 * Time welcomed by person working in theatre (8)

18 Windows almost unsettled criminal (8)

19 Distributes last of presents and bags (6)

21 Manipulates figures (8)

23 * No fool must be rejected (6)

26 * Draw near, but lacking application (5)

27 Gets upset on account of funny spells (9)

28 Chars polish in order to get financial support for student (11)

Down

1 Settle player as replacement on team (7)

2 Playmaker’s complaint seen regularly (5)

3 Thrills on acid to get going (4-5)

4 Former morning paper (4)

5 Deal with toad hopping around tent in a panic (6,2)

6 Took off holding yen for city in Asia (5)

7 * Resentment after sacking leader for good (7)

8 Company director’s first article that protects member (8)

14 African dressed in a suit seen at last (8)

16 Muscle resistance seen in retired player (9)

17 Giant needing the two of them to protect English border (8)

18 * Batter victim (7)

20 Makes fun of son and finally arrives (5,2)

22 Pains from area on thorax, mostly (5)

24 * Fruit that’s right for all, initially (5)

25 Ring cycle has no heart (4)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. Deadline: 5th March 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.

Down

(5)

(4)

Modus vivendi (9)

Boxer Mohammad ___ (3)

Masked brigand (6)

(6)

What killed Cleopatra? (3)

(9)

(8)

Svelte, thin (4)

Casting vote, forbid (4)

Insect bite (5)

1 Home of reggae (7)

2 No nude in (anag) (8)

3 Sailing boat (5)

4 Feeble, frail (4)

5 Pastoral (5)

6 Murderer (6)

11 Party on the slopes (5-3)

13 Military entertainment, body art (6)

15 Making a clear profit of (7)

17 Upswell (5)

19 Evens, gives up (smoking) (5)

20 To parrot, reverberate (4)

Winner: David Hall, Edinburgh

Runners-up: Kathleen Hill, Halifax, West Yorkshire; Graham Pointon, Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire

This esteemed magazine is called The Youngie, isn’t it?

This month’s star is the Norwegian prodigy Nicolai Heiberg-Evenstad from Tromso, aged just 16. I played against him in the final of the Spring Foursomes last year and he seemed to know the whereabouts of all 52 cards after barely a card had been played.

This deal comes from last year’s Norwegian teams championship. He was the only declarer to make 4 ♥.

Dealer West Neither Vulnerable

The bidding South West North East

3 ♦ (1) Pass 4 ♦ (2) 4 ♥ ( 3) end

(1) Weak with seven decent diamonds (well, they look like seven). (2) Boosting the pre-empt. (3) With the opponents pre-empting, partner rates to have something. The other option is a take-out double, but South doesn’t want his partner to bid a four-card spade suit (as would have happened here).

The teenage star from the north (sitting South) won West’s king of diamonds lead with dummy’s ace and led the nine of hearts. East rose with the ace and led a normal second diamond (only an unlikely club switch defeats the game, tampering with declarer’s communications and leaving him the safe diamond exit for later).

Declarer ruffed the diamond and crossed to the ace of clubs to finesse the knave of hearts, West discarding. He then cashed the king of clubs and exited with a third club to East’s queen. East had no better play than a low spade, but declarer successfully finessed the queen, cashed the ace (felling East’s king) and led a third spade.

West won the knave of spades, but declarer could ruff his third diamond in dummy (a fourth spade no better) and hold king-ten of hearts over East’s queen-seven. Ten tricks and game made. ANDREW ROBSON

Competition TESSA CASTRO

IN COMPETITION No 315 you were invited to write a poem called The Delivery. ‘What became/ Of that bowler, immortalised in Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings?’ wondered Adam Wattam: ‘His run-up never ended, thanks to Larkin’s cinematic cut./ The delivery and the life that followed are therefore up to us.’ The cricketing poems surprised me by their excellence. Most others were obstetric or doorstep, some both. ‘The modern convenience of on-line transactions is easy and fast for sure,’ wrote Fay Dickinson, ‘But it can’t match the human interactions of delivery to your door.’ Robert Best told a joke three times till he got the delivery right. Commiserations to them and to Polly Sharpe, Ann Hilton, Julie Wigley, David Dixon, Peter Hollindale, Andrew Lacey, Basil Ransome-Davies, Marie Maher, Sue May, Michael Keegan, Philip Wilson and Roger Farrance, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Con Connell.

The message in the letter box read ‘Sorry that we missed you.

Please ring this freephone number, we’ll be happy to assist you.’

So I rang the number, waited, like a hopeless fantasist who Believes that someone really cares, and hasn’t just dismissed you.

The anger-management mill that my wait became more grist to Left me nursing mental images that I dreamed I’d put my fist through. My rage had just adopted a distinctive amethyst hue

When someone answered, asked me for ‘the code that ends in six, two’. I relegated this poor soul to those who’ve joined the list who,

Once I have won the lottery, I’d shake an obscene wrist to.

Then you breezed in. A smile delivered. How could I resist you?

You grabbed the phone, said, ‘It can wait,’ and, joyfully, I kissed you.

Con Connell

Signed, sealed, delivered, just for you! If you don’t like me, tough, here’s what you do:

Fill in the form and pack me back, The GPS will trace and track; No need to work yourself into a stew.

But on the other hand, perhaps I’ll stay? You didn’t need a new set anyway!

Though your old TV’s on the blink

It’s much more fun to watch a sink

Of soapy water slowly suck away.

So keep the sink, forget the plasma screen; Be thankful for small mercies; don’t be mean. Wash up in good old-fashioned style, Rope in the family all the while And listen to the wireless in between!

Jenny Jones

‘We’re glad you’ve come to see your mum. She’s not herself today –

Won’t leave her room, is restless, sad. Go up, you know the way.’

My mother sleeps, diminished, frail. Where is the woman now Who gave me life and cared for me?

I stoop to kiss her brow.

‘Hi, Mum, it’s Kate. I’ve brought a gift To mark a special day.’

She wakes, stares, does not know me, screams, ‘Who are you? Go away.’

But then she sees the flowers, smiles And lifts them to her face, Breathes in their fresh, faint scent of spring, ‘My snowdrop girl,’ she says.

Veronica Colin

You wait. Stay in. You check your phone. Assurances it will arrive Have pinged across your screen. By 5. You check your phone. You wait. Stay in.

The bell, the door. Sometimes they knock. You stay in. Check your phone. You wait. They might be early, could be late. You wait. Stay in. You check your phone.

The online tracker makes no sense. You wait. Stay in. You check your phone. Time creeps so slowly on your own. Stay in. You check your phone. You wait.

While When? turns into If? you strain To hear a van slow down, the slam Of metal doors – but it’s a sham. You check your phone. Stay in. And wait.

D A Prince

COMPETITION No 317 I’m glad to have some left, but now the dentist wants thorough reconstruction. So a poem called Teeth, 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 317’, by Thursday 6th March.

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 17th February 2025 UK Travel

FOUND

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 17th February 2025

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Video

Sex-mad husband

QMy husband often wants sex when I’m not in the mood – and it annoys me. It’s so selfish! When we do make love, and it’s mutual, it’s wonderful, but I don’t see why I should submit to his every request. Name and address supplied

AFrankly, I think you’re the one being a bit selfish here. Aren’t there times when you want sex and he doesn’t, and he just makes the effort for your sake? Isn’t that a sign of love in itself? Contrary to old-fashioned beliefs, men aren’t always ‘up for’ sex. Now and again, they can find it just as much of a chore as us, but they make the effort because they love us.

There’s a growing view that men are selfish bullying bastards. But I think women are the stronger sex, and there’s a reason for the phrase ‘all men are little boys’. They can be just as vulnerable as us, if not more so – they just hide it better. Talk about it and explain your feelings – but with compassion and understanding, not resentment.

Holy hubby

QWe’ve always gone to church regularly every Sunday and have made many friends through the congregation. But we have a new vicar who is very evangelical and I can’t get on with his beliefs. My husband, on the other hand, has become hooked and goes to Bible classes twice a week; he’s become so saintly he’s changed personality. From being a relaxed, warm friend, he’s become judgemental and holy. I’ve tried to see the point, and prayed for insight, but nothing happens.

The husband I loved has disappeared. What can I do? I can’t bear to leave him.

G H, by email

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

AUnfortunately, your husband has stepped into an area that is completely beyond reason. So I doubt whether talking to him will have any effect. He’s had a profound conversion and sadly it may be a case of either joining him or losing him.

I feel you should give yourself a deadline – say a year hence. Explain how lonely you feel and, if you can, have a word with his local vicar or priest. Compromise is the only way forward. Time can often soften the intensity of new-found beliefs like his, and, with love on either side, you should be able to live together happily again. It’ll be different but still doable. Good luck.

Grandson’s night terrors

QMy eight-year-old grandson comes to stay now and again, and recently he’s often woken with ‘night terrors’. He does finally calm down – but a friend suggested they might be due to sexual abuse. I can’t mention it to my son – he might think I’m accusing him. I’m in such a dilemma. I can’t bear to think of my grandson suffering. Can you help? Andrea, Bristol

ANight terrors are incredibly common in children of your grandson’s age. So, unless you have very good reason to be suspicious, I’d put sexual abuse out of your mind. And night terrors are very different from nightmares. They often arise when someone goes from one stage of sleep to another. My son used to suffer from them and very frightening they were – for him and for me. It often seemed impossible to wake him.

Stay calm and reassuring and remember he may not even recognise you. Wait for it to pass. And perhaps suggest he see a doctor. Sometimes a very mild soothing drink before sleep can help

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enormously. I wonder if he experiences them at home – perhaps the change of environment doesn’t help. Night terrors usually pass in a few months, by the way.

Technophobia tip

QAs someone whose IT ‘expertise’ extends only to sending the simplest of emails, I have every sympathy with your recent correspondent. I too have, on occasion, wept over the difficulties presented by more sophisticated messages. For example, I have no idea what is meant by an ‘encrypted’ email – nor do I want to know.

My top tip is to never give your email address to any official body, be it the NHS, local council, gas board or any other. If they want to communicate with me, they have to send me a letter.

They may not like it, but it is how I choose to have my information from them. I find it works every time. Jane Moth, by email

AThe encrypted emails are often so confusing and well-concealed that even I, the intended recipient, can’t break into them – let alone any cyber thieves!

As for your tip about giving only your postal address, I’ve tried that – but when I arrived at an NHS appointment the other day, I found it had been cancelled (and the post was so slow the cancellation letter hadn’t arrived). I thought everything was meant to be quicker with IT – but, far from being quicker, it seems to me to be slower and more complicated than ever! Passwords? Spare me!

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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