29 St Trinian’s story Ronald Searle and Neil Mackwood
33 Young Fattypuffs and Old Thinifers Jill Parkin
36 We remember the ’60s Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais
5 The Old Un’s Notes
9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary
10 Grumpy Oldie Man
Matthew Norman
13 Olden Life: What was a slide projector? Pamela Howarth
13 Modern Life: What is slop?
Richard Godwin
31 Oldie Man of Letters
A N Wilson
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34 Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips
39 Prue’s News Prue Leith
40 Town Mouse
Tom Hodgkinson
41 Country Mouse
Giles Wood
42 Postcards from the Edge
Mary Kenny
43 Small World Jem Clarke
45 Rebirth of Renaissance
David Horspool
46 School Days
Sophia Waugh
48 God Sister Teresa
48 Memorial Service: Sir Martin Jacomb
James Hughes-Onslow
49 The Doctor’s Surgery
Dr Theodore Dalrymple
51 I Once Met … Auberon
Waugh Matthew Faulkner
51 Memory Lane Ken Tracey
52 Readers’ Letters
65 Commonplace Corner
65 Rant: Pretentious prices
Jon Askew
89 Crossword
91 Bridge Andrew Robson
91 Competition Tessa Castro
98 Ask Virginia Ironside Books
54 Story of a Murder, by Hallie
Rubenhold Christopher Bray
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
55 Empty Wigs, by Jonathan Meades Roger Lewis
57 Taking Manhattan, by Russell Shorto Ivo Dawnay
59 Spring Is the Only Season: How It Works, What It Does and Why It Matters, by Simon Barnes Patrick Barkham
61 The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War, by Charlie English
Nicholas Lezard
63 A Life in Books
Lady Antonia Fraser
Arts
66 Film: Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy Harry Mount
67 Theatre: It Runs in the Family William Cook
68 Radio Valerie Grove
68 Television
Frances Wilson
69 Music
Richard Osborne
70 Golden Oldies Mark Ellen
71 Exhibitions
Huon Mallalieu
Pursuits
73 Gardening
David Wheeler
73 Kitchen Garden
Simon Courtauld
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74 Cookery
Elisabeth Luard
74 Restaurants
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75 Drink Bill Knott
76 Sport Jim White
76 Motoring
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78 Digital Life
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78 Money Matters
Neil Collins
81 Bird of the Month: Pied flycatcher John McEwen Travel
82 Easter Island’s giant mysteries Sandra Howard
84 Overlooked Britain: Debenham House, Holland Park Lucinda Lambton
87 On the Road: Brian Cox Louise Flind
92 On the trail of Stephenson’s Rocket Patrick Barkham
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Front cover: George Harrison, The Beatles – Mad Day Out. Tom Murray/CAMERA PRESS
George Harrison’s gardener page 24
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The Old Un’s Notes
A new exhibition of declassified documents is full of espionage thrills.
MI5: Official Secrets is at the National Archives in Kew from 5th April to 28th September.
Exhibits include an unseen snap of wicked old Anthony Blunt, as well as the manually typed transcripts of interrogations of him and Kim Philby.
The ordinariness is gripping. An agent’s 1963 transcript of meeting Philby (codename Peach), to hand over a confession, adds, ‘We arranged that we would go to the Gents together.’
Then there’s German spy Karl Muller, who in 1915 infiltrated Britain posing as a Russian. Foolishly, Muller used the schoolboy trick of lemon-juice secret ink to transmit military intel.
The Old Un can confirm that heating reveals the lemon-juice script, as carbon from the acetic acid oxidises.
The postal censorship office, manned by women,
quickly picked up Muller’s treason. He was briskly hanged, but one of his leathery lemons survived to appear in the show.
Similar delights include a cork, cleverly carved to form a tiny message box with a sliding cover.
The story of American
Among this month’s contributors
Tim Rice (p14) created, with Andrew Lloyd Webber, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita His show My Life in Musicals tours from 11th April.
Maureen Lipman (p22) was in Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre Company (1971-73). She was Beattie in the BT ads and stars in Coronation Street. She played Joyce Grenfell in her show Re: Joyce.
Ronald Searle (p29) was one of our greatest cartoonists and illustrators. Searle (1920-2011) dreamt up the naughty girls of St Trinian’s and, with Geoffrey Willans, created Nigel Molesworth.
Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (p36) are legendary TV writers. They wrote The Likely Lads (1964-66), Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Porridge, Lovejoy and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet
agent Virginia Hall (1906-82) is still little-known. She was well-bred, brilliant and undeterred by the wooden leg she called Cuthbert — caused by a hunting accident.
SOE’s first female field agent in France, she stomped fearlessly about for 14 months, saving countless lives, earning her the Croix de Guerre, Distinguished Service Cross and MBE.
Hollywood actors, keen to hone their artistic reputations, sometimes come to London to appear in edgy plays.
It does not always work. The latest visitor was Brie Larson (née Brianne Desaulniers). She is new to the Old Un but hailed by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the year 2019.
Ms Larson popped up in a production of Elektra at the Duke of York’s Theatre and reviews were not entirely admiring. The Guardian approved, but the Independent called it ‘impenetrable’; the Standard ‘completely mad’; the Stage yawned, the Times boggled at ‘the misguided avant-gardery of it all’. The Mail awarded a rare turkey symbol (ie no stars out of five). Broadway World called it ‘a droning dud’.
The Telegraph described Ms Larson’s ‘jolting delivery with an almost tic-like need to amplify and draw out every use of the word “no”.’
Oh dear. Still, it could
Baddies and goodies: MI5 files on Anthony Blunt and Virginia Hall
Winchester men have ‘biggest feet in England’ Hampshire Chronicle
Rev’s pudding was mistaken for explosives Press and Journal
‘Ghost town’ fears as community leader raises concerns over wonky pole East Anglian Daily Times
Important stories you may have missed £15 for published contributions
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‘Mary Poppins has a nightmare, now they have bag checks’
have been worse. At least no headline-writer called it ‘cheesy’ or hailed it as ‘Brie’s stinker’.
The Oldie salutes the Establishment insiderturned-nonconformist radical Tony Benn (1925-2014), who would have turned 100 on 3rd April.
Whatever you make of his politics, Benn was rarely boring. Once described as a macaw in the rookery of Westminster, he wasn’t one meekly to follow the party line.
In 1975, he broke from the Labour leadership to campaign against the UK’s continued membership of the Common Market.
Benn later wrote that he ‘loathed’ the idea of the European Union, which he described as ‘bureaucratic and centralised’ and ‘of course dominated by Germany’.
Benn’s private life also sometimes strayed from the orthodox. A lifelong devotee of the pipe, he was known to scrape off ‘No smoking’ signs when he encountered them in public spaces.
He also expressed doubts about climate change, deplored what he called the ‘miserable’ kitchen-sink dramas fashionable on 1970s TV, and disliked being lectured by health faddists.
He was so uninterested in food that his diaries frequently record him
living largely on a diet of tea and bananas.
Benn’s views on literature put him at odds with many of his impeccably well-read political colleagues. He once listed his two favourite books as The Communist Manifesto and the Bible.
For fiction, he turned to an Agatha Christie mystery or any one of the Tony Blair-era Labour manifestos.
‘Utter twaddle,’ Benn said of the latter. ‘To be embarrassed by socialism was very much a characteristic of New Labour.’
A gifted mimic, Benn once rang his ministerial colleague Anthony Crosland (briefly Foreign Secretary, before his premature death at 58 in 1977), in the guise of a BBC interviewer, to enquire whether he didn’t think that ‘awfully nice Wedgwood Benn fellow’ was the coming man of
the Labour Party. It took some time for the penny to drop.
Crosland would later say affectionately of Benn, ‘There’s nothing the matter with him except he’s a bit cracked.’
Is the tiara the most useless form of headgear? It isn’t sunproof or rainproof – although I suppose thankfully it is rustproof.
The immense Essex Tiara – now known as the Scroll Tiara, perhaps to sound slightly less blingy – is part of the huge Cartier jewellery show at London’s V&A (12th April-16th November).
That tiara has performed a dazzling circular trajectory via rich and royal heads. It was made in 1902 by Cartier, ‘the King of Jewellers’, from 1,048 diamonds provided by the Earl of Essex for his wife, dollar railway heiress Adele Beach Grant (1867-1922), to wear to Edward VII’s coronation.
A genuine beauty (one of the ‘Lovely Five’ in British society) and committed vegetarian who worked out by manhandling heavy pumpkins, lovely Adele died in 1922, just six years after the Earl had been run over by a taxi.
Her tiara then mysteriously glittered in and out of view and ownership, materialising on Clementine Churchill’s head at Elizabeth II’s 1953 coronation, and on Princess
Fit for the Queen of Pop: the Essex Tiara, as worn by Rihanna
Margareta of Romania’s for her 1996 marriage.
It reappeared in 2016, adorning the singer Rihanna on the cover of W magazine – loaned by Cartier, which reacquired it some years previously. With a net worth of $1.4 billion, according to Forbes magazine, Rihanna could have bought it if she’d liked.
Should she like to see it again, it can be admired, alongside 350 other caratstrewn Cartier items, at the V&A.
‘I’m just joking! Unless you agree... But no, I’m just joking’
If the BBC wants to justify the licence fee, no one would complain if it granted access to the fabulous archive in the vaults.
That would be real value for money, since there’s so little current stuff to watch.
Help is at hand! The Beeb has launched the BBC Archive channel on YouTube.
It’s like coming home to an old friend – with appearances by the Old Un’s heroes Barry Norman and Peter Ustinov, and music from the likes of Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson.
Surely it’s time for Auntie to start a terrestrial archive channel, in the hallowed footsteps of Talking Pictures TV and Rewind TV.
Spare a thought for Percy Fawcett (1867-1925).
He was the British explorer
who, a century ago, in May 1925, set off with his son Jack and a companion in search of an ancient lost city they believed existed deep in the Amazon rainforest. None of the three men ever returned.
Born in Torquay in 1867, Fawcett came from a family of adventurers and soldiers.
He made several expeditions into the Brazilian interior before the First World War, charting hundreds of miles of unexplored jungle and bringing back fantastical tales of mysterious animals unknown to European zoology.
Fawcett’s descriptions of cat-sized venomous spiders were a popular feature of his lectures back at the Royal Geographical Society in London, although his account of his having personally killed a 65-foot-long anaconda was treated with some caution.
Fawcett’s exploits in jungles and atop mountains inspired novels such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912).
Typically dressed for his expeditions in a tweed suit and deerstalker, he is the godfather figure to the Indiana Jones franchise.
Fawcett also volunteered for front-line duty in the First World War, commanding an artillery brigade at the age of 50 and winning the DSO.
Opinions vary as to what happened to Fawcett and his companions after they set off on their final journey. The most popular theory is that they were killed by hostile tribesmen, offended that the visitors had failed to bring them sufficient gifts.
‘When you promised me a spa weekend...’
A German explorer who followed in the party’s footsteps concluded that they had plunged into the forest, got lost and eventually starved to death.
There’s even a story that Fawcett, disillusioned with Western life, staged his own disappearance in order to set up a commune in the jungle.
He and his companions, joined by some friendly women, lived there for the rest of their days.
Net-zero-embracing politicians are forever lecturing us about electric cars. But Labour MP Peter Prinsley complains that the parliamentary car park has ‘only two charging points, both occupied’.
Dr Prinsley’s Suffolk constituency is more than 80 miles from the Palace of
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
‘I hadn’t the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself’
Leave it to Jeeves, 1916
Westminster. If he is worried about global warming, should he not be taking the train rather than driving?
Aged 66, he might find the iron horse more congenial, too. You can sleep in a train. As, admittedly, you can in the House of Commons.
Looking for a juicy diary for the Easter holidays?
Well, oldies will love How to End a Story by Helen Garner, out on 13th March. Garner, 82, is a celebrated Australian writer of novels, screenplays and non-fiction.
Her diaries are a delicious mix of little chunks of thought: caustic views of her everyday life, together with snappy aphorisms.
She quotes the 1902 diary of painter Paula ModersohnBecker: ‘Marriage does not make one happier. It takes away the illusion that had sustained a deep belief in the possibility of a kindred soul.’
And here is Garner in 1984:
‘“If I asked you now to drop everything and run away with me,” said K, “you wouldn’t, would you.”
‘(Hangs her head) “No. But I would’ve. Once.”
‘“What changed?”
‘“I started thinking.”’
Who wants to be a billionaire?
If you want to make a fortune, listen to James Dyson’s tips
I am on the train from Malmesbury to Paddington.
I could have been on an earlier train, but I booked this one and did not want to pay the extra. I travel first class with a Senior Railcard, so the fare is marginally less ludicrous than it might otherwise be.
I am here with a cup of tea and half an egg sandwich (bought at my local Tesco yesterday for just £1.25: I love an end-ofday bargain) and my notebook. It’s rather a handsome notebook. I got it as a freebie in a goodie bag at a conference in York.
I have been in Malmesbury interviewing Sir James Dyson. The super-rich are different from us. They have more money.
Dyson, artist turned designer and engineer, looking 60, turning 78 in May, is an extraordinary achiever. He started out with nothing. Now, according to the Sunday Times rich list, his family wealth is around £23 billion.
A billion, by the way, is a thousand million. When we were young, a billion in the UK was a million million, but in 1974 we fell into line with the Americans on this one and accepted that a billion is 1 followed by nine noughts rather than twelve. Either way, it’s a lot of dosh.
I was interviewing Sir James for my Rosebud podcast. I have interviewed a few billionaires in my time. Inevitably, I ask the self-made ones for the secrets of their success.
‘Energy’ is often the answer they give; ‘using my own and harnessing the energy of others’; and ‘Persistence’.
Sir James agreed. ‘Persistence, yes,’ he said. ‘I’m a long-distance runner. You’ve got to keep going. And you’ve got to be ready to fail. You learn from your failures. Keep failing if you want to succeed.’
It took 5,127 prototypes over five frustrating years (plus borrowing to the hilt) before Dyson launched his G-Force vacuum cleaner in 1983.
I asked Sir James for advice I could share with my grandchildren, three of whom are about to launch themselves onto the world of work. He said simply, ‘If you want something done, do it yourself. Don’t expect others to do it for you. And don’t believe the experts.’
My first billionaire interview was with the Aga Khan, Prince Karim Al-Husseini Aga Khan, who died in Portugal on 4th February, aged 88.
He was the leader of Ismaili Muslims around the world and, so he told me, a direct descendant of Mohammed the Prophet, through Mohammed’s daughter, Fatima.
He was 31 when I met him and worth ten billion. He was still worth ten billion when he died, which, given inflation, suggests his fortune diminished somewhat over the years. Well, he spent a bit on horses and yachts, private jets, islands in the sun, and wives who came and went – the usual nonsense – but he did good works, too.
I was 20 when I interviewed him for my university magazine. He was based in Paris then. This was Paris in May 1968 – when many thought France was on the brink of civil Les événements de mai ’68 encouraged protests around the world – and graffiti. ‘Be realistic: demand the impossible’ was my favourite.
I had read in Paris Match that the Aga Khan never gave interviews, so I found his address in Who’s Who
and wrote to him – and he agreed to give his first-ever interview to me.
When I arrived in Paris, there were armed police on every corner. North of the Seine it was relatively calm, but south of the river it was a city in the middle of a revolution: burnt-out cars, pulled-up paving stones, streets closed off. Around the Sorbonne, there were barricades and tanks and armoured vehicles everywhere you turned.
The Aga Khan lived on the Île de la Cité. When I reached his house, I couldn’t see a doorbell or a knocker. The front door was wooden, covered with heavy metal studs. As I climbed the steps, it swung slowly open. A servant in a white jacket stood within. ‘Monsieur Brandreth? Son Altesse vous attend.’ The house was entirely lit by candlelight – a blaze of candlelight.
The candlelight is what I remember best. And I remember being struck by how self-deprecating the Aga Khan was: he talked several times about his ‘lack of self-assurance’. And I remember, too, when I suggested that in the West religion was on the decline, he said emphatically that the reverse was true in the Muslim world.
A word of thanks to all the readers who have kindly sent me their secrets of how best to get to sleep when you find you can’t.
From deep-breathing techniques to magnesium tablets, I am ready to give them all a go, and to date the one I have found most effective is the remedy suggested by my friend Bishop Richard Harries, Lord Harries of Pentregarth and of Thought for the Day. He simply lies back, closes his eyes and says Psalm 4.8: ‘I will lay me down in peace and take my rest: for it is thou, Lord only, that makest me dwell in safety.’
Sleep tight.
Gyles Brandreth: Can’t Stop Talking is on tour from April
James Dyson
Grumpy Oldie Man
Fear and loathing in Fleet Street
The Mystic Megs of the Telegraph love predicting Armageddon matthew norman
You will be familiar with the Americanborn concept of the intervention.
The friends and family of a person in trouble ambush the loved one with the intent of forcing them to seek help for whatever it is – generally drugs or drink, though more recherché forms of selfdestruction are also available – that ails them.
One notable example came in The Sopranos, when members of that lovable New Jersey family held the one for heroin-hooked psycho Chris Moltisanti that climaxed, perhaps inevitably, in a mass brawl.
It is to be hoped that our intervention would conclude without a group outing to A&E. But if violence is the price to be paid, so be it. Something must be done, and soon, for Allister Heath of the Telegraph
Before we go further, two things must be disclosed. First, I was fired as a columnist for the paper – one I had loved since childhood despite being a shade distended from its political worldview –about a decade ago. However, I’ve been sacked by countless others, and rightly so, without developing an appetite for sour grapes.
Secondly, in a strictly technical sense, this is none of my beeswax. I am not related to Mr Heath by blood or marriage. Far from being his friend, I have never met him.
Yet, as human beings, are we not all family? Is our shared humanity not connection enough to establish a duty of care? Did Jesus teach us nothing at all? (Yes, yes and no, for the hard of comprehending, are the answers to those.)
Mr Heath is not the most talentless inhabitant of the Telegraph’s capacious stable of the ostentatiously deranged. To glance at its website is to glimpse a digitised version of medieval bedlam.
One after the next, the inmates scream about whichever socialist-driven, apocalyptic nightmare has invaded their
minds that day, until you pray for the attendants to storm in and forcibly inject the Diazepam.
Yet, of them all, Mr Heath seems the one who might be rescued. He isn’t notably stupid, and doesn’t seem motivated by malice. He may even imagine himself to be well-intentioned.
The most palpable problem with a man who’d discern the imminence of Armageddon in a marginally overcooked steak, a tube train delayed for 17 seconds awaiting a green light outside Earl’s Court, or a small hole in a sock, is the pulverising lack of self-awareness.
No amount of being hysterically wrong, no torrent of ridicule for the wrongness and hysteria heaped on him by Private Eye can degrade the selfappraised omniscience.
This disorder is no rarer in columnists than in politicians, of course. But Mr Heath has raised the art of being hyper-confidently wrong to a zenith such that if you asked him about the weather, and he said, ‘It’s a beautiful, sunny afternoon,’ you wouldn’t dream of going outside without an umbrella.
‘Few would have predicted how much she would grow into the role,’ he wrote of Liz Truss during the Tory leadership campaign in August 2022. ‘They [her critics] will rue the day they so completely underestimated her.’ Indeed.
‘This was the best Budget I have ever heard … by a massive margin,’ he observed a month later of the fiscal triumph that destroyed his heroine, her Chancellor and very nearly the pensions industry with them.
The inmates scream about socialistdriven, apocalyptic nightmares
‘Trump is finished,’ ran the headline above yet another Meisterwerk a few weeks after that. ‘The future of the Republican party belongs to DeSantis. Now it is clear that the ex-president repels more voters than he attracts, the American Right needs a new champion.’ But of course.
The unelectable Trump, he wrote last November after Trump’s election, ‘won’t want Russia to be able to declare victory’ over Ukraine.
How very, very true. If anything has typified the President’s approach to ending this war in the early days of his second coming, it’s the tone of clinical even-handedness towards the combatants.
The Telegraph has been desperately seeking new ownership for a good while. But apart from the odd Middle Eastern petrostate on the hunt for a propaganda outlet, curiously not a soul has seemed interested in paying way over the odds for an asylum hijacked by its lunatics.
The era when newspapers were sufficiently relevant and powerful to justify inflated asking prices has passed.
But there are nobler reasons for buying a newspaper than political influence and the commercial opportunities that follow. Common humanity is one of those.
So if any of you have half a billion swilling aimlessly around in the Nationwide and a surplus of goodwill to match, I’d love to talk about facilitating that intervention.
It won’t be pretty. It may well require mild physical coercion. But if you, as new proprietor, and I, as your new editor-inchief, could only strap Allister Heath to a chair and read him a choice selection of his oeuvre, I have a hunch that, after as little as 30-34 hours, the tiniest shard of humility would puncture the staggering self-confidence, and the process of recovery could begin.
what was a slide projector?
Do you have a box of forgotten photographic slides at the back of a cupboard? Or an old projector, gathering dust?
My brother and I recently discovered that our dad’s Noris Trumpf projector, in its original case, still works after 50 years!
In the 1950s and ’60s, the slide projector, a cool bit of kit, had a huge impact on communal entertainment and making memories mid-century. Its starring role in the history of photography is often forgotten these days, when you can shoot and view a film on your smartphone.
Slides, originally painted and viewed through ‘magic lanterns’, have existed since the 16th century. In 1850, a slide containing a photographic image was created by the Langenheim brothers –only ten years after the invention of photography. Then the major update came in 1936 with the first Kodachrome 35mm colour slide.
The all-important projector, also developed in the 1930s, wasn’t commercially available until the 1950s, when it became immensely popular with families and was invaluable for educational purposes.
My father loved the latest photographic gear, and we all loved watching ourselves magnified on a screen in vivid, true-to-life colour. It was like being at the cinema! As a family ritual, this way of sharing and reliving good times was much more fun than handing round prints. Simple to operate, the projector could still trip you up, but it was all part of the entertainment. The slide had to be placed in a holder, upside down to correct the lens inversion, and manually pushed into the light-path – I remember the metallic clicking sound. Sometimes it got stuck or was the wrong way round, because it was hard to see these tiny plastic- or cardboardframed bits of film with the naked eye. A more seamless experience came with the rotary cartridge, a brilliant innovation which could feed 80 slides automatically, at the touch of a button. The German version, the Hans Gugelotdesigned Carousel-S (pictured), lives on in design books and museums, thanks to its beautiful, minimalist lines. Kodak Eastman sold over 35 million carousel projectors, the last one being manufactured in 2004; you can buy these and other models on eBay today.
These time machines enabled people to share their memories and their lives, like social media today, only with smaller audiences. A favourite subject was holidays, especially foreign ones, as tourism had boomed since the war and more of us were going abroad.
In the end, and rather unfairly, the slide show became a byword for bored, post-prandial ennui, as you yawned your way through your neighbour’s third visit to the Costa Brava and umpteen shots of his wife sipping vino tinto.
The heyday was over. In the late 1960s, my dad bought a Super 8 cine camera. In 1972, my wedding was filmed and shown through a newfangled movie projector. Then along came video, computer and digital technology for homes, schools and offices.
Oh, the nostalgia, looking back at this old way of sharing photos and preserving family history! You can digitise your slides now or buy a small viewer online for under £20 – but it’s not the same.
So, a pilgrim to the past, I’m off to organise a slide show with my vintage projector.
Pamela Howarth
what is slop?
Slop is a bit like spam, but I’m afraid it’s worse.
It’s the term for the low-quality words and pictures generated by artificial intelligence (AI) online. Like digital black mould, it festers and spawns in the dark corners of websites and the airless expanses of social media. And once you notice it, you realise it is everywhere.
The term is thought to have been coined by a developer named Simon Willison. He hoped to focus minds on the sort of useless, weird and misleading content that begins to proliferate online following the rollout of large-language models such as ChatGPT and Gemini and image-diffusion models such as Dall-E and Midjourney.
If you’ve performed a Google search in the last year or so, you’ve probably encountered some slop, since the world’s
most popular search engine now offers artificially intelligent answers right at the top of the screen. (This is apparently to save you from ever having to leave Google – but mostly to save Google from having to lose digital advertising revenue.)
In one famous early example, Google’s AI confidently asserted that glue was a necessary ingredient in pizza – to stick the mozzarella to the tomato. Willison was also concerned to see a food bank listed among the top tourist attractions in Ottawa.
Such mistakes are hardly surprising. AI is ‘wrong’ anywhere between 10 and 30 per cent of the time – though, considering that answer was in itself provided by AI, you’re advised to take it with some caution. Still, wrongness is among the more explicable categories of slop. Let me introduce you to Shrimp Jesus. These are images of the Son of God spliced with crustaceans – with prawns for fingers, for example – and they’re everywhere online. Last year, Stanford University’s Cyber
Policy Center studied 120 of the most popular Facebook pages and found that 8 per cent of them were regularly posting weird, AI-generated Jesus pictures to an audience of hundreds of millions. You can see this sort of thing on Instagram too: animations of croissants turning into tiny pandas, men composed entirely of biceps. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg – who reliably takes anything bad and makes it much worse – has promised users more AI-generated content. Why are they doing this? Simple. To attract your attention. You click on the image and find yourself on some e-commerce site which phishes out your information in order to spam you – or, rather, slop you – with more marketing materials. And so the slop cycle continues. More and more of this stuff spawns and respawns and generally clogs up every orifice of the internet. Soon there will be almost nothing human left.
Richard Godwin
I’m about to embark on a 33-date tour of the UK.
This recklessness has come about because a slightly shorter and less arduous version of this escapade worked very well last spring – 22 shows in 28 days, all in England.
This time around, I’m also venturing into Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Ireland itself.
I made a rather half-hearted attempt to become a pop star in 1964. I wisely abandoned it a year later when I met the 17-year-old Andrew Lloyd Webber and decided to have a crack at writing songs rather than performing them.
I also instantly abandoned my attempts to write tunes, as Andrew seemed to have that half of the process sewn up with staggering skill and determination. Furthermore, his ambitions were entirely centred round musical theatre rather than the New Musical Express Top 30, which had been my prime interest, indeed obsession, since Elvis – although the first record I bought was by Britain’s first rock ’n’ roller, Tommy Steele.
I had barely seen any West End musicals by early 1965, although I was very well-acquainted with the scores of the greatest shows, thanks to my parents’
The sad fact, I guess, is that I’m a frustrated performer
LP collection. After I had all but worn out the grooves of both sides of my six or seven pop singles, I would listen to the likes of Oklahoma, South Pacific, My Fair Lady (my favourite), Salad Days (a rare British hit), and Guys and Dolls Strange to relate, I never had any great desire to see the actual shows.
I was a vinyl freak and spent as much time fondling and admiring the album discs and their glamorous labels and covers as I did caressing and filing my own extremely modest assembly of 45s – plus one fragile 78, which did not quite make it into the swinging sixties after being sat on by an elderly relative.
Anyway, Andrew lured me into the musical-theatre world and, after five years of not a lot except some school productions of a short piece based on the Bible story of Joseph and his coat of many colours, at the very end of 1970 we suddenly found ourselves rocketing up the American charts with a double album entitled Jesus Christ Superstar By mistake – because no theatrical
Right: Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, with their awards for Jesus Christ Superstar, 1971
producer was remotely interested in a stage musical about the last seven days of Jesus’s life on earth, as seen through the eyes of Judas Iscariot – we had stumbled on a new way to launch a show: make the album before the production, not frantically in the first weekend after the show has opened (as long as it hasn’t already closed).
Unintentionally, we had used a combination of my obsession (records) coupled with Andrew’s obsession (musical theatre) to make our mark. Andrew’s music in Superstar was a magical combination of dramatic melody, stupendous orchestration and hard rock.
I am a bit miffed that the original JCS album never makes the Best Rock Albums of All Time, even if the list is a Top 500. It truly is a great rock piece, featuring inter alia Joe Cocker’s Grease Band (not Joe, though), Ian Gillan of Deep Purple, Murray Head, Mike d’Abo and sundry other rock luminaries.
As a result of that overnight success five years after Andrew and I met, I have ever since been considered a bloke who writes words for musicals – which is indeed true.
Nonetheless, I consider myself not really a fully-fledged theatrical but more a lucky outsider.
In some respects, I think my comparative lack of interest in what is actually going on in the world of musicals
has been an advantage. I’ve never been very much influenced by what is happening elsewhere. I still keep tabs on it but am inclined to avoid opening nights, occasionally even my own if possible.
I dread being asked my opinion by an eager reporter longing for vicious criticism. I once asked the brilliant lyricist Don Black, halfway through an
Tim Rice’s hits grew out of his love of LPs and Lloyd Webber’s love of musical theatre
opening night of his many moons ago, what he thought of the show so far and he replied, ‘Worse than I’d hoped.’
Oldie of the Year Award-winner Don is a superb wordsman (‘On Days Like These’, ‘Born Free’, ‘Diamonds Are Forever’, ‘Sunset Boulevard’ etc.). Thus he’s one of the tribe who generally don’t get quite enough credit for their contribution to a show –annoying if it’s a success (but can be good news if it’s a flop).
Another of my lyricist heroes, Sammy Cahn, was also hilarious off the theatrical piste. Yet he wrote some of the most romantic and moving lyrics of the 20th century – ‘All The Way’, ‘Call Me Irresponsible’ and
dozens more, for which Frank Sinatra, among others, was very grateful.
Anyway, my forthcoming extravaganza consists of nothing but songs with my lyrics. Plus me talking.
If this is not a strong selling point, I should mention that the music has been written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Elton John, BjÖrn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson and Alan Menken. Then there is John Barry, Mike Batt…
The singers are marvellous West End regulars and the small but perfectly formed band is led by Duncan Waugh, veteran musical director of literally hundreds of shows over the years.
The odd flop or original unsuccessful version of a hit is included, but I would be immodestly surprised if most of the audience don’t know at least 15 or 16 of the 20 on parade. Only a few would know ‘It’s Easy for You’, a song Andrew and I wrote for Elvis (and he recorded it!).
Between numbers, I recall how each song emerged, how it helped (or hindered) a show and what working with each mega-composer was like. So far I have had no defamation writs following my 2024 tour exposés.
particular song and/or the particular show came about, what it was like working with the relevant composer and how the song or show fared.
Sometimes I think I/we were lucky to have the success we did with a number. At other times, I’m a little miffed that it didn’t do better.
I don’t have any script, simply a running order of the songs, with the result that my reminiscences can vary considerably from night to night. I’m often mildly intrigued as to what I might
say next. The singers and band are very happy with this scattergun technique, as they usually hear something different each night – and have to keep awake, as they never quite know when I’ll shut up and announce the next song.
Neither do I.
Having been rather dismissive about awards, I hypocritically bring along the odd trophy, and confess at the very end that one particular award is my most treasured. Spoiler alert: it’s not an Oscar.
The sad fact, I guess, is that I’m a frustrated performer. I’m reminded every night on stage when I hear (for example) ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ or ‘Anthem’ from Chess sung so well just ten feet away from me, that I never had the chops, nor perhaps the determination, to make it as a singer – excellent though my version of ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ was when I was a vocalist with a rock covers group, sadly now disbanded, for 40-plus years.
But I hope my gratitude to, and enjoyment of, the world of musical theatre comes through on my forthcoming venture – albeit that I still feel a little bit of an interloper.
Tim Rice’s show, My Life in Musicals: I Know Him So Well, tours from 11th April to 31st May
Elaine Paige stars in Evita, Prince Edward Theatre, London, 1978
How to be interesting
Don’t talk about schools or parking. Do talk about sex. By Rachel Johnson
Now that a personage of such national importance as Tim Martin, the boss of Wetherspoon, says dinner parties are ‘Yawn, yawn’, we should take note.
He said dinner parties are both boring and deadly. They are killing off his Wetherspoons and other pubs as it’s cheaper for punters to trough at home, as F & B (food and beverage) served in hospitality – as opposed to private consumption – is VAT-rated.
I agree with Tim. Most dinner parties are boring, and too long. The format is pretty stale. How do we save the dinner party and the pub from extinction?
Easy. We should ban boring subjects, and boring questions. Do not turn, ever, and ask about the following.
1) Children. My bugbear is strangers thinking it’s nice to ask me, ‘So what are they all up to?’ and ploughing on with their meal while I produce my adult offspring’s CVs. An absolute no-no.
2) Schools. Total bore. Nick Coleridge, the new Provost of Eton, complains, ‘I can have only one conversation now, which is only about someone’s nephew or son or any tenuous connection the person has with the school!’
I couldn’t resist telling him about meeting the Queen at Buckingham Palace, in a clump with a couple of other
He opened with ‘Now, do you think size matters?’
editors. Geordie Greig, the former Daily Mail editor, and I reminded her of distinguished relatives who had served in courtly roles. She turned to the editor of the Times and remarked, ‘Am I really the only person here with no Royal connections?’
3) Holidays. Who cares? Only a half-wit could ask in February, ‘So, do you have any summer plans?’
4) Anything to do with travel, roads or parking. It may be a minor personal triumph that you wrote to the council about that pothole, but it’s what we used
to call in Fleet Street a MEGO (acronym for My Eyes Glaze Over).
5) Food or diets, especially Ozempic. Women love talking about these subjects, but they should be confined to the spa or coffee morning. My husband adds, ‘Why can’t we bring the tradition of ladies going through to powder their noses? It’s time we poor chaps had a break from talking to some tiresome woman about schools or grandchildren.’
6) Health and genealogy. It may be interesting to you that you are seven-per-cent Viking, but not to anyone else, and I’m afraid nobody wants to hear about your colonoscopy over the cauliflower cheese. No organ recital – a list of your ailments. And no posh-ancestor worship, please.
Don’t be a bore: Ennui by Walter Sickert, c 1914
I could go on. The Victorian-era taboo topics – sex, money, politics and religion – are the only interesting ones, even if mentioning Trump and the Middle East can reduce the mildest gathering to a screaming match. When I was editor of The Lady magazine, the matriarch of the publication, the late Julia Budworth, banned me from covering sex, politics or celebrity in the pages of the gentlewomen’s weekly – a diktat I ignored, with explosive results.
Anyway, let’s proceed with a list of boring questions, even though tastemaker Nicky Haslam says, ‘It’s very common to ask questions’ and ‘You should find things out by talking.’ He also says, of my choice of preferred subjects, ‘Money is quite boring, especially in the Cotswolds – they never talk about anything else.’
Most people know it’s a failure of imagination to ask ‘So what do you do?’ (unless you’re ‘sat’ next to someone famous such as Tony Blair, Nigella or Ralph Fiennes, in which case you ask in order to annoy them). But ‘So what’s keeping you busy?’ is far more irritating. Ditto, asking, ‘So how did you two meet?’ or ‘How long have you known X or Y?’ Stupefying. Also ‘What are you watching on telly? I need a new boxset’ is unforgivable at a dinner, as is talking about The Traitors
If ten people have gone to the trouble of dragging themselves off their sofa to dine off-site, the occasion merits –indeed demands – big talk, not small talk. I encourage gen con (general conversation), gossip, anecdotes and what the greatest conversationalist of all, Christopher Hitchens, called disputation.
Alan Riding, of the New York Times in Paris, says the dinner party is thriving as the intello observes rigorous rules. Cri-cri is banned, he said. Cri-cri stands for crianza and criada – Spanish for parenting and the help. ‘Nobody talks about religion in Paris. We are practically pagan,’ he said.
As for sex, that’s a no-no. ‘Everyone around the table has a secret, and you don’t know who knows what,’ he explained. X may not know that Y is Z’s maîtresse en titre and all are present. What do they talk about then? ‘Books,’ he says, ‘and ideas.’ Yikes!
The editor of this magazine insists, ‘A good conversationalist should not be shocked by anything.’
Which reminds me. I sat next to Andrew Roberts at Nick Coleridge’s 60th-birthday dinner and he opened with ‘Now, Rachel. Do you think size matters?’ and we had the most terrific chat.
It certainly beats someone telling me they’ve done only 8,000 steps today or that their spit test hasn’t come back yet.
Rachel Johnson is author of Notting Hell
Het Pelsken (The Little Fur) by Peter Paul Rubens, c 1637
Rubens’s most intimate portrait. Helena, Rubens’s second wife, is cast, playfully, as Venus, the Goddess of Love. Rubens has posed her in homage to his great predecessor Titian, who made several paintings of women in fur – and in imitation of Venus Pudica. Derived from classical sculptures, it refers to Venus covering her nakedness.
Yet, instead of hiding her breasts, Helena uses her arm to lift them into prominence, nipples erect.
Beware of Luxury by Jan Steen, c 1663
The moralising is clear in Steen’s larger-scale paintings of chaotic, dysfunctional families, for which he is still famous.
This is a classic example, full of chaos and jeopardy. In a topsy-turvy world, a child smokes a pipe, the dog eats the pie while the matriarch sleeps, and the baby throws his dish onto the floor.
And the flirtatious woman at the centre of it all, holding the wine glass so suggestively? Margriet Steen. Jan is having affectionate fun at his wife’s expense. They had married in Leiden in 1649, when he was 23 and she was probably slightly younger – and also pregnant. They had eight children.
The art of love
A new book by Nick Trend tells the story of art’s greatest love affairs through the artists’ most heartbreaking pictures
Portrait of Helena de Kay by Winslow Homer, 1872
A red rose was deeply meaningful for the sitter in this portrait, the artist Helena de Kay (1846-1916).
According to her best friend, Mary Hallock, it represented a sort of personal emblem, a symbol of herself. The painting seems to be part of the process by which the artist, Winslow Homer (18361910), came to terms with his unrequited love for her.
When he did this painting, Helena had already met her husband-to-be – publisher Richard Watson Gilder. The painting was made in 1872, when Homer realised his love for her was doomed.
It was a disappointment from which he seems never to have recovered. He lived alone for the rest of his life.
Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer by Francis Bacon, 1963
‘An artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs,’ said Francis Bacon (1909-92).
And the greatest passion in his life and the
greatest source of his despair was George Dyer (1934-71), his lover and model.
Three Studies is the first painting Bacon made of him, a couple of months after they met in London in 1963.
Especially in the right-hand portrait,
there are aspects of Bacon’s own physiognomy. It is as though the two faces are merging in a sort of spiritual and physical union.
In 1971, Dyer was found dead from an overdose of drink and drugs.
Nude Woman in a Red Armchair by Pablo Picasso, 1932
In 1927, the chance sighting of a beautiful 17-year-old girl in a Paris street proved too tempting for the frustrated 45-year-old artist.
‘I am Picasso,’ he told Marie-Thérèse Walter. ‘I feel we are going to do great things together.’ And they did – in secret.
He did this portrait as their relationship reached its erotic peak. She graces the sinuous lines of this red armchair with voluptuous curves.
Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels by Rembrandt, c 1654-56
Hendrickje was Rembrandt’s maid, lover and mother of his daughter, Cornelia.
The portrait was made as Hendrickje was getting to grips with Rembrandt’s bankruptcy and life with a young child, and yet she radiates a remarkable sense of calmness and poise. There is a delicious tension between her regal demeanour and the erotic charge of the portrait.
The Birthday by Marc Chagall, 1915 Chagall (1887-1985) began The Birthday on his 28th birthday in July 1915. The picture marked his marriage to Bella Rosenfeld (1895-1944) a couple of weeks later.
Marc said of their first meeting in their home town of Vitebsk, Belarus, in 1909, ‘I feel she has known me always – my childhood, my present life, my future – as if she were watching over me, divining my innermost being.’
Few of his many hundreds of pictures and sketches of her could be called portraits. When she appears, often in a dreamlike setting, we know it is her, from her calm, impassive expression and her dark hair.
Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow by Georgia O’Keeffe, 1923 O’Keeffe (1887-1986) made Grey Lines during her relationship with photographer Alfred Stieglitz. She often focuses on the folds, petals and stamen of a single exotic bloom.
Many of these paintings have been seen as referencing the female anatomy. She was angered and frustrated by what she felt was the reductive approach of many contemporary male critics who focused on what they saw as the sexual connotations of her art. Still, it’s hard not to see some of these paintings as an invitation to intimacy.
What Art Can Tell Us About Love by Nick Trend is out now (£18.99)
At 100,
Precious Ruby
Thelma Ruby has acted on stage and screen for 80 years. Maureen Lipman first saw her as Prince Charming in 1953
I’ve got ten grandchildren, never having had a baby, 52 greatgrandchildren and two great-greatgrandchildren.’
So says the fabulous actress, cabaret star and Oldie of the Year winner Thelma Ruby – formerly Thelma Widgoer of Leeds, and Thelma Frye after her marriage at to the late director and educator Peter Frye.
She turns 100 on 23rd March. But, still, she recently had to learn a scene and audition five times, in person, for the Mexican director Alejandro Iñárritu for a part in a new Tom Cruise film.
‘Don’t think I got it after all that,’ she laughs.
I first saw Thelma in pantomime in Hull in 1953 as Prince Charming (right) , when I was seven. My mother must have told me she was Jewish, like us, and I clocked that there might be a chance for me to glitter as she did, on a stage. I may have doubted her veracity as a proper prince, what with the high heels, tights and rouged cheeks. Seventy-two years later, fresh from playing the Enchanted Teapot in Beauty and the Beast, I understand that authenticity of gender is the last thing that matters in pantoland.
Valerie Grove, The Oldie’s radio critic, led me to Thelma’s one-woman show at the King’s Head, Islington. At 96, she had the personality of an ingénue and the memory of a pachyderm. She sang, danced and told dazzling stories of working on Chimes at Midnight (1965) with Orson Welles and Cabaret on stage with Judi Dench.
She had played Golde to Topol’s Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof three times from 1984 and – he was rumoured to be tricky – she got on with him famously. As she later did with Stephen Berkoff in Kvetch. And the entire cast of Coronation Street welcomed her when she played Lily Dempsey in 1996.
When I asked her about Topol, she said her husband, Peter, had given him his first job and that he had behaved impeccably towards her. ‘You never lost your temper with him?’ I asked.
Her reply speaks volumes: ‘I’ve never lost my temper with anybody.’
It shows – in her unlined face, her bouncy grey curls, her colourful wardrobe and her exuberant love of life.
Her energy is tangible and she might flash her Cyd-Charisse-eat-your-heartout legs at the drop of an anecdote.
‘The rest of me may have fallen into disrepair,’ she says, ‘but the legs are still spectacular.’
Her memory for names and detail is exceptional. She astounded me by remembering, 70 years on, the name of
the dance-school teacher in Hull, Miss Pickles – I remember her, too – who supplied the kids for that panto.
She is a tour de force all right and one who actually relished being forced to tour. She crossed America four times with the version of Golda Meir she and Peter adapted from the play Golda, cutting the cast down from 31 to two Peter and she were friends for many years when both were with different partners. They married when Thelma was 45 and she gave up what was a very successful career in TV, film and stage in Britain to go and live with him in Israel, learning the language and making educational English-language films which are still shown.
Her mother, Paula, had been one of C B Cochran’s glamorous singers in the 1920s. Paula Ruby was her stage name. Thelma and Paula were evacuated to New York during the war and a US businessman, Henry Barnet, a friend of friends in Leeds, funded their four years there, refusing to take back a penny. His war effort, I guess.
She was a shy child – so her family were surprised when she went to an American college to study drama. She returned to England in 1944, joined ENSA and went on to have non-stop employment.
The day I spoke to her she had gleefully taken receipt of £21 residual for a TV series, Move On, with Jack Dee. We commiserated on the lack of actors’ residuals, now that all jobs come with a buy-out. I wish Equity would engage in actors rather than politics.
Thelma’s activism is alive and well as she campaigns vigorously to save neighbouring Wimbledon Park from being desecrated by the building of 38 new tennis courts on landscape gardens created by Capability Brown. The plans involve chopping down 300 trees.
‘If necessary’, she told the press, ‘I shall chain myself to a tree!’
One wall of her living-room window is filled with the most spectacular view. The flat resembles a set for a Merchant Ivory film. Her archive and memorabilia are, like her legs, quite spectacular.
Since an Oldie lunch brought us together, Thelma has travelled from Wimbledon to NW3 several times to have dinner with my partner and me – I had written ‘and I’ there, but she corrected my grammar. Pardon the unpardonable name-dropping but, in the company of some big hitters such as Howard Jacobson and a couple of Labour peers, Thelma took the floor. She also took the ceiling and walls and held the room in the palm of her manicured hands.
The 100th-birthday party’s at our place. I’m proposing the toast.
Nobody’s value is more precious than Ruby’s.
Maureen Lipman is in Coronation Street
Thelma Ruby in panto, Hull, 1953
Neil Titley, the Beatle’s gardener, ran over his gnome but still got a lovely goodbye present from him
George’s magic flower power
During a 40-year career, performing a solo Oscar Wilde show, I undertook many periods of ‘resting’, when I did almost any job that turned up. And so, in 1970, I was lucky enough to become under-gardener at the Friar Park estate high on a hill overlooking Henleyon-Thames.
Resembling a French château, it had been built in 1889 by a successful solicitor and horticulturist called Sir Frank Crisp. After his death in 1919, the house was sold on and became the home of a Roman Catholic teaching order of nuns who ran a school in the building for 20 years.
One of their pupils was Jane Birkin (1946-2023). Jane, of course, became a renowned star but in those days was best known for her nude appearance in Antonioni’s 1967 film Blow Up, and for becoming the lover of the French singer Serge Gainsbourg. They became notorious after releasing the profoundly erotic record
Je T’Aime
On a related note, Jane Birkin recounted the story of arriving in London and hailing a taxicab. When she mentioned that she had once made a record called Je T’Aime, the cabbie screeched on his brakes and burst out: ‘Je T’Aime! Je T’Aime!! I’ve had three soddin’ children because of Je Bloody T’Aime!!!’
By 1970, the nuns had left, and, at the last minute, the increasingly decrepit Friar Park was saved from demolition
when George Harrison of the Beatles fell in love with it. Immediately, he turned his attention to the restoration of the grounds. His first gang of gardeners, in keeping with his religious beliefs, had been a group of Hare Krishna disciples.
While excellent at chanting, they had proved less efficient at gardening, despite their innovative use of World War Two flame-throwers to try to clear the weeds.
Seeing little progress in taming the lush jungle that had overtaken Sir Frank’s original, George Harrison sent for Maurice, who’d been his head gardener at his former property in Esher, Surrey. Maurice, a stocky and laconic countryman aged about 50, had been installed in one of the gatehouses with his family and, with a new crew of gardeners that included me, set about tackling the problem.
There were occasional visitors. John Lennon arrived one morning – his famed white Rolls-Royce gliding up to the château. It looked rather like a squashed ambulance. I had a distant view of John and Yoko and another figure in spectacles – who turned out to be Peter Sellers.
George said later that John had walked into the main building, looked around it and said that it was ‘so dark that he didn’t know how Patti and George could live there’. George replied, ‘It might help if you took your sunglasses off.’
That Christmas, George bought a new mini-tractor for Maurice – of which Maurice was rather proud. At least, he was until one afternoon a week later.
I was watering plants with him in one of the greenhouses when he gave a start and stared horror-struck at the sight of George and his companions painting the tractor in psychedelic designs.
Powerless to prevent it, he grumbled away resentfully to me, ‘You’d think some of them buggers would have something better to do with their bleedin’ time.’
Neil Titley in 1970, when he worked for George
Something in the way he mows: George (left) at Friar Park, Henley, 1975, and (below) for his album cover, 1970
This statement might have had more moral force if the foliage that we were watering at that moment had not consisted of 150 cannabis plants.
Probably George Harrison’s finest musical moment was when he released his triple album All Things Must Pass in November 1970. A month or so before the release, a photographer spent several hours taking shots for the record cover, including one of George sitting on the lawn dressed as a gardener, while in the foreground lay four prone garden gnomes, part of Sir Frank’s collection. This photo become the record cover (right). As all Beatles material was scoured minutely by the fans for ‘meaning’, it was destined to become a visual icon of the sixties.
Two days later, while in charge of the tractor, I mistook a gear and reversed over one of the soon-to-beworld-famous gnomes.
Oh well, all things must pass…
When I finally handed in my notice, Maurice called me over on my last afternoon at Friar Park.
‘George left something for you on the ledge by the kitchen door.’
I wandered over to find a sheet of paper with some close-written handwriting on it. I read the words and realised that they were the lyrics to George’s new hit, My Sweet Lord.
I thought it had been offered as a pleasant memento – or, more likely, as he was then in evangelical mood, as philosophical instruction. In those pre-retro days, no one had any idea that such a document might one day become a hugely valuable property. I certainly didn’t.
A week later, I was in a London pub with friends. I showed them this paper, and then carelessly placed it down on the bar table. As he turned, one friend accidentally knocked over his pint mug.
The beer swashed across the table and over the sheet of paper. I watched as the lyrics turned into an indecipherable smudge of ink.
Farewell, my lovely address book
Old telephone numbers and addresses conjure up a lost world of
children’s friends and much-missed parents for Penny Hancock
I’m giving my grown-up son a lift to a party. He gives me the postcode but no road name.
‘I need a road name,’ I screech. ‘What?’
‘There has to be a road name or I won’t be able to find it.’
‘You haven’t put Google maps on?’ I hadn’t.
I navigate my town by street name, the shop on the corner, the garage to the left. I like to exercise the navigational part of my brain, and I like a proper, old-fashioned address.
But addresses are slipping into the vast repository of defunct things, along with DVDs, CDs, handwritten letters with stamps and landlines. And so, by stealth, contact lists on phones are taking over address books.
I recently decided to replace our dog-eared old address book with a smart new leatherbound one.
The old address book is in quite a state. Not every name is recorded under its alphabetical initial. Some are under the surname, some the first name.
Still others are scribbled at random on whatever page was open when we took down a number, mid-phone call. There are doodles, and there are marks in felt-tip, a ring left by a wine glass. The odd coffee stain.
The address book lived by the phone for many years and used to get ‘defaced’ by our young children. Busy and preoccupied, we registered only irritation at the childish scribbles that obscured our contacts.
Today, these scribbles reveal new information about our now grown-up children to me. One daughter, eight at the time, had been attempting to organise what she saw, rightly, as our chaotic system. Always one for order, far from ‘defacing’ the address book, she was desperately trying to sort it out.
‘Please put this on F,’ she has written, with the F of Ferguson (scrawled on the B page) neatly encased in a square box.
And, in the M section, she wrote, ‘Please fill in this space with Ms!’
Living by the phone as the book did, it often doubled as a notepad.
‘RABBITS,’ I have scrawled across one page, with a phone number.
‘Ah,’ my partner remembers, ‘that was when the rabbits were trying to kill one another and we had to contact a rabbit expert.’
This sadly resulted in our having to sacrifice one of the pet rabbits, to save the other one. We found a new home for it. We didn’t strangle it, but it left one of the children without a pet.
Beneath ‘RABBITS’ and the phone number is the word ‘HAMSTERS’.
I ignored this at the time, assuming my daughter was simply practising her handwriting. Now I see she was taking advantage of our harried note about the warring rabbits to make a hint we never took. Poor child never did get her hamster, but the word reminds us of the period in her life when she desired small furry animals more than clothes or spa weekends.
The book contains some poetic addresses: Ferme du Château, Allée de la Gambauderie and Via Olmarello.
There are Streets and Avenues, Vicos and Calles, Rues and Places. Reminders of friends made when we were travelling; promises made to write.
Our address book is a document of our social life, our family history and, of course, the people who have left us.
Flicking through, I realise that quite a few of the names belong to those now departed to the bigger, celestial address in the sky.
Not that all of this is necessarily sad. Seagrass, Trinity Street, was the house my parents, now departed, used to rent every May and October on the Suffolk coast. The address conjures the vision of small children dunking bacon rinds on strings into the water to draw out crabs; the scuttle of claws on wood; the splash as we tipped them back into the sea; the smell of beer brewing; the feel of saltstung skin.
The house has long since been sold, but the memories conjured by its address live on.
The address book is also a record of a time now altered for ever. ‘Pay by cheque or at shop’ is scribbled underneath a number, reminding us of a time when we shopped with cash in department stores before cards or phones.
The adult children, home for a night, come in as I pore over the old address book.
‘That was Hannah McGreggor’s house,’ Child One says. ‘She gave me my first cigarette in the park. She’s married with three children now.’
The lives of the children’s friends, long since forgotten, emerge again, like photo negatives finally developed and forming a picture.
I can easily punch a postcode into my phone next time my son needs a lift somewhere, of course. But it will not one day take me back to this time and this place, in the way a proper address would have done.
And so I forget replacing it and reinstate the original address book next to the (now disconnected) landline phone, where it will always belong.
Hanging on the telephone
London’s oldest restaurant
Over 200 years ago, Wiltons and Rules first opened for business. But which came first? Charlotte Metcalf has the answer
Tucked into a velvet banquette behind snowy drapery at Wiltons restaurant in St James’s, London, I felt like Alice tumbling into an Edwardian wonderland.
Just across the room were semi-private booths, resembling enormous four-poster beds, conjuring up historic images of deliciously decadent trysts with showgirls. The deservedly famed oysters arrived, followed by the domed silver trolley trundling into view with Friday’s special, salmon coulibiac. It was several hours and the cheese trolley and pudding later before I left. It had been such a rare, delightful indulgence that it made me wonder about the restaurant’s origins.
alone, that she was fed up with the war and the bombs.
‘Just put it on the bill,’ said Olaf.
So she did, charging him £1,200 for one restaurant and one Dover sole. The Hambro family still owns Wiltons.
George William Wilton set up his oyster barrow in 1742 on Cockspur Street off Haymarket – so-called for selling hay and straw for London’s livestock. Wilton’s stall was popular with the traders: oysters were cheap, plentiful fare and not the food of the gods, as they are today.
The same was true of Paris, where seafood stalls also thrived. It was only much later, when an appetite grew for sitting down and enjoying a drink alongside food, that the notion of restaurants started forming.
Wilton’s stall remained in Cockspur Street, passing from father to son to nephew until 1805, when it became somewhere to sit and eat, under the new name, Wiltons Shellfish Mongers and Oyster Rooms.
Jason Phillips, Director of Wiltons, suggests it was partly to seek shelter from the British weather that the barrow moved inside. Still, it wasn’t until 1840 that Wiltons became a fully-fledged restaurant after Robert Thomas Wilton applied for a beer and wine licence at Wiltons Oyster Rooms, now on Ryder Street. Since then, Wiltons has moved over a dozen times, always within the St James’s area.
Wiltons was sold in 1942 by Mrs Bessie Leal. She complained to Olaf Hambro (1885-1961), Chairman of Hambros Bank and a regular customer dining there
The peripatetic nature of Wiltons allows Rules on Covent Garden’s Maiden Lane to claim the title London’s Oldest Restaurant.
Thomas Rule did not sell oysters on Maiden Lane until around 1798, 56 years after George William Wilton first set out his stall. In 1848, Rule’s son, Benjamin, took a 30-year lease on 36 Maiden Lane, where the restaurant remains.
‘If you define a restaurant by whether it serves alcohol with food, Rules got their liquor licence 44 years after us,’ says Jason. Nevertheless, it’s hard to argue with the solidity of Rules’s bricksand-mortar history.
Many years ago, I made a film for the BBC in Israel with the late Gerald Kaufman MP. As a thank-you, Gerald took my executive producer, Fiona Stourton, and me to lunch at Rules. Though it was less formal and more affordable than Wiltons, its ornate glass-domed ceiling, scarlet banquettes and magnificent red-and-gold carpet cocooned us in lush comfort and I never forgot it.
‘Gerald was a lovely gentleman,’ remembers Rules’s owner, Ricky McMenemy. Ricky came from Glasgow to be a waiter at Rules in the 1980s and never left. ‘In the ’80s, we looked to Brasserie Lipp or Les Deux Magots as models and crammed in the tables. Over time, we realised we were prioritising quantity over quality. So we slowly began
returning comfort to the restaurant’s core.
‘We were always a bit more relaxed than Wiltons, but we share a great sense of welcome. It’s vital we don’t become fossilised or preserved in aspic. Our secret is to move with the times but never throw the baby out with the bathwater.’
Like Ricky, Jason started at Wiltons young – he was just 18 when he began working in the kitchen. He too understands the challenges of keeping up with the times, at the risk of offending regular customers, as when he relaxed the jacket-only policy for men.
‘I don’t expect to see someone coming to a lunch wearing a cardigan – we are a restaurant!’ fumed one customer, vowing never to return.
Nevertheless, a couple of years later, he did, unable to find equivalent culinary quality elsewhere. He remains a regular.
Given that many oldies are in the business of trying to appear younger, it’s delightful to see two elderly institutions battle it out for the oldest-of-them-all title.
‘Sixteen years before Rules was even thought of, we were providing oysters to Queen Victoria,’ says Jason, reminding me that, between 1884 and 1924, Wiltons gained six royal warrants. ‘If Rules wishes to be the oldest restaurant, we’ll be very happy with that, so long as we’re recognised as the oldest oyster-trader.’
Who cares which is the older? The point is, they both remain in safe oldie hands. Ricky and Jason have clocked up around 80 years of loyal service and leadership between them. They are not about to embark on radical culinary adventures, or tear up the carpets in favour of fashionable, antiseptic, cacophonous, industrial minimalism. They’re so reliably excellent and welcoming that even young people want to go, ensuring that Wiltons and Rules will outlive us all.
Rules, 35 Maiden Lane, London WC2E 7LB, 020 7836 5314, rules.co.uk
Ronald Searle’s naughty schoolgirls grew out of his imprisonment in Changi Camp with Neil Mackwood’s uncle
My uncle, John Mackwood, was a Japanese POW both in the Changi Camp in Singapore and on the notorious death railway in modernday Thailand.
He was in the camp with the great artist and cartoonist Ronald Searle (1920-2011) and my uncle John, having been at theatre school, took an active interest in the plays that the POWs put on in Changi.
I have copies of several programme covers of those plays with titles such as In Clink Tonight, Khaki on Parade and Dover Road. In one play, R C Sheriff’s Badger’s Green, in March 1942, Lieutenant J L Mackwood played Mr Twigg and Ronald Searle was billed as Scenic Artist.
My parents – my father, Charles, was John’s elder brother – encountered a man on a ship coming home from Ceylon, where he was a director of the family business, who remembered John in the camps. He told my father that he should be proud of his brother – for he had been marvellous and had put on plays alongside Ronald Searle and others to keep up morale.
It’s extraordinary to think how these young prisoners, on starvation rations, could summon the energy to stage plays – billing themselves as The Palladium Players – and go to the trouble of printing programmes on battered typewriters. They must have been a great boost to the morale of the captive audiences and given the actors and producers something to do to kill the boredom of early camp life.
Twenty-five musicians put on a performance in Changi of Schumann’s music, attended by 500 ‘concert-goers’. How did they rescue their instruments and how did they survive in the corrosive tropical climate? Where did they get the sheet music?
Changi Prison was constructed for 600 prisoners, but the Japanese crammed 5,000 people into it. Still, it was a doddle compared with the horrors of work on the notorious Burma Road railway.
In the camp, Ronald Searle risked torture, beatings and probably death by
sketching the scenes he saw before him. These included gruesome pictures of severed heads of ‘unco-operative’ Chinese and Malay civilians stuck on poles by the victors as a warning after the capitulation by Britain and her allies.
In Searle’s book To the Kwai – and Back: War Drawings 1939-1945, remarkable ink or charcoal sketches show the various portraits of his Japanese and Korean guards.
There are disturbing pictures of brutality meted out to the prisoners, juxtaposed with images of mundane camp life, with skeletal prisoners resting on camp beds or dying of cholera.
Searle wrote, ‘At this point in our lives, some sort of philosophical outlook was desirable, for one great curse of prison life is that it allows too much time for reflection.
‘We had been prisoners for more than two years. But, in this seasonless part of the world, time had no particular meaning any more and the future was a great big blank.’
Uncle John did not speak much about the camps. But he did say to my father that the behaviour of the wicked schoolgirls in Searle’s inspired girls’ school, St Trinian’s, was taken from the Japanese – even if the high jinks of the roguish girls of St Trinian’s are as far removed as can be from the horrors of those camps.
After the camp, Uncle John went on to be a successful BBC radio anchorman at the United Nations in New York, broadcasting to the world. He became an inaugural presenter on Southern Television, then called Rediffusion.
‘Well actually, Miss Tonks, my soul is in torment’ (Searle, 1951)
His civilian life, like that of so many other of his fellow JPOWs, was sorely marked by five brutal years in the camps, where they saw unimaginable suffering, death, disease and brutality. He had a chequered life.
As a journalist, I kick myself for not sticking a tape recorder under John’s nose and asking him about his time spent as a young man in those hellholes. It would have made an important record for his children.
While I was leafing through Searle’s book of war drawings, out popped a poem by my uncle called ‘Japanese POWs Went to Church on Sundays’. Here is the first stanza:
There was nothing else to do
On this day, Sunday.
On any other day, what did it matter?
All days were same days to all of us, But on Sundays there was entertainment –
The actors, dedicated men would rise and speak to us.
We forget now what they said, But it was something most of us had heard before.
Somewhere, sometime, there before –
On Sundays.
And here’s the final verse:
We don’t know why this was
We only know that we, who live,
We live embittered and in pain.
One day, these memories will leave us, But until that time, please God, forgive us –
We will never go to church –
On Sundays.
Today’s Dissolution of the Monasteries
Silly C of E sold its vicarages – and destroyed the clerical caste a n wilson
Funny old Enoch Powell preached a disturbing sermon on the parable in St Luke’s Gospel about the rich man and the poor man (Luke 16:19-31).
The rich man has every privilege during his lifetime, but when he dies he goes to torment in Hades. The poor man has spent his life sitting at the rich man’s gate, covered in sores. When he dies, he is taken to Abraham’s bosom.
The rich man asks Abraham if Lazarus can come and put a few drops of water on his tongue. The offer is refused.
Can Lazarus, then, not go back to Earth and warn the rich man’s family to change their ways?
‘No,’ says Abraham. It’s clear from the Bible what the rich should have been doing. ‘If they will not listen either to Moses or to the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone should rise from the dead.’
Enoch maintained that this story made it clear that there can be no salvation for the rich. The gulf between Lazarus and the rich man is fixed – on earth as it is in heaven. We are called to dispossession. If we are unable to achieve it here, there will be no chance in any putative afterlife.
Enoch’s views coincided with those of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
When asked to address a group of clergy and seminarians in Rome, she said, ‘If you get to Heaven, you will expect to be reunited with many people here.’ She stared contemptuously at the bishops and monsignori in their shimmering soutanes. ‘They won’t be there. When you open your eyes in Heaven, the people you see will be the street poor of India.’
A few Sundays ago, we had words from the same disturbing St Luke: ‘Alas, for you who have your fill now: you shall go hungry…’
I was hearing the words being read, and then brilliantly expounded, in
St Mary’s Church, Somers Town, near Euston.
But Father Paschal, our vicar, took a slightly more benign view than the Prophet Enoch. Christ’s call to the poor seems like an inversion of wisdom; it is actually a programme for restoring the world to its intended order, in which everyone is valued.
Only a few days earlier, I’d been in dialogue with my old friend Charles Moore, who, together with the late Deborah Devonshire, started the Rectory Society 20 years ago.
A group of well-heeled gentlefolk had assembled at Chelsea Old Church, a very different place from the slums of Somers Town. If it is ever vacated, very few members of the Rectory Soc will be putting in offers on Father Paschal’s tiny vicarage in Somers Town, where you crunch your way over syringes to get to the hideous 1960s front door.
The Rectory Soc members (all utterly charming) lamented the olden days, which, as I rather callously pointed out, was a paradoxical thing to be doing –since it was their purchase of the old parsonages that spelled, or coincided with, the end of the old C of E.
The sale of parsonages by the Church Commissioners during the 1970s effected a catastrophe as radical as that caused by the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Charles Moore and I recalled the thousands of families who had lived in the vicarages. The Brontës, the Powys brothers, Jane Austen and her siblings are only the famous ones.
The vicarage was the place where educated gentlefolk lived, but they existed – as the old C of E itself had done – for everyone. The parsonage families were the neighbours of rich and poor.
And the fact that the Church owned all these substantial old houses meant that they could be offered to the clerical families. A huge proportion of the clergy
were the sons, grandsons and greatgrandsons of clergy.
It was a clerical caste who kept the show on the road. The sale of the rectories spelled the end of this class.
I am not blaming those who now live in old vicarages for the decline of religion. But, while Father Paschal was talking about the radical call of the Gospel, I thought of my newly made friends in the Rectory Soc.
Of course, some of those who now occupy old vicarages are nouveau spivs like Jeffrey Archer – who lives in the Old Vicarage at Grantchester.
But the gentlefolk of the Rectory Soc made me think, ‘Many of these are just the sort of people who in the past would themselves have become parsons. Instead, they have followed ways of life that enabled them to BUY their houses.’
In the Q and A, they described their hard-pressed clergy, each with ten ill-attended rural churches. But if members of the Rectory Society themselves became rectors, they could enjoy their nice old parsonages, while doing some of the work of the old parsons.
The Prophet Enoch and Mother Teresa overlooked the phenomenon of Grace. Father Paschal in Somers Town reminded us that gulfs can be bridged.
In Somers Town, Basil Jellicoe (1899-1935) galvanised the rich to provide the cash for the St Pancras Housing Association, which gave decent sanitation and living space for the abject poor.
The modern C of E, alas – that godless, bureaucratic machine – is so up itself that it is both ashamed of the gentlefolk who still believe in it and contemptuous of the poor who do not know it exists.
For details of the Rectory Society, go to www.rectorysociety.org.uk
The fatty generation
Jill Parkin, 66, despairs of young Fattypuffs and admires old Thinifers
Have you ever sat in a motorway service station the wrong side of the latest Cornish-pasty chain – and wondered how you’ll squeeze your way back to the car park without getting up close and personal with a man mountain and his matching woman whale, both in Nike plus-size sports tights?
Like a non-stop but very slow conga, the Big Ones leave their oversized cars, roll and sway through the automatic doors and around the food court before coiling about the counters of pasties –traditional, steak and gravy, and cheese and onion.
They often come in groups, possibly to maximise the freejumbo-sausage-roll offer. You may need satnav to find a route around them without meeting their close relatives in the McDonald’s tailback. They too wear outsize sports gear, for their workout – carrying the Krispy Kreme bag back to the car.
It was in a service station I learned that there is something called an all-daybreakfast Cornish pasty. There was a time when a full English breakfast was a treat at your weekend B&B. Now you can put it in a pasty and eat it between meals. What progress.
I am now looking over my shoulder for the body-positivity police. At 66, I may not hear them coming, but if I see them coming I can probably outrun them. Even at my age.
Body positivity! What about body responsibility? Tell the truth and
fat-shame the devil. The Big Ones have a whole industry catering for them and living off them. That’s why we have an obesity epidemic and a diabetes crisis.
Fat has been normalised and given rights. Rights to the NHS budget, the right to respect and, above all, the right to pretend the truth is not the truth.
We are supposed to believe grossness is somehow a disease, a contagion that anyone can catch. No one’s fault. I was just standing there and I inadvertently inhaled these loaded chips, a large Coke, and a stuffed-crust pizza. And if they sell doughnuts in bags, surely that’s a normal portion, isn’t it?
What a waist!
Vicky Pollard
Have you been in the M&S bra aisle recently? They go up to cup size K, big enough to make a sling for twin babies. Diving among them for a normal size you risk asphyxiation by a balcony bra requiring planning permission. Now you can buy outsize sportswear and outsize sexy underwear. When we were young, there was Evans the outsize shop – an exercise in clothing ugliness if ever there was one, keeping you in your fixed waistband. Now big is mainstream and shops go up to at least size 24. Can you imagine the row on social media if the size-12 people asked for a reduction for their clothes’ using less fabric?
Move over Gay Pride –make way for the everexpanding Fat Pride. Corpulence is catching for a reason. Catered for and beyond reproach, ever more people are relaxing into elastic waistbands – and into your airline seat as well as theirs.
Fizzy drinks are huge. Hot chocolate comes with swirly cream. People neck full-fat latte and think they’re ‘just having a coffee’. Popcorn in the cinema comes in tubs that would last through a double showing of Ben-Hur
Chain coffee shops offer wrapped ham-and-cheese things with saturatedfat readings statin-manufacturers must dream of.
Most of the Big Ones are not Oldie-readers, but they may be their children
Big Ones don’t know how to cook, say the body-positivity police. It’s to do with education, you know.
Really? We have a MasterChef-trained nation who can talk about deconstructed cheesecake and sous-vide but can’t make poached eggs on toast or steam some vegetables with a piece of fish or meat? How clever do you need to be to eat an apple instead of a deep-fried apple turnover?
Most of the Big Ones are not Oldiereaders, but they may be their children. Thin old women in care homes, who grew up during the war, are visited by massive children and grandchildren. Old family photo albums reveal a different, slimmer breed that’s evolved into something much bigger and flabbier.
Hospital beds have got bigger, as have ambulances. People who overflow airline seats object if there are complaints from fellow passengers who cannot breathe. The NHS is spending a fortune on diabetes treatment, stomach stapling and statins.
Fat is no longer wedging itself in a corner, trying not to be seen. It is out there, flaunting itself, swaying across the pavement and cowing the rest of us into silence.
Body positivity? Someone should tell the Big Ones it’s all just a big fat lie.
Jill Parkin wrote for the Daily Mail and Daily Express
Handy guide to armless tops
The gilet is perfect for time-poor gazillionaires. You can bike, store a tie and avoid phone thieves
An elegant neighbour, who lives with a husband and three sons, is ruthless about disposing of what she calls clutter.
She came to our cottage, holding out – with a look of slight irritation on her face – a quilted navy gilet with orange trim. She offered it to my husband, asserting that, although it was brandnew, she wanted to get rid of it because ‘there are just too many gilets hanging up in our hall’.
It seemed remarkably generous of her. Later we realised the gilet was ‘noisy’ – there was an audible sound of rustling when Giles moved around in it.
When a taste-broking friend arrived in the cottage, she assessed that the gilet was ‘bordering on fine – it’s 100-per-cent nylon, and the bright orange trim is not ideal, but it could be worse. At least it’s not totally high-vis – then you would just look like a binman or council operative.’
Neither of us cared, as the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks, and we both began wearing it. The gilet allows your arms unrestricted movement. If you zip it right up, you can protect the vulnerable area of your neck from chill penetration.
The chief advantage is that you can put your mobile, keys and dog lead in the
It is perfect at this time of year when the weather is transitioning, so to speak. You don’t need a full coat, but you do need something.
You can buy a heated gilet with battery pack. A 5V USB power bank is required. It’s like going out with your own electric blanket.
Why have we all become so weedy?
I once interviewed the artist Guy Taplin, known for his repurposing of driftwood on the north Essex coast, near Jaywick. Taplin stood on the pebbled shore for hour after hour in a lightweight jacket and shirt, waiting to collect the wood he would carve into curlews. He had never felt the cold, alleging he had spent so much time outside that he felt he had developed a ‘thicker skin’.
Gilets, worn as a uniform by finance bros, are indispensable to them. They leave the arms free for cycling; no time can be wasted in stationary London traffic. The zipped pockets protect the phones from snatchers and can store a tie, should it be needed.
Christian Horner in a Schöffel, with wife, Geri Halliwell
As the writer Stephen Doig observed, the gilet signals that the wearer is embodying ‘outdoorsy dynamism in keeping with alpha posturing’. Finance-bro gilets are cut from a superior cloth to nylon. They are made of wool, shearling or packed with ultralight down. The colours need to be neutral – navy, black or grey. The rest of the uniform consists of
smart classic white, light blue or striped shirt and quarter-zip jumper.
The snob brands are Schöffel, House of Bruar, Patagonia and Tiger of Sweden. They can be worn as a mid-layer under a jacket and discarded quickly if the formal City-gent look requires a straightforward suit. This is when the tie comes out of the zipped pocket.
Fur, of course, is the best form of body-heater but it’s too risky to wear fur in London as you risk verbal – if not physical – assault, from antis.
A fashion student I know has used her sewing machine to ingeniously repurpose an unworn red-squirrel-fur jacket given to her grandmother in 1951 as a 21st-birthday present.
Even in those days, the granny was too horrified. ‘Red squirrel?! I couldn’t bear to wear it.’
By cutting off the arms and stitching it into a lightweight black cloth jacket, the student can reveal the cosy fur lining if she senses a safe space.
Otherwise, it is invisible to onlookers – and keeps her warm. She points out, ‘The squirrels are already dead and wearing fur reduces emissions, as you don’t need any heating on.’
There are gilets from the high street to suit every pocket. Limited-edition runs are even sold by taste-brokers on Radio H-P. They might be called ‘jerkins’ in Liverpool or ‘Cirencester life jackets’ in the Cotswolds. Even Nigel Farage has one – his is a jerkin. They are called ‘Wandle vests’ on the ultra-chic online site Fera.
Why would they ever go out of fashion? They are too comfortable and convenient. The zip pocket is the swing factor. No need to be mugged again.
But they said that about crocs. Why would anyone ever wear anything else when crocs were so comfortable? Even in hot weather, crocs are not nearly so widely found as they once were.
Ubiquity is the tipping point that often triggers a fashion reversal.
Comedy writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais do remember the swinging decade – and meeting its most thrilling performers
When the sixties really swang
Dick Clement
In 1960, towards the end of my two years’ National Service in the RAF, I applied for a job at the BBC.
I had no idea what I could or couldn’t do, but it felt as if I’d be swimming in the right pond. I got offered a trainee position as ‘studio manager’ and accepted. I reported this to a bunch of fellow officers and said glibly, ‘From what I hear, I’ll have to drop my trousers if I want to get on.’
A visiting Wing Commander frowned. ‘I hope you’re joking. I happen to find that kind of thing entirely disgusting.’
I was right about one thing (not dropping my trousers): it was the right pond. ‘Studio manager’ sounded dull, but I liked my colleagues, male and female, and every day was different. This was at Bush House in the Overseas Service, broadcasting in 28 languages. I still know the Polish for ‘rhubarb’.
I did a little acting, and some writing, and in time I was promoted to producer in the African Service (I had never been to Africa). I did interviews, one of them with Count Basie, a hero of mine. I figured a few people must have heard of him in Sierra Leone.
My speaking voice seemed acceptable – so I did some voice work too. Then Alva Clark, an experienced broadcaster, joined the Service.
At the time, I ran an improvised cricket team called the Bushwhackers. As it was my team, I was in no danger of being dropped. I went in at number nine and made shrewd tactical decisions from mid-off. I asked Alva to play, figuring he had to be good – he was from Barbados.
As it turned out, he was no Gary Sobers but he was great company, with a ready wit, and we became good friends.
Out of the blue, we were asked to do a five-minute broadcast every morning at 9.55, talking about whatever was in the news. This meant we had to get up early to find something to write about, get it down, quickly rehearse and go on the air.
I interviewed Count Basie – a few people must have heard of him in Sierra Leone
One day, when we were sitting on the grass in Hertfordshire waiting to bat, Alva told me about a previous radio job he’d had, in Ethiopia. He told me he fitted in there partly because of his light skin colour: ‘I have a little cream in the coffee.’
It was a more elaborate job than the one we were now doing, a daily news broadcast in English. Every bulletin had to be passed by a dozen censors, each of whom had to sign his or her approval. I asked what they did if one of them hadn’t signed by the time they went on the air.
‘We put out yesterday’s news.’
That was his routine until 13th December 1960, when he heard raised voices and gunfire from somewhere in the building. Having a strong sense of self-preservation, Alva ducked under the table.
Armed men in fatigues burst through the door proclaiming that Emperor Haile Selassie’s reign had ended.
Alva emerged from under the table, arms held high: ‘Praise the Lord! The years of tyranny are finally over!’
This seemed to calm them down and Alva ad-libbed some more, welcoming the new regime – the Council of the Revolution, aiming to install a progressive government while the Emperor was on a state visit to Brazil. One of them remained behind while the others left, perhaps in search of breakfast.
No longer did the daily news bulletins need to be approved by censors, who were presumably in hiding. The rebels gave Alva and his Ethiopian colleagues a
Count Basie in Made in Paris (1966)
free hand to cobble something together, after listening to the Voice of America and the BBC.
Four days later, it happened again. Shouts and stamping feet outside in the corridor. Alva ducked under the table a second time. This time, the intruders wore military uniforms. The revolution had been overthrown.
Alva repeated the same routine as he revealed himself: ‘God be praised – our saviour the Emperor has returned!’
Great guy, Alva. Pity he couldn’t bat.
Ian La Frenais
Robert Freeman was sixtiescool, a Cambridge educated, tennis-playing handsome man who photographed London’s most beautiful models and the Beatles.
For some reason, he took a liking to me and improved my fashion choices and haircuts. He once picked me up in his Studebaker Avanti, a car few people had ever heard of, never mind seen. A leggy blonde had to squeeze up and wriggle onto my lap. She was Anita Pallenberg.
Later that night, we went to a club called Sybilla’s and were joined by Pattie Boyd (who writes in this issue’s supplement). David Bailey said the sixties was really a party only for a few hundred very glamorous people. I was very definitely not on the guest list, but that night I thought I might have got my Cuban-heeled boot in the door.
It was Robert who told me about Jimi Hendrix, and I went to see the new phenom at a Soho club called the Bag O’ Nails, arriving three hours early to be assured of a good table.
back of the room, where it was impossible to see the band and so I left, missing one of the most iconic gigs in
A few days later, however, I saw Jimi Hendrix in the Chelsea Antique market
Dick said I
looked like
a yak and, when it rained, smelled like one,
too
browsing, as I was, in the vintage-
He said, ‘Hey, man,’ and I said, ‘Hey man’ back. He then bought a white, fur-trimmed Afghan coat – the kind that hippies had discovered in Kabul and introduced to the London scene. Later in life, I wondered if shepherds in Afghanistan were freezing their arses off because all their coats were in Chelsea.
A short time before Jimi went on, when the club was heaving with rock stars, I was told by a burly minder that I had to move because the table was reserved for the Moody Blues. I was obviously considered a ‘ligger’ and was relegated to the
From top: Jimi Hendrix, Anita Pallenberg, Pattie Boyd
Jimi bought one. So I did, too, and we both wore them as we went our separate ways on the King’s Road. My writing partner, Dick Clement, said I looked like a yak and, when it rained, I smelled like one, too. Amazingly, yak coats are now fashionable
Through the years, I have bought many, many Jimi albums, but since that night at the Bag O’ Nails I have never, ever bought a record by the Moody Blues.
Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais wrote Porridge, The Likely Lads Lovejoy
Prue’s News
Start spreading the news – I’m the new Sinatra
My default position is to say yes.
Over the years, I’ve accepted plenty of invitations I should have steered clear of.
On Would I Lie to You?, I sat there like a turnip, too slow to get a word in between the professional comedians’ whip-fast banter.
On Celebrity Mastermind, I was so panicked I ran up the lowest score on record – I couldn’t even name the left-handed lead singer Beatle.
Occasionally, wiser heads have dissuaded me from challenges. My family put a stop to Dancing on Ice with cries of ‘Mum, you can’t dance and are far too old – you’ll break your neck!’
My agent had similar reservations, more politely put, about celebrity Strictly
But my agreeing to Singer went unchallenged by nannying friends and family, mainly because they didn’t know about it. Such is the secrecy required, the only member of the family who knew was my husband.
I pretended to everyone else that I was having singing lessons because I’d wanted to sing for ever. That is the truth: I’ve always longed to join in with a fullthroated Abide with Me at a Cup Final. In
the old days of TV’s Songs of Praise, I would envy the obvious joy that lit the singers’ faces on Sunday night. But unless I was in the shower, or alone at the bottom of the garden, no sound would emerge from my tight, aching throat.
So The Masked Singer gave me a fantastic chance.
I reasoned that if they couldn’t teach me to sing in six months, with my throat still refusing to open and no sound emerging, then we could just abandon it. They wouldn’t want me on the show if I couldn’t do it after all.
It soon became apparent that the Masked Singer budget for helping non-singers would not stretch to the help I’d need. So I hired Richard Coxon, the
complaining or wincing at my efforts, patiently taught me to breathe, sing from my abdomen, not my chest, to exercise my never-used singing muscles and, above all, to relax and just belt it out.
Slowly it worked, and I got to sing right through ‘A Spoonful of Sugar’ or ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ without my throat closing.
Recording day was bizarre. All the competitors had separate dressing rooms where we each spent the day in isolation, to emerge (hooded and silent) to be led to rehearse, record our songs, get costumed (I was Pegasus, complete with wings, hoofs and mane) and finally to perform on stage with an audience.
When the big moment came, I didn’t do well. But then, after Jonathan Ross swiftly identified me, and the audience sacked me, I had to sing again – this time without the Pegasus head. With nothing more to lose, I just went for it and belted out ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’’ at full tilt.
No idea if I was in tune, but I just loved it.
Prue Leith’s Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom is out now
Town Mouse
End of the line for the glorious tram
tom hodgkinson
A news story popped up on my computer. It was about trams in London. A section of tramline was being closed in Croydon.
OK, the story did not knock Trump off the front page of the New York Times. But for me it was cataclysmic. I had no idea that there was a trams network in London.
How often had I ruminated about the fate of the London tram. When visiting Zurich some years ago, I was impressed by the brilliant electric-tram service, so noiseless and so planetfriendly by comparison with our diesel-belching buses.
Why can’t we have trams in London, I thought, like those clever Europeans?
I excitedly called the TFL press office to find out more about the London trams network, and was disappointed to discover that it’s very much limited to two services in Croydon, and that there are no plans to create any more.
This is not what we were told by Ken Livingstone back in the day. When running for mayor in 2012, Ken told a conference about his trams vision:
‘If re-elected, I intend to start installing a tram running the length of Oxford Street. We would demolish the gyratory system [at Marble Arch], handing part of it back to green land and building two developments on part of it which will fund the project.’ He said work would be completed by 2018.
It was a beautiful dream. But sadly it never happened. So one has to ask, why is London so, erm, tramsphobic?
We haven’t always been tramsphobic. We used to love trams. The first, installed around 1870, were pulled by horses. Then came steam-powered machines.
The first electric tram started running in 1901 from Hammersmith. By 1906, there were 300 trams on the roads. By 1913, there were 3,000 of them, carrying millions of passengers every year.
Fast forward to the thirties, and trams were on their way out. They were pushed out by the aggressive new diesel buses. In 1946, the London Passenger Transport Board announced that buses were ‘eminently flexible and much cheaper’ than silly old trams.
Two of London Transport’s higher-ups were notably tramsphobic. There was Alexander Valentine of the London Transport Executive, who reckoned that trams caused congestion and made a mess with their overhead wires everywhere. And Albert Stanley, Baron Ashfield, first chairman of London Transport, was a tramsphobe. He liked the Underground and had presided over an enormous extension of the tube network.
In 1950, the tramsphobes were in the ascendant, and one of their number, Labour peer Lord Latham, successor to Stanley, launched Operation Tramaway By 1952, the operation had been successfully completed: there were no more trams in London. The last one ran in 1952.
There’s a jaunty Pathé newsreel about it on YouTube. ‘It’s goodbye to the old clangers,’ goes the voiceover accompanying some lovely trams footage, complete with gents and ladies driving their open-topped automobiles alongside the double-decker tramcar.
‘Here’s the last tram just arriving into Woolwich from the New Cross depot,’ the newsreader goes on. Large crowds of delighted onlookers gape and cheer. ‘It’s 91 years since London got her first tram. So they’ve had a pretty good run for London’s money.
‘Great-grandpa will tell you there’s not much you can do on the back seat of a Shadow [???] you couldn’t do on the old trams. They had a wonderful sway about them.’
Another wistful film on trams uses the same word, sway. ‘ We’ll remember the rattle and the flag and the sway. How snug it was to be inside when it was raining outside.’
This film follows a tram down inside the Kingsway tunnel, which went underneath Holborn and emerged on the Embankment (you can see the entrance today). It then plays an old Cockney music-hall song in praise of the tram, which refers again to their utility as a location for romance: ‘You’d sit close together and spoon all the way.’
We watch the last tram pull in as the crowds – supposedly 20,000 of them –sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Then Lord Latham announces, ‘And so, in the name of Londoners, and London Transport, I say, goodbye, old tram.’
Looking back, you wonder why trams were seen as out of date, when today they look like the latest thing. Why, oh why can’t we be like Zurich, which never made the foolish mistake of getting rid of the trams?
Country Mouse
The Englishman’s last right: a blazing bonfire
giles wood
‘Property is theft’ is a catchphrase coined by the 19th-century anarchist Proudhon. It is a fact that I own one acre of land – incidentally the smallest amount of land that qualifies for membership of the Country Land and Business Association.
And since the former Labour government was ousted in 2010, thickets of shrubs and evergreens I planted have grown exponentially – beneficiaries of the drenchings that were a once-in-ageneration event but now seem to happen yearly and trigger what a neighbour has identified as the Refrigeration Effect.
This neighbour, a vulcanologist and avid supporter of Israel’s conduct in the war, claims that, with cold air running over saturated ground, it’s no surprise that laundry never dries out.
In summer, English yeomen swear when their petrol mowers won’t start because of damp plugs. In winter, they swear because their bonfires won’t start.
And yet, in Canada, you can store a pile of hardback books in a windswept barn for 50 years or more without ill effect. Dry cold is a different kettle of fish from sodden cold. Try that book-storage technique in Blighty and you end up with a mildewed pulp, with mushrooms sticking out at right angles.
With Mary in London attending nightly book launches where too many authors are clearly chasing too few readers, word reaches me that the bottom has fallen out of the second-hand-book market. Only first editions are worth keeping. And only those in good condition.
Unlike the vinyl market, where even scratched records are in demand because of the ‘authenticity’ of the experience of playing them, there is no similar demand for books in bad condition.
I will delay the book cull until her return, but Mary’s absence is a good
opportunity for me to have a general clear-out. First, the diseased rose clippings, which even the woke RHS reluctantly concedes are best consigned ‘with a heavy heart’ to the bonfire and not to the fashionable, ecologically correct ‘slow heap’ which consists of the likes of brushwood, brash and hedge trimmings.
Slow heaps now occupy around 30 per cent of my land. Mix in the national collection of 21st-century rank weeds and you can be sure that the jerkin-clad neatness obsessive Alan Titchmarsh would not approve.
Now a tame baby muntjac seems to feel at home here. I haven’t the heart to persecute it, even though I can witness the terrible damage all deer wreak on the bark of young trees.
It’s only a matter of time till I am paid a visit by a council snooper. Under the last Labour government, I spotted two of them, taking photographs of my plantation from my perimeter fence.
The spies declared that, acting on a tip-off from a neighbour, they were gathering evidence of ‘rat harbourage’.
The neighbour had complained that my plot of land was covered in newspapers. He was correct.
Having joined the Henry Doubleday Research Association, I had been inspired by their citizen science findings that newspaper ‘mulch’ was the progressive non-toxic solution to the problem of perennial rank weeds.
I was duly ordered to remove said newspapers, but it’s an ill wind etc. As a lifelong citizen scientist myself, I noticed that the rare, spring-occurring morel fungi sprouted not from the tabloid mulch, but from the rotting broadsheet.
I will never have the opportunity to experiment with the Guardian. Yet another example of how Labour suppresses aspiration.
Now fast-forward to a new Socialist regime, the UK now running the most repressive government there has ever been in Europe, according to US VicePresident Vance.
Moreover, Labour doesn’t understand growth – and certainly not slow vegetative growth. No doubt only underfunding is preventing their surveilling my own fiefdom via drone technology, but I expect a foot patrol from the Kafka-esque forces any day.
Our occasional tree surgeon called the other day. ‘Labour really hates the countryside,’ he alleged. ‘They are not just coming for agricultural inheritance tax; they want your shotgun and firearms licence as well. Even trail-hunting is in their sights. Got any chickens? A woodburner? Not for long, mate.’
Miraculously, they haven’t yet thought of coming for my ‘polluting’ bonfires.
Now, as any amateur pyromaniac will confirm, the first few lighting attempts will fail. You are effectively just drying out the material. You must create a heart: a burning furnace, a terrestrial version of that pale orb called the winter sun.
When you have used your last newspaper/ cardboard box/ Hoover bag and candles and still failed to get your bonfire going, you mustn’t pour petrol on it from a can. It will light the bonfire but likely you as well.
My blood is up. I have flammable items. I am lining up obsolete hardback reference books, which most households are reluctant to incinerate owing to cultural taboos associated with authoritarian regimes of the past – let alone those of the present.
And, yes, those mail-order ‘fur-effect’ boots that gave me blisters are now toast.
The joy of a real country bonfire on private land. Safe for now – but for how much longer?
‘Oh – when you invited me over to check out your vinyl, I thought...’
Postcards from the Edge
Kent councillor’s case for refugees
Ben Bano’s parents fled the Nazis – now he’s fighting for today’s asylum seekers. By Mary Kenny
Most voters want to see immigration reduced – and think the boats that come across the Channel should be stopped.
Deal, just eight miles from Dover, is on the front line for this traffic. Yet there’s a local councillor who believes the town should honour its motto to ‘Welcome the Stranger’, and be supportive to the cause of refugees, stateless persons and immigrants.
Ben Bano is a widower aged 75, with the craggy looks of a retired university professor. More than ten years ago, he launched Seeking Sanctuary, an organisation that helps migrants and refugees.
the reviled’. Ben even perceives today’s refugees and asylum seekers in the tradition of the pilgrim – on a journey, both physically and metaphysically.
He has also worked, for a charity, on the spiritual needs of older people, and the role of spirituality in dementia.
Ben’s approach to migrants is based on two motivations. One is that his own parents found refuge in Britain in 1938, from Nazi-occupied Europe. The other, unusually, is based on a sense of Christian spirituality.
He has completed an MA on Christian resistance to the Third Reich. He is focusing on remarkable characters such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the German Jesuit priest Alfred Delp, executed in early 1945 by the Nazis.
He has also studied the activism of Polish and Hungarian nuns, such as Matylda Getter, Margit Slachta and Sára Salkaházi, who rescued Jews during the Second World War.
And he sees a parallel today with helping people from terrible countries and corrupt regimes.
Ben insists the activism of these resistants was based, essentially, on a spirituality. Bonhoeffer reflected that ‘we have for once learned to see the great events of history from below; from the perspectives of the outcasts, the maltreated, the powerless, the repressed,
Perhaps it might seem rather high-flown to have a town councillor – who might be expected to be focused on road potholes or parking regulations – to be concerned with the spirituality of pilgrimage, and how Dietrich Bonhoeffer came to reject the rationalism of Kant.
But his fellow councillors seem to accept Ben, who sits for Labour, for his compassionate intentions, and he hasn’t personally met with hostility.
His story is rich in links with continental Europe. His late wife, Marie-Claude, was French, and her brother, Fr Jean Perrot, was an active worker priest in Paris. These were radical clergy who lived in modest circumstances among the poor.
Most people might think it inappropriate to compare refugees and immigrants into Britain today to those fleeing the Nazis – it’s not the same situation. But I admire Ben Bano for his real compassion for those who feel their lives are so intolerable they must flee their own country.
April marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen death camp. For the first time in history, such horrors were transmitted through broadcasting and film.
Yet Robert Kee reported (in his book 1945: The World We Fought for) that audiences walked out of cinemas when these newsreels were being shown. Some people found the reality so gruesome they couldn’t accept it.
Perhaps T S Eliot was right – we cannot bear too much reality.
There’s an old French joke about a Normandy peasant who gets the opportunity to visit London for the first time. When he returns home, his neighbours ask him if he enjoyed the visit.
‘Oh yes,’ Gilles replies. ‘But it’s bizarre that the English call their public places after defeats – Waterloo, Trafalgar…’
My sympathies are with Gilles, the innocent yokel. I thought it was unfortunate when the Eurostar from Paris was first brought into Waterloo (now fortunately diverted to St Pancras).
And it’s a positive step that the battleship formerly called HMS Agincourt has now been renamed HMS Achilles, to spare the offended feelings of the French. The renaming has had the blessing of the King (despite his predecessor Henry V’s victory at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.)
But this is not just about ‘feelings’. The Anglo-French military alliance has never been stronger. Britain and France are the only two nuclear powers that can effectively defend Europe, and close relations are essential.
Battleships are very much part of this Anglo-French entente
There’s an awkward oldie moment when someone gives you a cordial greeting in the street, or at a café, and you just cannot put a name to the face. You know you know them, but what’s their moniker?
I now resort to a pleasantly evasive Irishism. ‘Ah,’ I exclaim, ‘it’s yourself!’ Then, if you play along guilefully for time, the name may eventually filter through the aged synapses.
But sometimes I wish we could commonly adopt the practice of Alcoholics Anonymous, where everyone announces their first name on opening their mouth to speak. Often, as soon as the name is spoken, memory is restored.
Small World
Eureka! My Archimedes moment
When the water ran out of the hotel bath, I made a genius discovery
jem clarke
Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he shares with his parents…
My mother and I – while often at war –have much in common.
We both live at the same address. We both sponge money off the same 88-yearold man. And we both have completely messed up body-washing routines. Specifically, my mother can no longer lie in a bath, and I can no longer stand in the shower. Being only five foot long, I can actually float in a standard bath.
Sometimes, I wish I had more body area to scrub, as I told Father. Noting my piled-on paunch, he observed, ‘You’re working on that one, though, aren’t you, son?’
My preferred modus operandi for a bath is dimmed lighting and disastrously loud radio, as I have to take out my hearing aids. Radio 4 Extra blares the abridged Dickens out of our small detached. And I’m surprised Hancock’s Half Hour hasn’t become the first show to be given an ASBO.
Still, it’s a break for the neighbours from the three of us having antisocial aggro with one another. I nearly called the police the other night at 2am. Someone was dragging heavy objects in an adjacent room while swearing at the top of his voice. Turned out it was Father repositioning a deaf and jigglesome Mother back onto the commode.
I recently went to a favourite hotel on business. The room had had a new bath fitted and I’d bought an exciting, eucalyptus-based bath cream to try.
All seemed well. I was languishing in the beautiful, free, hot water – and an early-’70s full-cast adaption of Poirot, complete with nostalgically offensive accents for the suspicious characters – when I suddenly felt a strange chill. Opening my eyes, I realised I was a little fat man lying in an empty bath.
The water had all run out of the plughole. Poirot had only just taken his hat off, never mind trying to solve a sodding
thing. I had eucalyptus foam applied generously round my articles with no water to uneucalyptise my bits.
How could this happen with a new bath? I analysed the conventional plug and realised it was not a tight enough fit. I’m not a man of science, but I like to be proved right. So I filled up the tub again and recorded on my phone camera the seven minutes it took to drain.
Rather proud of my guerrilla journalism – and buoyed with the enthusiasm for the morning only a good sleep and eucalyptus-scented testicles can bring – I made my way to check out at the reception desk.
The young male receptionist seemed to have a spark about him – and an accent straight out of the Poirot adaption, to be honest.
I felt brave enough to confide in him about the bath-plug problem.
He studied the seven minutes of footage with a look that showed me how appalled he was by the plug and the poor customer experience engendered.
I could see from his furrowed monobrow that he was onside. So I ventured a question: ‘If I sent this clip to you, would you send it on to head office?’
‘No, no, no, sir. It would not be the right thing to do.’
‘Why not? This clip clearly shows an unacceptable plug leakage!’
He said, ‘It also clearly shows a naked man filming on a mobile phone.’
He drew my attention to my naked form reflected in both bath taps. I’m the only man whose distorted reflection on the wonky surface of a polished tap actually looks taller and less wide than the real person. I must admit I’ve since replayed the clip to myself, whenever I’ve been feeling a bit low.
Two weeks later, I deliberately booked the same hotel. This time, I filmed a
non-blue version of the selfsame incident. I had seen someone on YouTube solve a similar problem with a generic plunger and some builder’s putty. So I was also able to have a radioomnibus bath – I managed to listen to the full recording of The Camomile Lawn When I returned home, Mother was sitting in the long chair. This is the venue for her most formal high-drama moments. Every New Year, she is lowered into it to choose the year’s lottery numbers and who is going to be taken off her birthday-card list.
She cried, ‘Is this how it ends for me?
A budget hotel phones me to tell me my son has left some pleasuring apparatus in their bathroom?’
‘Mother, it’s … oh. It’s a sink plunger and some rubber stuff, I’m guessing?’ My innocent plea fell on medically diagnosed deaf ears. Mother wants me to bathe with mittens ‘to ensure against devilry’ – as she puts it to the neighbours, when they asked why we’re all shouting again.
Rebirth of the Renaissance
The dark truth behind the myths of the artistic golden age
david horspool
What is it about the Renaissance?
How has a loosely defined – some would say indefinable – period in history seduced so many for so long?
Well, it’s the art, I hear you reply. Of course, the genius of a Michelangelo or a Leonardo will command our attention for as long as we have eyes to see.
We mustn’t forget the architecture –all those classically inspired, perfectly proportioned cathedrals, churches and palazzi, soothing the breast much more reliably than the busy Baroque or revived Gothic that succeeded it, let alone the horrors of what the modern architecture profession would later foist on us.
The literature isn’t bad, either. A Renaissance library could include not just Italian masters, from Dante and Petrarch to Boccaccio, but Montaigne, Erasmus, Cervantes and Shakespeare too.
I could add music, philosophy, the beginnings of scientific practice – but you get the idea: the Renaissance was a golden age of just about everything.
That’s how historians have long framed it too. The modern historians who bequeathed us histories of the Renaissance that are still recognisable today – the Swiss Jacob Burckhardt or the German Hans Baron – wrote their books to provide a key to this greatness, not to question it.
Both located it in what they called humanism – a sort of I-know-it-when-Isee-it description – which encompassed everything from the early roots of Protestantism to the first budding of democratic sensibility.
A new book, Inventing the Renaissance, by Ada Palmer, an American historian, argues it’s time to give up on the myth of this period as a golden age. Each era gives us a new Renaissance, and historians, whom she imagines cooking up new concoctions in their history labs, have always presented us with a Renaissance corresponding with their own interests.
So Burckhardt found nationalist awakening, while Baron discovered
participatory politics or ‘civic humanism’. In fact, as Palmer very sharply points out, Baron’s original German term in his book title, bürgerliche Humanismus, could be translated as ‘bourgeois humanism’.
But, as his book was translated and distributed in 1950s Red Scare America, ‘civic’ was preferred, so as not to worry readers that they were getting Communist propaganda under the counter.
And, naturally, these historians were wrong. That’s how history works, after all. We are convinced of one way of looking at something until new arguments and preferably new evidence convince us we were mistaken.
Take Baron’s civic humanism. When talked up as an early form of political freedom, this did not correspond to the way very many Renaissance places were run – including not just the monarchies of France or England, but the oligarchies and autocracies of Italy itself.
Even in the most civically human Italian Renaissance city of all, Republican Florence, the ruling class accounted at its most expansive for about 10 per cent of the population. The other 90 per cent, those at the top agreed, should never be allowed anywhere near political decisionmaking. This sounds less like even an early form of participatory democracy and definitely like no golden age.
Other Renaissance myths that fail Palmer’s lab tests include Renaissance as proto-capitalism (only up to a point: the economic landscape was far too varied to generalise). Ditto the idea of Renaissance as modern (it was equally medieval).
Then there was the suggestion that the Renaissance was, in Burckhardt’s words,
Historians presented us with a Renaissance corresponding with their own interests
a time full of ‘the comforts and elegancies of life’. Machiavelli’s contemporary Ercole Bentivoglio, who ought to have known, thought that without a good historian future generations would never believe how bad times had been. See, too, Harry Lime in The Third Man
Not all Palmer’s targets are so intangible. She also deals with individuals, including those with contested reputations, Machiavelli most comprehensively. They include Lucrezia Borgia, only now beginning to emerge from her most cartoonish, baddie depictions as a poisoning femme fatale.
As for Michelangelo, he is impossible to understand, Palmer argues, unless you notice and discuss the ubiquity of naked men in his art – which doesn’t necessarily mean simply that he was gay.
Palmer’s is an enjoyable, capacious book about an inexhaustible subject. If sometimes her chatty, matey style gets too much, it has the advantage of making the drier bits of Renaissance achievement – even double-entry bookkeeping – as readable as the greatest hits.
She is not too much of an academic, either, to realise that your best chance of understanding the Renaissance is to visit the places where it happened and see so many astonishing surviving examples of its genius.
For Palmer, who gives the ‘Northern Renaissance’ short shrift, that means Italy. Even if you have to listen in on guides getting the Renaissance wrong outside the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, you’re still in Florence.
Then again, you might find yourself gazing at the Davids of Donatello or Michelangelo, or happening across a less storied, but no less overwhelming masterpiece such as Perugino’s Pazzi Crucifixion, and thinking, never mind the historians – this really was a golden age.
Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance (Apollo) is out now
Sophia Waugh: School Days
School on TV? It’s all scrumpy and rumpy-pumpy
It was completely by mistake the other day that I began to watch the school drama series Waterloo Road
It must have been something to do with watching the television while ironing and randomly pushing buttons on the antiquated remote. Someone somewhere decided that Waterloo Road was the thing for me. And, by George, he or she was right.
The first series came out in 2006, by which time I had been teaching for only four years. Set in a school in Rochdale, it opens with the headmaster, driven beyond endurance, having a nervous breakdown on the roof of one of the school buildings.
Thereafter it deals with the travails of the acting headmaster and his attempts to turn this rough school into something resembling an institution of learning more than Bedlam.
The plots are good, and the performances mostly strong – but it was the comparisons with schools today that really drew me in and have kept me hooked.
Our hero, the acting head, brings in a ‘posh’ teacher who has strong views on discipline as a deputy head. The staff do not like it, or him, and the children are outraged.
But, gradually, things begin to change. The deputy introduces a house system, which is sneered at as posh. (To be honest, I felt the same when I started my first job. I had no idea that state schools ever had house systems and thought it very odd.) The children engage in the competition, but of course everything goes wrong.
What has really worried me as I watched this show, which does sometimes lack verisimilitude for the purposes of dramatic narrative, is how little we have learned since 2006.
The mobile telephones are not smart, but they can take pictures, children can cause problems with them, and teachers
are already struggling with them. Why is it only in the last few years that most schools have banned them? you wonder while watching the show.
Bullies still bully. Cheating on coursework (by the teachers, not the students) has become a thing of the past because the GCSEs are now 100-per-cent examined rather than because human nature has changed.
But that is the only element of the plot that is no longer entirely relevant to modern schools.
It is outside the school setting that the programme begins to lose its truth. The teachers are endlessly meeting for pub lunches, and when they meet after school they drink champagne
The pub features a lot – a teacher even takes a troubled 14-year-old to the pub and buys half-pints of cider.
There is a lot of hot romance between staff members. Call it romance, if you will; sometimes, it has nothing to do with love and involves desks. While I have of course known of staff romances, and
even desk-related scandals, they are much fewer and further apart than Waterloo Road would have you believe.
But the teachers themselves, even if sometimes stereotyped, do ring true. There is the grumpy old man who hates children, hates teaching and hates the school but is tolerated because at least he can keep discipline.
In contrast with him, we have the teacher who prides herself on how much she cares, even if sometimes it leads to wrong decisions.
There is the hopeless one who tries to make friends with the children by wiggling her bottom when teaching French and trying desperately to be liked by making smutty jokes. Needless to say, her classes are riot scenes.
And the children? We have the geeks, the troubled teens, the bully, the kind, thick girl with overlooked promise and the carer. And not one of them has a shirt tucked in or a tie done up.
Now that’s true to type. No wonder this show runs and runs. It’s glorious.
sister teresa
The Bible’s dazzling pearls
Books on spirituality become very dated.
Shelf space was needed in our monastery library. So two of us were clearing out some 19th-century blackbound and grim-looking volumes in tiny print – translated, mostly, from the French – which were gathering dust on a top shelf.
Inexplicably, among them was a lavishly illustrated paperback on Fabergé’s Easter eggs. My companion wanted to get rid of it, but I wouldn’t let her. Even though I don’t particularly like Fabergé I was glad we kept it, as it made me think.
St Paul is not in favour of jewellery: it makes him cross. But both the Old Testament in general and Matthew’s Gospel in particular see it from a quite different angle.
One of my favourite references to ornaments occurs in Psalm 44. The daughter of the king is wearing robes embroidered with pearls set in gold: she must have looked terrific.
In antiquity, pearls were the most
precious stones of all, more valuable than gold, and a symbol of wisdom. The best were to be found on the shores of the Red Sea and in far-off Britain.
Two of Jesus’s briefest parables are a pair. ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field which someone has found; he hides it again, goes off happy, sells everything he owns and buys the field.
‘Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls; when he finds one of great value, he goes and sells everything he owns and buys it.’ (Matthew 13:45-6)
Was it unpardonable rashness on the part of the merchant to sell all he had? There is something of the gambler in him – reprehensible if carried to extremes, but everyone needs to gamble sometimes so as not to atrophy into firmly-set ways.
Jesus is telling us that to enter into the Kingdom of God is to accept to do His will. This cannot, by definition, be a
Memorial Service
grim thing if it is going to be pearl-like. There are many fine things to be
‘Kingdom of heaven – like a chant looking or fine pearls’
had in life and they are there specifically for us. But ultimately there is only one thing for which it is worth making the supreme effort – our own personal relationship with God; in other words, our eventual sanctity.
This is to be done by our service to others, and by our full and Christian appreciation of all the wonders that are ours for the asking, and by prayer.
The Kingdom of God is not just a pleasant religious idea that can be given our attention when we have the time to explore it, like an attractive object in a museum. It is there for us all the time and we need to pay attention to it.
Sir Martin Jacomb (1929-2024)
The Rev Dr Ayla Lepine gave the welcome and bidding prayer at St James’s, Piccadilly, for Sir Martin Jacomb.
Jacomb was Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, Chairman of Canary Wharf, vice-chairman of Kleinwort Benson and deputy chairman of Barclays Bank.
In the eulogy, Andrew Joy, Jacomb’s nephew, remembered Martin’s catchphrase at his landmark parties: ‘Plenty of drink and no dull people.’
He recalled how the historian John Julius Norwich, who had known Martin from the age of 13, said of him, ‘He is the only man I know who has never said a stupid thing.’
Andrew Joy recalled Martin saying,
‘Always take the corner seat at the board table. That way, you can see everyone while you are talking without turning your head. And speak softly and clearly: people always listen more carefully if you speak softly.’
Jacomb, Joy said, made instrumental contributions to Big Bang and the development of Canary Wharf. He earned his knighthood in part as a result. His family were delighted for him, although one of his sons was worried the knighthood was hereditary.
Jacomb also advised the Royal Opera House, the British Council and
the Oxford University Press, which he helped rescue from financial mishap.
The university bestowed on him a rare award of an honorary fellowship and a doctorate of civil law. He was also an original member of the Nolan Committee on Standards in Public Life.
Hymns were ‘O worship the King all glorious above’, ‘All people that on Earth do dwell’ and ‘Thine be the glory’.
Patrick Bruce and Max Jacomb read Kipling’s If—. Emma Bruce read Micah 6: 8-9. Saffron Jacomb read ‘Not how did he die, but how did he live?’
The anthems were How Lovely Are Thy Dwellings Fair by Brahms and Handel’s Glory to God.
Music included Bach’s ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ and Mozart’s Ave verum corpus.
JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW
The Doctor’s Surgery
How to keep oldies in the driving seat
Risk of dying in a road accident doubles after the age of 70
dr theodore dalrymple
Telling a patient that he (or she) is no longer fit to drive and must surrender his licence is one of the most unpleasant tasks a doctor has to fulfil.
The patient almost always takes it badly. He protests, often angrily, that he has been driving for over 60 years and that, without his car, life will become difficult, impossible or not worth living for him at all. He doesn’t need a young whippersnapper of 50 to tell him what he can and can’t do.
In this situation, the close relatives are often the doctor’s best allies. They have often wanted precisely this for the sake of the old person’s safety. They say that they will remove the sparkplugs or otherwise incapacitate the patient’s car.
Some 22 per cent of fatalities on the road are of people over the age of 70, while 13.6 per cent of the population are of that age. Since those over 70 are likely to drive fewer miles than those who are under it, the relative danger of being involved in a fatal road accident while driving when old is probably twice what it is for those younger than 70 – who include those of the most dangerous age group of all, 17-24-year-olds.
A paper from British Columbia examined the rate of road accidents that drivers who had been implanted with cardioverters and defibrillators were involved in during the six months after the implantation.
These devices monitor the heart rhythm, and administer a shock automatically to bring it back to normal if it becomes irregular and likely to cause syncope or even death.
Naturally, these devices are more commonly implanted in the elderly, for it is they who suffer most from irregularities of heartbeat.
On the principle of precaution, those implanted with one of these devices either because they are liable to suffer an episode of irregular heartbeat, or because they have
already suffered one and are therefore likely to suffer another, are prohibited from driving immediately afterwards, for one month in the first category and for six months in the second.
The authors of the paper discovered that, in the six months after implantation, those with the devices had about 20 per cent fewer road accidents involving either police attendance or an insurance claim than matched controls.
From this, they drew what seems to me a very strange and unwarranted conclusion: ‘These results suggest post-implantation driving restrictions could be shortened, making them less burdensome, without introducing excessive traffic safety risks.’
There is undoubtedly a tendency in modern society not to lift restrictions when they cease to be necessary, either because the risk has disappeared or because it never really existed in the first place.
Excessive caution is a malady of our times, and it is easy to see why. If a
restriction is lifted and results in an increase in what the restriction was supposed to prevent, those who ordered the lifting of the restriction will be blamed; whereas, if the restriction is not lifted, no one will ever know that it is unnecessary, and so no one will be blamed. That is why it is easier to impose a restriction than to lift it.
But the results in the paper do not support the reduction or lifting of driving restrictions after the implantation of the devices, though it remains possible that they are unnecessary in the first place.
To establish the risk of accident after implantation, it would be necessary to know how many people in the implantation group infringed the restrictions and how many miles they drove. For example, if only ten per cent of them disobeyed the restrictions and furthermore drove only a few miles, their accident rate on the figures provided would be extremely high.
To put it kindly, the false conclusions of the authors are mildly shocking.
Nanette Newman’s miracle oil
Guide to Growing Old Disgracefully
Sponsored
Cover: Quentin Blake
Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA
Editor: Charlotte Metcalf
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Publisher: James Pembroke
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Among the contributors
Our cover illustration is by Quentin Blake, 92, cartoonist, caricaturist and children’s writer, who has illustrated over 300 books, including many by Roald Dahl.
Nanette Newman was a winner at the 2024 Oldie of the Year Awards. She is an author and actress, appearing in nine films directed by her husband, Bryan Forbes.
John Humphrys presented Today from 1987 to 2019 and Mastermind from 2003 to 2021.
Lisa St Aubin de Terán on old age, revered in Mozambique
24 King of the road
Dave Robinson lives a life on tour
25 Wild at Heart Bond Girl Madeline Smith’s late-life lust
Dave Robinson is the founding father of the grassroots pub rock movement. He co-founded Stiff Records in 1976, signing Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, Madness, Tracey Ullman and many more.
Peter York is a social commentator and author, best known for co-authoring The Sloane Ranger Handbook with Ann Barr. His latest book, about the culture wars, is A Dead Cat on Your Table.
27 Fly south for winter Anne Sargeantson flees to Nicaragua
30 Don’t fret Garry White on Trump’s return
Caring friends
Simon Robinson has watched WWII veterans enjoy life’s adventures, thanks to sympathetic carers
Ihave the privileged position of being the friend and agent of a small number of oldies, many of them centenarians or near-centenarians. Knowing them has enriched my life.
As a child, I developed a lifelong love of old films, watching with my late grandmother. TV was live then, so I feigned illness to escape school and be back in time to watch the afternoon showings. I was enthralled by Rebecca, made in 1940, when my grandmother was a teenager in Blitz-ravaged London.
Joan Fontaine plays the timid, near-simpering narrator Mrs de Winter. I remember being transfixed as Fontaine, wearing a fetching 1940s felt hat, stands her ground with Mrs Van Hopper, her American employer, who has just learned of her companion’s engagement to Max de Winter and does her best to unsettle her with a mocking and derisory tone.
Would Mrs Van Hopper, with all her bluster and cash, manage alone in Monte Carlo without her trusted companion? Perhaps, but certainly not so comfortably.
Becoming a companion at a capricious employer’s beck and call was often the fate of a middle-class ‘spinster’. Many were drawn from the ‘surplus’ of women following the First World War.
In those days, a paid companion was de rigueur for those that could afford it. Literature and films set in the late 19th or early 20th century are full of such characters, often prying into the perceived sacrifices of these impoverished women.
For a single woman, who had perhaps had to vacate the family home inherited by a male sibling, becoming a paid ‘companion’ was seen as a genteel, respectable occupation. It was just a notch above being a governess, providing a roof and travel opportunities.
In 2025, there is hardly a companion to be found. Universal
Aunts, founded in 1921, is the last remaining establishment to help fill such a role. Today, companions have been largely replaced by carers.
In the 1930s, someone had little trouble introducing their companion in the drawing room. Today, the presence of a carer might suggest some infirmity in their employer. I’ve heard numerous euphemisms for this role, from ‘assistant’ to ‘my friend’ – the truest, and my favourite.
While we can all cite someone of a great age living entirely independently, this is a rarity. Most oldies need someone in their corner. Most find a carer boosts, rather than impedes independence.
A carer can mean the difference between having adventures or staying at home. Without carers, so many centenarian heroes and heroines would have been unable to take to the jets, planes, helicopters and ferries that carried them to the D-Day celebrations, as commemorated in The Great Escaper (2023), starring Michael Caine and John Standing.
At 104, Christian Lamb, described by Tim Smit CBE as ‘marvellously funny, indomitable, charming and with the swagger of a Musketeer’, was awarded the Légion d’honneur for supporting D-Day. She said her carers, found by her daughter, mostly from South Africa, ‘have all become friends, with careful weeding’.
The vast majority of carers I have met are interesting, capable and brave. It takes courage and a great sense of responsibility to up sticks and adapt to someone else’s home and regime, win their trust and ultimately their friendship.
During lockdown, I witnessed oldies and carers forging true bonds, as they hunkered down in the trenches of isolation with only each other for company.
A good carer ensures their client
is comfortable, happy and appearing at their best.
Often their client does not want to be fussed over in company or appear in need of care. Tact and sensitivity are absolute requisites and a good carer will bow to the delicate task of appearing to be largely unnecessary. Humour and mutual respect are essential for the true camaraderie that can be the upside to this special relationship.
My own beloved grandmother was helped enormously by my aunt. When my aunt had to go into a care home, it was a fate my grandmother was determined to avoid.
‘My knees will stay under my own table,’ she asserted. At 87, in deteriorating health, she took on
Blind faith: Lt Col Frank Slade (Al Pacino) and carer, Charlie Sims (Chris O’Donnell), in Scent of a Woman (1992)
carers, enabling her to say in the Essex bungalow she adored.
With Maria, her carer, at her side, my grandmother was most happy – ideally under her cherry tree, with a book and glass of something.
‘You think of everything, thank you,’ she’d say when Maria brought out a blanket.
Maria understood well that my grandmother’s hearing loss did not necessarily mean she was disinterested in conversation.
In fact, if the subject became tiresome or boring, my grandmother
would slip her perfectly effective hearing aid into her handbag and just pretend not to hear.
Maria had a great sense of humour. As a result of this hearing loss, there was much laughter along the way.
Once at lunch, she said, ‘Hilda, do you want gravy?’
My grandmother was incredulous. She rolled her eyes and said, ‘I think we can both see those days are long gone.’ I explained that Maria had said ‘gravy’, not ‘baby’. My grandmother laughed uproariously.
Many older people recall formidable maiden aunts with ear trumpets, or the marvellous sisters in Fawlty Towers with their hearing devices. Still, resentments can build fast around hearing loss.
‘It’s so annoying to keep repeating myself and she will not get her hearing tested,’ is something carers often hear from grumbling friends and relatives.
Elderly people can be slow to seek help, saying, ‘It’s not that bad; it’s just you speak so softly,’ or ‘Don’t shout. I can hear you.’
Worse, people sometimes link hearing loss with dementia. When my grandmother was in a hospital ward, a nurse told me, ‘It’s hard for people with dementia.’
My grandmother did not have dementia, but she did have flat hearing aid batteries.
Pride often gets in the way of people submitting to such devices. My mum is on the verge of needing them but avoids the topic.
I pointed out how discreet hearing aids are nowadays and reminded her of my schoolfriend who has worn them since his teens, largely unnoticed, but she says she’d prefer to wait until she’s 70.
Rather than being embarrassed, those hard of hearing would do well to remember that one of our greatest of Britons, Sir Winston Churchill, had failing hearing from the middle of the war.
press photos began appearing of him with a hearing aid. In 1955, his private physician, Lord Moran, said, ‘It does not seem a long time since Winston did all the talking at every meal. Now he sits all huddled up in silence. He can no longer hear what is being said. He is outside the round of conversation and not a part of it, though, at times, it is true, when there is a burst of laughter, someone will explain to him what it is all about.’
With a little digital help for the ears and a good carer, no one needs give in – ‘Never, Never Never!’, as Churchill said in 1941 – and new adventures can begin.
Thankfully, my grandmother’s generation was more of Sheila Hancock’s ‘Old Rage’ school of thinking. She continued to rage, rage against the dying of the light.
With a little digital help for the ears and a good carer, no one needs give in, and new adventures can begin
‘If you have lived for a hundred years, the great thing is to go on enjoying yourself,’ says Christian Lamb. On January 28th, she and WWII codebreaker Patricia Owtram, 101, were presented with 2024 Radio Times D-Day 80th Anniversary covers at a champagne reception at Claridges.
With a little support, they thoroughly enjoyed the evening, just as they did in several London nightspots, 80 years ago
Good carers are friends, confidantes and spirited advocates who enable as much participation in life and society as their charge delights in.
By the 1950s, it was much commented on and
They are never patronising, nor do they make a public fuss. Invisibly, they encourage confidence, independence and allow their charge to feel anything is possible.
Ultimately, carers are lifeenhancing enablers to lifeenhancing go-getters.
Simon Robinson is an agent for several WWII veterans
Winston Churchill with his hearing aid
Outrageous oldies
Ageing men should ignore dreary dress codes – but mustn’t look like children’s telly entertainers, advises Peter York
Nicky Haslam, contributor to The Oldie, has been an inspiration to us all for years. I mean years.
When I started writing for Harpers &Queen, just as Anna Wintour was leaving it to take over America, Nicky came as a fringe benefit. We saw him everywhere, including on the Chelsea punk front lines. He was sublimely confident about his taste and never followed any of the rather tight-arsed dress-code do’s and don’ts for the mature man, which I set out in these pages in 2023.
Nicky thinks, like Osbert Lancaster’s cartoon character, Lady Littlehampton, “If it’s me, it’s U”. So he wears all sorts of unlikely things. He’s never aimed to fit in.
Later, he even had a facelift –something my 2023 piece advised against as un-English. However, his came out rather nicely and he told absolutely everyone about it. When I saw him last November, he was wearing an elegant corduroy suit (he will have worn something wildly different the following day) and his silver hair was tinted at the front into a whimsical brown-quiff affair.
Nicky can get away with all this –and much more – because he knows what he’s doing and why. He can play about because he has a huge memory bank of looks and clothes, just like his archive of paint colours, furniture and fabrics. It might look OTT at first but it’s really disciplined.
This business of clothes, like conversation, is interesting because it needs a visually clever audience to get the references. But Nicky can put on a show which everyone enjoys –he’s a part-time stage raconteur and cabaret singer after all.
One disgraceful get-up that mature men sometimes adopt is ‘the Harley Davidson look’.
John Russell, former MD of Harley Davidson Europe, said: ‘Harley Davidson sells to 43-year-old accountants the ability to dress in leather, ride through small towns and have people be afraid of them’.
This chimes with that fatal British adoption of eccentricity – ‘I’m mad, me’– growing their hair and wearing very bright colours.
The idea of an engagingly dishevelled toff is embedded in the national image-bank. Take the late Marquess of Bath, with his ponytail, patchwork robes and wifelets. But then, if you own Longleat with its 9,000 acres, you can get away with quite a lot.
It’s great Rod Stewart has all that hair but should he be competing with his wife’s hairdo?
Turning back the years: Nicky Haslam, 85
An acquaintance, a middlemiddle Home Counties professional in his sixties, has taken to wearing ever odder clothes. I recently asked him on a Zoom gathering to show us his shoes, which were in extreme ‘Viva Las Vegas’ mode. But I’ve never asked him what the intended effect is or what drove him to it.
‘Increasing disinhibition’ can either mean you’re past caring because you’re rich and confident enough to please yourself or that you’re past it generally and have to be apologised for by your wife.
The sartorial equivalent is a
get-up that shouts ‘I’m still here/still a babe magnet.’
My brilliant friend and writer, Simon Mills, once wrote a joint column with Nicky in The Evening Standard. He says your pursuit-ofbabe magnetism shouldn’t stretch to adopting your mother’s coloured, streaked, fresh-from-the-salon hairstyle. It’s great that Rod Stewart still has all that hair, but should he be competing with his wife’s do?
The problem is that as British men age, they either adopt the nutty toff style or – worse – the all-purpose children’s telly entertainer or the Celebrity Antiques Road Trip type.
Think the Timmy Mallett look with those Jelly Tots giant specs. The pantaloons, the red shoes (who remembers Kickers?).
Mills’s Male on Sunday blog has perfect pitch in these matters. He recently described Italian-American actor Stanley Tucci, who loves us and lives in London, as ‘unafraid of clashing spots and squares or bold tone-on-tone arrangements. His popping colour choices are zesty and uplifting but never comedic, lairy, or attention seeking. He pairs silks with wools against cotton poplin and merino with stylish abandon. He is dressed for pleasure. Yours and ours, but mostly his own.’
That’s the way to go and shows why Simon’s blog is treasured in the smartest inboxes.
Just before lockdown, I shoved a lot of clothes into storage and forgot them. I’ve just started disinterring them. My self-image as a tidyminded ascetic, all black and navy blue, relieved only by a Liberty pocket handkerchief, has taken a hard knock.
There are a fair few Euro-designer things with questionable detailing, like a Scott Crolla suit which seems to be made out of marble-effect curtain fabric, and a variety of tassel loafers. Full disclosure; I’m looking forward to wearing the lot.
Peter
York’s latest book is A Dead Cat on Your Table
A tiny room of one’s own
In her widowhood, Elisabeth Luard discovered that very small is beautiful
Aroom of my own at well over 80 – how fabulous is that?
The middle daughter found it. ‘Studio-flat, high ceiling, stairs to a sleeping-platform, suits a posh student.’
She laughed. She knows her mother well. Perfect. I bought the place sight unseen. The year was 2017.
The farmhouse where I’d lived for 25 years in the wilds of Wales had found a buyer. And, with children long gone, husband departed to the great writing-room in the sky and grandchildren embarking on lives of their own, it was time to re-locate.
I needed to find somewhere that didn’t have five bedrooms and a leaking roof, and stash away whatever cash was left over (not much).
Downsizing is a lot less demanding when there’s no one around to argue over what goes to the dump. Order the skip, empty the bookshelves, sell anything decent on the walls and schedule the garage sale.
And no, I explained to my loving family – and they are indeed loving – that their only surviving parent (and grandparent) had no intention of waiting out her allotted span in a rocking chair with a view of the Eastbourne seafront.
Really not. I’d done time in Eastbourne, a year, when just out of boarding school, at the Eastbourne School of Domestic Economy. The result was an understanding of white sauce and a certificate in housemaiding: work downwards from picture-rail and dust behind the radiators.
Domestic competence and the London Season led, as was expected of a young woman with prospects, to marriage and children. I met Nicholas Luard, husband and father of our mutual children, at Private Eye – where I was employed for my secretarial skills (fast and accurate) while moonlighting at art school.
Nicholas, at the time, was co-proprietor, with his Cambridge friend, Peter Cook, of London’s first
(and only) satirical nightclub, The Establishment.
Reader, I married the boss. Circumstances thereafter – details available in my memoir – led to my current pad.
It’s a one-room apartment in a converted factory building in Acton: builder’s-finish, all modcons, space under the stairs for an eight-foot-long kitchen table made to order by a shipwright in the port of Tarifa, southern Andalucia.
The table has always been non-negotiable. I write at it and paint, peel potatoes and skin rabbits on it. Which makes it necessary to clear everything off whenever I entertain. Which sometimes, even in a one-room studio-apartment, I do. I love to cook. There’s room for 12 at table but 14’s a pinch.
For the first three years of relocation, the walls and ceiling
Elisabeth’s mini sitting-room
Right: marrying Nick in 1963
remained as I found them: retirement-home white.
That was the right amount of time for a downsizer used to the wide open spaces to find her bearings and take important lifestyle decisions such as, well, what to do with the colour chart.
in cities by reason of numbers –good reason for oldies not to relocate to the shires.
Have bus pass, will travel. Casual contact with passing strangers is available everywhere. Words can be exchanged in queues and at the bus-stop (this doesn’t work on the tube).
And there’s a lesson in determination to be learned from the game old bird (male or female) on a walking-frame crossing the traffic against the lights.
As for the young, I find other people’s toddlers adorable and babies irresistible, even when their sweet little faces are covered in mashed-up carrot. And I’ve never failed to find a willing teenager to interpret the map on my mobile.
‘You’re a difficult woman,’ observed a friend from the country when we found ourselves together on the old folks’ seats on the bus. ‘You say what’s in your head.’
Really? Sounds a touch
The result? Chinese-lacquercrimson in the section that works as a sitting room. Aegean turquoise in the office. Willowherb pink in the kitchen. And desert sand in the bedroom. It makes me happy.
‘I’m not surprised,’ said the middle daughter. ‘It looks like everywhere you’ve ever lived.’
New friends are easy to come by
Tourette’s – but perhaps she’s right. I do like difficult women. And difficult men, too. I married one. The father of my children was nothing but trouble for the full 40 years we shared the planet. There were consolations. Among them, an ability to pick the appropriate couplet from Andrew Marvell at the drop of a hat. And, yes, I’d rather he hadn’t died of drink (as it used to be called) before we’d reached the sunlit uplands.
My generation, and his, came of age in the wild and wonderful 1960s. I was young, unmarried and lived in a room of my own, until I married in 1963 and that was the end of that – until now.
Elisabeth Luard wrote Family Life, Birth, Death and the Whole Damn Thing
I’m a brilliant, modest actor
Want to get ahead in showbiz? Follow Robert Bathurst’s ruthless, charming tips
No amount of talent can get you to the top in showbusiness unless you understand the rules.
First, any performer who shows diffidence about their ability is lying and cowardly.
The self-effacing actor is giving the worst performance of his or her life. It doesn’t fool anybody. The surest sign that you’re a complete ponce is saying that you don’t take yourself too seriously.
Rule 1 of Showbiz
Cut the tired old modesty act, OK?
Rule 2, and there’s no getting away from this
Anyone who’s good at comedy is by definition a total bastard. To get a laugh, then another, then topping it with the next; is controlling people. The only person in the room not laughing is the performer. Look into their eyes: cold as ice. Don’t believe their smiley top teeth. Which brings us to...
Rule 3, the TV Times Teeth Test, another incontrovertible law of showbiz
The genre dictates the amount of teeth you show in your publicity photographs. This absolute rule, without which you can have no career, is: Top Teeth for Comedy, Bottom Teeth for Drama, Full Set for Musicals. See Richard Briers, Colin Firth, Elaine Paige.
Rule 4
Only sleep with another celebrity. Why? Is it a deep fear that the ordinary non-celebrity, currently in your hotel bathroom, might turn events of the previous evening to their advantage, leading you into another round of awkward questions when you get home and more publicised stays in a sex addiction clinic – the well-known Priory Defence? No, it’s not just that. It goes to a fundamental essence of celebrity. Thus...
Rule 5
Celebrities only mix on the basis of mutual need. It’s a neatly hierarchical, reassuring position and confirms our status.
Rule 6
You can’t expect to marry someone who’s going to keep up with your pace when you break through to the A List. My Starter Wife understood that – eventually.
split was amicable - bought her a house. The kids were cool about it; took it in their stride. Like all actors, I have ‘kids’, not children.
dog onto the set. Insist. In TV, I’m always Number 1 on the
know who’s in charge.
I’m on good terms with most ex-agents and I’ve even returned to a couple. Some actors stay with their rep for decades, a choice I respect, but the vast majority of them are complete saps on the road to nowhere.
To CBE or not to CBE? When you accept a gong you should be stripped of it immediately if you come up with all that crap about how it ‘honours the profession’.
Rule 9
Actor honours are For Services To Your Career, plus a few charity carol concert readings at St Paul’s, but often it’s just because someone in the Foreign Office fancies you.
The CBE is a toff-enough prize to accept without seeming ostentatious – cf oh-so diffident
to be like you. So long can do what you
It’s a bit of an exercise
call sheet, so no argument: the dog comes too. My co-star, Number 2 on the call sheet, can’t bring their dog. So it’s another good statusindicator, especially if someone from production has to take him for walkies.
Rule 8
Change your agent regularly, like clearing out the sock drawer. I do it every two years or so; they need to
intuit how far you can go. Day 1 on a film set, I put down my marker: give the crew a hard time if you’re kept waiting. Tell the runner there isn’t enough fruit in the Fruit ‘n Fibre. Play rap at full volume at 5 am in the make-up chair. That tells them who’s boss.
If they’re truly professional, you won’t see any looks of hate – just absolute respect.
Robert Bathurst was in Cold Feet
Luvvie daaahling! John Gielgud in Much Ado About Nothing, 1959
Wheely Wild Ride
Tired of the Hell of public transport? Tim Dansie and his wife took to their scooters – and London became their playground
Ialways enjoy a trip to Halfords, as there’s usually something I want to buy. An adult push scooter (costing from £45). What better toy for an old boy? Even better for an old boy’s wife.
Armed with our new acquisitions, we quickly got into swapping the ‘push off leg’, and were soon skimming down the pavements, enjoying horrified and admiring looks in equal measure.
Our shared injuries of knackered right knee and double hip replacement were forgotten as we forged along at lightning speed. A runner’s high, not experienced for 20 years, was suddenly back. Journeys of 20 minutes or more, now took seven. We re-engaged our competitive edge, whizzing through gaps in traffic and past slow-moving pedestrians.
Light to carry, the scooters fit easily into a car boot, extracted painlessly at the station and clicked open in one move.
We are under way, over the bridge to Platform Two. A few quick pushes and we’re aboard. Folded once more, they stack neatly in the overhead racks.
one-sided game. We are soon smugly parked outside Pret with our Americanos and hot milk, waving happily at our overtaken victims.
The smell of the open road never fails. The satisfying clunk and click
conveniently in the buggy space. Non-electric, and clearly uncool, they remain low on the thieves’ register. Fitting under seats in restaurants and received happily by waiters and staff, the scooter becomes a talking point and entrée.
Our scooting career has now lasted a full two years. As yet, we have not seen a single other couple – old or young – out on them. Children under ten don’t count.
There is the potential for accidents, and we are aware of our unprotected heads. This very vulnerability serves to keep us safe, as we expose our years for all to see.
Then, sliding down Liverpool Street Station platform at ‘walking pace’, we are soon in the busy London streets. Our iPhones attached to handlebars, shades on, backpacks in place – we are away. Well-known sights roll by. The Gherkin looms and is left in our wake. Familiar tube stops are passed as we discover the city we only knew underground. Now landmarks join together like a vast puzzle – no longer fragmented into Bank, Barbican, Holborn and Bond Street.
As the West End looms, and the pavements fill, the wonderful sport of taxi- and bus-dodging begins.
We weave our way past the semi-stationary traffic, grey hair and bald head providing the perfect red flag. A bright blue vehicle is clocked, and the race begins up Oxford Street.
With the average traffic moving at a stately six mph, this proves to be a
machine, the whole city experience is transformed. No longer the relentless trudge up the platform and descent into the darkness of the underground. The daylight beckons and the London streets await discovery. Faces light up and lock down in equal measure. Children point excitedly. Young professionals beetle past studiously ignoring us. Older folk are baffled.
A man cries, ‘You two are far too young for that!’ Heading directly at an impenetrable wall of humanity, we come to a swift, measured stop. Exchanging the usual pleasantries and courtesies, we walk gaily by and then remount to continue the chase.
Platform guards can be officious. Dismounting at just the right distance away, we walk casually by – only to head off at speed, with their admonishments dying in the wind behind us.
Our perfectly sized scooters allow us to travel feeling free and unencumbered. During regular visits to the British Library, our scooters fit
Shepherd’s Bush was the scene of my only incident. Travelling at no more than walking pace, a change in the pavement left me sprawled, but unharmed, in front of a young mother pushing a pram. I don’t know who was more surprised, but I certainly know who was the most embarrassed. Declining any help, I scuttled shamefacedly away.
We have been evangelical in our enthusiasm both at work and play. My dear wife runs a regional law firm some 20 minutes’ walk from the town centre.
The young staff continue to be
We weave our way past the semistationary traffic, grey
hair and bald head providing the perfect red flag
amazed each time she steps aboard for the lunchtime run to Tesco. Cruising effortlessly down Butt Road, she is followed by a range of glances, hand gestures and amazement.
If this article convinces just one – or maybe two of you – out there, then my duty is done.
Just say yes!
At 81, Liz Hodgkinson was saying no to invitations. When she started accepting, a thrilling new life opened up
It’s not a sight you often see.
An elderly lady tripping unsteadily along London streets at midnight in high heels and leather jacket, having been to a raucous rock concert. She’ll arrive home in Oxford at 3am and try to beat the student revellers to a taxi home.
So who is this old lady? Why, it’s me! A few years ago, instead of saying an automatic no to invitations and events that get me out of the house at unsociable hours, I decided to say yes.
This ‘yes’ sees me dolling myself up in sequin tops and granny dancing, sometimes to the cringing embarrassment of my grandchildren – when, in most people’s eyes, I should probably be tucked up in bed at nine with a hot water bottle, a mug of Horlicks and an Agatha Christie.
I also go into strange pubs where I know nobody, buy myself a drink and introduce myself to friendlylooking people. More often than not, I find myself engaged in an interesting chat with a former stranger. No romantic entanglement has ever resulted from these sorties, but it pays to be bold rather than a timid old biddy.
discovered who – saw me lying on the cold pavement and called an ambulance.
But did that teach me a lesson? It did not. As soon as I had recovered, I was looking at more boozy and unusual events to attend.
I’ve tried to curb my drinking since, but when you’re chatting away and waiters keep filling your glass, it’s hard to keep a check on it. There have been no further mishaps, although I’ve come close.
The same spirit of adventure has seen me travelling to many odd places. The strangest of all was one Christmas at Damanhur.
This is a weird spiritual community in northern Italy, where the inhabitants, who have names like
With all these jaunts, has anything disgraceful ever happened? Yes. Sad to say, my propensity to trot out to exciting events can have less than salubrious outcomes.
Coming home after one such party, having had too much to drink and not enough to eat, I fell down unconscious in the street and woke up many hours later in A&E.
The medical staff were astonished to find a smartly-dressed, middleclass, older woman among all the drunks of the night.
Some kind person – I never
Duck-Billed Platypus, have hollowed out mountains to create fantastical underground temples.
Being asked to hug a tree is probably the most normal thing you will find yourself doing there. But, once again, I said an enthusiastic yes rather than a shuddering no.
In the same spirit, I accepted an invitation to spend New Year with a friend who had moved to southern France. Getting there necessitated catching a coach from Oxford to Luton Airport at 4am.
My next-door neighbour, about the same age as me (81), said there was no way he’d want to make that
sort of journey now. Admittedly, I did wonder if it were wise.
But, once there and royally looked after, I was glad that I’d made the effort –even if it would have been so easy to have just stayed curled up in my comfortable little nest.
I also always accept offers to give speeches and talks, even though sometimes I suspect that I will be haranguing a multitude of three.
Often, before I am about to address, say, the Nantwich Women’s
The medical staff were astonished to find a smartlydressed, middle-class older woman among all the drunks of the night
Institute, I wonder what on earth made me agree to go.
But I ask myself, ‘What do I have to lose?’
It’s a chance for yet another adventure and to explore an unfamiliar town. And something might result from it. Y0u never know. I also sometimes attend protest rallies and travel significant distances to see dissident films, never shown in standard cinemas.
My last time was at a screening in Bath, where I got soaked to the skin. I then had to wait two hours for a train home, thanks to cancellations. Was it worth it? Just.
Most of my ‘yes’ experiences have been positive. So is there anything I would say no to? One or two.
I would never go bungee jumping. Nor would I go cold swimming in the winter. There are some limits to what I am prepared to do to continue living life to the full.
Liz Hodkginson’s latest book is A Mink Coat in St Neots: My Mother’s Flower Shop and the Mystery of a Wealthy Russian Princess
Glass half full: Ricky Gervais and Liz (right)
My Bigger Splash
Hugh Thomson soaks up a Spanish festival devoted to water, ham and being naughty
As a child, I always fancied taking a garden hose and spraying every adult within reach so hard they could never get past the spray to close me down. But it’s taken 60 years before I’ve actually had the opportunity.
It’s midnight and I’m standing in what could be a waterpark – but is actually the centre of Lanjarón, a small Spanish market town.
Teams of firemen are aiming industrial hosepipes at everyone who moves or tries to shelter behind a pillar. I’ve had special dispensation to use a hosepipe, which could blow a man 50 yards down the street.
This is the Fiesta del Agua y del Jamón – the Festival of Water and Ham. We have the mountain ham the next day.
My hosepipe victims have already been through the gauntlet of 100 water hoses. They emerge down the main street, laughing, sodden and happy. Numerous buckets are emptied from houses’ upper windows onto the runners below.
It’s a wild and very Spanish sight. Buñuel would have enjoyed the cavalcade of costumes that are getting incredibly wet: a man dressed as a nun, another with a diving mask, and plenty of women dressed as witches from the earlier sorcerer’s procession.
A bunch of anarchic schoolboys are holding water guns as big as bazookas. Some spoilsports are wearing wetsuits but most are virtually naked.
After 40 years of holding this
water festival, Lanjarón attracts participants from all over Andalucia and further afield. Thousands have registered to take part in the water race. For health and safety reasons, the town hall keeps track of all participants, in case any slide a little too far along the wet streets.
But, unlike the macho bullrunning at Pamplona – or those Spanish festivals whose only ostensible purpose seems to be to drink oneself into oblivion –Lanjarón’s water festival is
Plenty of children are allowed to stay up and enjoy the spectacle, as children always do, of adults behaving badly
celebrated by women, children and its entire population.
It attracts 20,000 celebrants from all over Europe. It is a playful and delightful mix of Catholic and Islamic tradition, celebrating water in all its forms, principally by pouring it all over each other.
‘We will purify ourselves with water,’ the Mayoress announces at the celebration’s start.
At the stroke of midnight before the saint’s day of St John on June 24th – conveniently right after the summer solstice, when the heat is on, day and night – runners congregate at one end of the town.
They run its length as they are pelted by water. There’s a whole further ceremony the following day, when giant water bombs are hurled about with abandon.
Plenty of children are allowed to stay
up for this midnight occasion and enjoy the spectacle, as children always do, of adults behaving incredibly badly.
One team of mischievous teenage girls, dressed as witches, asks a fireman to fill a bucket so they can pour it over a companion, for having the wrong sort of broom. Instead, they pour it over the fireman himself – risky, as he still has his hose.
A team of male football supporters are modelling the wet Real Madrid T-shirt look. Without the physique of actual players, their stomachs look like they would fall into an offside trap.
At one point, I find myself sheltering behind a pillar with the event’s organiser: Juan Antonio, from the town hall.
Everyone calls him el Güero, ‘the blond one’, because his hair is marginally less jet black than his neighbours.
He tells me that ‘elsewhere in Spain, they celebrate the feast of St John the Baptist by lighting bonfires. Here, we put everything out with water!’
Then he uses me as a human shield when a fireman turns his hose on us.
It’s a moonless night and, up high here in the mountains, there is little light pollution. So it is easy to see Scorpio rising and the Milky Way over the snow-capped summits of the Sierra Nevada.
If you had asked me beforehand how I would feel at being drenched to the skin at midnight by a crossdressing nun with a water pistol, I’m not sure what I would have said.
But it’s a strangely liberating feeling – a true midsummer festival of release.
And, as the drenched crowd walks into the main square for more music and dancing – not least as one way to dry off – I can honestly say I’ve rarely enjoyed a festival more.
I just wish I’d had the courage to use a similar hosepipe on all those boring adults when I was a kid.
Hugh Thomson wrote Viva Byron!
Water, water everywhere: Festival of Water and Ham, Lanjarón
The essential oil
At 90, Nanette Newman is addicted to almond oil
Bette Davis, the American film star, said, when being interviewed about her career that had spanned many years, ‘Old age is not for sissies.’
I was reminded of that quote a few days ago while trying to open a carton of chicken and vegetable soup. I struggled for more than 20 minutes.
I pushed where it said, ‘Open here.’
I prodded – I stabbed dangerously, first with scissors, then a knife, fingers aching, with lots of swearing.
l finally admitted defeat and hurled it in the rubbish bin, and thought how right Bette was.
Now, at 90, I am very aware that so many things, which I just did easily some years ago, have now become a bit of a challenge. Looking in a magnifying mirror first thing in the morning takes a certain amount of courage.
It is only possible if – like me –your eyesight isn’t what it used to be. A vague vision is preferable to
Looking in a magnifying mirror first thing in the morning takes a certain amount of courage
the sharp reality staring at you before breakfast.
Growing old definitely requires a certain amount of re-adjustment, starting with what one wears.
You definitely don’t want to look like mutton dressed as lamb. As the
years add up, it’s essential to look at yourself with an objective eye and listen to well-meaning friends’ advice, even if you ignore it.
Now I am in my tenth decade, I try to concentrate on my good bits.
At the risk of sounding conceited, I do have really good teeth, thank goodness. So, when I think other bits of me are a bit depressing, I remind myself of that and gloat a bit – and smile a lot.
I also think that, at 90, you have to laugh at yourself a lot.
My daughters, Sarah and Emma help me do that – Sarah particularly. Sarah was with me the other day, when we had to get into a taxi.
It was raining, of course, and has anybody reading this noticed how high the step is into the taxi?
The effort of me trying to navigate the step made us hysterical with laughter.
I walk with a stick – so getting up and down steps is not my best thing. Oh dear! But, anyway, it was a truly comic performance – a
Monty Python or Charlie Chaplin moment. I think the taxi driver may have thought we were drunk.
Senior moment! I have just remembered my brief for this article was meant to be beauty tips for us old ladies.
I must confess that when I see a cream with a label that says ‘anti-ageing’, I usually buy it. But, mainly, I am addicted to pure almond oil. I have used it for years and, yes, it does mean going to bed with a slimy face. But nothing is without its downside.
Almond oil and laughing at yourself a lot are my two beauty secrets plus giving a nod to Bette Davis and remembering that old age is not for sissies. She was spot on, by the way. So try not to be one.
Actress Nanette Newman won 2024 Oldie In-Law of the Year, with son-in-law, John Standing, also 90
Nanette Newman on screen (left) and (below) today
Wonderful today
stretch to three. But I feel so woolly the next day that I have to cancel things and then feel guilty.
Pattie with George Harrison, 1966, and (below) now
Pattie Boyd has given up make-up and bitterly regrets her Botox
When I was a model aged 18, I was pretty and life was fabulous.
I got one job after another. Nothing was nicer than waking up, doing full make-up, including false eyelashes, and then going out to greet the day and photographers.
And then, one day, I got a really special job, a part in the Beatles first film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964). George Harrison asked me out, and I thought, wow! This was amazing. Reader, I married him.
Every day I carried on putting on my make-up because I needed to look good. Eventually I realised it was my insecurities that made me wear it. Make-up had become a mask to hide behind and I thought nobody would love me without it.
Anyway, two husbands later, I’m now with Rod Weston, and I don’t bother to wear make-up any more.
He doesn’t seem to notice, except when we go out for special occasions, and there’s nothing like Rod glancing down at my feet with a slight frown for me to notice that, yet again, I’m not wearing the high heels that he likes. I’m totally going
to pieces! Well, no! It’s more that I’m just so relaxed in myself and happy to look however I look. And if we’re going somewhere really special, I’ll gleefully plaster on the make-up again.
Often I meet oldies riddled with fears and insecurities. So it’s been a blessing and a relief for me to rid myself of mine. Once I found confidence within myself, I found I was able to do wonderful experimental things; even going out on a limb to try the Peruvian hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca. It was absolutely fantastic and freeing and reminded me of my heady young days, when we experimented with LSD.
Though dabbling in hallucinogenic drugs over 60 is pretty disgraceful, it reassured me I was neither rigid nor fearful, like so many oldies. After all, it wasn’t that different from drinking too much champagne at a party – and why not, if I’m having a blast?
Having said that, when I go out with friends, I do try to remember not to have more than two Margaritas – though I sometimes
After all, how many more days, months or years do I have left to enjoy my life?
For years, I’ve been lucky enough to be a guest in glorious houses around the world. But I always nurtured a dream of how divine it would be to be the host. Recently I booked a villa in Marrakech and invited friends. It was an excuse to pull out all the old outfits languishing in the back of my wardrobe and to buy some floaty long dresses and skimpy tops on a whim. The whole process filled me with glee. I could wear what I wanted without worrying about anyone else’s rules. But then, in the excitement of going away, I decided to have some
Botox. It was one huge mistake. One party has followed another and I still can’t raise my eyebrows, let alone apply any make-up. It’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever done. And, what’s worse, I did it in a delicious environment and felt miserable about myself. Never, ever again!
Pattie Boyd, a photographer and ’60s supermodel, wrote the memoir Wonderful Tonight
Pattie Boyd marries Eric Clapton, 1979
Power naps
A
glass of wine and a siesta turbocharge productivity, says Andrew Roberts
‘Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight,’ wrote Winston Churchill in The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his war memoirs, ‘without that refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts 20 minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces.’
As an undergraduate, I decided to put those words into practice. For most days over the past 43 years, I have taken an afternoon nap, although admittedly they have tended to be longer than 20 minutes, – usually twice that.
Churchill was right: a nap can renew enough of the vital forces to turn one working day into two.
Churchill certainly practised what he preached. ‘Never to my knowledge,’ his son-in-law Vic Oliver wrote in his memoirs, Mr Showbusiness, ‘not even during the most serious and hectic alarms and excursions of the war, did he neglect to give himself this brief, restoration sleep. It seems to be a characteristic need for many great men and geniuses.’
In today’s time-deprived, turbo-charged working environments, in which a glass or two of wine at lunchtime is deplored and an afternoon nap positively reviled, it is hard to convince the under-60s that the oldie way of doing things is actually the path to better health and longevity.
It is also – counter-intuitively enough – the way to increase overall productivity.
Of course, at 62, I may be tempting providence to claim this, but bear with me.
One does not have to go to bed every day – though I do – to enjoy the benefits of an afternoon nap. Sofas and deep chairs work perfectly well too. Once reawakened, the day has been effectively divided into two, and twice as much can be achieved.
One tip is aways to keep eyepatches in the back pocket of every pair of trousers.
Although medical opinion is overall sceptical – or worse – about napping’s health benefits, there are always new studies appearing that cast doubts on this.
One has suggested that beds should be installed in the British workplace, because our best ideas come to us there rather than in the office. Nearly one-third of all the people polled in a comprehensive survey claimed their brains went into overdrive in bed. Only 11% believed they had their most creative thoughts while at work.
Professor Richard Wiseman has said, ‘Britain’s bosses must therefore foster new approaches if they want to get the most out of their employees.’
A psychological survey commissioned by the East of England Development Agency stated that, as well as feeling and working better, afternoon nappers also have
their best ideas in that sublime limbo between unconsciousness and being fully awake.
Having always suspected this, I ensure that I have a pad of paper beside my bed and a pen with a tiny battery-operated light attached.
When I write things down, I don’t have to switch on a lamp and fully wake myself up, let alone my wife. Ideas for whole chapters of the 20 or so books I have written or edited have come to me this way.
Thomas Edison and Mark Twain were both prodigious nappers. Margaret Thatcher used to take a short one in Downing Street – from 2.45pm to 3pm – just before Prime Minister’s Questions. I have found they can be taken any time between about 2pm and 5.30pm, when one’s biorhythms are at their lowest.
Coffee is the arch-enemy of this regime, and reasonable amounts of wine at lunchtime a distinct ally.
Early-morning rising also helps. Berkeley University scientists suggest that you should not nap until at least seven hours after you’ve woken up.
For most days over the past 43 years, I have taken an afternoon nap
Dr Mark Rosekind, president and chief scientist at Alertness Solutions, a Californian consulting firm in the area of fatigue management, which advises the US airline industry, is an advocate of getting the Federal Aviation Authority to mandate pilots napping when off-duty during flights.
In advanced tests, monitoring pilots’ brain and other physiological activity during transatlantic flights, his team found that the pilots who took naps were nearly four times more alert during landing than those who did not.
‘Nature intended us to fall asleep in the middle of the day,’ says Dr Gregg Jacobs, a doughty proponent of the benefits of napping. ‘A midday nap is an integral part of the daily routine of many cultures, particularly those near the equator.
‘This coincides with a slight drop in body temperature and occurs regardless of whether we eat lunch. It is present even in good sleepers who are well-rested.’
The longevity statistics of Mediterranean practitioners of the siesta imply it is not merely olive oil and exercise that accounts for elongated lifespans in places like Sicily, Spain and the Lebanon.
Noël Coward, in Mad Dogs and Englishmen said we ‘detest a siesta’.
We definitely should not.
Andrew Roberts’s latest book is Churchill: Walking with Destiny
Out for the count: Margaret Thatcher
Iwas thrilled with my wheeze. After a few Rum Negronis too many, I had promised to celebrate my son Ludo’s recent 21st birthday and my impending 65th with a brief but determined assault à deux on Las Vegas, that most iniquitous of all dens of iniquity. We couldn’t wait.
Mrs Ray, though, was far from impressed. ‘Any drugs, hookers or tattoos and don’t even think about coming home,’ she warned.
Although his elder brother, a staunch teetotaller, takes after nobody in our family I can think of, Ludo is his parents’ son and, I’m delighted to say, has all the makings of an old soak.
On being told that he had to make the most of his gap year and do something useful, Ludo promptly enrolled on a course at the European Bartender School, graduating top of his class. I almost burst with pride.
He now juggles his university studies with working in cool bars and playing in cooler bands.
There isn’t a cocktail of which Ludo hasn’t heard, nor one he can’t make – he was the perfect companion for four days in Sin City.
Some go to Vegas for the gambling, some for the show and some, like us, for the fine food ’n drink. When I was last there, 16 Vegas restaurants shared 21 Michelin stars. There were more Master Sommeliers than anywhere else in the world, more Roederer Cristal and Dom Pérignon drunk, more award-winning bars per square yard, and word was that things had only got better.
We based ourselves on the fabled Strip at the gloriously swanky, brand new Fontainebleau, with its 30 restaurants, eight bars, lounges and nightclubs (plus theatre, casino, spa and Oasis Pool Deck).
We started by watching The Hangover, that seminal Vegas movie of questionable judgement and poor behaviour, lying on our beds accompanied by a fine bottle of ice-cold champagne.
We then, just out of courtesy, ducked into the Fontainebleau’s lobby bar, Collins, one of Esquire’s 2024 Best Bars in America.
Next we took in Azul, whose speciality is tequila and mezcal cocktails. Then, at Chyna Club, we had the best Chinese food I’ve ever
What goes on tour: the Rat Pack in Las Vegas
Viva Las Vegas
Jonathan
Ray took his son to Sin City – with strict rules from his wife
had. We rounded things off with a post-prandial cocktail in the swish Nowhere Lounge, serenaded by the hippest of retro jazz bands.
We’d been up for 24 hours and were shattered, but things were shaping up nicely.
At Ludo’s suggestion, we started next day at Fontainebleau’s exclusive Intravenous Drip Lounge.
We treated ourselves to a reviving NutriYouth ‘to repair cellular damage’ (me) and an Ultimate Recovery ‘the most advanced hangover recovery’ (Ludo). They cost the earth, didn’t deliver anything intravenously a well-made Bloody Mary couldn’t deliver orally, but we left with a significant spring in our step.
We walked the length of the Strip and cabbed back, marvelling at the Eiffel Tower, Doge’s Palace, Campanile and dancing fountains at the Bellagio.
At Wakuda in the Venetian, we had one of the best meals of our lives. Then on to cocktails in Barbershop Cuts & Cocktails, a deliciously louche, secret speakeasy in the Cosmopolitan, with a brilliant, rip-roaring house band.
We climbed through a hidden wall safe into another secret bar – the Lock in the Horseshoe – and
Ludo smoked his first ever cigar (‘Don’t tell Mum!’) at 4am in Bleau, Fontainebleau’s all-day bar.
I danced with my first ever drag queen, the majestic Eureka O’Hara, at the ’70s DiscoShow (‘Don’t tell Mum!’). We drank cocktails made and delivered by robot at, erm, Tipsy Robot and had more at the fabulous, open-24 hours Golden Tiki in Chinatown.
We saw Paranormal, a remarkable mind-reading show, had a hangover-busting brunch at the Wynn and two fabulous farm-to-fork lunches in Carson Kitchen and Esther’s Kitchen in the Arts District. Then we sweated out the alcohol at Awana Spa in Resorts World, with a 12-minute helicopter ride along the Strip at dusk.
Finally, waiting for a cab to the airport, we had a flutter. I gave Ludo $100. He lost $75 at Blackjack. Luckily, his dad was there to show him how, turning the $25 back into $350 at roulette.
It was a punishing few days with only one thing to tell Mum about – a small pair of matching father ’n son tattoos.
Jonathan Ray is the Spectator’s Drinks Editor
IMy immortal diet
John Humphrys wants to live for ever...
slow news day in 1972.
‘Typical’ meant digging out the Gallo Hearty Burgundy from the filing cabinet for a quick glass at about noon, then booking a table at the latest trendy restaurant for a martini or two, a decent wine with lunch and port or brandy to finish off. Then back to the office.
That particular day, all hell had broken loose.
Watergate, the biggest story in the world, had taken a dramatic turn while I was at lunch. London wanted me to do a live broadcast on the new-fangled satellite feed –at ten grand for ten minutes.
Wow! What a chance to prove that I, the BBC’s youngest TV foreign correspondent, was a worthy successor to the legendary Charles Wheeler – assuming that I didn’t fall off the chair in front of the camera.
I didn’t, but the next morning the so-called ‘hero-grams’ from London did not arrive. Instead, my Washington producer gave me a steely look and told me that the boss had noticed my ‘condition’. If it happened again, I’d find myself back in Wales on a local rag, taking the names of mourners at funerals.
I heeded the warning and I’ve never had a drink at lunchtime since. And, predictably perhaps, I’ve gone further. We obsessives who’ll never see 60 again know half measures are for wimps.
We mock the desperate old gits who preach that the way to
cope with getting old is to learn a new language every week and fill your diary with challenging lectures.
We know there’s only one way to cope with the advancing years. It’s not a question of whether to grow old gracefully or disgracefully. It’s about not growing old. It’s about re-inventing yourself. It’s about becoming an evangelist. It’s about stopping the clock.
Booze was the first to go. Lunch-times became zero-tolerance zones.
Evenings: maybe half a pint of weak beer mixed with nonalcoholic stuff that’s now so fashionable even the pubs are boasting about it. And, to my great
It’s not about growing old disgracefully. It’s about not growing old. It’s about reinventing yourself
surprise, it actually tastes like beer. Or maybe my taste buds have died.
But here’s my really big change. Food. I’ve given up the stuff I loved – steak and chips, streaky bacon, sausages – and now gorge on the stuff I used to sneer at.
And when I say ‘gorge’ I mean at least 20 kinds of food every day. Not that I count them. Well… not often. I’m not quite that weird. But here’s a taste of my daily menu.
Breakfast is blueberries and natural yoghurt. Mid-morning: banana. Pre-lunch snack: olives and raw carrots. Lunch: in winter, it’s soup, with beetroot, onions, tomatoes, lentils, greens, herbs and spices, plus sardines or avocadoes.
And my own discovery, of which I’m very proud: a splash of raw apple cider vinegar.
In summer, it’s salad. That’s followed by a bowl of assorted nuts with prunes and figs plus an apple with a bowl of pomegranate seeds and watermelon. Dinner is usually fish, followed by a very large orange and a chunk of 95% black chocolate with apricots.
You might want to save your applause (or your jibes) until I’ve boasted about my exercise regime.
It begins daily at dawn, running around my local park for a mile or two. After breakfast, I do the first of three daily exercise sessions – some with weights, some just the usual press-ups etc.
And while I write this, I’m bouncing up and down on my feet as I tap the keys because I use a stand-up desk. Sitting down is bad for you. Oh, and I’ve given up the car. I cycle everywhere.
Applauding yet?
Probably not. As a discerning Oldie reader with a sophisticated appreciation of a nicely aged filet mignon, accompanied by a decent claret, you’re probably thinking, ‘For God’s sake, man, get a life!’
You may also recall the tired old gag that says being abstemious doesn’t actually help you live longer. It just feels like it.
And maybe that’s true. A study that’s been tracking 27,500 older Americans for 14 years suggests they’re generally more likely to show signs of depression after they’ve retired. But it depends on how much they drink. For men, two drinks or less in a day (one drink for women) generally makes them happier. But abstaining completely has the opposite effect.
So maybe one of these days I’ll abandon my efforts to grow old gracefully or disgracefully and just try growing old naturally.
Whatever that might be.
John Humphrys presented Today from 1987 to 2019
My alcoholic diet
...while Roger Lewis reaches for his emergency corkscrew – after a cardiac arrest
Of any hundred people struck down with a cardiac arrest outside hospital, only ten will reach A&E alive, ambulance availability permitting.
Of those ten, five will die quickly – in the corridors no doubt – and three will suffer brain damage from the oxygen deprivation.
Only two will survive to fight another day. Evelyn Waugh didn’t. He dropped dead on the lavatory at Combe Florey. Peter Sellers didn’t. He turned bright blue and collapsed in the Dorchester. The other day, comedian Tony Slattery, whom we all loved in Who’s Line Is It Anyway, had a fatal heart attack at 65.
I did survive, after my dramatic myocardial infarction in Morrison’s carpark in Hastings, which the locals still talk about. All these statistics ought to be sobering, except that is not the right word in my case.
My attempt at Dry January lasted three-quarters of an hour. Anna got cross with me, tipped the Tio Pepe down the sink and hid the corkscrew.
She then had to go to look after her mother for a few days – so my boozing re-commenced. I have an emergency corkscrew.
When I came out from hospital after the ticker do, I was armed with no end of leaflets and advice about diet, exercise and ‘lifestyle’ change.
I have stuck to the dietary advice in fairness – also to my belief that one unit is one bottle.
Meals mean fish or grilled chicken every damn day there is. I haven’t touched red meat for years, nor butter or white bread. I make toast with that brown stuff full of seeds and grain, smearing it with Flora, which has absolutely zero taste.
As for exercise, this is rather where I fall down. My diabetic nurse expected me brightly to go along to the gymnasium, armed with a towel and a water bottle. I declined the invitation. Then the phone calls and letters from the hospital started, entreating me to go on walks.
Alas, I am content doing nothing – pottering, puttering, watching old
films on television, wrapped in my dressing gown. Not for me any jumping, squatting, side-to-side leaps or hip thrusts.
I can just about rotate my ankles and stand on tiptoe, though not for long. I look askance at Dame Mirren’s regime.
She goes in for those Royal Canadian Air Force sit-ups and push-ups which, according to their handbook, ‘can be done beside your bed in barracks’.
I lived briefly in Canada, a place so boring I thought I was dead. I am not surprised their military personnel dreamt up running on the spot and one-armed handstands. There’s nothing else to do; certainly few aerial battles to fight.
Anyway, my point is – how vain, how deluded it is to keep fit. I can’t stand seeing old people showing off, in their sports bras and jogging gear, walking purposely with a badminton racket sticking out of a tote bag.
Unlike other oldies, I have no intention of prolonging life, only in making what’s left of it as tolerable as possible. It both amuses and enrages me, therefore, the thousands of press articles about healthy eating, healthy physical habits, which have no relevance to me whatsoever.
I have stuck to the dietary advice – also to my belief that one unit is one bottle
How vain; how deluded. You can’t stop what’s coming – genetic inheritance is what counts; stamina. Oatmeal, kale, fennel tea, almond butter, chia seeds and magnesium supplements: pig’s bottom to all of it. I similarly actively detest mindfulness and meditation. I laughed like hell when I read vegans are more likely to be depressed and that appetite-suppressing drugs make the hair fall out.
As one of the two per cent who bounce back after keeling over, I’m sorry to say I don’t want to shout and sing. All that’s happened really is that I am more conscious than ever of failure, of unfulfillment. I am more gloomy, less tolerant.
When young, I thought I could combat the world, give it a little push. I now know I am powerless to do anything about identity politics, culture wars, social justice, preferred pronouns, virtue signalling, the trans mob, decolonising the curriculum, destabilising immigration, diversity, equality and inclusion balls, and the rest of the anti-Western civilisation and anti-white people lunacy, which send up the blood pressure and has infected education, the media, the civil service, museums, everything.
I have no goals. I have given up the ghost and get tired easily. Indeed, the first thing I do after getting up is go for a little lie down.
Roger Lewis is the author of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor
African Queen
In Mozambique, where oldies are revered, Lisa St Aubin de Terán can do whatever she wants
Iused to have a problem with age. It started in my teens and dogged me until I hit midcentury. No matter what I wore or who I was with, I looked and sounded like a very tall and very pretentious 12-year-old.
On the phone, on hearing my squeaky voice, people asking for me insisted I ‘go and call Mummy.’
I was refused entry to bars and clubs long after I passed 40. Age was something that happened to others. When I was a granny at 36, I still looked like a kid. With my baby face, I thought getting old was something that only happened to other people.
Then so much happened to me that the next time I really looked hard in a mirror, I found to my astonishment I was 70 and an OAP. How and when that happened, I had no idea.
Yet I aged in a place of ancestor worship where youth is ubiquitous but age is revered. Maybe because it isn’t easy to survive cyclones, floods, droughts, locusts, epidemics and the near-continuous plague of malaria. When you do, you get Brownie points for just being there.
While there are relatively few inhibitions in Mozambican youth, there are almost none once you pass
60. You can be as demanding, unreasonable, noisy, grumpy, flirtatious, idiotic and troublesome as you please and still be as cosseted as the village mascot.
Having spotted the arrival of greying hair and wrinkles, I shrugged them off into the (rather large) bag where I relegate input from trolls and detractors.
Other more debilitating symptoms lodged in my system, like parasites. As a lifelong non-driver, I sail the four miles across the Mozambique Channel to Ilha, once the country’s capital, now a charming UNESCO World Heritage island, with bars, cafés and restaurants – sadly lacking in the mud hut village on the mainland where I have lived for 20 years.
The sailing is on a cumbersome dhow ferry. The trip costs 65p and takes up to five hours. The dhow has no steps – so young and old have to heave themselves up with a giant push-up and then clamber in.
Local, rheumy and decrepit octogenarians all achieve this nimbly, and so did I, until two years ago, when, having waded through waist-deep tepid water, I reached up and heaved to no avail. And the more I tried, the weaker I became.
As ours is a village with not much
entertainment and no TV, watching me flounder so tickled the other passengers that I was stuck clinging to the side for quite a while.
Then, as though by some unspoken signal, a group of them hauled me unceremoniously on board. The laughter continued in little outbursts for the entire trip.
The local ladies invited me to join in the laughter. I did outwardly, as I nursed my grazed shins and aching arms. Inside, I was thinking ‘Oh God! I’m busted and the thin end of the ageing wedge is finally in!’
It has been quite a long haul to get to 71. But there is no way I’m clocking out for at least another 20 years. And I intend to do that African-style, in bursts of outlandish colours, dancing when the spirit moves me, and singing whenever and wherever I feel like it, despite not being able to carry a tune in a wheelbarrow.
Back in my village of Mossuril, people claim I’ve swallowed the word ‘No’. And I have: I use it freely, only doing what I want when I want to.
I spend a lot of time in Mozambique, Italy and England, building dry stone walls and making mosaic paths with river stones and different types of quartz. What with that, gardening, reading and writing, I fill my days.
Having left school at 15, the urge to learn has never left me and I get enormous pleasure from it.
You can be as demanding, unreasonable, noisy, grumpy, flirtatious, idiotic and troublesome as you please
I am convinced that I’ll be spared from the scourge of cognitive decline because my life is as full of passion and gratitude now as it was in my teens.
With a daily dose of castor oil, black seed oil, a pretty healthy diet, and a slather of tallow, I fully expect to be around to delight my fans and irritate my adversaries for a good long time to come.
Lisa
St Aubin de Terán’s latest novel is The Hobby
Bridging the generation gap: the late Wilfred Thesiger, 92, at home in Kenya, 2002
King of the Road
After 60 years in the music business, touring keeps
Dave Robinson young
I’ve spent 60 years on the road all over the world, listening to bands do their thing live. The spirit is still there and strong, even as the flesh gets weaker.
My musical adventures began in the early ’60s, when I photographed young beat groups influenced by the Beatles. Somehow, I opened a club in Dublin where anyone could play and the fans flocked.
In the ’70s, I started a grassroots musical movement in the back rooms of pubs. Bands played two or three sets of their own songs alongside short covers of other people’s songs.
Paula Yates and Leslie Ash.
Back then, American-owned major record labels weren’t yet preoccupied with glam bands and all that non-organic mainstream bullshit they churned out for hits.
I started signing pub rock bands to my label, Stiff Records. We were soon representing some of the greats: Elvis Costello, Ian Dury & the Blockheads, Ducks DeLuxe, Dr Feelgood, Lene Lovich, Nick Lowe, Madness and many more.
We went on our Live Stiffs Tour in 1977, showing how live performance built an artist’s reputation. Our tours embodied the raw, rough and ready spirit of the era, with our bands’ unpredictable and energetic performances.
Then along came MTV and we began making pop videos, shooting the very early ones in Stiff’s garage. We made them up as we went along.
Tracey Ullman was doing Doris Day covers and we pers sorts of famous people to play cameos, from Paul McCartney to Neil Kinnock. Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall made regular appearances in Stiff videos.
Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie wrote and starred in a wild two-and-a-half-minute long ad that we made for The Tube the Channel Four live music show hosted by Jools Holland,
We frequently stayed up all night, filming or getting something edited in time to be screened. I loved it. There were moments of terror in the spontaneous lunacy but that was the joy of the music business then.
There were moments of terror in the spontaneous lunacy but that was the joy of the music business then
Our bullish attitude was displayed on T-shirts that were printed with ‘If It Ain’t Stiff, It Ain’t Worth a F…’ – now collectors’ items.
A lot of those talented groups are still performing – at least, those
Left: Madness, 1979, signed by Dave to Stiff Records
Below: Kirsty MacColl & Shane MacGowan, 1994
Kirsty MacColl (tragically killed in a boat accident), for Fairytale of New York. And I’m still at it. Recently I did a one-man pub tour and I’ve just come back from touring South Africa with my young Carlisle band, Hardwicke Circus, flying with Rwanda Airlines (a much softer landing than Ryanair).
The bands we played with had bizarre names – including the Springbok Nude Girls – and seemed to be influenced by Led Zeppelin. Some only had one microphone, handheld by the lead singer – no backing vocals or mic stands here.
Hardwicke Circus, though a sharp shock to the system, went down extremely well. We played in vineyards, bars, clubs and on the beach; in Johannesburg, Soweto and ‘happening’ Cape Town, where we had lots of late nights.
It’s an ageless country. In my 81st year, I felt I’d returned to my youth and I can’t wait to go back.
My love of live music has taken me round the world to more toilet venues than most people have had hot breakfasts.
The essence of a great song makes visiting all those shoddy venues absolutely unmissable. I regret that people today generally choose to enjoy their music alone
Nothing will ever beat a live band in a shoddy pub.
Dave Robinson, who co-founded Stiff Records in 1976, was a leading figure in the pub rock movement
The greatest surprise for me as I grow older is the increasing intensity of emotion. Maybe it truly is the dying of the light.
I mistakenly thought that feelings of passion, loss and love, would gradually become numbed over time. The very opposite is true. I am constantly overwhelmed.
Giving up a car came as a great relief and release. I loved my honey-coloured Beetle, but now I walk everywhere, and am much healthier and happier on foot. I had turned into an old witch, railing at innocent motorists who mistakenly parked across my measly drive.
I have come to prefer night over the day. It is the element of danger and secrecy that entices me. Hearing the tawny owl calling for a mate, I close my front door behind me and set off at a disgracefully late hour when all neighbours’ bedroom lights have been extinguished.
It’s thrilling to walk several miles along the black River Thames, at a pace I can normally never reach in the daytime, full of crowds and
Wild at Heart
Madeline Smith’s pulse still races at a lusty man and a fine champagne
traffic. I am always the solitary being. Even my dogs have had their final sniff and pee. So there’s nothing to return to in the early hours of the morning.
It’s nothing for me to stride brazenly into a pub and order a double rum and lime and talk to other single souls.
My own mood swings are almost intolerable. So if I recognise sadness or loneliness in another person, I’m unafraid of a potential rebuff.
I mistakenly thought that feelings of passion, loss and love would gradually become numbed over time. The very opposite is true
I go alone to the theatre quite frequently and love to sit enthroned in the Royal Opera House. I relish my own company and am answerable to nobody, with an almost devil-may-care philosophy in preparation for that final exit, alone.
Losing my father too soon, before we had time to repair emotional bridges, was possibly the most potent lesson learnt. We tussled in my childhood and teenage years.
Later, he and my husband locked horns at the top of our staircase. I nearly had murder on my hands, causing a rift between my father and me and turning us into strangers.
With these memories burning inside me, I almost make a nuisance of myself with friends and relations, ensuring we don’t fall out.
In addition, my cup overfloweth, perhaps a little too often, with unaffordable, best-quality champagne and spirits. My liver has seen me through thus far. Now what is a little excess between friends?
Perhaps my emotions are more intense now, because I am inevitably running out of time. I’m currently behaving in a ridiculous fashion towards the male object of my desires.
WhatsApp must be exhausted by my volatile moods. I write like a teenager in lust and love; like a bitch on heat. I simply don’t care. I’d dearly love a lusty man to come home to. I’ve buried two men. What have I to lose in my advancing years?
But if I cannot have that wish fulfilled, I’m still going to dash across roads in front of traffic. I speak my opinion in company even if it’s badly received– then those people were not worth knowing anyway. And I’ll go on spending money as if I had only an hour to live – and generally continue to be a total disgrace.
Madeline Smith starred in Hammer horror films. She was in The Two Ronnies and Up Pompeii!
Miss Caruso (Madeline Smith) & James Bond (Roger Moore), Live and Let Die (1973)
Fly south for winter
When the mercury plunges here, Anne Sargeantson heads to Nicaragua to top up on sunlight
Why slog all the way to Nicaragua as an octogenarian? I went at the tender age of 75 in 2014. I was with my youngest son, Dominic, an ex-film director, who started a travel company specialising in bespoke regional trips. He lives outside beautiful Granada, Central America’s oldest Spanish colonial city, with Stefano, his ten-year-old son.
I used to try and help Dominic with his large, glorious, as yet uncultivated, tropical garden. After 8am, it was too hot.
Dominic’s housekeeper, Adilia, cried, ‘Granny, you are too old and your face is red!’
She eventually became friends when I wanted to buy presents for my grandchildren. We went to the local market together on the bus.
rice – or rice and beans –accompanied by eggs, some fish, chicken and beef, tomatoes, local vegetables and tropical fruit.
Buses are hot, crammed with babies, livestock and parcels, but age wins every time with a seat offered. At the market, Adilia was my bodyguard, shooing people out of the way. In return, I bought her a set of saucepans.
Determined to learn Spanish, I tried a language school in Granada. Rather than explaining the finer points of grammar, the teachers far preferred chatting about the British Royal Family, their relationships and marriages. Do they all live in castles? Did I meet the late Queen? And did she wear a crown and always travel in a golden coach?
Babies, small children and elderly women are adored and admired everywhere, never alone and always attended by their families and neighbours.
Nicas’ respect for the aged is wonderfully reassuring. They always offer help to cross the road and negotiate steps, occasionally accompanied by an unexpected hug – rather startling at first, but I came to expect it and rather enjoy it.
Nicaragua is by no means a gourmet destination but the coffee is excellent.
The customary diet is beans and
Restaurants sometimes serve surprisingly delicious specials. I grew to relish Sopa de Frijoles – red bean soup, flavoured with coriander, topped with a poached egg and salty Nicaraguan cheese.
What about creepy-crawlies? I don’t like them any more than I used to but mosquitoes are not a problem and public buildings are regularly sprayed. Scorpions are not of 007 movie dimensions and can be easily dispatched with a flip-flop and only sting if touched.
Remedy? Coffee, of course, one of many trusted home remedies and
‘Granny, you are too old and your face is red!’
a cure-all for many ailments from insect bites to coughs, colds and headaches.
Nicas fear snakes. They are mostly harmless with the occasional poisonous variety, but Nicas would kill them all.
Another fear is water as so few people can swim. If it rains, the streets empty. Even if they can swim, Nicas stay at home to avoid pneumonia. If pregnant, do not go
outside in a full moon. On the other hand, the only time to prune shrubs and trees is when the moon is full. There is a lot to learn.
Contrary to some perceptions, Nicaragua is said to be the safest, law-abiding country in Latin America. As in all poor countries, there is a little petty theft, but drugs, guns and violent crime are very rare and there is a zealous police force.
Cars and motorbikes are regularly stopped by random police road blocks, manned by two or three black-clad, guntoting police.
Take your passport with you at all times for identification and you’ll be left alone as a visitor. When parking in a town or city, a ‘car watcher’, often a child, will keep an eye on your car in return for a few pesos. There will also be a moneychanger on any street corner with a large wad of cordobas, which he’ll count and peel off at an alarming speed in return for dollars.
I’ve now been to Nicaragua many times and travelled with Dominic to some beautiful, remote locations.
I’ve been steered up a small tributary in a flat-bottomed boat, stayed on a house on stilts above the Rio San Juan rapids and on private islands, been in dense rain forest surrounded by monkeys and beautiful tropical birds. I’ve watched my grandson’s surfing lessons on the Pacific coast.
Solo, I visited a coffee plantation high in the chilly hills of Matagalpa, where I discovered a women’s co-operative and joined in making ceramic bowls and jugs.
I am already looking forward to my next visit. Rainy season apart, the climate is bliss after the inevitable oldie creakiness that comes from enduring a chilly, damp British winter.
It’s well worth the long flight to laze on the shady terrace or under the mango trees in Dominic’s fragrant, sunlit garden, listening to the birds.
Anne Sargeantson explores the Rio San Juan
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 March 2025
Just relax
Don’t worry about Trump: The Return,
says Garry White
Masters of the art of growing old disgracefully have several common traits: passion for life, creativity and a healthy dollop of mischief with our long-developed wit and wisdom.
Significantly, we’ve also learned to stop worrying about the things we cannot change. Overthinking, and the anxiety this brings, can be left to the young folk as their generational cross to bear. We oldies know better than to fret.
It’s easy to see why many regard Donald Trump’s re-election as problematic. His ruthless partisanship, questionable morality and rejection of inclusion will likely harm many.
However, despite his use of fear to supress opponents, I cannot regard Trump: The Return as the horror movie sequel many believe it will be.
First, separate what Trump says and does. His deal-making modus operandi involves the threat of excessive penalties followed by some form of capitulation.
During his election campaign, Trump threatened to put major trade barriers up against Canada and Mexico on his first day in the White House. These did not materialise. He repeated the threat in February, only to postpone them at the eleventh hour, once action was taken and markets reacted negatively.
The 25% potential tariff on America’s neighbours was an incentive for both countries to do more to hinder the drug trade rather than leaving the battle to the US. The threats are designed to force action and are unlikely to be implemented in full – even if he does raise tariff barriers eventually.
I’m also relaxed
as the UK is likely to escape any significant measures.
Another good example of tariff threats working was seen at the end of January. As part of his immigration pledge, he sent two military planes to Colombia laden with deportees, but Bogota refused them permission to land.
In response, Mr Trump said he would retaliate with ‘urgent and decisive’ measures, including 25% tariffs on all Colombian goods.
After an initial bullish response, a few days considering the implications forced Colombian President Gustavo Petro to cave in
Overthinking – and the anxiety that this brings – can be left to the young folk as their generational cross to bear
to Trump’s demands. Petro even agreed to send his own plane to the US to pick up the deportees.
America may be a teenage nation, lacking the lessons learned in oldie Britain’s long history, but it remains a democratic country with checks and balances that limit the excesses of executive
Indeed, a federal judge has already blocked Trump’s executive order to end automatic citizenship for babies born on American soil.
This ban is temporary, but these sorts of actions will limit the change that can be enacted.
The Senate and the House of Representatives are currently controlled by Trump’s Republican Party. But it is just two years until the midterm elections, when incumbent presidents often lose control of one of these, making it more difficult to take major legislative action.
If history repeats itself, Trump has just two years to get his bills through the democratic process, limiting what can be done.
The stock market will be another check on this president’s excesses. Throughout his first term in office, Trump was an avid and vocal watcher of markets and often took credit for US indices hitting record highs, usually on social-networking sites, especially Twitter.
Any policy excess that causes inflation to spike is likely to upset the market and impact the valuations of US companies.
The Constitution was constructed to keep any
government into three executive, and handed to
His plans to introduce tariffs, shrink the US workforce by deporting undocumented migrant workers and make the tax cuts introduced in his first term permanent are all inflationary. If these are taken to extremes, Americans will feel poorer as their stock portfolio plunges and price rises eat away at household budgets. Although he won’t be standing for re-election, his ego will not want to see a legacy such as this.
So, despite his bluster and bullying, Trump is unlikely to be able to upset the applecart entirely. Look past what he says to what he’s actually able to do. Dismiss any long-term worries about his return.
His re-election is not something I can change, so the oldie within ensures I don’t expend my energies worrying too much about him.
Garry White is Chief Investment Commentator at Charles Stanley
I Once Met Auberon Waugh
When I met Auberon Waugh (19392001) in 1994, I had barely heard of him.
He and his wife, Teresa, had been billeted at our house for a nearby wedding. They came back after the event, took dinner with my mother, me and my then girlfriend, and then they went to bed, leaving early in the morning.
I didn’t give it another thought. Why would I? The dinner was the usual fare and of course I can’t remember what we spoke about. A year out of university and with the world apparently at my feet, why would a bespectacled writer, who wrote for the rags only people like my mother liked to read and whom I was unlikely ever to see again, hold a place in my mind? I was soon to find out.
A day or two later, his thank-you letter arrived. I have it in front of me and it is a masterpiece. Written on Literary Review writing paper, it runs to a full two pages in elusively hard-to-decipher handwriting. The dinner I had already forgotten comes back to life, but in colours I had been quite unaware of at the time.
It is as if he and Teresa had been dining in Hollywood or with the Queen rather than the good people of Oxfordshire. The food, the people and the accommodation are all described
with extravagant hyperbole.
He arrived after the wedding, feeling, he says, like ‘a sour, smug, stuck-in-the-mud’ but left our house ‘an optimistic old fool with the scent of adventure in the air’.
What could we possibly have done to prompt such a conversion? He considered me, my mother and the girlfriend to be ‘the most attractive, funny and clever people’ and apparently told Teresa on the way home that his idea of a perfect death would be to be taken from this world while sitting in conversation with the three of us around our table. Surely there are better exits to be wished for?
Waugh in the roses, 1976
house and our dining table to be remembered.
He couldn’t have met more normal people and it is beyond doubt that we would have had roast chicken followed by Bakewell tart. That is the secret to a great thank-you letter. It bumps the event up a few notches, makes light of the deficiencies and elevates the basics to frankly undeserved heights.
It gives thanks for something greater and more special than the parties in truth remember. It can rewrite history.
In 1963, when I was in my teens, I went for a job interview.
I was edgy about the questions they would fire at me and had an image of being confronted by a panel of interrogators, as in the scene in the Peter Sellers 1962 film Only Two Can Play. Sellers’s character had cause for concern because the panel’s chairman turned out to be the husband of his mistress. No such problems for the eighteen-year-old me, but it was still daunting. I was to be interviewed by
His conclusion – that it ‘will be remembered for the rest of our lives, or at least as long as there is conscious brain activity’ – is plain over the top.
Or is it? I don’t report what he wrote because it is gospel truth, but it is what I want the truth to be. It’s how I want our
So my meeting with Bron was at best fleeting. Had we met a month later, we would have looked through each other without a flicker of recognition. But his letter makes me feel as if I really knew this charming and discerning man; this lover of fine food and wine; this brilliant conversationalist.
And it has affected how I remember the event – where my recollection was at best pretty black-and-white, his letter adds a splash of colour and focus – like an old film remastered and retouched.
Matthew Faulkner
The elephant in the interview room
one apparently middle-aged chap. On meeting him again in later years, I realised that at the time he must have been only in his late twenties!
I sat outside his office while he finished a phone call. I was expecting to pick up some interesting snippets about the company or their contracts, but his conversation finished like this:
‘I’ve got a new one for you, Brian. How do you know if there’s an elephant in the pub?’
After a pause, he said, ‘OK, I’ll tell you. Because its bike is outside.’ Followed by laughter.
I was shocked to hear this captain of industry enjoying the latest craze for elephant jokes. It made me feel on a
par and more relaxed by the time I was called in.
In 1963, elephant jokes peppered our conversations. Their absurdity and slick delivery appealed to us rebellious youths.
How do you get four elephants into a Mini?
Two in the front and two in the back.
The silliness didn’t stop there.
How many giraffes can you get in a Mini?
None. It’s full of elephants. There’s more.
How do you get an elephant on top of an oak tree?
Stand it on an acorn and wait 50 years.
The craze that swept the western world was born in the USA. Lyle Becker, an
18-year-old whizz kid, had founded a trading-card company and produced cards bearing the first elephant jokes.
These cracks were picked up by newspapers and magazines and became part of sixties life.
The style of humour soon developed, leaving the elephants plodding behind. What’s yellow and dangerous?
Shark-infested custard. I told that one to my interviewer. He liked it – but I didn’t get the job.
By Ken Tracey, Orpington, Kent
Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past
The Oldie, 23–31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk
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I lived The Good Life
SIR: I grew up just round the corner from where the Goods (‘Fifty years of The Good Life’, March issue) had their garden, in Kewferry Road, Northwood.
At the time Northwood was a genteel suburb and quintessential Metro-Land. However, Tom and Barbara would not have had the seal of approval from the neighbours.
The Metropolitan Line visionaries under Edward Watkin wanted suburban man to use the train every weekday to commute, before coming back to his home away from the smoke.
The Goods had given this up in order to try to be self-sufficient – which, as we know, proved to be something of a struggle.
Some years later, I had the good fortune to mention this to Penelope Keith.
Yours faithfully, Kevin J Last, Hinton St George, Somerset
Taxing times
SIR: Poor Matthew Norman (‘Taxed to the max’, March issue). Quite right –phoning HMRC is a waste of time. So, too, is HMRC’s advice to write.
Nearly three years ago I submitted my estimated Capital Gains Tax, correct to the £, ready for immediate payment. No reply, in spite of my repeated letters.
After two years, I received an HMRC acknowledgement that they’d missed my first letter and agreement to my estimate. Plus a claim for two years’ interest! Foolishly, I paid it – but with a bitter complaint that the delay was HMRC’s fault, not mine.
I sent many further letters, with no answer. Nearly three years on, HMRC has replied, but with a warning that it will take a long time to review my case. Thank you, Matthew, for airing this issue. We need more journalists like you. Do taxpayers deserve this appalling service?
Rod Alexander, Kingswood, Gloucestershire
‘What
a small world! We’re rich, too’
Travelling very light
SIR: In response to Mary Killen’s wonderful ‘Confessions of a bag lady’ (March issue), here is the list of my four-month luggage in South East Asia last spring. It puts hers to shame.
I am very proud that I had only one backpack containing two pairs of shoes, six of socks, four of pants, two of trousers,
‘This call won’t be recorded, as our research knows your conversations are pretty damn dull’
shorts, three cargo shirts, notebook and biro, mobile and charger, first aid, a poncho, a hat, a water bottle, a toothbrush, nicked hotel soap, passport and a few plastic cards.
Regards,
David Rimmer, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire
Mice work
SIR: Your motoring correspondent, Alan Judd, highlighted (‘Mouse in the machine’, February issue) a matter that should be taken up by vehicle-manufacturers.
He wrote that a friend had mice eating the wiring in her Skoda Yeti because Skoda had replaced the plastic insulation with soya.
One night, I had rodents visiting three vehicles parked in my carport and driveway. One vehicle, a Toyota Hilux, had its wiring harness chewed to the extent that the repair bill came to $3,500. Toyota explained that the wiring was these days insulated with a plant-based material, not plastic.
Several acquaintances have had the same problem. I now leave the
bonnet partly raised and place a solar-powered light in the engine compartment; rodents don’t like light and openness. Peppermint oil is also recommended as a deterrent.
Philip Powell, Denmark, Western Australia
Tall stories
SIR: Reading Rebecca Willis’s Rant about the embellishment of anecdotes (March issue) reminded me of the late great Miles Kington’s reply when challenged about the veracity of a story.
‘Oh, yes, it all happened. Not necessarily in that order. Not necessarily at the same time. Not all in the same place. And not all of it to me.’
James Pembroke, Publisher, The Oldie, London W1
Trustworthy trusts
SIR: Neil Collins (Money Matters, March issue) is to be commended for championing the cause of Venture Capital Trusts.
Oldies who take his advice to invest in successful VCTs will enjoy income-tax relief and tax-free dividends, while helping our small companies to grow into big ones. The UK needs and will benefit from this growth.
Well done, Mr Collins! Yours faithfully, Robert Pellegrinetti, London NW5
Royal plinth
SIR: Does David Horspool’s article about plans to site the monument to Elizabeth II in St James’s Park (History, March issue)
‘It’s not me being stupid. It’s the smartphone being too smart’
reflect the abandonment of the decision, made public in 2013, to site the monument in Trafalgar Square, which would mean the end of the fourth plinth’s role as a showcase for public art?
Yours sincerely, Tony Medawar, London SW19
Rum with whisky
SIR: ‘A Rum Castle’ by Lucinda Lambton (Overlooked Britain, March issue) brought back vivid memories of a week, many years ago, that I spent walking over Rum with five old university pals while staying at Kinloch Castle. We were the only guests there to enjoy the fantastical décor and bathroom facilities.
orchestrion played us into dinner with rousing marches; we sat in the magnificent swivelling chairs from Sir George Bullough’s ‘yacht’, which became a hospital ship during the Boer War – he was knighted for his support of the war effort. After dinner, we had exclusive possession of the snooker saloon. We played snooker, and we were also able to sample all the Islay malts while doing so.
Oh yes, and the walking. Visibility was almost zero for much of the week owing to thick mist and rain, while miserable –but dangerous-looking – long-horned Highland cattle obstructed the tracks that we were trying to walk.
An unforgettable Scottish experience. Paul Emhirst, Stillingfleet, North Yorks
Taking a punt
SIR: Re Philip Corp’s letter (March issue), the Cherwell Boathouse, which still makes punts by hand, is quite clear that the end with the flat deck is the front. Why would you stand on a shiny surface, slippery when wet and at least a foot above the water, where body movement causes the punt to rock?
In the morning, an upright stuffed grizzly bear was waiting to greet us at the bottom of the stairs. In the evening, the Kinloch Castle, Rum, 1900
“How about fashionably never?’
The correct end has always been, and always will be, the back of the punt, which is low down, reducing rocking, and has both a long punter area –important for the duration of the pole push – and a non-slip wooden grid for punter stability.
If Mr Corp wishes, I could demonstrate this with a race from the Cherwell Boathouse to the Vicky Arms –loser to buy the beers. I make this offer with confidence, although I am 70!
Ian Brent-Smith, Bicester, Oxfordshire
Jesus the builder
SIR: The ancient city of Sepphoris, thriving at the time of Christ and home to Jews, Romans and Greeks, was only four miles from Bethlehem. It was reputed to be the birthplace of the Virgin Mary. It is very likely that Joseph, as a construction worker, accompanied by Christ, would have spent time on jobs there – and Christ would have been exposed to Greek and Roman influences as well as his native Aramaic. Lamartine in his Voyage to the Orient (1835) refers to visiting Sepphoris, but only quite recently have excavations revealed the scale and importance of the place.
Yours faithfully, Elizabeth Blackshaw, Rottingdean, East Sussex
Dr Crippen in the dock
CHRISTOPHER BRAY
Story of a Murder
By Hallie Rubenhold Doubleday £25
It is 79 years since George Orwell wrote Decline of the English Murder
Orwell dissected those ‘murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost everyone and which have been made into novels and rehashed over and over again by the Sunday papers’.
Yet those same cases – Dr Crippen,
Jack the Ripper – are still being retold. A few years ago Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five gave us a feminist take on the Whitechapel killings. Now, in Story of a Murder, she takes on the Crippen case.
Crippen’s story is quickly told. Michigan-born, Crippen was a quack homeopath who fetched up in London in 1897 at the age of 33. His wife, Belle, was a music-hall singer of Polish extraction.
The marriage was difficult, and Belle was never shy of letting her husband know about her men friends. Crippen, meanwhile, took a fancy to Ethel Le Neve, an office typist.
Then, one night in January 1910, after the Crippens had hosted dinner at their
home in Kentish Town, Belle vanished. At first, Crippen told her friends she had returned to America on a whim. Pressed for more information, he suddenly announced that she had died.
At first, he said this had happened in Los Angeles; a few days later, he changed the location to San Francisco.
At this point, Belle’s pals called Scotland Yard, and Crippen changed his story entirely. Cora wasn’t dead: he had simply been too embarrassed to admit she’d left him for a lover.
Chief Inspector Dew seems to have
Murder most foul: Dr Crippen poisoned Belle, his music-hall singer wife
swallowed this guff. But Crippen, who had in fact poisoned Belle with hyoscine on the night of her disappearance, didn’t believe the flatfoots could be fatheads. After he’d ordered Ethel to cut her hair and disguise herself as a boy, they fled for Canada aboard the SS Montrose.
The ship’s captain thought there was something rum about this father and son. By means of Marconi’s fabulous new radio gizmo, he contacted the cops. Dew booked a faster transatlantic passage and was there to arrest Crippen as he arrived in Canada.
Hallie Rubenhold’s putative USP on this oft-told tale is in the bigging up its female angle. Not, note, the feminist angle. Whatever else it is, Story of a Murder is not a work of angry agitprop.
Far from defending women against the poisonous patriarchy Crippen embodied, Rubenhold is keen to implicate Ethel Le Neve in the murder of her rival.
This is certainly a twist on a tale that has most often revolved round Crippen’s insistence that his lover had nothing to do with his wife’s murder. But it isn’t a new twist. David James Smith’s Supper with the Crippens (2005) went over much the same ground.
And at a faster clip. Boy, does Story of a Murder plod. Given the dearth of evidence against Le Neve, Rubenhold is obliged to get creative with her narrative. The book is full of ‘must have’s – Crippen ‘must have known’ this, ‘sensed’ that and ‘suspected’ something else.
At one point, Rubenhold talks of how easy it is to ‘imagine Ethel gazing across the road [from Crippen’s offices] up at the illuminated windows of King Edward’s Mansions, dreaming, planning, plotting’. Indeed one can, though whether one should is another matter.
But Rubenhold is off, talking of ‘an itch that is difficult not to scratch, a conclusion that wants to be drawn’. By the time she describes Ethel as having been ‘pushed … over the edge’ by an ‘inciting incident’, we might as well be listening to a movie pitch.
Then again, perhaps a story that’s as thin as Crippen’s needs the melodramatic treatment. For all the grubbiness of his crime (Belle’s body was dismembered; only her torso has ever been found), nobody has ever convincingly painted him as a psycho sex killer. He was a Pooterish dullard, with the most mundane of murder motives. Offing your spouse and running away with a lover is as everyday as violent crime gets.
Reading Story of a Murder, you can’t help wondering if Crippen’s tale would ever have been retold were it not for the grim onomatopoeia of his surname. His Christian names were Hawley Harvey, a breathy cocktail that evokes the blessed memory of Charles Hawtrey – though it was Peter Butterworth who actually got to parody Crippen in Carry On Loving. Hallie Rubenhold retells it capably enough, but there’s no getting away from the fact that that’s all she does. You put the book down thinking of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s crack about what’s true isn’t new and what’s new isn’t true – or anyway not susceptible of proof.
Time, then, for a Ruth Rendell…
Christopher Bray is author of Michael Caine: A Class Act
Very Grand Guignol
ROGER LEWIS
Empty Wigs
By Jonathan Meades Unbound £25
Sensitivity editors qualified in Diversity Awareness Training at any conglomerated house would have 40 fits combing through Jonathan Meades’s manuscript.
The N-word turns up, as does the assertion ‘wogs begin at Calais’. Jews have ‘enormous snozzles’, which use up an unfair share of oxygen.
Paedophilia is not a crime but ‘expressions of fondness’. Middle Eastern fundamentalism is the property of ‘superstitious illiterates’ and ‘superstitious barbarians,’ who have no intention of civilising themselves, as they rather enjoy acts of terror. The Third Reich was green before ‘green’ ever was – so bully for them.
And so on and so forth. Sexism, racism, old bufferism, Islamophobia – all the shibboleths are present. Luckily for Meades (and for us), his enlightened publisher, the crowdfunded Unbound, can see that the offensiveness and riotous bad taste are satirically intended.
The opinions belong not to the author as such but to his ghoulish cast of characters, who have names like Yonatan Alfasi, Micky Mavroleon, Cornelia Prance and K Winston Dogg.
Sometimes, as here, one can be confronted with a slab of prose –Wyndham Lewis, late-period Henry James – and although sheer majesty is registered, and appreciated, what is being said, what quite is going on,
‘See what happens if you don’t stop chewing your fingernails!’
is harder to explain. Thus Empty Wigs – a phrase meaning empty-headedness, intellectual blindness and obtuseness; a zombie-like state, of deliberately not thinking too deeply about anything.
Meades thinks deeply about everything. If I understand what he is about, in this thousand-pager, he is arguing that, should the world about us finally and thoroughly be examined, what’s on show, the unvarnished truth, is ‘heartless, criminal, psychopathic and misanthropic’.
Cultures and societies, for example, keep going to war because ‘the smell of war was invigorating’. Destruction whets the appetite for more destruction, chaos for chaos. The only statement to be made with certainty about life is that it’ll turn into death.
The Meades view, a cruel one, is that there’s no kindness, niceness, compassion or empathy anywhere to be found – not really; no such things as friendship or warmth. Love is ‘a meaningless word’, a sign of ‘virtuous mental flagellation’ made by ‘soupkitchen pietists’.
And don’t bring Jesus into it. ‘Jesus turned the other cheek. He was rewarded with nails through his palms.’ The Christian mass, into the bargain, is ‘part cannibalistic gluttony, part homoerotic sadism’.
Normality, in this epic, is famine, plagues, boils. It is typical of Meades to mention ‘bloody bandages caked with brain tissue’, and the reason the book is exhilarating is the adolescent relish with which horrors are described. Atrocities get the author’s imagination going: scorched blood and scalded bones, ‘rot’s many colours’, rashes and buboes,
medical procedures and diseases, such as malaria, cholera and typhus.
‘Venereal infections of the anus’ recur, the suppurations and abscesses, along with farcical medical mishaps such as ‘household good gone missing in people’s rectums’ – eg the nozzle of a Hoover Dustette.
Meades does enjoy picturing bombs and shootings: ‘The tremor burst the blocks. Bodies were spun through windows by the force of relief blasts’; ‘The shot’s blow hurled him from the banquette.’
In the search for scenes of destruction, the surrealistic action wheels from post-colonial North Africa, which allows for topical discussion of the problems of mass migration and over-crowding, to English woodlands full of ‘hellhags and lycanthropes in the broken trunks and severed boughs’.
Here, estates and parkland are requisitioned for military purposes, and mad aristocrats dine on roast fox – ‘every bit as good as dog meat’.
One minute, we are in the company of armed insurrectionists (‘I seldom knew what I was carrying or the identity of the person I was delivering to’). The next, we are on the trail of French collaborators ‘who had done the Germans’ bidding with enthusiasm’, tracking down Jews and the handicapped for deportation and death. No wonder, after Belsen, Jews thought, ‘If they can do that to us, why cannot we do it to them?’
Empty Wigs is at odds to prove that real, propulsive and persistent cosmic forces are brutal. Sex is animalistic breeding. ‘Humans are animal, everywhere begot by animal behaviour.’
This is not only a metaphor, as Meades parades crackpot scientists in laboratories, who are doing things with horses, bulls and cows: ‘higher miscegenation and crossspecies harmony’.
Mention is also made, predictably, of Nazi experimentation in the House of Dolls, and incest is more than a footnote: ‘Motherly love was never so motherly.’
What makes the book more than an indulgent malign fiesta is the comic verve, the rococo prose. It is as if Firbank, Anthony Burgess, Nabokov and Mervyn Peake had hunkered down in Elysium to concoct sentences over draughts of absinthe, and had then dispatched the result to Meades in a fever dream.
Roger Lewis is author of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor
Old New York
IVO DAWNAY
Taking Manhattan
By Russell Shorto Swift Press £20
If the art of the deal has a global HQ, it has to be the famously transactional US President’s home town – New York or, more specifically, Manhattan. Deal-making lies buried deep in its early history and collective DNA.
New York – or New Amsterdam as it then was – became the capital of the provincial extension of the Dutch Republic 400 years ago.
In 1625, Broadway was still an Indian trail and Wall Street merely the location of a small town’s northern ramparts.
Yet, according to a new history, it was largely the commercial genius of the Dutch – together with a smattering of English realpolitik – that fuelled New York’s eventual takeover from the British capital as the world’s new Rome.
The first deal, of course, was the acquisition from the Lenape Indians in 1625 of southern Manhattan for a very reasonable 60 guilders – $700 at today’s values (and, contrary to myth, no chickens were involved). The second, 40 years later, saw the epicentre of global capitalism snaffled up by the English by decidedly Trumpian means.
In much the same way as the 47th US President is today parking his gun boats outside Greenland and Panama, in 1664 an English flotilla made the Dutch an offer for their New Amsterdam
colony that they could not refuse. They called it New York, after the Duke of York, later James II.
But, before handing over the tiny 1,500-strong New Amsterdam colony without a shot fired, the outgunned Dutch still managed – from a position of abject weakness – to negotiate a deal that ensured its unique, global freetrading practices would remain undisturbed.
Elsewhere, the newly returned Stuart regime in London was rigorously applying the Navigation Acts in an attempt to stymie the Dutch maritime empire – then much larger than its own.
The Acts – triggering two bloody naval wars – demanded that all trading with English colonies could be conducted only by English ships sailing from English ports.
But, in the tense, week-long stand-off between Colonel Richard Nicolls’s four frigates and peg-legged Peter Stuyvesant, governor of the colony, exemption from this monopolistic restraint of trade was agreed.
By good fortune, sensible, eventempered Nicolls, a childhood playmate of the Duke of York, was as pragmatic as his new subjects.
To avoid conflict, he retained the semi-democratic, Dutch civic practices – as a burgemeester – and governed largely by consultation and consent.
His free-trading concession massively advantaged the tobacco- and fur-traders of newly named New York over the other English North American colonies – not least Massachusetts, whose obstreperous, didactic Puritanism
was loathed in equal measure by both the Dutch and the Anglo-Catholic Stuarts.
While the killjoy Bostonians were still burning witches and Quakers alike, the Manhattan colonialists – just half of them Dutch, the rest a flotsam and jetsam of Europeans – practised genuine religious liberty.
Moreover, Russell Shorto’s thesis –derived from a stash of newly translated papers – paints a picture of a town already drunk on luxury and materialism and, no doubt, one-upmanship.
The supercharged competitive greed that eventually produced today’s dazzling neon skyscape set in early.
‘Its people were no longer content with primitive lives,’ he writes. ‘They had built solid and elegant homes … stocked with silver, crystal, and brandy for entertaining; good-quality paper and ink; elegant furniture made by European craftsmen; stockings and lace.’
Show-off fat-cattery was born.
Shorto’s central point is that New York’s secret sauce for success was its uniquely Dutch, 17th-century culture of open, global trade, combined with a worldly-wise – not to say cynical –pragmatism that viewed negotiation, not bullets, as the best way to confront raw power.
The book is a reminder too of how much more advanced Dutch capitalism was than England’s. While still fighting their former Spanish masters, the burghers of Amsterdam had already created their East and West India Companies with stocks and shares – then invented a stock exchange in 1604 to trade them. By contrast, the London Stock Exchange did not open for business until 1801.
Shorto’s vivid and fast-paced narrative conveys the effervescent spirit of the age – and its disappointments. By the time he left in 1668, Nicholls had suffered his own setback. His boss, later the much hated James II, consigned, with typical Stuart arbitrariness, a large chunk of the territory to a newly created New Jersey colony – a favour for a friend which illogically shattered the coherence of the Hudson estuary between two authorities.
Yet Nicolls had successfully kept New York out of the bloody Second AngloDutch War and was finally bidden farewell at the dock by genuinely sad and grateful townspeople.
It was his misfortune to die – killed by, ironically, a Dutch cannonball – in the Third War, just four years later.
Ivo Dawnay was Washington Bureau Chief for the Sunday Telegraph
Spring’s role
PATRICK BARKHAM
Spring Is the Only Season: How It Works, What It Does and Why It Matters
By Simon Barnes Bloomsbury £18.99
There is a moment when we first encounter spring that we might call pure joy.
Often it is more delicious and complicated than that: it’s the excited, restless bewitchment experienced by Mole in the opening of The Wind in the Willows. When we are sprung on like that, we are transformed. We commit acts of great praise or foolishness, and life is never quite the same again.
Many of us develop personal definitions of the apotheosis of spring. For me, it is when a butter-yellow brimstone butterfly bursts out from behind the catkins and sets off into the pale-blue late-February sky. As befits a writer best known for sharing the delights of birdwatching, Simon Barnes loves the first swallow, in which he sees ‘a promise of happy, carefree days that will last for as long as the swallows stay with us’.
These are moments of thankfulness, and anyone struggling with winter will thank Spring Is the Only Season for its generous definition of spring.
Spring, Barnes reasons, begins the moment after the winter solstice, when the days start to lengthen again, and does not end until midsummer’s day.
Capturing spring’s elusive magic has vexed the greatest artists. In recent years, explorations of spring in British nature writing have tended to focus on emotional journeys. But Barnes tries a different approach, more akin to an American popular science writer in its tone, ambition and global reach.
This is a kaleidoscopic, encyclopaedic book. If there was a degree in spring (there’s an idea), it would be a foundational set text. It addresses every aspect of spring, large and small, from the creation of the universe to the phytoplankton that bloom in the seas when seasonal warmth arrives.
We begin with the reason we have seasons in the northern and southern hemispheres: because the earth not only spins but wobbles.
On we tilt through thematic chapters looking at biological expressions of spring (in botany, birdsong, flight, eggs) and also the myriad cultural ways in
which the human animal has celebrated spring – in mythology, poetry, painting, literature and even sport.
As a former sportswriter par excellence, Barnes is on home turf as he describes spring festivals of sport, such as the London Marathon, where amateur runners triumphantly conquer ‘the great horizontal Everest of suburbia’.
Barnes is a fine teacher, possessing a talent for big-picture thinking, close observation, deft synthesis and wit.
We learn that the Easter bunny is actually a hare, how skylarks sing on and on without appearing to breathe, and how some birds, butterflies and other insects tackle the ‘annual catastrophe’ that is winter ‘by not being there when it happens’.
Spring Is the Only Season does not flinch from the restlessness of spring, which in many animals is due to an urge to mate (a familiar human impulse, although one not, we learn, shared by bats).
I particularly enjoyed Barnes’s analyses of the literature of spring, where he bravely includes Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and his chapter on how spring has been painted. There are also astute discussions of the fearsome disrupters and silencers of spring – the second agricultural revolution and global heating. Plenty will be familiar to experts in each field, but few readers will be expert in every field we romp through in this polymathic book.
We are told a lot, and yet I would have enjoyed more spring days out with Barnes, as when he shows us adders basking in early spring sunshine, or more emotional storytelling, which he offered in his recent On the Marsh
But every author has the right to define his or her own terms, and write different kinds of books, and Spring
‘This isn’t what the marriage counsellor meant by setting aside one night a week as date night’
Is the Only Season emphatically does what it claims in its subtitle: here is spring, the universe and everything.
For all the knowledge that Barnes imparts, I was most moved by his short, deceptively simple lists of spring observations which end each chapter.
These have been sculpted into minimalist near-poetry, rather like the haikus he eloquently celebrates in a section on spring in Japan – a country that enlarges spring by planting blossoming cherry trees in every public space.
And so, on 29th January, we have: Two great tits singing Snowdrops under weeping willow Single gnat
And 1st April strikes a comedic note: May blossom
Thirty-eight restless curlews, about to migrate north Green-veined white (butterfly)
Brief lie in hammock
This is it! We can feel spring! As Barnes writes, ‘Spring is not just the nicest time of the year; it’s the closest we get to paradise.’
Patrick Barkham is author of Wild Child: Coming Home to Nature
War of the Words
NICHOLAS LEZARD
The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War
By Charlie English William Collins £25
The CIA is, for many in the West, a name of ill omen: the spookiest of spooks, capable of assassinations, the overthrowing of democratically elected governments, stuffing explosives into Fidel Castro’s cigars, you name it.
But the subtitle of this book suggests something even more sinister or embarrassing. And, indeed, much of the material in this book remains classified – English had to ask the participants directly for their memories.
The murky secret, it turns out, was that the CIA funded numerous underground presses throughout Eastern (Soviet) Europe during the Cold War.
It paid for the printing and distribution of hundreds of titles of books and magazines throughout the Soviet Union. And that was it; no violence or skulduggery was used at all.
Well, there was skulduggery on the anti-Soviet side. There had to be, to get materials and books smuggled into the countries, and news out of them.
‘I feel like I’ve got one good novelist in me’
The violence, apart from the occasional hot-headed offshoot (which was more symbolic than anything, and not intended to hurt anyone), came solely from the authorities.
Those who pine for the return of Soviet-style government should read this book, which contains alarming details about what happened to those dissidents who ended up in jail. It was brutal, and not limited to physical violence.
This book centres almost exclusively on Poland. That is where most of the resources went, because – especially after the 1979 election of Pope John Paul II and the 1981 Gdansk strikes –Poland looked like being the first part of the Soviet world to detach itself.
And for English to have included the stories of every other Eastern European nation would have meant at least five times as much work.
The Polish story is compelling enough. The censorship was so extensive that even a book on how to grow your own carrots was blacklisted – because it implied collective farms were not good enough. A part of me wonders how you can spin a whole book out of growing carrots in your backyard, but it’s the principle of the thing that counts.
Other books and authors on the forbidden list were the obvious ones such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and anything by Solzhenitsyn, Camus, Bertrand Russell, Kurt Vonnegut and Philip Roth. And Agatha Christie. Why? The occasional country-house settings? Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Blandings stories were allowed in because the security services deemed them to be vicious satires against the upper classes, which is, I suppose, a possible reading. Also banned, and smuggled in, were publications such as Marie Claire,
Cosmopolitan and the New York Review of Books. There is a lot of derring-do in these pages, and the courage and ingenuity of the people involved are almost shaming when we consider the costs of dissidence.
During Poland’s period of martial law, which overturned all the advances gained by the efforts of the Polish trade union Solidarność, involvement in printing underground material, among an enormous number of irritants to the regime, carried the death sentence.
English evokes the chill of fear and anxiety – and the chill of a Warsaw winter, and the fug of tobacco smoke where presses and the editors worked.
He likes to mention what the weather was like on given days almost half a century ago, and if he uses some imaginative licence, why not? It helps build up the picture.
It’s hinted that the CIA’s reluctance to let the files regarding their promotion of literature into the public domain is because there were always two divisions to the organisation.
One was cerebral, the other gung-ho. The latter thought the former to be a bunch of sissies, and wanted to get on with what they considered to be the real work. But there is plenty of spy stuff here, with safe houses, drops and shaking off the secret police tails.
Smuggling a printing press behind the Iron Curtain is about as easy as it sounds. But they managed it.
In Poland, it’s not really done to remind people that the CIA were involved, for perhaps obvious reasons. But, as one of the key players of the time said, ‘I thought, wow, a secret service supporting books – that’s fantastic.’
Nicholas Lezard wrote It Gets Worse: Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury
A Life in Books – Lady Antonia Fraser Charles II’s difficulties with girls
Writing history, I began to view quite ordinary situations in a different light.
Why should Charles II, in his youth, bother about children – his own or anyone else’s?
When his father was executed by Parliament in 1649, Charles II, as he became, was not yet 19. Time surely to be concentrating on his own youth rather than on the youth of the country.
Charles II was a handsome man with the darkly attractive looks of his Medici ancestors. He would not lack for little friends, whether they were princesses or chambermaids.
But the real question that occupied Europe after the death of Charles I was not so much the little prince or princess playing in the royal nursery, as the fine lady who might be seated on the royal throne beside her husband: the queen and mother of the future king (or queen).
What mattered about this fine lady was, first, that she should be properly married and, secondly, that she should give birth to an heir (preferably but not essentially male).
Antonia’s ancestor Charles II (1630-85) by John Wright, c 1676
contemporary doubt about Monmouth’s paternity and rumours about Robert Sidney (with whom Lucy Walter certainly had a fling), in fact his appearance clearly echoes that of Charles II. The real question was marriage. Could Lucy Walter claim the role once occupied by Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s queen?
In English – and Scottish and Irish – history, the identity of the mother, as well as that of the father, has a special importance.
While studying Charles II in the 1970s, I discovered my own by-nomeans-unique royal descent – from Barbara Villiers, one of Charles II’s main mistresses. The importance of Barbara lay in the length of time she exercised her power over the King.
One of her sons – Fitzroy; that is, the king’s son – ended up being created Duke of Grafton. A huge proportion of the English aristocracy can claim descent from him, including the late Diana Princess of Wales (and, by further descent, our present King).
Very early on, the future Charles II demonstrated that male infertility was never going to be one of his problems. At the same time, it became uncomfortably obvious that marrying the mother of the future monarch was another matter altogether. That is, marrying someone of suitably royal blood, able to bear healthy children, preferably male and bringing with them perhaps a royal alliance or two.
Compared with a light-hearted evening in a great hall, ending perhaps in a sweet little memento nine months later, this was an infinitely harder task.
All of this was in considerable contrast to my own life. When I was contemplating writing about Charles II, I had two children and was expecting a third.
No question here of succession to anything! Just a rather anguished listing of expenses at my monthly accounting, and muttered sentences: ‘If we have a boy (we already had two daughters), we mustn’t forget public schools are getting to be terrifying in how much they cost.’
This would be followed by a resolute promise to myself: ‘Enough. I shall think about Charles II and his future, not my own.’
And I buried myself in the anguishing but highly enjoyable history of Europe and Charles, telling myself to concentrate on the English succession and forget about the cost of a British taxi ride.
As Charles the exile wandered round Europe, the first possible future monarch made his appearance.
He would be known as the Duke of Monmouth (1649-85), but at this stage he was simply the delightful baby son of a saucy Welsh girl, Lucy Walter.
It was at the Hague that Charles first encountered Lucy, a pretty, young girl whom John Evelyn described as ‘brown and beautiful, bold but insipid’.
He found her again and the couple, in a manner of speaking, fell in love; at any rate, were linked by enough passion for there to be rumours of their marriage.
And there were enough rumours for their son, Monmouth, to be thought to have a real claim to the throne – at a time when Charles II was sinking fast towards the grave. It was all a question of marriage. Plenty of girls had had a loving relationship with Charles, but could any of them conceivably claim to be his wife – and thus the mother of a legitimate prince?
Although there was some
My finest hour was when I was invited to go to Edinburgh to celebrate the anniversary of the Royal College of Physicians, founded by Charles II. I decided that to begin by claiming boldly, ‘Both you and I – surveying the crowded hall – can claim descent from King Charles II.’
The 17th century ended as it had begun – with a tricky situation over succession. People had worried away about the succession to the unmarried Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I – a worry that had ended with the emergence of James VI from Scotland as James I of Great Britain.
With the death of James II, the situation was even more complicated. Who was to be the monarch? The question of the mother emerged again. Was the monarch to be the Protestant princess, Anne, daughter of Anne Hyde, a royal lady-in-waiting and first wife of James II? Or was it to be James Stuart, the baby son of the Catholic second wife, Mary of Modena?
Queen Anne prevailed – and the baby son became the Old Pretender, father of Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Antonia Fraser is author of King Charles II
The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.
David Hockney
If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.
Lewis Carroll
I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time.
Charles M Schulz
If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.
A A Milne
Nobody realises that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Albert Camus
You taught me that what mattered first was narrative, and that if one wanted to do anything extra, one must still see to it that the story stood up on its own.
Kingsley Amis to Somerset Maugham, 1955
You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.
Walt Disney
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the rest is in the hands of God.
George Washington
Commonplace Corner
Elegance is inferior to virtue.
Mary Shelley
Scenery is fine – but human nature is finer.
John Keats
If you don’t want your kids to be like Bart Simpson, don’t act like Homer Simpson.
Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons
Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.
Goethe
The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.
H G Wells
If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile-driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack.
Winston Churchill
Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.
Anne Frank
I never saw an ugly thing in my life. For let the form of an object be what it may –light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.
John Constable
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Gustave Flaubert
There is one rule for politicians all over the world. Don’t say in power what you say in opposition. If you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.
John Galsworthy
A careless shoestring, in whose tie I see a wild civility, Do more bewitch me, than when art Is too precise in every part.
Robert Herrick, Delight in Disorder
See me safe up: for in my coming down, I can shift for myself.
Thomas More
Pretentious prices
Many trendy coffee bars and bistros have adopted a pretentious habit –omitting the final numeral from the price on the menu.
These haughty cafés love to display their wares, usually on a handwritten board, in the most twee fashion: ‘Flat white – 4.1’, ‘Earl Grey tea – 3.3’, ‘Pain aux raisins – 3.6’.
I’m not too sure of the logic behind this strange practice, but it’s something you don’t see in other trades. I can’t imagine my local garage offering a full service and MOT for 235.5.
Maybe they think it looks less expensive; that, by leaving out the end number, it will make the price appear smaller, thus cheaper. And they usually exclude the pound sign too, craftily removing the concept of money
altogether, in the hope we’ll be further duped into thinking we’re getting a right old bargain.
Or possibly they believe it has an appealing quirkiness that will charm us into ordering extra shots and sprinkles to turn our regular latte into a Wonka-esque confection.
SMALL DELIGHTS
Bedtime and your wife says, ‘My headache’s gone.’
MIKE HOWE, GILSTON, HERTS
Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk
I reckon it’s more likely a vain attempt to portray the image of a chic Parisian patisserie, by trying to make the downing of a basic coffee and cake in your local diner feel like a fancy-pants gourmet experience in La Belle France.
For a barista in Blighty, trying to conjure up the feel of an Americano in Paris can work only with a complete change in the look of the price, because we use a different currency.
But whatever the motive, trying to turn a coffee into an Escoffier simply by leaving off the last character seems to me like a pompous cup of old bullshit.
JON ASKEW
David Hockney
FILM
HARRY MOUNT
BRIDGET JONES: MAD ABOUT THE BOY (15)
Just before Bridget Jones’s Diary was published in 1996, there was a single embargoed proof copy doing the rounds in the offices of Picador, the book’s publisher.
The twentysomethings and thirtysomethings in the office raced through that single copy in turn, leaving it tattered and dog-eared, if not quite soaked in Chardonnay and Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream.
Helen Fielding’s book was pitchperfect and extremely funny – because, like most great comedy, it had truth at its heart. The first film, also called Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), was spot-on, too.
The same can’t be said for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy – the fourth film in the series. It doesn’t have that kernel of truth. Instead, it’s a clumsy weepie-meets-romcom, with the original actors nailed onto its creaking structure, and the comedy elements of Bridget’s character awkwardly hammered on top.
Those actors remain brilliant. Renée Zellweger’s English accent and delivery are flawless. When she went undercover in those same Picador offices as a publishing assistant before the first film came out, no one rumbled her.
Colin Firth is a lesson in sombre understatement, but he barely appears as Mark Darcy, Bridget’s husband, except as a ghost. That’s because Darcy is dead – and the film begins with Bridget facing the agonies of widowhood and single motherhood.
And, without Colin Firth to spar with, Hugh Grant is in a tricky position as Daniel Cleaver, the charming, monstrous rogue. Some of the best bits
Arts
of the earlier films involved Cleaver sparring with Darcy in pathetic, middleclass fights.
Left to his own devices, Grant is still a masterly actor, but he is acting into a void, without Firth as his foil. And without Zellweger as his love interest. Cleaver’s super-shagger mega-confidence has faded as he hits his mid-sixties and faces a lonely, sickly old age with an estranged teenage son.
Bridget’s gloom is lifted by the boy of the title, Roxster, played by the hot young thing of the moment, Leo Woodall.
Woodall is perfectly good, and good-looking, but not nearly as good, or good-looking, as Hugh Grant – even now. He’s little more than a symbol of youth –at one point stripping off his soaked white shirt, in an echo of Colin Firth’s strip scene as Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (1995).
You feel nothing for Roxster. You feel nothing for Bridget as her grief is momentarily relieved by him. And you still don’t feel anything for Bridget when
Sad about the boy: Renée Zellweger
she finds real happiness with a more suitable man of her own age, a teacher at her children’s school, Mr Wallaker –played by Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Mr Wallaker is in fact a real person –in real life, the slightly differently spelt Mr Walliker, a teacher at University College School, north London, who taught Helen Fielding’s son, Dash.
But, in real life, Helen Fielding didn’t end up with Mr Walliker. She just thought he was a very good teacher. In that jump from real life to the romance demanded by fiction, ramped up by the demands of film adaptation, you lose the suspension of disbelief, good as Ejiofor is at trying to suspend it.
The chord the first Bridget book and first Bridget film struck now sounds off-key. In the packed cinema where I watched the new film, there were a few laughs from Bridget loyalists. But there was none of that electric feel – or the gales of laughter – you get with a film that really goes straight to the heart.
Helen Fielding’s co-screenwriters – Dan Mazer (co-creator, with Sacha Baron Cohen, of the sublime Ali G, Borat and Brüno) and Abi Morgan (The Split and Eric) – couldn’t be any better qualified. And even Richard Curtis and Andrew Davies – who wrote the screenplay of Bridget Jones’s Diary with Fielding – would have been hard-pressed to save this project.
There are well-observed lines on the agonies of the excruciatingly polite post-bereavement dinner party. And there are a few moments when you feel your heartstrings plucked by Bridget’s sadness.
But, in the end, this isn’t an elegy for Mark Darcy, but an elegy for the triumph of Bridget Mark I – the thirtysomething who mirrored the true feelings of a generation, heightened those feelings and turned them into comic genius.
THEATRE
WILLIAM COOK
IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY
The Mill at Sonning, until 12th April
Is Ray Cooney, 92, Britain’s most unfashionable playwright?
In 2012, when Cooney co-directed a movie of his biggest stage hit, Run for Your Wife (‘as funny as leprosy’), film critics queued up to give it a ferocious kicking. It was widely cited as one of the worst British films ever made.
Yet showbiz history is littered with awful films of fine plays. Run for Your Wife ran for nearly nine years in London’s West End, Cooney’s plays are regularly revived in theatres throughout the land, and Cooney has become a byword for British bedroom farce, Britain’s answer to Georges Feydeau. Isn’t it terribly snobbish for critics to deride a beloved farceur who sets out simply to entertain?
I must confess to being one of those snooty critics. For decades, I didn’t so much deride Cooney as ignore him. In 40 years of theatregoing, I’d never seen his work on stage. This was a grave omission – as for a film critic who’s never seen a Carry On film. So when I heard the Mill at Sonning was reviving his hospital comedy, I beat a path to their (barn) door.
This idyllic dinner theatre has been going strong for over 40 years. Dinner theatre is quite common in America, but in Britain it remains a rarity. I don’t know why. As theatregoers know all too well, an evening at the theatre means indigestion: eating far too fast, far too late or far too early. Here, you can wolf down a yummy sit-down meal, then stroll straight into the stalls.
I loved my steak-and-ale pie and lemon tart (with a pint of Loddon, the local ale), and an even bigger attraction is the theatre itself, on a leafy island in the Thames.
There’s been a mill here since the Domesday Book. This oak-beamed building dates back to the 18th century. When Tim and Eileen Richards discovered it, in 1977, it was derelict. They spent five years restoring it, and opened it as a theatre in 1982. It’s now run by their daughter, actress Sally Hughes. It’s a charming hideaway, a bucolic haven in the Thames Valley commuter belt. You’d never know workaday Reading is only a few miles away.
Yes, but aside from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play? Well, I had a lovely evening out (here, the
performance is only part of the experience), but the show itself left quite a lot to be desired.
First, the script. For students of social history, It Runs in the Family is very revealing about British attitudes to sexuality – and not in a good way. It was written in 1987. It feels more like 1957. It’s hard to fathom that Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus (1973) and Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (1982) – two British farces that have aged far better –predate it.
You’d be a fool to expect feminism in a trouser-dropping comedy, but there’s something rather off about the depictions of women in this play. Yes, the male characters are ridiculous and the female characters get the last laugh, but there’s an uneasy froideur to this drama.
I’m often infuriated by the insufferable wokeness of modern drama. This play made me think today’s cultural warriors might have a point.
Secondly, the direction. It may sound like an unlikely criticism of a bedroom farce, but I found a lot of the acting much
too broad. Farce should be about normal, sensible people caught up in ridiculous situations. The characters themselves should be as ordinary as you and I. Steven Pinder is wonderfully naturalistic as the adulterous doctor, but several of the supporting players were far too cartoonish for my liking.
Yet this audience clearly relished it. They didn’t seem to mind the hackneyed characters (the matron, the policeman...). They adored the preposterous plot twists and seaside-postcard humour. There were lots of laughs throughout, and the chatter on the way out was appreciative.
It made me wonder whether the West End is actually completely unrepresentative of what people up and down the country really want from a night out at the theatre.
Some of us want to be provoked and challenged in the theatre. Cooney understands that most people just want to be amused.
Clockwise from bottom right: Steven Pinder, Natasha Gray, James Bradshaw, Francis Redfern, Elizabeth Elvin
RADIO VALERIE GROVE
The Island is a drama about the Desert Island Discs island.
It’s now crowded with castaways, littered with their discarded bibles and Shakespeares, and their weird luxuries: terrific idea! Inhabitants are now chopping up their pianos, and burning the pages of Henry IV, Part 1 on the campfire. They are exasperated that the latest islander has brought yet another bloody coffee machine – and what use is Ian Hislop’s lifetime supply of Frosties?
Scriptwriters Tom Oxenham and Simon Alcock have a ball, with so many Monty Pythonish possibilities.
But it doesn’t quite live up to its promise, despite Stephen Mangan (a recent castaway, with the enthralling story of his huge Irish family) narrating. Some impressions from Dead Ringers might have helped.
A new Radio 3 series, Facing the Music, also promised well. Dominic West tells us how an irascible Beethoven wrote Fidelio – originally Leonore – just as he became deaf. West’s voice is, as always, excellent. Pronunciation perfect, phrasing superb, timbre euphonious.
One could listen to him for ever. But – ugh! A female voice interrupted. ‘I’m Carapichellew,’ she seemed to say: ‘I’m a podcaster and a Haitch-seepee-see-registered psychologist.’
Another female voice, an ar’ist, told us how crea’ive people work. Glottal stops remain a hanging offence chez moi, especially in Bee’oven. Radio 3 is indulging a podcast audience: why? If a first-rate actor such as Dominic West can be lured, why ruin a broadcast with testimonies from unconvincing voices?
Someone mentioned ‘vocal training’, which I thought had quite died out. A voice coach arrived in the Broadcasting House studio to get Adrian Chiles and Paddy O’Connell to say ‘Ooh’, ‘Oh’ and ‘Ahhh’, and ‘Darling, you look ravishing’ –as Chiles said, it’s hard to say that with a Birmingham accent. One of Harry Graham’s Ruthless Rhymes stumped them too.
But the item missed the point: it’s not accent that matters; it’s the voice quality – expressiveness, variety, warmth – that gives radio its impact.
When Alexander Armstrong came onto Today on the 50th anniversary of P G Wodehouse’s death, he pointed out that Plum had ‘the friendliest voice in all literature. Such geniality.’
The barrister Nemone Lethbridge, who at 93 has a voice with great distinction, became a castaway recently.
One of her discs was the Tom Lehrer song ‘I wanna go back to Dixie’: ‘Old times there are not forgotten/ Whuppin’ slaves and sellin’ cotton’… ‘I wanna talk with Southern gen’lemen, and put my white sheet on again, I ain’t seen one good lynchin’ in years.’
Lawks-a-mercy! Lauren Laverne stepped in hastily to explain to under-50 listeners that this song was satirical, written ‘in a spirit of criticism, in 1955’.
Poor blameless Lehrer, still with us at 96, can be retrieved on YouTube, beaming his incomparable smile, and explaining that he wrote about horrible folks in order to ‘kick them when they’re down’. But, now, guilt renders us timid and humourless where we once could laugh. Goodbye to the Kumars, the Two Ronnies…
Apparently, radio’s serendipity factor is ebbing. People pre-select whatever they want to hear, no longer landing by chance on the unexpected. Does anyone still seek out afternoon drama, now much possessed by the recent past?
I recommend retrieving When Alan Met Ray (by Ian Pearce and Andrew McGibbon, starring Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse) about The Oldie’s friends the Hancock scriptwriters, Galton and Simpson, and how they met at 18 in a TB sanatorium.
Or there’s Moorgate, by Laurence Marks (of Marks and Gran), recalling the 1975 train disaster, when Laurence, a reporter, was sent to investigate – only to find his father was among the dead.
I have just heard a bishop (of Leicester) say ‘to be honest with you’.
Can a bishop say that?
TELEVISION
FRANCES WILSON
The White Lotus (Sky) began as a hurriedly put-together pandemic project and is now in its third season. It is generally agreed to be a masterpiece.
Even the opening credits have genius: scrolls of scenic wallpaper depicting palm trees, pineapples, monkeys, hibiscus plants, ancient ruins and young lovers.
As the music gets increasingly frantic, they come alive. Storm clouds gather, waves rise, the fruit starts to rot, fish get caught in the tentacles of jellyfish, sharks eat men and goats fornicate with women.
Close observers will see that the images contain clues to the chaos that will ensue in the show.
Season one was set in Hawaii, season two in Sicily, and season three takes place on an island in Thailand, but the format
remains identical. The discovery of a dead body is followed by a flashback of seven days. A boatload of white Americans arrive at a luxury White Lotus hotel to be looked after by the rattled hotel manager and his longsuffering, underpaid staff.
The identities of the corpse and the killer are revealed in the final episode, by which point the audience has been so thoroughly entertained by the guests that we have forgotten we are watching a murder mystery.
Exotic locations, filthy rich people, tiny bikinis and regular dollops of sex are bound to hold an audience. But what makes The White Lotus so watchable is the satirical sensibility of the show’s creator, writer and director, Mike White.
He is entirely in command of the way in which we talk across one another in the 21st century.
Season one brought us Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge), a galumphing neurotic heiress with botched plastic surgery.
She has come, with her 45 trunks of frocks, to scatter her mother’s ashes: ‘Oh Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother ... She just couldn’t handle her jealousy… And
what’s weird is I miss her, even though she was a big jerk.’
In season two, a Hollywood producer retraces his Sicilian roots with his woke son and sex-obsessed father (‘It’s a penis; it’s not a sunset’).
In season three, Michelle Monaghan (from Mission Impossible), Carrie Coon (The Avengers) and Leslie Bibb are old school friends on a girls’ trip: ‘You’re looking great. Who’s your surgeon?’
The scenes between the women are so well observed they are painful to watch: whenever one of them is apparently out of earshot, the other two demolish her character.
This season’s dysfunctional family are the Ratliffs, who are in Thailand so that Piper, the daughter, can write her college dissertation on Buddhism. The porn-addicted eldest son, Saxon (played by Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of Arnie), is trying to get his timid (clearly gay) younger brother laid. The father, Timothy (Jason Isaacs), is being pursued by the FBI, while the mother
(Parker Posey) is a Southern Belle dosed up on pills.
Walton Goggins is magnificent as Rick, an aggressive, monosyllabic stoner with a dark past and a free-wheeling younger girlfriend called Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood). Together, Rick and Chelsea have the most striking teeth of any couple on Earth.
In one of the strongest scenes, Rick, having been bludgeoned by Chelsea into seeing the hotel’s stress-management meditation expert, explains that his mother died of drugs, his father was murdered, and that he himself is ‘nothing’, a ‘car without petrol’.
Belinda, the spa manager from the first season, returns, as does Greg, the creepy husband of Tanya McQuoid. Only he now calls himself Gary and has a prostitute in tow, picked up in Dubai.
Lalisa Manobal, from the K-pop supergroup Blackpink, makes her acting debut as Mook, a health guru being courted by the hotel security guard. ‘Isn’t she so pretty?’ repeats Chelsea.
‘Please stop talking,’ replies Rick. ‘You’re like a f**king machine-gun, you know that?’
Mike White’s devotion to the art of television is proven by his appearances on two American reality TV shows. In the first, The Amazing Race, he teamed up with his gay dad, Mel. Before coming out, Mel was a far-right evangelical Christian who ghost-wrote the memoirs of Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham. In the second show, Survivor: David vs Goliath, whose format is not unlike that of The White Lotus, White finished in second place.
He began his career writing for Dawson’s Creek, before doing the screenplay for School of Rock (starring his friend Jack Black).
White first came to my attention through the sublime comedy Enlightened, which he produced, directed, wrote and starred in, alongside Laura Dern. It is worth watching Enlightened just to learn what genius looks like. Mike White has colourless hair, pink, watchful eyes, transparent lashes and translucent skin.
Behind the camera, he sees everything. In front of the camera, he is so white he is barely there.
MUSIC
RICHARD OSBORNE
LA VIE PARISIENNE GRISÉLIDIS
Just when we thought the golden age of studio-made opera recording was over, an elite Swiss-based foundation gave us
Bru Zane – the editorial and recording wing of the Centre de Musique Romantique Française.
Since its launch in 2009, it’s produced no fewer than 42 recordings of rare and not so rare French operas written between 1780 and 1920.
Loyal collectors will be familiar with Bru Zane’s distinctive demy octavo 200-page hardbacks, with their snugly encased CDs, texts, translations, scholarly essays – and pairs of silk marker ribbons.
The two newest releases are among the finest yet. Offenbach’s uproarious take on 1860s Paris, La Vie parisienne, where louche residents fleece gullible tourists as they flock to the fleshpots of the newly designated ‘Gay Paree’, has simply been unlucky on record.
But whatever happened to Grisélidis, Jules Massenet’s ‘lyric tale’ – part miracle play, part comedy, part romance – first seen at Paris’s OpéraComique in 1901? ‘Essence of Massenet’ is how one contemporary writer described it. And so it is: a connoisseur’s opera if ever there was one.
The tale of patient Griselda was popular in medieval times. Forget Chaucer’s charmless retelling in The Canterbury Tales, devised to set the
Clerk of Oxenford at loggerheads with the Wife of Bath. Massenet’s opera derives from an altogether more agreeable source: a beautifully crafted stage adaptation devised for the Comédie-Française in the early 1890s. Here it’s not the cruel Marquis who tests his wife’s fidelity with made-up tales of a dead child; it’s a stone devil who stirs into life on the chapel wall. Mind you, he’s a good-natured devil, or so he claims – fond of a bit of
Rick (Walton Goggins) and Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), The White Lotus
Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)
skirt, but tied to a shrewish wife and unlucky in love. Think of Howard, Pearl’s husband, in Last of the Summer Wine
Massenet clearly relished writing Grisélidis, making exquisite music of his own, alongside a few quiet nods in the direction of the devil music of Weber and Berlioz, and the mock-medieval sanctity of Wagner’s Parsifal.
There are moments of high drama in the piece – you’ll probably need a stiff drink at the end of Act 2 – but it’s the sheer craft of the writing that holds the attention in two hours’ traffic of the stage, where not a single note is wasted. Both casting and conducting are of a high order.
They say a good wine needs no bush. As it happens, Offenbach’s La Vie parisienne is not so much a fine wine; more a classic cocktail – absinthe topped up with champagne, Ernest Hemingway’s famous tipple, perhaps. A mischief-making vaudeville in five acts, it was commissioned by the actor-singers of Paris’s Théâtre PalaisRoyal ahead of Napoléon III’s great showpiece event of 1867, the Paris World Fair.
Offenbach and his scurrilous craftsmen-librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy generally dressed up the victims of their satire as Greek gods. Here, though, they hold a mirror up to Paris itself, seen through the eyes of a pair of impecunious men-about-town posing as tour guides at the grand new Gare de l’Est. An adulterous Swedish baron and his wife are their first clients.
From the outset, this 160-minute romp was a good deal abbreviated –first, by government censors; then by Offenbach himself as he tried to create a better balance between Meilhac and Halévy’s play and the dazzling, airborne music he’d provided for it. Some have criticised Bru Zane for recording a newly edited, pre-censorship complete edition of the opera. But why? If it’s just the highlights you want, make your own selection.
One person who solved the problem was the great French actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault, whose staging of the piece was one of the glories of French postwar theatre. A 50-minute highlights disc of the production was recorded for the ‘Paris’ label in 1958. It remains available as a download. So perhaps nowhere better to start than with that incomparable actress, singer, and comédienne Suzy Delair in Métella’s famous waltz-song – visitors and their hosts stumbling ashen-faced
onto the streets after a night of unbridled indulgence.
‘Hey there, you happy toffs!’ cries a nearby road sweeper.
Given that the Paris of the 1950s is about as remote from us as the Paris of the 1860s, some of the flavour has been lost. But the Bru Zane team have done their homework. It’s a fine set.
Incidentally, La Vie parisienne is the prototype for another similarly delightful, if sexually less explicit, tale of philandering toffs: Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, which Meilhac and Halévy also wrote.
I doubt whether we’ll be seeing the Offenbach this side of the Channel anytime soon, but tickets are already on sale for a new production of Die Fledermaus that will be playing at the Grange Festival in Hampshire in June.
GOLDEN OLDIES
MARK ELLEN
DYLAN’S MUSE
I’ve got a theory. There would have been no folk protest movement, political edge to rock music, Concert for Bangladesh or Live Aid, had it not been for one person.
And it’s not Bob Dylan. It’s his old girlfriend Suze Rotolo.
You’ll know her – the flame-haired teenager on his arm on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan as they tramp through New York’s West Village in the snow. She’s now back in the frame again as one of the key figures in A Complete Unknown, the winning new biopic about his breakthrough in the early ’60s.
Bob comes across – and fairly – as a rude but charming, selfobsessed and manipulative fame-seeker forgiven for his catalogue of abrasive faults on account of the luminous brilliance of his songs.
hopelessly in love – ‘Cupid’s arrow hit me in the heart and dragged me overboard,’ he remembered in his memoir.
A suburban boy from Minnesota, he’d never met anyone like her – streetwise, bohemian and, most of all, fiercely political. Her parents were members of the Communist Party and friends with Russian spies. She was an anti-nuclear campaigner who’d marched for integrated schools since the age of 15.
Dylan, who’d never written a political song in his life, was so keen to impress her that he began churning them out by the yard – Masters of War, Blowin’ in the Wind, Oxford Town, A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall. The success that followed cemented an image that endures to this day – the windswept crusader for peace, justice and racial equality heading into battle with a harmonica and acoustic guitar. The image gave pop music a whole new dimension way beyond just entertainment.
It now talked of senators, congressmen, murders, warmongers, weapons of mass destruction and the perils of the disadvantaged. It was seen as a force that could change the world.
In Dylan’s wake came the age of folk protest and a succession of campaigning songs through soul, psychedelia, reggae, punk and rap, from John Lennon and Bob Marley to the Clash and Public Enemy. Archetypal protest-singer Billy Bragg even started out sporting a trademark Dylan cap. Bob’s songs were at the heart of the Concert for Bangladesh, which inspired Live Aid, the Nelson Mandela tribute and every political music event since.
Rotolo is cast as little more than a besotted, tear-stained, two-timed lover, which is so far off the track it’s ludicrous. You wonder just how she’d react if she were still here to complain (she died at 67 in 2011).
They met in 1961 and Dylan fell
Rotolo split with Dylan after three years, in 1964. He never wrote a political song again, with the possible exception of Hurricane. He veered off instead in a new direction, into the realms of multicoloured, fever-dream whimsy about a ‘drunken swirling ship’ in Mr Tambourine Man – which was inspired by a poem she’d read him, Rimbaud’s Le Bateau Ivre. So he owes her for that as well.
Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo, Freewheelin’ (1963)
EXHIBITIONS
HUON MALLALIEU
SIENA: THE RISE OF PAINTING
National Gallery
8th March to 22nd June
On 9th June 1311, the 7ft-by-13ft central panel of Duccio’s Maestà was carried in procession from his Sienese studio to be installed in the cathedral.
When the whole thing was assembled, the panel of the Virgin and Child in glory, surrounded by saints, was further surrounded and backed by more than 40 smaller panels telling the story of Christ’s life and the Passion. It was in Siena, then – not the rival city, Florence – that the Renaissance was launched as far as painting is concerned.
During the 18th century, such art was out of fashion. So the Maestà was dismantled. Although some of the front panels are still in situ, others from the rear and predella were lost, and subsequently found their way to collections around the world.
Eight of the predella panels have been brought together for this show, which comes from the Metropolitan in New York and is curated by Caroline Campbell, formerly of London’s National Gallery and now Director of the Irish National Gallery.
Nativity of the Virgin (1335-42) by
Pietro Lorenzetti
One of these panels which embodies the break with static, unemotional medieval art is The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew. It shows the exact point in Luke’s account when Peter, astonished by the miraculous draught of fishes, tries to avoid his destiny: ‘Depart from me for I am a sinful man, O Lord.’ The faces and gestures say it all.
Siena’s Trecento pre-eminence was short, cut off by the Black Death in 1348 and by eventual conquest by Florence, but what a moment it was. Duccio was followed by his pupil Simone Martini, who spread the Sienese
Left: The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew (1308-11), from Duccio’s Maestà Below: Simone Martini’s The Way to Calvary (c 1326-34)
influence to Angevin Naples and Papal Avignon, whence it travelled on to Burgundy and even England, in the form of the Wilton Diptych.
The show reunites all six longseparated panels of Martini’s Orsini Polyptych. There were also the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, who died of the Black Death.
I am digesting a new book by Jules Lubbock, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Good and Bad Government Reconsidered (Ad Ilissum, £45), a meditation on the frescoes in the Sala dei Nove in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico.
The oligarchy known as ‘the Nine’ was responsible for this cultural outburst, but soon afterwards also for the downfall of its own regime and the city itself.
The show, from the Met and National Gallery collections boosted by major loans, is very manageable, offering around 100 paintings, sculptures, metalwork and textiles – and what impressive offerings they are.
GARDENING
DAVID WHEELER
COME HOME AGAIN TO WALES
Having noticed my recent election to the chairmanship of WWCG, several friends raised their bushy or pencilled eyebrows.
Why? Because if you google the above four letters, you’ll be delivered into the blessed arms of the Worldwide Church of God.
But it’s not that Adventist church in America I’ve become leader of. Coincidentally, though, that institution was founded by a newspaper advertising manager, a role that appears (way down) on my own CV. And, to this day, it meets on Saturdays, which my WWCG also does.
Enough teasing. We are West Wales Country Gardeners, a small group of keen gardeners based in the Principality’s south-west counties of Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire.
The godly WWCG was founded in California in 1933. We are younger – a later-20th-century breakaway, I’m told (although records seem not to exist), from the Royal Horticultural Society’s Rhododendron, Camellia & Magnolia Group. It was patronised by the local gentry hereabouts, whose gardens were measured in acres, not yards. Not so nowadays.
My immediate predecessor at the WWCG was Jenny, widow of legendary nurseryman and Alpine plant specialist Jim Archibald, who also enthused breathlessly about hellebores and hostas. Older gardeners can still be heard to say of a beloved plant, ‘I got it from the Archibalds.’
My partner and I joined WWCG shortly after decamping from Herefordshire four years ago. Membership had dwindled to a mere 30 or so souls.
Nevertheless, its combined pool of vast horticultural knowledge is matched only by the friendship, bonhomie and comradeship of its extant supporters.
Our meetings are usually held on the
second Saturday of the months from September to March at Bronwydd Village Hall, a couple of miles from the old town of Carmarthen.
On Saturdays from April to August, we run a programme of days out; sometimes to members’ gardens, sometimes to notable paradises within our bailiwick.
I’m hatching plans for occasional distanced jaunts – convivial charabanc forays further afield, with morning and afternoon garden visits interposed by a tasty picnic or nourishing pub lunch.
Plant sales comprise two of our calendar highlights. Next up is 13th September at Bronwydd, when, for the first time, we’ll invite non-members to join us, to donate – and buy! – plants, seeds, gardening books and paraphernalia. And produce, too. We all have a glut of apples, tomatoes and too many courgettes in late summer. I’m billing it as a secular harvest festival.
The proceeds should help swell our coffers. It’s the increase of our current meagre assets that will finance ambitious future happenings. Who knows? We might even bag a celeb one day.
West Wales’s damp and mild climate (not quite Cornwall; not exactly Gulf Stream Argyllshire) suits an enviable array of plants.
We are, as well, conveniently placed for Aberglasney, the National Botanic Garden of Wales, Picton Castle, Colby Woodland Garden, Dyffryn Fernant, the House on Stilts at Ferryside, and the plant-rich abundance of Llwyngarreg and Cae Hir, not to mention that unfailing source of all things planty, Farmyard Nurseries at Llandysul.
We have coastal palms, heathland shrubberies, exotic arboreta and untold horticultural treasures held in the collections of diverse individuals.
While nothing in my job description
compels me to attract new members, I nonetheless keep a Recruiting Officer’s badge under my lapel. Come and join us –singles £15 annually; couples and family £25. Check out our schedule on Instagram (@west.walescountrygardeners). Meanwhile, confuse us not with those missionary worshippers across the pond. Instead, thank God such garden clubs exist – oldies should join one now. Companionship guaranteed.
David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal
KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD ALEXANDERS
The plant takes its name from a city in Egypt, or from a famous Macedonian general, or it is a corruption of the Latin.
There may not be a definitive answer, but it is called alexanders. It is a herb and vegetable once widely grown but now largely confined to the hedgerows.
I have often seen alexanders in Cornish and East Anglian hedges in spring, growing near the sea and standing about four feet tall, with clusters of yellowish flowers in umbrella shapes. It has the scent of celery, but I have never tried eating it.
I now learn that every part of the plant is edible – seeds, leaves, stems and roots – which suggests to me that alexanders should be revived in the vegetable garden. Though it is a coastal plant, like
Picton Castle, Pembrokeshire
samphire and sea kale, it does not have to be grown in a saline environment.
Started from seed, it may be slow to germinate, but plants can be bought, or perhaps found in the remains of an old monastic garden, where alexanders would have been grown for medicinal use as well as for the kitchen.
Once established, the plants require no pruning and are generally free from disease. They will tolerate frost and can be cropped as a winter vegetable.
The leaves may be used like parsley, the roots roasted like parsnips, and the young stems treated like asparagus in spring. The seeds will go black in summer and are described as peppery.
The Romans, who introduced alexanders to Britain, apparently valued them for their aromatic oils, having the scent of myrrh – whatever that may be. They also ate the plant to ward off scurvy.
In appearance, alexanders can be confused with angelica and, rather more seriously, with poisonous hemlock which is of the same family. The more common complaint is that the plant is invasive and will readily self-seed. If it does, it is worth knowing that the alternative name for alexanders is horse parsley.
Dig up the unwanted plants and give the animals a treat.
COOKERY
ELISABETH LUARD GO BACK TO YOUR ROOTS
Maturity comes into its own in the kitchen when there’s nothing growing in the fields.
Roots are subterranean survival food – nature’s way of getting herself through the cold months. They can all too easily be overlooked when everything is available from everywhere on supermarket shelves all year round.
When choosing in the farmer’s market or anywhere else where the goods are not enclosed in plastic, look for firmness and an absence of sprouting, and keep your purchases in the fridge if you’re not going to cook them straight away.
Roots sprout enthusiastically as soon as they’re out of the cold store and into the central heating. Wouldn’t you?
Elderly carrots To serve hot, slice finely and cook in a lidded pan with a splash of water and a knob of butter and maybe a few slivers of fresh ginger; remove the lid and bubble up at the end to evaporate the juices and make a little sauce. To prepare as a salad – carrots are one of the classic trio of hors-d’oeuvre (the others are celeriac and beetroot) sold by weight in every French
charcuterie – grate through the mediumfine holes on the grater, and dress with lemon juice, olive oil and a black olive or two to signal the recipe’s land of origin.
Full-grown beetroot Don’t peel or trim, just wrap in foil – or pack into a lidded earthenware pot – and bake in a medium oven till tender, allowing 40-60 minutes depending on size.
Rub off the skin, rinse if sandy, then dice or slice. Serve hot in a white sauce, without or without grated cheese. To serve as a salad, dice and dress with mayonnaise and a handful of chopped gherkins or capers, or diced apple and toasted walnuts.
Old parsnips Peel, chunk and cook in salted water, drain thoroughly and toss with butter and plenty of chopped parsley. Or roast with a handful of peeled baby onions, slivers of ginger root and butter, loosely covered with foil. Or scrape, matchstick and shallow-fry till browned and a little crisped.
Swedes (aka Swedish turnips) Peel, chunk, and cook in plenty of salted water, drain thoroughly and mash over the heat with butter and a squeeze of orange juice and grated zest. For clapshot, beat an equal volume of mashed swede and potato with hot milk, butter and a pinch of nutmeg.
Sprouted swede shoots, says Florence White in Good Things in England, appear in April, look like young peachcoloured asparagus and were much appreciated by the gentry in the 1930s.
Celeriac Don’t be put off by the weird knobbliness, a result of stripping out the celery stalks for storage, just slice off the outside with a sharp knife, chunk and cook as you would potatoes.
To serve as a salad, grate the raw root through the large holes in the cheesegrater, blanch (drop into boiling salted water and drain immediately), and dress with a remoulade. Prepare the latter – a mustardy vinaigrette – by working a
spoonful of mild French mustard and a little honey with a light oil (olive, nut, or seed), adding wine vinegar drop by drop as the mixture emulsifies, as for a mayonnaise.
Salsify (aka scorzonera) A slender, black-skinned root which looks rather like a skinny parsnip and has a delicate, nutty flavour. Don’t scrap, just rinse, cook whole and scrape off the skin when tender – once cut, the flesh dries out and loses much of its moisture.
After 20 minutes in boiling salted water, the roots peel easily and the pulp stays white as snow. Slice or leave whole, and treat as any other root – it’s particularly delicious slipped under the grill with a dusting of grated Parmesan.
RESTAURANTS
JAMES PEMBROKE
ODE TO DORSETSHIRE
Eighty years ago, a couple nicknaming themselves Mouse and Jumbo set off on a pre-war gastronomic tour of Dorset.
I know this because the Dorset Archives Trust recently bought Mouse’s diary, which laments ‘dully lit dining rooms, inferior port and the usual devastating English salads’.
So no surprises there, but an Oxford professor of English Literature has dubbed it ‘an invaluable trove’, in the tradition of Pepys, when all Mouse does is to enjoy scoffing at locals – especially in my parish of Corfe Castle.
She has rivers of contempt for Swanage’s ‘bright young things’, who are ‘large, vulgar and determined to enjoy themselves at all costs’. They must have all been down at my Aunt Nancy’s hotel, the Wolfeton; her tipple of choice was sparkling red Burgundy.
Well, if Mouse can do it, so can I, only this time with millennial positivity and praise. Stand by, Dorset Archives Trust. Here is a snapshot of the diary you can buy from my children when I’m gone. I’ll skip nicknames.
‘We cranked up the jalopy in Lyme Regis, the very western part of God’s own county’ – OK, it’s a bit flowery but they love that at the DAT – ‘where our friends, Guy and Flora’ – very important to namecheck locals to give it period flavour – ‘took us to Lilac, set in former smuggler cellars in the High Street.
‘They drowned us in Margaritas in anticipation of cured Lyme Bay fish and delicious beef short rib. Service a delight.
‘The next morning, we descended on Bridport, awash as ever with Trustafarian evacuees from Notting Hill, for the very best dumplings at Dorshi.’
‘Spiced up, we walked to Burton Bradstock for lunch at the Seaside Boarding House, the six-bedroomed outpost of Groucho Club châtelaine Mary-Lou Sturridge. It was built by a scion of the Pitt-Rivers family as a party place and comes complete with ballroom. Her cocktails are the best west of Soho’s Dean Street. And her threecourse lunch on the terrace for £22 is miraculous.’
‘We couldn’t miss the Catch at Weymouth, dubbed “the best restaurant in the world” by Giles Coren, who’s never wrong’ – come the purchase of the diary by the DAT, he’ll be Lord Coren of Gargantua. ‘Then up to Beaminster for Brassica, where all the best of Dorset’s meat, fish and vegetables go to be scorched and steamed. Across to Gussage All Saints, where we had a top lunch at the Cockerell, which is owned by the village and now run by exotic Margaret Turner, a jeweller by trade.
‘And then down to the Pig at Wimborne, where we had excellent roast pork and enough time to visit the chain library in the Minster. Then grilled sole at Rockfish, on the newly smartened Quay at Poole, where they play the Shipping Forecast in the loo.’
‘And onward to the blessed Isle of Purbeck, rich in game, crab and lobster, but until recently more of a purveyor of chicken nuggets. Now the deli at The Salt Pig offers great value lunches in both its Swanage and its Wareham branches, where you’ll spy the local bridge and book-club sets exchanging gossip.
‘For a treat, they go to Shell Bay, overlooking Brownsea Island. Our tour ended with top roast beef in the new garden terrace at the Scott Arms, which has the best view in Dorset.’
Shall we start the bidding at £25,000?
DRINK
BILL KNOTT
DOUBLE DIAMOND’S COMEBACK
Double Diamond is not a beer that many will recall with fondness.
It was highly promoted in the 1970s. In a precursor of textspeak, its beermats were emblazoned with such slogans as Q4ADD and IOUADD. It was one of a slew of top-pressure, characterless keg beers, among them Whitbread Tankard and Watney’s Red Barrel.
They may have been triumphs of advertising and marketing but owed very little to the art of the brewer.
It represented everything that the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) was
fighting against: fizzy, chilled, pasteurised and advertised on national television with a catchy jingle: ‘Double Diamond works wonders, works wonders, works wonders.’
At CAMRA beer festivals, someone had the bright idea of selling badges that bore the legend DD IS K9P. They proudly adorned a plethora of home-knit pullovers.
For Double Diamond, it was the nadir of a long, sad decline for a beer that started life as a flavoursome, strong-ish, bottle-conditioned India Pale Ale, first brewed in Burton by Samuel Allsopp and Sons in 1876.
Allsopp’s was swallowed up by Ind Coope, which in 1961 merged with Tetley Walker and Ansells to form Allied Breweries, which merged with Carlsberg Tetley in 1992. Double Diamond’s trademarks were scattered to the four winds.
Step forward Jamie Allsopp, a former hedge-fund manager and the nine-timesgreat-grandson of Samuel Allsopp.
He managed not only to consolidate the trademarks but to find the original recipes for Allsopp’s ales, in a ledger bought at auction by Steve Holt, who runs the Kirkstall Brewery in Leeds.
Double Diamond has now been reborn, and I am pleased to say it tastes nothing like its infamous 1970s predecessor. Distinctly bitter, with a crisp bite and a citric tang, it is reminiscent of a modern, American-style IPA. According to Allsopp, who sells it on tap at The Blue Stoops, his new Kensington Church Street pub –‘Welcome to the home of Double Diamond’ is engraved in the window – it is selling very well.
This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines, all from France: a classic Mâcon that would be perfect with poulet de Bresse, a fragrant Viognier from the sunny south, and a meaty Côtes du Rhône with more than a hint of garrigue herbs. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.
Mâcon-Chardonnay, Talmard, Burgundy 2023, offer price £13.95, case price £167.40 From the ancient village of Chardonnay: bright, apple-and-pear fruit with a nice grip.
Viognier ‘Petit Mazuret’, Demazet, France 2023, offer price £10.50, case price £126.00 Viognier’s trademark peachy aromas, fruity on the palate and dry on the finish.
As are his new cask ales – India Pale Ale, Best Bitter and Pale Ale – made by Holt in Leeds to recipes adapted from the originals in their precious ledger and fermented with original Allsopp yeasts retrieved from the National Collection of Yeast Cultures in Norwich.
A handsome Victorian corner pub, The Blue Stoops is named after the Burton-on-Trent pub where Samuel Allsopp first brewed Allsopp’s Ale in 1730. It should be a place of pilgrimage for anyone interested in the history of British brewing, or anyone who fancies a pint of characterful, well-kept cask ale. Best of all, it is a proper pub: it has an excellent restaurant as well, but the main bar is reserved for drinkers.
It may be Jamie Allsopp’s first pub, but he promises it will not be his last. And, praise be to heaven, DD is no longer K9P.
Côtes du Rhône Rouge, Domaine de la Berthète, France 2023, offer price £11.50, case price £138.00 Sunny, spicy red fruit and rounded tannins, pleasingly plush on the palate.
Mixed case price £143.80 – a saving of £27.59 (including free delivery)
TO ORDER Call
370 9930 Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk Quote OLDIE to get your special price. Free delivery to UK mainland. For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 29th April 2025
SPORT
JIM WHITE
LONG-LIFE RUNNERS
At my local parkrun the other day I fell into conversation with a fellow silverhaired plodder.
‘Have you read The Race Against Time?’ he asked, looking me up and down. ‘It’s the absolute bible for the runner who’s getting on a bit, like you.’
Well, I have now. And my fellow jogger is right. The author, Richard Askwith, has delivered a most brilliant piece of writing. Part memoir, part journey of discovery, it is a superb, unputdownable account of what it is like still to be running well into your sixties. And beyond.
Well beyond, in the case of Stanisław Kowalski, who, at a Masters Athletics Competition in 2015, set the world record for the fastest 100mph sprint for those aged over 105. Mind, he was the only competitor.
I called the author to find out how to keep on running, even as time is being called.
‘Well, I’ve still got pains in most of my joints,’ Askwith says, just back from a run. ‘It’s pretty tough being an old runner. But it’s a lot better than being an ex-runner.’
He has unearthed how many oldies are putting on our trainers and setting off into the gloaming. He was not surprised to learn about the discussion of his book at a parkrun. After all, he tells me, the proportion of participants in the weekly organised dash who are over 65 tripled from one per cent to three per cent between 2009 and 2019. And is growing all the time.
‘The thing I really learned was that, as a group, runners are so much more full of life, still stretching themselves, taking on challenges,’ he says.
‘The older you get, the easier it is to develop a habit of regret, always comparing with the past. It takes the joy out of everything. Running allows you to keep believing in the possibility of improvement, even as all else seems to be deteriorating. It gives you targets and challenges. Not least the challenge of actually getting out there.’
He has also learned that conventional wisdom is entirely wrong. How often are runners told by their non-running contemporaries that they are putting their knees in peril.
Actually, research suggests the opposite is true: running strengthens the joints. A study of older plodders by the pointy-heads of Stanford University found that non-runners are seven times
more likely than runners to need knee replacements. Also that runners out-live non-runners by an average of seven years.
And – perhaps most significantly – for runners, the onset of late-life disability typically starts 16 years later than for non-runners.
‘All those things you hear about the benefits of running – clears the head, strengthens the body, improves the mind – are even more significant for the older runner,’ Askwith believes.
And it is never too late to start.
‘Absolutely you can begin running at any time,’ he says. ‘In some ways, there are advantages in being a beginner. You haven’t got any lingering running injuries, for a start.’
If you are tempted to take up the sport, he recommends starting by running down a hill. The good news is you can use your free bus pass to get to the top.
There is one thing running as an oldie can’t do. That is to stave off the end of the race entirely.
‘I’ve not encountered anyone who has managed to swerve death by running,’ he says. ‘Well, not yet, anyway.’
Even the great sprinting supercentenarian Stanisław Kowalski didn’t manage that. He died in 2022.
Still, it was a week before his 112th birthday.
MOTORING ALAN JUDD
HOW SAFE IS YOUR DRIVING?
A frosty morning: a sprinkling of snow; frozen puddles on the lanes, some concealing potholes.
Then round the bend sped an oncoming Audi TT. Confronted at about head height by the iron girder of a bumper on my old Defender, the androgynous driver slammed on the anchors and veered this way and that until seeking refuge on the verge.
Fortunately, I was doing less than 20mph and we missed by inches.
Near misses, albeit less dramatic, are a feature of everyday driving. During a recent 1,500-mile round trip between one end of the country and the other, much of it on motorways, I was struck by how often one is just a couple of feet away from the thundering wheels of 40-ton trucks. If one of them made contact with you at 60-70mph, you might be scraped off the tarmac like a lump of strawberry jam, as the old song had it.
It says a lot for human hand-eye
co-ordination that there aren’t many more than the 1,624 UK road deaths recorded in 2023, down 5% from 2022 and, per million of population, the third lowest internationally.
The human body wasn’t designed to travel at such speeds, and it’s remarkable that we react as accurately and rapidly as we commonly do. In fact, although it doesn’t feel like it, you’re safer on motorways than on the rural roads where I live. The former have 21% of traffic and 5% of deaths; the latter 44% of traffic and 60% of deaths.
Men comprise 75% of road deaths, most often aged 30-49. Women killed on the roads are most likely to be over 70. The death tally for all over-70s is 22% of the total; for those aged 17-29 it’s 23%.
Failure to wear a seat belt is a factor in 24.7% of deaths (mostly men). Speed is a factor in 57.7%, behaviour or inexperience in 46.8% and distraction or impairment in 34.9%. Of course, all these factors may be present in a single accident.
This provoked me to ponder my own driving faults. Not easy, of course, since it’s well-known that most drivers (especially men) rate themselves above average. I’ve been on skid pans, been coached in fast driving in Aston Martins and Bentleys, played with a Formula Ford and practised on the Le Mans and Nürburgring circuits. So I’m probably above average, yes?
I fear it doesn’t follow. Despite all that, I’m naturally a slow driver who enjoys navigating cumbersome vehicles and may tempt some of those behind to overtake when they shouldn’t.
I daydream and don’t always pay attention to what’s going on around me. I use my mirrors properly: I can usually say what’s following me – but sometimes at the expense of not heeding what’s in front. I drink and drive within legal limits but know I’ve driven when too tired.
When I smoked a pipe, I would fill and light it while driving. I don’t call people on my mobile but do fiddle with the radio and CDs. I’m not impatient – I’d rather be at the back of a queue than at the front, so that I can turn off. But occasionally I am, in a word, inattentive. Which can make for near misses.
The airline industry records near misses and the technology to do so exists in modern cars. Your car could link to your insurance company and the DVLA so that, by the time you get home, your premiums have increased and you’ve points on your licence for driving without due care, all without your knowing.
Governments love regulation and it could happen. Would it be good or bad?
Matthew Webster: Digital Life
Save your family photo albums for ever
What on earth do you do with old photographs?
Many of us have become the inadvertent custodians of ancient family photograph albums; rarely, if ever, looked at, but too precious to throw away.
One local family solved this problem by generously giving to our village dozens of photographs of the houses and inhabitants from about 1903. Fascinating – but how could we share them?
There is a technological solution, but it’s not perfect. I spent a day slowly copying all the pictures, editing and
Webwatch
For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk
Jane Austen Family album
https://tinyurl.com/websterjane Photographs found on eBay of Jane Austen’s family.
Into the public domain
https://tinyurl.com/webster450\ Released from copyright on 1st January – Marx Bros, Popeye and more.
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
annotating the results, and then uploading them all to the village website.
It has been popular, but this is only a temporary solution. The photographs have survived for over 12 decades at no cost to anyone. Will our village website exist in another 120 years’ time?
Not if the subscription isn’t paid –and, anyway, will websites exist at all in a century?
Despite this uncertainty, I have started taking the same line with the ancient family photos that have accumulated in our attic.
It’s not a difficult process, although it is slow. You can use a scanner, but I have found that a faster solution is to take pictures of the pictures. I bought a cheap (£15) tripod, and that holds my phone above an album. It has a gadget that allows me to take the pictures without touching the phone (so no risk of wobble). I quickly ploughed through a couple of albums – almost 100 pictures.
The next job is editing. All the pictures were automatically uploaded to Google Photos (it could have been to many similar services). There I could trim them (or ‘crop’ them, as we photographers say), maybe brighten them up a bit and add names or dates, if I know them.
So now I have electronic versions of all the pictures, and they are ‘backed up’. So, should my house be swept away in the next East Anglian floods, those pictures are safe in Google’s memory somewhere, and I know that Google will
have made a copy as well, in case their primary memory fails.
I could stop now; the pictures are protected until Google goes bust. But that seems little better than the physical albums. The pictures may be secure, but only I can look at them.
There’s an answer. Google Photos, and most other comparable sites, let others view an album – either specific people or anyone who knows the web address of the album. It’s up to you.
Or I could create a special Webster family photo website (like our village site), organising the pictures in groups and offering some commentary. That’s much easier than it used to be, but still not for the faint-hearted.
Still, it’s only temporary, at least compared with the longevity of the original photos, which could easily last another century.
Quite apart from the possible demise of Google one day, or the collapse of the Internet, the technology used to store the pictures may fade away.
It’s happened before; remember the floppy disks we used in the 1990s to store information? Where are they now, and all the data that was on them?
These are problems for later. My main ambition right now is to find a way to remove the many photo albums we have in our attic, without losing the memories and memorials within.
But have I had the courage to throw away the albums we’ve digitised so far? Of course not…
Neil Collins: Money Matters
Energy inefficiency
This year’s 8th January was a still, cold day in the UK, and the nation’s electricity system came uncomfortably close to blackouts.
Quite how close is disputed: very close, according to one expert observer who plots the complexities of the generation of juice to your mains socket. Not really close at all, according to the government body in charge of keeping the lights on.
Maintaining constant electricity
requires a complex system of balancing suppliers. Keeping track of the cornucopia of information published every day is what turns David Turver on. Much of this is provided by the National Energy System Operator (NESO), which has insisted there was no real problem on 8th January 2025.
Mr Turver disagrees. There was almost no wind – something that happens uncomfortably frequently during cold weather, and the actual
margin after sunset that day was waferthin. We were saved by some last-minute postponements of maintenance schedules, interconnections from across the Channel, some eye-wateringly expensive gas generation, and luck.
The gas generators cleaned up, but they are at the back of the queue for providing power. So they must keep plants on stand-by, hoping for more 8th January days. The business case for keeping them going is not attractive, and
even before gas was demonised by the green lobby, they were progressively shutting down.
There is not a lot that the consumer can do about this, other than to realise just how much of our energy bills are a direct consequence of Britain’s stampede towards ‘net zero’. Successive governments have quietly piled the costs of renewables onto households and hoped we wouldn’t notice.
Domestic prices are among the highest in the world, while the cost of energy to companies is driving
manufacturing in the UK to the brink of extinction. No matter how efficient your plant is, if a competitor pays half what you do for fuel, you will eventually be driven out of business.
Nobody in the ‘government for growth’ is prepared to admit this home truth, preferring to blame the war in Ukraine, greedy gas companies or the weather. Fortunately for our dear Prime Minister, he has a human shield in the shape of Ed Miliband. If things get too hot, or rather too cold and dark, he can always fire him.
It’s probably going rather too far to suggest that you should invest in a stand-by generator for when that happens. But if Donald Trump succeeds in forcing down the oil price, dependency on heating oil rather than overpriced gas or electricity might look quite attractive during next winter’s inevitable cold snap.
Unless, of course, global warming means we need never be cold again.
Neil Collins was the Daily Telegraph's City Editor
‘Brush up your Shakespeare’
Exclusive visit to
Stratford-upon-Avon
Including a performance of Much Ado About Nothing 13th-14th May 2025
Working with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, we have put together an exclusive tour of Stratford which is not available to the general public. We will be staying at the Arden Hotel and taking our meals in the best of the town’s eateries.
The trust has organised private access to historic sites including Shakespeare’s Birthplace and family homes. You will be shown rare treasures from their world-class collections, usually unseen by the public.
This unforgettable experience offers a unique window onto Shakespeare’s life in Stratford. Sign up now for the last few places.
ITINERARY
Tuesday 13th May 10:02 Depart from Marylebone; arrive 11:38 at Warwick Parkway.
Transfer to Arden Hotel in Stratford and walk to the Vintner for lunch.
Welcome talk by Penelope, Viscountess Cobham CBE, and Luke Purser, the Chairman and Director of Development at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust; lunch in the private dining room at the Vintner.
Afternoon tour led by Mark Ratcliffe of Hall’s Croft, built by Shakespeare for his daughter, Susanna, in 1613. Pre-show supper, with short talk on the play by Professor Charlotte Scott, at the Brooke Suite, in Arden Hotel.
Room to see the Shakespeare Collection, with treasures including the parish register with the baptism and burial of Shakespeare, none of which is normally on display.
Continue to Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare was baptised and buried. 1pm Lunch in the library of the Townhouse, in Church Street. Talk by Professor Charlotte Scott, the Curator of the exhibition
RSC performance of Much Ado About Nothing –stalls tickets.
Wednesday 14th May
8am-8.30am Breakfast.
8.45am Depart on foot for a private guided tour of Shakespeare’s Birthplace.
10.30-11.30am Exclusive visit to the Reading
‘The Women who Made Shakespeare’, at Nash’s House, the home of Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth Hall and her first husband, Thomas Nash. Visit to adjacent New Place, the footprint and garden of the place where Shakespeare lived for the last 19 years of his life.
Taxi to station to catch 17.11 train from Warwick Parkway, arriving at Marylebone at 18.44
HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 or please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Price: £650 (inc VAT) to include one night’s accommodation at the Arden Hotel, two lunches and one dinner, wine with meals, RSC tickets, all entrances, guide and station transfers. Train tickets are not included. Single supp: £50.
Above: RSC performance Right: Hall’s Croft
Pied flycatcher
by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd
The biggest thrill I had from the 30 bird species seen over 40 years in my north London garden was when I saw a dazzling male pied flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca).
As with other hole-nesting species, it will use nest boxes and has even been recorded nesting underground in deserted mammalian abodes.
The female’s contrasting camouflage plumage makes it ‘a very dull little bird’ – David Bannerman’s description in his magisterial The Birds of the British Isles (1953-63).
Pied flycatchers migrate to Europe in summer from West Africa. The bird’s UK stronghold is Wales; it frequents only western pockets in England and Scotland. It is not seen in the Isle of Man or Ireland.
Elsewhere in the UK, it is a bird of passage; hence my sighting in a Camden garden. This geographical choice seems immemorial. It is unmentioned in those 18th- and 20th-century bird classics The Natural History of Selborne by Gilbert White (Hampshire) or Grey of Fallodon’s The Charm of Birds (Northumberland/Hampshire).
The males lead the way, arriving in April, and moult before departure, becoming indistinguishable from the dull females to all but experts. Pieds do not flock to migrate and can linger into October. In marked contrast to its fellow African migrant, the spotted flycatcher, it does not hunt for flying insects from a favourite perch; but is nonetheless profoundly conservative. It returns to inhabit the same wood, year after year (nine is the maximum lifespan) – regardless of identical adjacent woodland – and to the same nest hole to breed.
If required, it is notably pugnacious, successfully and surprisingly bettering the nuthatch, which is twice its weight and armed with an intimidating beak; it
can also win against those bruisers great tits and blue tits.
It is a bird of upland country, nesting in woods, preferably oak and birch, and trees bordering lakes or rapid streams. Proximity to water is essential because of its need for insect abundance. When breeding, it feeds on insects and caterpillars; on migration, on seeds and fruit.
Like most songbirds over the past half-century, it has drastically declined in numbers and distribution. Between 1995 and 2010, the UK population halved. This is blamed on changes in the African wintering grounds and at stop-overs on migration, as much as on damage caused to their breeding habitats – where declines can also occur if an earlier
spring means they arrive too late for peak food availability.
Happily, recent research (Birds of Conservation Concern 2021) lists the pied flycatcher as one of five species moved from red to amber in the BCC traffic-light assessment of concern. This contrasts with 70 red-listed species, up from 36 in the first 1996 review – out of 245 species assessed. Furthermore, in 2023 several RSPB reserves – eg Haweswater (Cumbria), Coombes Valley and Consall Woods (Staffordshire) –reported record numbers and a new project is successfully underway at Wood of Cree (Dumfries and Galloway).
This April it is hoped that overall the UK will welcome more than 20,000 pairs.
Travel Magic isle mystery tour
More
than 700 years after they were made, the mammoth Easter Island statues still perplex the experts. By Sandra Howard
The travel bug lives on.
It started over 75 years ago, when I was sailing the seas, aged six. My father, an RAF doctor who knew his tropical medicine, had been posted to Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia. School was only in the mornings, with every afternoon at the swimming pool. I had a pet chameleon. I’ve never looked back from those exotic days.
However much of the world one explores – and, speaking on cruises, Michael [Howard, the former Tory leader] and I have done a fair bit, from Papua New Guinea to the Amazon and Manaus – there was still one remote corner whose mystique and extraordinary features held a unique appeal. It was a hell of a way to travel for a pair of oldies, but if not now… We just had to hurry up and do it.
‘Isn’t it a bit mad of you?’ our daughter said, diplomatically not adding, ‘at your age?’. ‘I mean, suppose you have a fall or get ill?’
‘We’ll be fine,’ I said confidently, hoping she wasn’t worried about having to travel to the most isolated place on earth to pick up the pieces. But there was no point in letting a few aching, creaky joints get in the way – we’d never go anywhere.
Easter Island is 2,000 miles from the nearest inhabited land, Pitcairn Island –whose population of fewer than 100 are descended from the mutineers on the
Bounty – and nearly 3,000 miles from Chile, which now runs daily flights to Easter Island from Santiago. It’s a five-hour flight – and that’s after the long-haul journey to Chile.
We’d decided on a pitstop in Santiago and a little longer there on the return, exploring the nearby wine country.
Easter Island, known locally as Rapa Nui, is tiny – approximately six miles by ten. It was most likely settled by Polynesians between 400 and 1200 AD – settlers who formed into clans and, beset with drought and a disastrous shortage of water and crops, fought bitter civil wars.
The fate of the island has had scientists scratching their heads ever since it was discovered, in 1722, by a
Dutch explorer, Jacob Roggeveen. He described how the first Rapanui, coming aboard their ship, completely naked, marvelled at the ship’s taut rigging and became very alarmed when he looked into a mirror, peering behind it to see who was there.
Other European explorers came with their guns, rats and germs. Peruvians enslaved huge numbers of the island’s menfolk and took them away.
Throughout the many centuries of the island’s tumultuous history, the Rapanui created over 900 moai statues, weighing up to 75 tons and over 50 feet high. Their distinctively carved features are said to resemble past chiefs. They were what we had travelled halfway across the globe to see. No other Polynesian island has them, and no other country. Their mystery, scale and haunting presence were astounding.
There are moai dotted about the whole island, leaning, upright, half-finished and fallen. But the most miraculous are the 16 moai of varying sizes standing sentinel on a stone platform facing inland from the sea. To guard over the Rapanui people? No one is quite certain.
With seven World Heritage Sites and the most majestic and mystical moai to be found at one of the more remote, Tongariki, we booked a private guide for the day. He was a Rapanui called Teao, tall, good-looking and knowledgeable. He took us first to Rano Raraku, the
archaeologists alike. It was popular: tourists were sunbathing and we had tuna-filled wraps at one of the two cafés.
to stay, from campsites and Airbnbs to five-star hotels. We stayed at a boutique hotel called Hare Nui – simple, scenic and charming, with rich greenery and a doll-size swimming pool.
Its owner told us it had been his grandmother’s house. She’d traded in chickens, but made so little money selling to passing ships that she’d decided to open as a hotel.
It was well-placed in Hanga Roa, the island’s one small town, with 95 per cent of the population – now about 7,500. It has a harbour with good fish restaurants, a post office (our postcards took two months to arrive), a pharmacy, a hospital and a few tourist shops.
The hospital was excellent and a 15-minute stroll from the hotel. Michael had walked into a door in Santiago, and I’d worried that the cut over his eye could need a stitch. A delightful young doctor glued it up. Our daughter needn’t have worried.
We joined a tour going to Orongo, Rano Kau and Vinapu. Orongo is a ceremonial stone village sitting high on a clifftop with low, earth-covered dwellings, windowless. They had such weirdly low doorways that I imagined the naked Rapanuians having to wriggle in on their tummies. Orongo is famous for its ritualistic ‘birdman cult’, a competition devised by an ancient king with no heirs, as a means of choosing his successor.
Contenders in the race had to shin down the cliff, often falling to their deaths, swim through shark-infested waters to an islet and return with the first egg that the Manutara bird (a sooty tern) had laid. Anyone surviving that lot certainly deserved to be king.
largest of Easter Island’s three extinct volcanoes. The sight of the many halffinished moai on its grassy slopes and the sense of silence, calm and mystery were deeply moving and humbling.
‘This is called “the factory”,’ Teao said, ‘where all the moai were constructed from the volcanic rock. They were started in holes in the ground and then “walked” to their chosen spot, using ropes with men on each side pulling alternately. It’s been proven with reconstructions.’
The row of 16 moai towering above us was just as moving. We walked up close and gazed up in awe, feeling incredibly privileged.
From there, it was on to Anakena, with more wondrous moai, and the only beach on the island – the landing spot for settlers and explorers, scientists and
Environmentalists had always held the Rapanui entirely responsible for their island’s deforested barrenness, thanks to the eco madness of cutting down all the palms for shipbuilding and firewood. The population, at times in the thousands, had once shrunk to around 100, with only 20 women among them. Our guide, Teao, was one of 14 children – perhaps proof that the urgent need to rebuild the population was being taken to heart.
But scientists have since dismissed the eco-madness theory. Finds of ancient husks proved it was all down to proliferating rats eating almost every nut from every palm on the island – so no new trees could have grown.
A friend who went to Easter Island over 20 years ago said there’d been just one top-flight hotel. Now, with tourism on the up, there are plenty of places
True to the Polynesian need of an aristocracy, one group of early settlers had declared themselves royal. They’d hung rocks from the children’s ears, become known as the ‘long-ears’ and fought many battles through the long civil war with a more plebeian clan, the ‘short-ears’ – a sort of precursor to Oliver Cromwell – who’d eventually prevailed.
We marvelled at many sites, including the crater lake at Rano Kau – almost a mile across, with a microclimate that allowed figs and vines to flourish.
Fascinating as these are, they’re far from the incomparable wonder of the moai, whose images still float in my mind today. It’s the moai that matter; the moai that make Rapa Nui unique.
The Howards travelled British Airways to Miami. American Airlines to Santiago and Latam Airlines to Easter Island. They stayed at the Hare Nua Boutique Hotel in Easter Island’s only town, Hanga Roa
Above, Sandra Howard and, opposite, former Tory leader Michael Howard, among the 900-plus moai
Overlooked Britain
Byzantium via Holland Park
The King of Debenhams department stores turned a corner of west London into a gleaming treasure trove of mosaics and tiles
lucinda lambton
There is no more exotic house in the British Isles than Debenham House at 8 Addison Road, West London.
Listed Grade I, it was designed in 1905 by Halsey Ricardo for Sir Ernest Ridley Debenham, 1st Bt (1865-1952), the department-store owner. At the time, he had the terrific total of 170 outlets nationwide.
A new biography of the architect, Halsey Ricardo – A Life in Arts & Crafts, by Mark Bertram, is out this month.
This is a house that glistens from top to toe: its outside with brilliant white Carraraware tiles by Royal Doulton; inside with blue and green Burmantofts glazed brickwork.
Its interior is covered with a wealth of mosaics and marble. The mixture of bricks and tiles emulates his former triumph, Howrah Station in India, otherwise known as the Gateway to Calcutta.
Despite the house’s startlingly glorious appearance, Ricardo’s design was based on the soundest of principles –to build in materials impervious to the corroding effects of the city atmosphere and to define the architectural lines with colour, rather than with bulging embellishment.
It was built to create the effect of a peacock’s tail and, in the right light, would shimmer and gleam.
The tiles of glazed terracotta and ceramics, known as faience, were a protective skin, spot-on for protecting buildings from London’s pollution.
After the first and great shock of seeing it rearing out of the trees abutting Holland Park, you are surprised yet further
by having to walk along an elegantly roofed walkway to the front door. Its entrance has wrought-iron gates by the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft. Ricardo’s name and the date of the house are on a panel of cypress and pomegranate trees in a Tuscan landscape.
Open the door into the front hall and
here is Sir Ernest Debenham’s masterstroke. Sheer walls of brilliant, turquoise-blue tiles soar up to marble balconies piercing the pendentives of an immense marble dome.
Ricardo had wanted to leave this white, but Sir Ernest, inspired by Ravenna in Italy, commissioned Gaetano Meo to design these glittering
George Jack’s Byzantine Hall, Debenham House, 1912
and brilliantly coloured scenes with their Persian, Ottoman and Byzantine influences.
The balconies, with openwork Byzantine patterns and elaborate pillar capitals, as well as a smothering of mosaic decoration, were all designed by George Jack, who for some years also made furniture for Morris and Company.
The whole house was a hive of industry for the Arts and Crafts movement. William Aumonier carved the newel post for the stairs.
E S Prior made all the coloured-glass panels, the rich door furniture and the light fittings, and all of them are brass inlaid with enamel.
Sheer walls of brilliant, turquoiseblue tiles soar up to marble balconies
Shimmering mother-of-pearl inserts enrich the mahogany bookcases. Moths’ wings are a particularly beguiling feature, with the creatures flying round hourglasses. Ernest Gimson designed the library ceiling.
The king of the show was William De Morgan. His tiles cover almost every flat surface in the building. Flying rats and owls pounce on mice in the bathrooms. Peacocks stand beneath the trees in the passages. Sixty glinting lustre ships sail round a bedroom fireplace. There are 28 tiled fireplaces in the house. No two are alike. Many of the tiles
were part of an order for the Russian Tsar’s yacht Livadia, torpedoed in the First World War.
‘The interior of the house is both dignified and charming,’ wrote an impressed estate agent in 1914 when the house was sold, for £6,000.
In 1964, it was taken over by the Richmond Fellowship, the excellent organisation for community mental health.
Technologically, the house was a triumph. There was an alarming central vacuum system run by a great motor in the basement, with filtered nozzles suctioning in the filth throughout the house. Even more extraordinary, there was a telephone connected to the theatre for live performances.
Beatrix, wife of the youngest Debenham child, Martin, could remember the delight of living there during the Second World War: ‘Although it was empty, Henry the butler was there, very light on his feet in white tennis shoes.’
She was an ambulance-driver in Tunbridge Wells. She would come to London every Friday ‘on one of those sinister unlit trains with no corridor and a cigarette light burning in the corner’. She was welcomed with lovely China tea and toast into this glowing temple.
‘It was quite creepy during the bombing, though, but the house felt safe and strong. A 500-pounder fell into the garden and we didn’t feel a thing. The caretaker who always wore an Anthony Eden hat made a potato patch out of the gigantic hole that it had made.’
Sir Ernest’s wife had difficulty moving into the house, with its sheer ceramic walls and its violent decoration, where an inch of her own decorative schemes would have been an intrusion. It was said that ‘the men had expressed themselves like mad all over the place’.
Eight children were brought up in the house, every one of them ‘a lively, ebullient and original individual’.
They are all commemorated in the hall by mosaic portraits, alongside their mother’s and father’s. Every one of them still blazes forth today, amid the signs of the zodiac on the ceiling.
Also part of this rich assembly is Jason and his crop of warriors springing forth from teeth, as well as Ulysses and Orpheus. A quotation from the Odyssey marches round their feet.
The children helped to create it all. Mosaicist Gaetano Meo set them to work, each of them having a little calico bag of chippings.
Remember that all this took place in a country-like wilderness, with the gardens of this urban palace rolling into its own field, which was once filled with cows, stretching over to Holland Park.
A curious extra footnote – Elton John once owned and lived in this house.
Top: mosaics by Gaetano Meo. Above: Debenham House, 1905. Below: stained glass and door furniture by E S Prior
On the Road
The Flying Scotsman
Brian Cox
tells
Louise Flind
about the journey from his Dundee childhood to playing Manhattan tycoon, Logan Roy, in Succession
Did you know Succession would be such a hit?
Jesse Armstrong and Adam McKay pitched the show to me and I thought, ‘Wow, this is going to be great.’
Was Logan Roy based on Murdoch?
Not at all. Of all the characters I’ve played, I thought Logan was one of the most misunderstood because all he wanted was a successor for his business and he has these three hopeless children. Of course he got angry.
my dad took me to boxing and I had to wear these boxing gloves and box this other kid. I swung my glove up and missed him and he swung his glove up and hit me and the fight was over. I did think, ‘Why is my dad putting me through this?’
What was Dundee like for you as child?
Do you prefer playing villains?
I’d rather do more comedy. As I get older, I just want to laugh more.
Which has been your favourite role?
I made my mark in Titus Andronicus in the ’80s and won an Olivier Award for best actor.
And your least favourite?
Where was Succession filmed? New York, Dubrovnik, Siena and Florence.
Do you mind being asked to tell people to f*** off in the style of Logan Roy? It gets a bit boring.
Do you prefer film and TV to the stage? Theatre is hard work because it’s live and it’s nightly. Television – you get more of a chance because you’re episodic; same with film. I don’t really have a preference.
What’s the most glamorous place you’ve filmed in?
I loved filming in Iceland. It’s haunting. I did a film there called Good Heart, and it was actually set in New York.
Is there something you really miss?
I live both in London and in New York, and we’re buying somewhere in London but, for the moment, we’ve got a very small flat. Both Nicole [Ansari – his wife] and I have got a lot of clothes, and we both like our space, and agree that the way to a happy marriage is to have separate bedrooms. I miss my separate bedroom and I’m sure Nicole does too.
What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?
We would go to Butlin’s – typical working-class boy. I was about four and
Dundee’s always had a bad rep. It’s the people of Dundee who are wonderful because there’s a lot of Irish. My family were all Irish originally. They all came across to work in the jute mills.
Do you come from a theatrical family? Theatrical, no. But, in the sense of being theatrical, yes. My sisters all sang.
My dad, sadly, died when I was eight, but he had great bonhomie and we had these wonderful Hogmanays. I would do Al Jolson impersonations, which was my trick, and I got my first sense of an audience. We always had about 70 people for Hogmanay.
It was a tiny flat – two bedrooms – and my brother and I slept in the kitchen.
Did your parents encourage your acting?
My mum did. She was 30 when my dad died and she then had a series of nervous breakdowns.
Did you act at school?
A bit. My school was a disaster. I would go for errands to waste the day.
What was your first big break?
Getting the job at the Dundee Rep. Very nervous, I arrived in the theatre and there were two guys having a fight, and I went upstairs and there was this lovely actor Gawn Grainger, who’s married to Zoë Wanamaker.
He was smoking a cigarette and he said, ‘Are you all right, darling?’ And I thought, this is the place I have to be.
There’s a film I did in the early ’90s and my daughter wasn’t very well and it was really difficult because I didn’t like what was going on. I didn’t like the director, and one of the actors punched another actor…
Do you miss Scotland? Where’s home now?
I miss it on occasions. I’ve just directed a film there. So I’ve been working in Scotland, most of the last part of 2024 editing, and it was great to be back in Scotland with Scottish crews. Home is probably going to be more in London than in New York, because of what’s happening in America –very worrying.
Where did you go on your honeymoon?
We never went on a honeymoon; we went straight back to work. My wife says her life is a honeymoon. [He turns to his wife.] That’s nice, darling.
Do you have a go at the local language?
No, because I come from Dundee.
What’s your biggest headache when you’re travelling?
People who come on the plane with those bags. I wish they’d just make everybody check their baggage.
Do you have any travelling tips?
Try and sleep as much as you can, especially on a long journey. I love being up in the air because nobody bothers me.
Brian Cox is in The Score, Theatre Royal, Haymarket
Across
1 Person beginning to get upset over tree (8)
5 Butcher’s fine cuts hit us badly (6)
9 Seeming reliable, and at home with golf (8)
10 Decorative gilding found in essentially blue room after renovation (6)
12 Flight from Italy taken by celebrity with lawsuit (9)
13 Sulked, being topless and exposed (5)
14 One’s levy halved for land offshore (4)
16 Free energy contained in explosive missile (7)
19 Looking more drained about a very unnecessary fuss (7)
21 Signals last of sugar to be removed from preserves (4)
24 New first lady before year’s end? I don’t believe it! (5)
25 Criteria designed on golf for old people (9)
27 Where a camper may be determined (6)
28 Nail it and go off such design (8)
29 Student failing to start easy cash job (6)
30 Where the reality is somewhat insubstantial (8)
Down
Genius crossword 450 EL SERENO
1 American taken in by Scrooge’s endless illtreatment (6)
2 Sweet not including contents of sugar (6)
3 Cyclist’s clear case of error (5)
4 Classic struggle to accept northern term (7)
6 Agree damage – is one reconciled? (9)
7 Border row – French working to the fore (8)
8 Flood in a French court (8)
11 Answer found in favourite fuel (4)
15 African organisation squeezed by harsh cut (9)
17 Exercise in burning logs here perhaps (4,4)
18 European role developed about tax that stops at different levels (8)
20 Manipulate American capital in Europe (4)
21 Headgear making my love clear (7)
22 Young fish from Greek isle cooked (6)
23 Tolkien characters raised case of local parchment (6)
26 A barrier that must be stone (5)
it to comps@theoldie.co.uk Deadline: 4th April 2024 We do not sell or share your data with third parties.
First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25. Two runners-up will receive £15.
NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.
Runners-up: Jonathan Causer, London SE13; Kathryn Sparrow, Morecambe, Lancashire
I can’t resist sharing this ending from the Gold Cup Final, shown to me by my friend Derek Patterson of Kent. Patterson and I go back a long way, since the World Junior Tennis Championships in 1989 – well, actually, we won the very recreational side tennis doubles tournament at the World Junior Bridge Championships in Nottingham.
Dealer East North Vunerable
Declarer, Patterson, won West’s ten-of-hearts lead with the queen and led up his singleton club. West rose with the ace and continued with his second heart. Winning dummy’s king, declarer cashed the king of clubs shedding his remaining heart, ruffed the knave of clubs (East shedding a diamond) and led a spade to the queen.
East won the king of spades and led another spade. Winning the nine, declarer crossed to the ace of diamonds. On this trick, East accurately unblocked the queen, hoping his partner could win the second diamond. Declarer cashed the ace of hearts and led that second diamond, East playing low and West winning that hoped-for knave.
In the three-card ending, West perforce led a club, dummy holding ♠A 3 and ♥6, East holding ♠10, ♥J and ♦K, and declarer holding ♠J and ♦8 7.
Declarer ruffed with dummy’s ace of spades and East was squeezed in three suits. If he discarded the king of diamonds, declarer could cross to the knave of spades to cash a long diamond; if he discarded his winning heart, declarer could lead the nowgood heart, kiboshing East; finally, if East underruffed, declarer could cross-ruff. Wonderful – thank you, Del. ANDREW ROBSON
Competition TESSA CASTRO
IN COMPETITION No 316 you were invited to write a poem called The Bus. Sheila Gray took a speedy country bus: ‘I breathe in, hoping it will help/To make the bus seem slimmer/As it skims the hedgerow branches/ And becomes a coarse hedge-trimmer.’ Vivien Brown gave voice to the tour-bus guide, ‘Jolly Jeff, with a J’, and Janine Stratton remembered the story from Dead of Night about ‘Room for one inside, sir’. Commiserations to them and to David Silverman, Heather Uebel, Andrew Lacey, Veronica Colin, Gail White, Peter Jarvis, G M Southgate, Alan Bradwell, Christine Acres, William Wood, Toddy Hoare and John McTavish, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to I White, inspired by a painting now in the London Museum.
At one end of the car, a mother raptly regards An infant cradled by her right arm; her left one,
As if of its own volition, gently draws in Her plump little daughter to share the spectacle;
Covertly, a fashionably dressed young lady, Complete with parasol and posy, shares it, too –
Unlike the top-hatted, white-spatted City man, Nearby, who has eyes only for his newspaper! And, at the other end, luminous as a bride In her white uniform, a young nurse, looking up
At a standing-room-only passenger, completes This tableau of Victorian society…
Or of some of its two-legged members, at least:
Artist, George William Joy, who painted it for us,
Left viewers to imagine a four-legged one, Trotting ahead of The Bayswater Omnibus I White
The trolley bus, a sixties child’s dream, Resplendent in its livery, green and cream, We’d board, my mum and I, a special treat, Ride from the Market Place to Browning Street.
Dangling from a spider’s web of poles and wires, No rails, no tracks, just four pneumatic tyres, How silently that double-decker glided, Transporting us to where my aunt resided. The pole rope, most essential of requirements, Was vital, should we suffer a dewirement. With a fizz, sometimes a lightning spark would shower,
Then the pole was reattached, restoring power,
A gentle lurch and then we’d smoothly journey on.
But sadly soon the trolley buses were all gone.
To reinstate them might not be a bad solution:
No overtaking, no emissions, no pollution! Julie Wigley
A ‘cow’ring, tim’rous beastie’, the C10, Shy of its route along the London streets In case a passenger advances. When Rain/sleet/snow is forecast, it retreats Into its depot — cosy, clean and warm, Safe from the traffic’s cut and thrust, and bikes
Laden with pizzas, buzzing in a swarm. Delivery drivers? Top of its dislikes.
The timetable? A skill it never learned: That’s for the bigger buses. Single-decked, A backstreet crawler through the postcodes spurned
By double-deckers that command respect, It takes the long way round and knows the way
Of turning each light red upon its stalk And minimising its own working day.
So, my advice: strong shoes, a map, and walk.
D A Prince
Climbing downstairs on the bus,
My friend behind me said, ‘You’re going Bobby Charlton, Webs, From this view of your head.’
At seventeen the shock sent me In doubly vain pursuit
Of anything to stem the loss And make my scalp hirsute.
Since then – and now full billiard bald –I’ve felt quite glad that stage Had happened in my early prime And didn’t come with age: When hair recedes as years advance, It marks the end of youth, With inch by inch men forced to face
The unrelenting truth.
Bill Webster
COMPETITION No 318 Nemone
Lethbridge chose Scarborough Fair on Desert Island Discs; Nick Cave chose Girl from the North Country. So a poem, please, with the title The Fair, in any sense.
Maximum 16 lines. We can’t accept entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – please include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 318’, by Thursday 3rd April.
Taking a Walk
On the trail of Stephenson’s Rocket
patrick barkham
It was a wintry late afternoon when I arrived at Geltsdale.
Wet, windy, muddy and very, very grey. This is Pennine Cumbria, an austere, bleak and peaceful world away from the bustle and easy beauty of the Lake District.
I had planned a route. But, at the car park beside these two hill farms that have become a vast RSPB nature reserve, I discovered there were a multitude of trails – many more paths than on the OS map. Sometimes you just want to follow someone else’s trail. So I did.
I combined the Forest Head Quarry Trail with the Stagsike Trail to make a circuit of the nature reserve in what was billed as a three-hour walk.
I began by following in the footsteps of the Rocket
This was a grassy track that had once been a short railway line, bringing stone from a quarry and coal from a mine. In 1837, miner James Thompson paid £300 for Robert Stephenson’s pioneering locomotive. After its short career as a passenger train, the Rocket enjoyed a less glamorous retirement, transporting coal in these parts.
There were no Rockets, miners or even birders, but there was an abundance of birds. A resentful churr-churr-churr came from the fieldfares nervily perched in young birches. As I approached, they flocked up and flew further down the track. There, 30 strides later, I disturbed them again and away they flew with their churr-churrs and little whistles. Our friends from the north, soon to be migrating back there.
Three lapwing were next to take great offence, peewitting around me. It is all very pleasant taking an occasional breather from humanity, but when we do, we see our impact on surrounding animals more clearly. Here I was the sole representative of a species feared and shunned by everyone except Canis familiaris.
Nursing this species loneliness, I gained elevation through the old quarry and gazed over the reserve. On the flanks
of the moor, native trees had been planted sparsely – so it looked almost like parkland.
The aim is to create a ‘mosaic’ (the conservationists’ favourite word) of wood pasture, glades and some trees and scrub, among which cattle still graze. We don’t know what native tree-clad uplands look like because we haven’t got any, but these trees wouldn’t ever become dense forest.
In this windy place, new trees take their time. The silver birches were the height of a spindly four-year-old tree in the lowlands. Except, here, they were 15 years old and unusually stocky, thick branches braced against the perpetual breeze.
The blue hills of Scotland rolled away to the north. This was the watershed of the Eden heading west and the South Tyne flowing east. Despite being within sight of the silver-shining Solway Firth, the little Howgill Beck, rushing through the nature reserve, was on its way towards the North Sea.
Further on, the stream had been rewiggled from a dismal-looking straight channel across a flat meadow, and now there were rushes and pools of water near Tindale Tarn. Redshank and geese
were enjoying these water meadows. A curlew cried out – another song of loneliness – from a big field where sheep still grazed.
The human world returned in the form of a lovely old row of low, whitewashed stone cottages, and a marvellously gnarly crab-apple tree where generations of livestock had taken shelter.
As the world stilled at dusk, under a blanket of mizzle, a thrush sang its evensong. Its three-note repetitions echoed for a mile in this grand arena. I wondered what it made of its close cousins, the scattershot fieldfares, who would never stay here and sing for their territory.
Did I mention that at dusk it was just me and the birds? And it remained cold, wet, grey, and quite glorious? Our beautiful world. And not so lonely when we can enjoy the bountiful company and conversations of other creatures.
Geltsdale Nature Reserve, Hallbankgate, Brampton, CA8 2PN. Car park what3words: crinkled.drives. grain. Follow the Forest Head Quarry Trail and then take the Stagsike Trail in a round to take in most of the reserve
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War of the wills
QWhy on earth don’t relatives share items left after a member of the family has died – each maybe having the item for six months/a year maybe and then passing it over to another relative for another appointed length of time? If the item then needs to be sold, the proceeds can be split in half.
Wouldn’t this arrangement put a stop to all this stupid and petty quarrelling at such times? I always find it very sad and upsetting when folk quarrel over items at such distressing times, and it seems to me quite unnecessary to quarrel anyway. Share! It can work!
Name and address supplied
AOn the face of it, this seems an obvious solution but, unfortunately, although it might work with some objects and people, most of us imbue inherited items with emotional baggage that simply can’t be split.
We can get worked up about our sister, for example, having that particular teaspoon of our mother’s, not because we really need it but because it symbolises our mother’s love. What we couldn’t cope with in life – sharing her love – can’t be done now she’s dead. We want all of it.
Hence the ‘petty’ quarrelling, as you call it. It’s not petty to us. It’s huge. They don’t say, ‘When there’s a will, there’s a war’ for nothing.
The best way to avoid all this is to divvy up the inheritance before the relative has died. This can take some of the sting out of the result – because you know that your mother would have liked it this way.
I’m afraid that usually can’t solve the problem completely – the resentment
Ask Virginia
virginia ironside
can linger for years and years.
It’s often only the next generation who can say, ‘What was so special about that? Was it really worth the bitterness and misery it begat?’
Forgive forgetfulness
QMy father has Alzheimer’s and is very forgetful. He often repeats himself several times during a conversation, or dreams up unlikely bits of information that are clearly not true.
He recently got it into his head that we were all related to Jonathan Swift. A total fantasy. My husband and I just let it wash over us, murmuring, ‘How interesting,’ or acknowledging that he’s repeating himself by gently finishing the repeated story for him.
If he suddenly catches himself doing it, and apologises, we just say, ‘It’s worth hearing twice,’ or something kindly.
My brother, however, and his wife are ruthless in picking him up on anything they’ve heard before. ‘You’ve already told us that three times,’ they’ll say, making my father very upset and withdrawn. We argue about this a lot, with my brother, particularly, arguing that it’s wrong to indulge him and will make him worse. J G, Farnham, Surrey
AI’d say your brother feels very threatened by his father’s illness, and is trying to deny that it exists; he does this by treating him as if he retained all his faculties when clearly he hasn’t. Maybe he’s terrified of developing Alzheimer’s himself.
Or maybe he just can’t bear to see someone he used to respect and look up to slowly deteriorate into someone completely different.
Try to show your brother the compassion he is, sadly, unable to
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summon up for your father. And ask him if he might be a little bit more forgiving of your father’s fantasies and memory lapses.
Don’t sniff at sniffers
QI’ve only just got round to reading your letter on sniffing (October 2024 issue) and must therefore now draw your attention to the fact that some medication causes sniffing, which is very unpleasant for the patient and for his/her companion(s).
My husband and I discovered this only when he was prescribed daily medication after a prostate op. He had been taking this medication for a few weeks when he started sniffing.
It puzzled us at first, but then we read the medication leaflet and found that, yes, it could cause sniffing – which, once it had started, could not be reversed.
My poor husband has suffered with sniffing ever since, even though he stopped taking the medication … and I suffer too, as of course I hear it constantly.
Name and address supplied
AThank you so much for pointing this out. I certainly never knew this and, when faced with a sniffer, often rather pointedly offer him or her a tissue. But I do hope that when you meet new people, you explain what’s happening.
I’ve always regarded compulsive sniffers as rather bad-mannered but if I knew it was involuntary, I would be a lot more compassionate.
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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