81 Taking a Walk: Harold’s Park Farm, Essex Patrick Barkham
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Front cover: Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. Jeeves and Wooster. ITV
Early party girl page 19
Former Baywatch
The Old Un’s Notes
actress Pamela Anderson has just paraded make-up-free and hairsprayless for Paris Fashion Week.
She said she wanted ‘to really peel it back … I wanted to remember who I was’.
But the once heavily back-brushed ’90s bombshell, who as Californian lifeguard
C J Parker slow-jogged across the TV screen before a weekly audience of 1.1 billion, can’t swim so easily away from her glamour-girl reputation.
London’s Design Museum has announced its major exhibition next year is Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style.
And the prize exhibit is Anderson’s scarlet Baywatch one-piece – undoubtedly the most famous swimsuit in the world.
C J Parker may have been a fantasy, but Baywatch’s costumes were based on those worn by real Southern California lifeguards. Anderson’s was specially adapted for her unique proportions.
Nicknamed Baby Bardot for her curvy figure and (allegedly artificial) pout, the former Playboy bunny brought the swimsuit back into fashion, beating the bikini as every sun-loving woman’s favourite item to dip in.
With this new exhibition, it will be difficult for Anderson, now in her late 50s, to drown out that iconic memory.
Splash! opens in March 2025. Dive in.
Among this month’s contributors
Robert Bathurst (p15) plays Jeff Bernard in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell at the Coach & Horses, Soho, in January. He was in Cold Feet, Toast of London, Downton Abbey and the remake of Dad’s Army.
Kathy Lette (p21) is a writer. Her novels include Puberty Blues (1979) and The Revenge Club (2024). Her non-fiction includes In Bed With... (2009) and Men: A User’s Guide (2010).
Griff Rhys Jones (p22) was in Not the Nine O’Clock News. He was in Alas Smith and Jones with Mel Smith. TalkBack, his company, produced Da Ali G Show, I’m Alan Partridge and QI
Kate Garner (p34), a songwriter and singer, is the daughter of Chas Hodges from Chas & Dave. She presents The Stories Behind the Songs on Talking Pictures TV.
‘In art, originality is too quickly applauded. In life, it is usually punished.’
This sounds like something Oscar Wilde might have said — and that’s intentional.
Maarten Asscher has won the Oscar Wilde Society’s fifth Wilde Wit competition with this profound observation.
This year’s contest, co-sponsored by The Oldie, drew more than 500 entries, each crafted to sound like something Oscar himself might have said.
Second place went to Nick Symondson for ‘A life of purity is a life of missed opportunity.’
Simon Scarratt came in third place for ‘Better to be irreverent than to be irrelevant.’
Another award was chosen by three-time winner Darcy Alexander Corstorphine, who has now joined the Oscar Wilde Society committee, which determines the shortlist. He selected Amalia Dolores’s entry: ‘The older I get, the more I know about being young.’
All four 2024 winners receive Wildean prizes. First prize is the new book from Kate Hext, Wilde in the Dream Factory: Decadence and the American Movies
The new 2025 edition of Who’s Who includes a rare hat-trick.
Major General Julian Buczacki, Assistant Chief of Defence Staff, is one of the new entries. He finds himself in the hallowed red book,
Stripped: Pamela Anderson in Paris – and Baywatch
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Pet gerbil given oxygen after house fire
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Two new food-hygiene scores are given for baguette shop and pizza place
Bucks Free Press
Man in trench coat
Eastern Daily Press
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Every Friday, we will send you the very latest stories and features – the more timely stuff which doesn’t make it into the magazine. And a joke from the late great Barry Cryer. Plus you get advance notice of our literary lunches, reader trips and courses. Don’t miss out. Go to www.theoldie.co.uk and enter your email address in this box:
ahead of his brother, oncologist Professor Simon Buczacki, and his father, Dr Stefan Buczacki, former chairman of Gardeners’ Question Time.
Among Julian’s recreations in Who’s Who, then, he is now able to write, ‘Beating the next two people at Trivial Pursuit.’
Former Conservative MP Gordon Henderson managed, in his last year in the Commons, to write a (rather good) spy thriller, Steven Statton – a very working-class spy.
The 575-page door-stopper is set partly at Westminster but is, happily, largely non-political.
The one moment of personal score-settling may come when two characters are discussing the Isle of Sheppey, which Henderson represented for 14 years.
‘I know where the Isle of Sheppey is,’ says the hero; ‘it’s full of caravans, amusement arcades and sheep.’
To which the other character adds, ‘And fat people with tattoos.’
It is perhaps just as well that Henderson, 77, is not seeking re-election.
Botanical artist Emma Tennant has a new exhibition, Two Years in Scottish Gardens.
Among her pictures is Two Leeks (pictured). The leeks
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come from Edrom House, the Berwickshire house of her late daughter, the model Stella Tennant (1970-2020).
Stella was photographed (above) by Martin Parr at Edrom with her gardener, Bert Kinghorn, in 2018.
Emma Tennant writes, ‘I love the fact that the simple leek inspired JAR [Joel Arthur Rosenthal], the worldrenowned jeweller, as it does me. Stella often spoke of JAR with such respect and affection. They shared a great love of plants.
‘Stella’s favourite JAR piece was a pair of weeping-willow earrings that she wore for the night of the Met Gala in 2013. They will shortly form part of the V&A’s jewellery collection, having been donated by JAR “In Memory of Stella”.’
You can view the show at www.katiepertwee.com.
The Old Un, ever short of a bob or two, was pleased to receive (for the third time) a £10 voucher from the Office for National Statistics for filling in a census questionnaire.
One niggle, though, was a set of questions that demanded to know if the respondent had any ‘health condition’. The answer to this, plainly, was ‘Yes’ because we all have health conditions – either good, bad or middling. What the ONS meant was ‘health problem’ or ‘ailment’, but it was too twee to say so.
Oldie-reader Sheila Crispin enjoyed reading the Old Un’s story about the appointment of the Rev Mark Birch as Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons.
Sheila taught him when he was a veterinary student at the University of Bristol. Mark qualified as a veterinary surgeon in 1993 and worked in a veterinary practice dealing with domestic pets and exotic animals before he was ordained.
Like the Speaker, he has a deep affection for animals. His three-legged cat, Natalie, will join the Speaker’s rather larger menagerie; two cats (Clem and Attlee), a tortoise (Maggie) and a parrot (Boris).
Following his appointment, Mark said, ‘It is great to be
Stella Tennant by Martin Parr; Two Leeks by Emma Tennant
working with someone who loves God’s creatures as much as I do.’
He’s seldom read any more, but in the 1920s and ’30s, Warwick Deeping (1877-1950) was an extraordinarily prolific and popular novelist.
Seven of his novels made the bestseller list and his career lasted 45 years. His final work, Old Mischief, was published in 1950, the year of his death.
2025 is the centenary of the publication of his most successful book, Sorrell and Son. An international bestseller, it was made into an American silent film in 1927 and a British talkie in 1934.
There was also a muchloved television series in 1984, starring Richard Pascoe and Gwen Watford.
The hero is Captain Stephen Sorrell MC, forced into a life of servitude and sacrifice after his wife walks out on him and their son. Women don’t always come out of Deeping’s book enormously well. Noble Sorrell tells son Kit that his mum is dead, because death is surely preferable to betrayal!
Though a man of class and learning, he works as a hotel porter to provide for Kit’s medical training. Even after
the ex-wife suddenly reappears, all turns out well
Modern critics hate it, but in 1925 – and again in 1984 – people wept at its simple yet poignant story. Actually, so did the Old Un.
The Old Un joins David Cazalet (see page 16) in saluting his great-grandfather P G Wodehouse – on whom death sneaked up with the lead piping 50 years ago, on Valentine’s Day 1975.
The Government only knighted Wodehouse a month before his death at 93.
The conventional wisdom is that he had been overlooked because he behaved badly while held captive in wartime civil internment camps.
Wodehouse gave five radio broadcasts under the title How to Be an Internee Without Previous Training. Some thought his talks went beyond naivety and reached the level of treason.
A bit thick, in the Old Un’s opinion. As Malcolm Muggeridge said, Wodehouse was singularly ill-fitted to living in a time of ideological conflict. He wouldn’t have known a hot political issue if you’d served it to him on a skewer with truffle sauce. The whole art of Wodehouse’s humour lies in observing people taking themselves Very Seriously, and responding accordingly.
Take his reflection on
being transferred between Nazi camps:
‘All through my period of internment, I noticed this tendency on the part of the Germans to start our little expeditions off with a whoop and a rush and then sort of lose interest. It reminded me of Hollywood.’
And you only have to look at Wodehouse’s sublime satire of Oswald Mosley as Roderick Spode – leader of the Black Shorts – to see what he thought of Hitler.
Wodehouse’s two finest defenders were Evelyn Waugh and his son Auberon Waugh.
In 1961, Evelyn Waugh broadcast ‘An Act of Homage and Reparation to P G Wodehouse’ on the BBC Home Service.
Waugh captured Wodehouse’s unique combination of genius and innocence: ‘For Mr Wodehouse, there has been no fall of Man; no “aboriginal calamity”. His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden. The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled.
‘Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.’
In Homage to P G Wodehouse (1973), Auberon Waugh called him the master of ‘the Great English Joke’. By that, he meant ‘All seriousness – personal, religious, political – is reduced to absurdity … the best jokes completely ignore everything in which men of authority try to interest us.’
It also helped that Wodehouse was a great classical scholar.
David Cazalet was kind enough to reveal Wodehouse’s brainy timetable at Dulwich College (pictured).
Mirabile dictu, as Bertie Wooster – or, more likely, Jeeves – might have said.
The 1927 American silent movie version of Sorrell and Son
I hate the wee hours of the morning
My nocturnal bathroom visits stop me sleeping
I can’t sleep.
Of course, I can sleep and I do sleep, but not necessarily in the right place at the right time.
I have no difficulty nodding off in church or at the cinema – at our local deluxe flea-pit, they even provide beds for the purpose.
My problem is overnight slumber. I get to sleep pretty quickly once the light goes out and then I am out for the count for three hours at least; often for four and a half. (My sleep pattern, like yours, runs in 90-minute cycles.) And then I wake up in need of a wee.
I got into the habit of nocturnal micturition when our children were small. My wife explained to me that it’s one of the downsides of having children. And I’ve noticed it’s got worse since we’ve had grandchildren.
Anyway, at three or four in the morning I pad out to the bathroom, pad back and climb into bed again – and that’s when sleep eludes me.
For an hour, sometimes two, I lie there, quite still, eyes closed, mind racing. I have tried every remedy from Nytol (gives you brain fog in the morning, in my experience) to silently singing the Lord Chancellor’s song from the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Iolanthe The one that begins ‘When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is taboo’d by anxiety…’
I know all the words and it’s quite consoling to think that a genius like Gilbert went through what I am going through – but it does not get me to sleep.
Nor does rhythmical slow breathing. Or counting sheep. Or counting my blessings. Nothing is working.
If you know something that does, I will be amazed and very grateful.
As a partial insomniac (I am awake only for around 90 minutes a night), I take a keen interest in the lives and habits of fellow sufferers.
One of my heroes is the great Victorian author and photographer Lewis Carroll, whose little Guide for Insomniacs has recently been reissued by Notting Hill Editions.
Fifty years ago, I wrote a show based around Carroll’s insomnia, which toured for a while with the comedian (and master of Odd Odes) Cyril Fletcher playing Carroll in a striped nightshirt and with gusto, if not with a complete mastery of the lines. He pinned bits of the script on assorted pieces of furniture around the set and visited them in a disconcertingly random order.
not at all unlikely, to be blamed by somebody. If you limit your actions in life to things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much!’
Time for a nap
Twenty years ago, I co-wrote a musical about Lewis Carroll. We did a memorable reading, with Simon Russell Beale in the lead and Romola Garai as Isa Bowman – the young actress who had played the title role when Alice in Wonderland was put on stage in 1888, and used to holiday with Carroll in Eastbourne.
There was talk of a film of the play (with Bill Nighy as Lewis Carroll), but it came to nothing when one of the producers got it into his head that if Lewis Carroll were alive today, he would almost certainly be ‘cancelled’.
Lewis Carroll was more at home with children than with adults. He wrote for children. He photographed children. He made special friends of assorted young girls over a number of years, corresponding amusingly with them, writing and devising poems and puzzles for them, and dedicating works to them.
In 1893, his sister, Mary, wrote to him about the gossip that was attached to these relationships. He replied:
‘You need not be shocked at my being spoken against. Anybody who is spoken about at all is sure to be spoken against by somebody: and any action, however innocent in itself, is liable, and
Carroll told his sister that, because of his experience, he was convinced ‘that the opinion of “people” in general is absolutely worthless as a test of right and wrong’. He said that, for him, there were only two tests when ‘having some particular girl-friend as a guest’. Did he have her family’s ‘full approval for what I do’? And did he ‘feel it to be entirely innocent and right in the sight of God’?
So it was not a troubled conscience that kept him awake at night. I reckon it was a teeming brain and a wonderfully vivid imagination. He did his best to put his ‘wakeful hours’, as he called them, to good use, devising games, composing verses, solving mathematical problems night after night.
He even invented a writing tablet which he called the nyctograph that enabled note-taking in the dark.
Last night, between four and five, as one of my getting-to-sleep games, I went through the alphabet in my head, listing the names of friends I should have sent Christmas cards to – and would have done had I had the energy to do so.
I got to W before I nodded off. W was for the actor Simon Williams who always makes me laugh. He sent me a text this week with this quote of Ava Gardner that he thought I’d like: ‘A party isn’t a party without a drunken bitch in tears.’
Sleep tight.
Gyles’s daily anagram is at www.fullrainbow.co.uk
Strange case of a mystery benefactor
Who returned my lost glasses? It’s far from elementary, my dear Watson
matthew norman
In the way of this dismal age for the young, my son, Louis Norman, has been restored to his childhood home for some 16 months.
This is less by choice than through economic necessity. No one within 17 postcodes of sanity, let alone a close relative, would wish to cohabit with me.
For all that, I think he finds it almost tolerable. He and his partner have turned the previously condemnable top floor of the house into a pleasant apartment. And while he naturally finds his old man a loud and narcissistic nuisance, there are occasional beacons of amusement to light the path.
Often, these revolve round the mishandling of food. He christened one of my creations ‘blood pork’, for example, after a self-inflicted knife wound liberally seasoned the batch of potsticker dumplings soon to be served to an unknowing and appreciative table of guests. ‘Floor beans’ was his designation for another signature dish.
The moment he rang from two storeys above the other day, it was plain that a fresh eccentricity had been noted. This one involved no culinary breakthrough.
‘Oh yup, yup, yup,’ he began, that being his preferred prologue to the announcement of an oddity. ‘I was looking out of the window onto the road just now, and feel I should report what I saw.’
‘A drive-by shooting?’ I asked anxiously. Long ago, when he was tiny, drive-by shootings were a regular feature of life on our elegant Shepherd’s Bush thoroughfare. Often, his mother and I would relish the aftermath from our bathroom window.
But the influx of migrants from the Levant has massively improved the area, and that innocent pleasure has long been denied us.
‘No, not that – something more novel,’ explained Louis. ‘A woman just cycled
up to your car, put a pair of glasses on the bonnet, and cycled off the way she’d come.’
Now this, you will agree, was intriguing. In the late-Victorian era, relating that a ginger woman had deposited spectacles on a car bonnet (or, rather, on the mane of a hansom cabpulling horse) and cycled away was exactly how the first-time visitor to 221B Baker Street would introduce a new case.
‘What?’ I ejaculated, picking up the imaginary pipe and filling it with fictitious shag from a non-existent Persian slipper. ‘I mean, in the name of sweet Lord Jesus, WHAT?’
‘A. Woman. Has. Just. Cycled…’ said Louis, in the slow and over-deliberate manner of a young A&E doctor addressing a suspected-stroke victim.
‘I heard what you said,’ I interrupted sharply. ‘I just don’t understand it. I mean, who was she?’
‘Oddly enough, she didn’t introduce herself,’ said Louis. ‘All I can tell you is that she had red hair in a ponytail, and was wearing a hi-vis yellow jacket.’
‘Are the glasses still there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I suppose I’d better retrieve them.’
‘That,’ said Louis, ‘would seem the obvious next move.’
And there, perched insouciantly on the bonnet, as advertised, were the glasses – specifically, an over-the-counter pair bought a while back during one of those familiar periods when the prescription pair had elected to go AWOL.
Among the curiosities here is that I
How did she connect a filthy old Audi and a pair of glasses?
had no recollection of using them that morning. I had been out and may have put them on to read a sign showing the butcher’s Christmas opening times.
But since I’d been home for a good hour when Louis filed his most singular report, she could hardly have tracked me from the butcher’s on the scintillating tour that took in a fishmonger, a chemist, a bookie and a convenience store.
Besides, none of these outlets could have known where I live. And in none, at any time, was a redhead present.
Nor could she have known me by my address; if she had, she’d have rung the bell or posted them through the letter box.
We must assume, then, that she recognised the car. But, even if she had, how on earth could she have made the connection between a filthy old Audi and a cheap pair of glasses?
I have been pondering this mystery round the clock for some days (admittedly without thus far selfinjecting with a seven-per-cent cocaine solution), and remain both wildly unnerved and entirely bemused.
In which event, my dear Watsons, I have no option but to beg for your help.
Are you a red-haired female cyclist with a yellow Day-Glo jacket and either (a) a philanthropic penchant for returning lost eyewear by leaving it on car bonnets, or (b) a grudge that led you to seek vengeance by gaslighting me in so impressively original a way?
If not, do you know of such a person currently operating in London W12?
A relative, possibly, or a patient recently discharged, perhaps too soon, from a psychiatric facility?
The reward for information leading to the identification of the mystery bicycling redhead is a pair of plastic spectacles, worth much less than the £8 initially paid for them, but with a sentimental value far beyond measure.
what was Winterbottom Book Cloth?
The first book to be bound in book cloth was issued in 1823 by the bookbinder Archibald Leighton. But it was not until another Archibald, the Manchester cloth and cotton merchant Archibald Winterbottom, started his own company in 1853 that the book-cloth industry really took off.
Charles Dickens, William Thackeray and Wilkie Collins were all bestselling Victorian writers, but would their works have reached such a wide public without the invention of book cloth?
The answer is no. Before book cloth, made of stiffly starched cotton, books had been bound in leather or vellum, which made them unaffordable except to the rich. Very often, books were first issued in limp, easily perishable paper coverings by the publisher, and it was up to the bookseller or buyer to bind them in expensive durable materials.
This inefficient and somewhat amateurish way of producing and selling books meant the trade was slow to expand.
The development of book cloth, which could be manufactured on a vast scale
in Northern cotton mills, changed all that and heralded a true revolution in publishing.
Winterbottom, a Victorian entrepreneur, had first worked for the cotton firm of Henry Bannerman. There he developed the starch mixes and machinery for top-quality book cloth.
It was a highly technical process but, as an astute and innovative businessman, Winterbottom foresaw the commercial possibilities that had eluded Bannerman.
By 1874, when he bought Victoria Mills in Salford, he was on the way to becoming the largest producer of book cloth in the world. He also introduced the gold-stamping and elaborate designs on book covers that are so characteristic of Victorian volumes.
His two sons and their descendants carried on the business, driving out all competitors and establishing a near monopoly, which lasted until 1980.
The high demand for book cloth from America and Germany, particularly, turned the Winterbottom family into multimillionaires.
The happy effect of all this was that authors’ works could now reach a large audience. Some of them, such as Dickens, became millionaires themselves.
what is a dudebro?
The dudebro is no mere dude and no mere bro. He is a dudebro. You may feel that’s tautologous, but there is a subtle difference between a ‘dude’ and a ‘bro’.
A dude is excessively concerned with his looks. A bro is excessively invested in his masculinity. The dudebro combines the worst elements of each. He likes to drink beer, play video games, harass women in bars and beep you when you slow down for pedestrians. He works out, has tattoos and dresses in such a way that you will notice this.
His interests include protein shakes, Bitcoin, PornHub, Joe Rogan and the Ultimate Fighting Championship. He won’t hear a word against Elon Musk. He hates the woke new Jaguar advert – it offends him to his core! He also hates people who take offence too easily.
There are unofficial dudebro chapters everywhere, but America is the dudebro’s heartland and where he’s most consequential.
‘We’ve had a cultural problem with young men for a number of years that is now becoming a political problem,’ one researcher told Wired magazine earlier this year in an article heralding the dawn of ‘dudebro politics’ in America.
Donald Trump was clearly paying attention. On the 2024 presidential campaign trail, the Republican nominee identified the dudebro as the crucial voter in battleground states. It can’t have hurt that he has an 18-year-old son, Barron, who could tell him which media figures to court. Trump gave lengthy interviews to uber-podcaster Joe Rogan, YouTube comedian Theo Von (‘My son’s a big fan of yours’) and Adin Ross, a 23-year-old man from Florida who is famous for playing Grand Theft Auto.
Trump meanwhile surrounded himself with men who subscribe to at
The rapid growth of literacy in the 19th century greatly increased the desire for books. The Winterbottom Book Cloth Company was largely responsible for satisfying the great leap in learning. Their attractive, mass-produced covers allowed readers with modest incomes to buy the books they had coveted.
Until about 1850, the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mrs Gaskell and some other Victorian writers had been issued as weekly or monthly partworks in magazines. Archibald Winterbottom pushed for them to be published instead as complete works bound in his embellished book cloth. As a direct result, the number of books sold between 1850 and 1890 increased tenfold.
By 1945, the Winterbottom Book Cloth Company remained the leading manufacturer in Britain and a major exporter – but the end was in sight.
Cotton cloth was rationed after the war and publishers started to issue paperbacks, which were much cheaper than even the cheapest book cloth.
Next time you hold a beautiful sturdy Victorian book, you can be pretty sure the cover came from a Winterbottom factory.
Liz Hodgkinson
least a part of the dudebro agenda. There’s Vice President-elect J D Vance, a staunch believer that feminism has gone too far and that women should stay at home. And there is ‘First Buddy’ Elon Musk, one of the billionaire broligarchs who stand to benefit from his presidency. One of Musk’s first acts when he bought Twitter for $44 billion was to make it more amenable to dudebros, welcoming back figures like Trump and Andrew Tate.
‘It’s men vs gays ’n’ chicks,’ was Tate’s summary of the 2024 presidential election.
The results unfortunately bore this out. For decades, young people have favoured left-leaning, progressive candidates. In 2024, Trump won the ‘men aged 18-29’ demographic by 14 points, while ‘women aged 18-29’ favoured Kamala Harris by 18 points.
Among the many criticisms levelled at Harris in the messy aftermath? She should have gone on the Joe Rogan podcast. Richard Godwin
Raise a glass to Jeff
Robert Bathurst is playing Jeffrey Bernard at his Soho watering hole, the Coach & Horses
I’ve got an occasional residency in a Soho pub. For the last few years, I’ve turned up behind the bar at the Coach & Horses in Greek Street to perform Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell to a paying public.
The play, taken from Bernard’s weekly Spectator column, ‘Low Life’, was collated and constructed into a theatre show by Keith Waterhouse. He set it in the Coach, where Bernard would begin his day at opening time, 11am. Starting in 1989, the show ran profitably in the West End, starring Peter O’Toole.
It makes sense to perform it in situ; doing the play there makes the pub echo, if a bit incoherently, with history.
James Hillier, the director, cut the piece to just one hour long and has me doing it on my own – the stage version had four other actors. The fact that it’s relatively short has its advantages: it’s quite a scrum in there and can get quite steamy – and I can do two shows a night.
I remember the O’Toole performance. He was succeeded by Tom Conti, James Bolam, Denis Waterman, Robert Powell and others. I recall thinking that Waterhouse gave O’Toole four other actors on stage with him, playing scenes from Bernard’s life, mainly to stop him going mad doing the show for months on his own.
There’s no room in the Coach for five actors; there’s barely enough space for me. The audience perch on bar stools and benches, or stand. I move out from behind the bar and plough through them, sometimes climbing over wedged knees, occasionally trying not to step on a dog.
I have a high table and a stool out in the middle area, from which the stage manager has to clear punters before the show.
I have to keep moving. Though open plan, the pub has three distinct sections, cleaved by walnut-coloured wooden walls. At any point in the show a third of the audience are slightly disadvantaged – so there has to be a flow to make sure everybody can be engaged.
I am conscious that, when I’m doing the egg trick (I won’t explain – you’ll have to come), there are some people at
the far end who don’t have the best view. This is in contrast to those who are just three feet away, who are in peril of being spattered with egg.
Working so close to an audience has its obvious challenges for concentration, though this show is not the first such experience for me. I did a promenade play at the Royal Court where the audience followed the actors. I would do a speech on the stairs backstage as they crowded round. In one performance, I had the critic Michael Billington standing right next to me, scribbling on his notepad. Shopping list or vitriol? I didn’t check.
In the show at the Coach, perhaps the main job, or at least the first, is to let the audience feel it’s all perfectly normal. It’s not theatre as we know it, and the artifice couldn’t be plainer.
The punters are on stage with Jeff; there’s no separation. This also allows for complete lack of fourth-wall embarrassment when things go wrong.
I’ve had to stop the show a couple of times when a member of the audience has collapsed. The first time it happened, I thought it was possibly fatal. The elderly man was taken out when the ambulance arrived – I later heard he was OK – and the restart happened to come at the point when Bernard is talking about the Grim Reaper and all the friends he’s lost. The ambulance flashing lights
were strobing through the pub.
Part of the pleasure of performing
Bernard’s writing is that some people aren’t sure how they should take it. I occasionally see some enjoyably lemon-sucky faces of disapproval.
I put a trigger warning on the press announcement last time: ‘This show contains references to smoking, drinking, alcohol and sex.’
The Daily Mail took this seriously and fulminated to the play’s PR. I replied that the warning was ironic; that it was just a list of four perfectly legal adult activities and that perhaps the most problematic aspect was that the show also contained humour. They printed that and now, officially, the Mail gets irony.
Bernard’s writing is delicious. To do the show is to deliver a feast. I’m not glossing his life. Any study of the period, such as Soho in the Eighties by Christopher Howse, describes the harsh routine of self-destruction by the set who drank in rotation at the Coach, the French, Gerry’s and the Colony Room.
When people sought out Bernard in one of those dens, expecting him to be as witty, verbally nimble and perceptive as he was in his columns, they usually went away disappointed. He got his copy done before opening time – a lesson to wannabes.
His column was an entertainment. Like that of any autobiographical comic writer, the portrayal of himself was a construction, rooted in truth and laced with honest and at times touching revelation. But it was always with an eye to the perfectly phrased gag; on getting the next commission.
Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, starring Robert Bathurst, is at the Coach & Horses, Soho, 19th January to 10th February. Tickets at jeffreyplay.com
Cheers! Robert Bathurst as Jeff Bernard
David Cazalet salutes P G Wodehouse, his step-great-grandfather, 50 years after the Master’s death
The real Plum
A‘bout five years ago, there was a thrush who built her nest in a poplar tree, and she sang so beautifully that all the worms came up from their holes, the ants laid down their burdens, the crickets stopped their mirth, and the moths settled in the front row near her.
‘She sang a song as if in heaven, going up higher and higher as she sang.
‘At last, the song was done and the bird came down panting.
‘“Thank you,” said all the creatures. “Now my story is done.”’
That was written by P G Wodehouse, my step-great-grandfather, when he was seven.
When I was a small boy, this little story hung in a frame in my bedroom. So did the somewhat terrifying school timetable (pictured on page 7), which was Wodehouse’s curriculum at Dulwich College in the 1890s.
And, next to my bedroom, my father, Edward Cazalet, who took over his estate when ‘Plum’ (from ‘Pelham’) died, lovingly built his own Wodehouse library: his diaries, letters, the books he read, what influenced him, his notes and papers, his pipe, typewriter, tobacco box, hats and coats etc.
And, of course, his books. A world of ‘Aunts bellowing to Aunts like mastodons across the primeval swamps’, who ‘chew on broken bottles and wear barbed wire next to the skin’; of dynamic girls with ‘laughter like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge’; dukes with moustaches that ‘rise and fall like seaweed on an ebb-tide’; shy men with voices like Gussie Fink-Nottle’s, whose unique timbre reminds the hearer ‘partly of an escape from a gas pipe and partly of a sheep calling to its young in the lambing season’.
My father adored Plum, and remains the one living person who knew him well. His devotion was in part because Plum so adored and protected his mother, Leonora Wodehouse (pictured) (190544), who tragically died as a consequence of a bomb in the Second World War, when my father was seven.
Plum and my father’s grandmother had married after Leonora’s own father had died, and he adopted her as his own daughter. Their relationship was deeply touching, and they wrote many playful letters to each other.
His dedication to her in The Heart of a Goof (1926) reads, ‘To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.’
Her death was devastating to him. He was not a man for showing emotion, but his letters express an aching sense of loss, magnified perhaps by his own lack of close family connections as a child.
As a product of Empire, with his parents in Hong Kong (his father was a colonial magistrate), he was brought up in England, almost exclusively by his aunts (allowing us to join the dots about his views on aunts). Between the ages of
three and 15, he saw his parents on only four occasions.
I remember talking to Plum on the phone as a small boy. Every Christmas and birthday, he would send me and my siblings a signed book with a ten-dollar bill in each one, and we would call him to thank him.
When I listen to old BBC tapes of him talking, I immediately remember that crackly voice on the phone coming from across the Atlantic, old, kind and present, asking me about sports and school.
I was eight when he died, aged 93, of a heart attack, pencil in hand, still writing, 50 years ago, on Valentine’s Day, 1975.
The collapse in the value of the rupee in the late 1890s wiped out the family money. Plum was about to go up to Oxford, following in the footsteps of his brother, Armine, who had just taken a double first in Mods and Greats, and had become a don.
Armine became a visiting professor in Poona, to tutor Indian writer Jiddu Krishnamurti in theosophy. Plum was meant to follow in his footsteps but, with no family financial support, he was forced to find a job at HSBC in London as a clerk. There, he said, he proved to be ‘the most ineffective clerk whose trouser seat had ever polished the surface of a high stool’.
Thankfully, his ineptness led him to a rethink. So he launched himself on a writing career, best encapsulated by his winning the Mark Twain Medal for ‘having made
With adopted daughter, Leonora, aka ‘Snorky’, (1905-44), 1933
an outstanding and lasting contribution to the happiness of the world’.
On the 50th anniversary of his death, we will be celebrating precisely this. This happiness stretches far and wide, with 99 books still in print, translated into 37 different languages, new adaptations of his work for stage and TV bubbling up year after year, and great authors writing their own homages to him.
His life is well documented; somewhat less documented are his musical achievements. In the 1920s, as a lyricist, he had five musicals on Broadway running concurrently! He was the bridge between music-hall entertainment of a bygone age and the modern musical.
Had he died in the 1920s, he would have died famous as a lyricist and a Hollywood writer. Gershwin and Kern were his pals and saw him as a master.
Here’s something to give you some sense of Plum’s ability to transcend time, situation and culture.
The scene is the opening of the new law courts in Bhutan. My father, then a High Court judge, is the British guest of honour, representing the weight, might and history of British jurisprudence. There is much pageantry and solemnity.
The Lord Chief Justice is walking the line of visiting dignitaries, each stiffly addressing the other with well-rehearsed words of mutual respect. The Lord Chief Justice gets to my father and, with reckless abandon, grabs him by the hand, pulls him violently into a tight embrace and with wild hoots of laughter yells,
‘WHAT HO! WHAT HO! WHAT HO!’
My father falls into this embrace like a lost brother. In the chaos that ensues, these two highly distinguished men of law escape proceedings to talk Wodehouse and became firm friends.
Why does he make us laugh? It’s sentences like this: ‘It was often said of Archibald that, had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to it to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers.’
It is Pythonesque, it is Blackadder, it is Latin in structure, it is something so tangentially absurd…
And all this at the rate of three mind-boggling similes a page, with plotlines that are equally ridiculous. Just read the short story ‘Uncle Fred Flits By’ (1935) and you’ll see what I mean.
Brilliant writers and intellectuals – all, as PGW would say, ‘steeped to the gills in serious purpose’ – would visit the family library to search for the essence of his genius, and stay for weeks.
Each day, they would pore over his writing. Each night, exhausted and silent,
P
they dined with us, bringing a certain lugubriousness to home life, turning each merry party into ‘one of those jolly, happy, bread-crumbling parties where you cough twice before you speak, and then decide not to say it after all’.
These academics exhibited the same ‘sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife,
Gershwin and Kern were his pals and saw him as a master
and dropping the baby into the city reservoir, he turns to the cupboard, only to find the vodka bottle empty’.
One American academic sent my father to sleep. Things got so turgid I threw a bread roll at one, to see if the Drones spirit coursed within. It didn’t.
Scholarly articles would ensue, talking about the transferred epithet and ‘his sentence structure so redolent of the Iliad’ etc.
He did, though, have a rigorous
classical education, which must have shaped his prose style and lines like Bertie Wooster’s in Right Ho, Jeeves (1934): ‘I retired to an armchair and put my feet up, sipping the mixture with carefree enjoyment, rather like Caesar having one in his tent the day before he overcame the Nervii.’
Has anyone truly got to his essence? Can you bottle genius? Robert McCrum and Paul Kent have brilliantly tried in their books – both joyously, unlike the above scholars.
Robert’s account of a heavy-drinking night out in Holland with the Dutch P G Wodehouse Society is a joy.
I asked Robert, returning a ghost of a man from Holland, whether he’d enjoyed his time with our Dutch brothers.
He nodded… ‘A sombre nod. The nod Napoleon might have given if somebody had met him in 1812 and said, “So, you’re back from Moscow, eh?” ’
Somewhere between Shakespeare, the Bible, Horace and a deep love of the English language you will find Plum.
And when you find him, as in a game of sardines, you will creep into the space with him, you will feel life is better, and you will feel quietly smug as you watch, from a small crack in the curtains, all the others searching, still yet to discover him.
G Wodehouse (1881-1975) at work at his Long Island home, 1973
Stephen Fry talks about his new book, Odyssey, and the genius of Homer and the Ancient Greeks. Greek was Fry’s salvation at school –and also gave him his nickname, ‘Fru’.
You’ve heard about podcasts, those recordings of interviews and documentaries … well, The Oldie is launching its own series of enthralling recordings with Oldie favourites. And it’s all free. All you have to do is click and listen – any time you like. Go to www.theoldie.co.uk/radio-oldie
Kenneth Cranham salutes Elvis on the King’s 90th birthday. Cranham was blown away by Presley in 1957 and remains enchanted, compiling mix tapes of Elvis and his inspirations.
Listen to Thomas Pakenham on his new book, The Tree Hunters, and the daredevils who brought exotic trees back to Britain. And actor John Standing and writer William Boyd reveal all to Radio Oldie.
We’re also bringing you TOP OF THE PODS… Listen to our pick of the best podcasts out there, from documentaries and history to comedy, arts and life!
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Fashionably early
Gone are the days when people turned up late to parties. Now everyone wants to go home as soon as possible. By Candida Crewe
My mother was once stopped for soliciting as she sat in her car outside a house in Kensington, all dressed up, waiting to go to a party.
She explained to the policeman she was congenitally punctual. Arriving on the dot or even early was an occupational hazard. Luckily, being of the same persuasion, he let her go.
That was in the sixties, but the notion of arriving anywhere on time persisted in being as uncool in the eighties when I was a young woman about town.
Then, if you were asked to drinks, the time was 6.30pm and no one who wasn’t a total dweeb would be seen dead arriving before 7 at the earliest.
Same with dinners when invitations stated ‘8 for 8.30’. Who ever arrived before nine, or cared that the hostess’s soufflé had transitioned to a pancake? It was insufferably bourgeois to think of such considerations. Looking cavalier was all that mattered.
In 1957, C Northcote Parkinson devised the Cocktail Formula, as part of his Parkinson’s Law:
‘The people who matter will not want to make an entrance before there are sufficient people there to observe their arrival. But neither will they want to arrive after other important people have gone on (as they always do) to another party. The optimum arrival time will be exactly three-quarters of an hour after the time given on the invitation card: 7.15 if the party is supposed to start at 6.30.’
During the Christmas party season, I went to a brace of book launches, a private view, a 60th drinks party and a dinner or two.
Old habits die hard and I did not turn up à point at any of them. But I am by nature as punctual as my mother – and I’m now 60, so can’t be bothered to try to be cool any more.
These days, I arrive ten minutes after the starting pistol instead of my erstwhile 45 minutes (minimum), or couple of hours (in extremis).
When I pitch up closer to kick-off, I have arrived to a heaving crowd every time. Sometimes I’ve been only five
minutes ‘late’ and the heaving is already in full swing. The majority have not arrived not only at the new cool hour but, heaven forbid, actually early.
This used to be completely unthinkable. We all knew that logically some poor sod had to be the first to arrive, but we were all on a tacit mission that it should never be us – social suicide. It implied so many unacceptable and bad things: nothing else to do; no work; no friends; a fatal enthusiasm. Why enthusiasm was verboten for booze, food, friends on tap and bonhomie was never quite clear. We just knew instinctively it was a major error.
Until suddenly it wasn’t. When did 6.15 become the new 7.30? 7 the new 9? Either the cool lot has popped its clogs in one fell swoop and we are left
endured just to let people know you’re still alive.
Lots of people stop work at five. What to do with that dead time before the witching cocktail hour of six? So … they turn up on the dot.
I was at a recent book launch at Daunt at 6.10 – the new sweet spot. There were over 100 people already quaffing away and clutching copies of the book. Should I have shown up at 5.30pm and done some browsing before the fun began?
I had a lovely time. But I was there for only an hour – how surprising to find myself one of the last to leave.
The last stragglers to leave an early evening event used to go at 10.30pm –then went off to supper in Chinatown, on to the Groucho or the Chelsea Arts Club, winding up in bed at dawn.
I go running and don’t drink but no longer have the stamina for chain-partying. I welcome the now-popular 7.30pm invitation to dinner – practically high tea, for God’s sake.
At 10.15pm, it’s straight home. Bliss. Reassuringly, my son, Erskine, 26, still thinks being on time is ‘not vibes’.
‘The best thing is to be the last to arrive and
the first to leave,’ he says cheerily. I remember how crucial it was to give the impression of being in demand. How being questioned for being a sex worker was better than being keen and on time. Those were the nights.
Party girl: Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961
IGo to Husband School!
Is your man a let-down in the kitchen and the bedroom? Time to send him to ’s new boot camp
f we send dogs to training school, why not husbands, too?
Imagine having a hubby who was always pleased to see you, heeled when called, fetched, remained loving and loyal at all times and, best of all, was house-trained.
I do all my research in a scientific, in-depth fashion – over cocktails with girlfriends. And what I’ve gleaned is that most of them are not having sex with their husbands.
Why? Because they’re fed up with doing all the chores. Giving a room a sweeping glance is the closest most men ever come to housework, besides leaving a roasting pan to soak and looking thoughtfully at the washing-up now and then.
When a woman has worked all day and comes home to cook dinner, help with homework, find the lost sports kit, stack the dishwasher, sort the washing, do the ironing and put the cat out, by the time she crawls into bed, the one thing she’s fantasising about is sleep.
Then she feels the hand creeping over the sheets… Men make horror movies called The Blob and The Thing. Busy mums would make The Hand.
This man, who hasn’t spoken to you all day or helped around the house, thinks you’re in the mood for love. You’re in the mood for running him through with a carving knife.
And yet, he hasn’t noticed. He’s just prodding away at your clitoris as if it’s an elevator button and he’s running late for a meeting. And you, the exhausted wife, are thinking, ‘Take the stairs.’
No wonder the majority of divorces in Britain are now initiated by women. And since married men live longer than single men, clearly the male of the species would greatly benefit from a Husband Training School.
Upgrade your domestic skills, boys, and beleaguered wives might refrain from putting you out with the recycling.
What’s on the curriculum? Number one is culinary prowess. The way to a woman’s heart is through her stomach – that is not aiming too high. What does a woman really want in bed? Breakfast.
Classes will offer real-life testimonials from men whose masculinity isn’t threatened by doing the odd Sensitive Thing with mangetout.
Next on the agenda – housework. Forget bulging biceps; the Iron Man women really lust after is the bloke with a laundry basket in one arm and a starch bottle in the other.
Husband School also offers a practical exam, How to Sort Out the Tupperware Cupboard Without It Imploding.
Former pupils will give testimonials confirming that, after changing the toilet roll on the spindle, they didn’t immediately start ovulating.
Professors will produce papers on why it’s in a man’s interest to help around the house – it’s been scientifically proven that no woman ever shot her husband while he was vacuuming.
Clean up your act, darling
Seminars will instruct men on how to sit calmly in the passenger seat when a woman is parallel parking and say nothing. For extra marks, husbands will take tutorials on ice-cube-trayrefilling, toilet-seat-lowering and how to avoid urinating on the bathroom floor. I’m sorry, but how can they miss that big gaping hole? It’s not as though we’re asking them to aim into an eggcup. For God’s sake, fellas, sit down. A re-education programme on not scratching nether regions in public is essential. Why men do this is a mystery. I have never once seen a woman making a random rearrangement of her genitals at a
Still, we are happy to admit when we’re lost. Your average man worries his testicles will retract if he dares ask a stranger for directions. That could be the real reason for colonisation; explorers were just a lot of lost white dudes.
Thankfully, satnav means that losing your way is no longer an issue. As most men have a fondness for gadgets, we gals should invent a genital-orienteering device – twatnav. Blokes would have no excuse not to help us reach our desired destination – which, by the way, is a cosy little spot that goes by the name of G.
On the subject of sex, if only men could learn to be as faithful as dogs. Unless crossed, the female of the species tends towards fidelity and constancy. There are a few species where the male stays faithful until he dies – but mostly as a result of being eaten by his partner after mating.
Until we train our husbands as well as we train our dogs, a wife’s favourite position in the boudoir will remain the doggy position – where he begs and she just rolls over and plays dead.
Kathy Lette is author of HRT: Husband Replacement Therapy (Head of Zeus)
My academic failure
This is a bit mortifying. But I do deserve it.
Around 20 years ago, I started getting offered honorary degrees. And I started accepting them.
They were local ones at first. Not ivy-clad cloisters but – what shall I call them? – ‘Recently established seats of learning’: once polys or colleges of car maintenance. All fully understandable.
After all, I had opened a few fêtes in the district. I was a local somebody.
And these events were as harmless as
Griff Rhys Jones was flattered by his honorary degrees – until he was publicly humiliated department asked for capital assistance with the new Lord Alli Business Appeal, I sent honorary cheque. Like their degree – purely
I delivered the necessary platitudes – mainly by flattering the parents. I told them that they had saved all that money to get their offspring a good career and the ungrateful bastards would stick them in a care home as quickly as possible – that sort of thing. It almost
Honorary Fellow, Cardiff University, 2009
comedian, I now went about, pointing at things, saying, ‘How and worthy of honorariums. I got quite a lot of letters after my name (as long as Hardy, Kipling and rhinos.
had briefly featured in the
But I did do other, minor things. Cardiff (a distinguished branch of the University of Wales, the town of my birth and where my father learned to be a doctor) dished up a fancy scroll and then asked me to become the patron of their Sustainability Unit.
I didn’t trouble to find out what they meant by ‘sustainability’. I discovered later that they meant net zero. It happened that I have led a few protests against badly sited wind farms. They didn’t read the same newspapers I wrote in. The relationship was not, well, ‘sustainable’.
So, a few years later, after mentoring a debate at Cathays Park in Cardiff –between those who wanted a windmill in every field in Wales and those who wanted an acre of solar panels – I willingly accepted a ‘cup of tea’ with the Vice Chancellor. I intended to seek my exit over a biscuit. But before I could proffer my resignation, the chancellor leant forward.
He had a proposal: ‘Griff, I have met the governing body,’ he said, ‘and we would like to offer you the chancellorship.’
(Reports of my
‘Eh?’ The resignation died on my lips. ‘The chancellorship of the whole university?’
‘Yes.’
Doctor of Letters, Anglia Ruskin University 2004
‘You mean like Prince Philip?’
‘Well, these days, more like Ruby Wax or Lenny Henry … or even that Gyles Brandreth fellow. They are all very successful chancellors, you know.’
‘Are they? What an honour. Er … let me just check with my wife.’
This was a catch-all excuse – because, frankly, I didn’t want to be a chancellor. The chancellor had to sit on a platform in Cardiff for two weeks in the middle of the sailing season, and listen to Welsh –there being no Latin west of Bristol (see tacsi).
When I got home, however, Jo reminded me of the signal honour. She reminded me of my father’s bombwatch duties on the roof of St David’s during the last war. She reminded me of my poor Welsh mama. How ecstatic she would be. ‘Fab’lous,’ she would say.
And she reminded me that I was just a
I was gawping over the top of my glasses like Norman Wisdom on Prozac
girl who can’t say no. I worked for other charities. They were probably recognising me for my good intent. I should buckle down and suck it up.
I should be like Peter Mandelson, who wrote of his great joy (yes, ‘joy’) at being Chancellor and conferring a doctorate on Mick Hucknall. (Really? He didn’t even choose Mick Hucknall, did he? But Mandy is a politician. Whole afternoons smirking on a platform probably suits him.)
Anyway, I said yes.
I swallowed the Cambrian toad. I started learning Welsh. I forgot summer sailing.
I was summoned to Cardiff. (I live in London, so no longer local.)
I was dressed in a gown and mortarboard and marched off for the official photographs.
After them, one snapper, Iolo the Photo, asked, ‘Griffith bach, I wonder, could you look over your glasses? And stick your mortarboard back on your head?’
So I did – and immediately thought better of it. ‘No, no, ha ha … no, I don’t think we should do the cheeky look.’
‘Oh, Griff.’
‘No. No. Can we stick with the poker up the arse?’
Bangor University, Hon Fellow, 2008
The following day, the Vice-Chancellor sent me a selection of snaps.
‘I see you have included one of me posing as a deranged Will Hay,’ I wrote hastily. ‘But I must counsel against that, VC. I see a night when your rugby club runs amok in the arcades of Cardiff town and the Western Mail then prints a picture of your clownish Chancellor.’
So we got the silly photo scrapped, and the day of my enthronement approached.
There was one final formality. This was a meeting of the Cardiff dons to ‘rubber-stamp’ the appointment.
I wasn’t present, thank God, but I often visualise it in my dreams.
An uptight git, played by Kenneth Griffiths at his most wound-up, leaps to his feet.
He points out that the current Chancellor is the distinguished Sir Martin Evans, a Nobel Prize-winner! ‘Does the convocation really want to replace him with an entertainer personality from the TV?’
‘Noooo!’
They turned me down. In public. There was a row. In public. The governors and the teaching body set against each other’s Welsh throats.
In public. About my suitability.
I left them to it. In a short letter, I pointed out that I had never asked to be their chancellor and I would withdraw to give them a chance to sort out their differences.
Perhaps I should return when I had a Nobel prize myself.
They re-appointed Martin Davies. There was some Celtic codswallop about officially offering him an extension to his tenure, but, in fact, he quietly resigned a short time later and they managed to get a junior minister of education from the Senedd as their proper, scrupulously Welsh chancellor instead.
At the height of this public humiliation, the Vice Chancellor rang me up. ‘I’m hiding out on my French property,’ he whispered. (Others have protested about the excessive remuneration afforded to the ViceChancellors of this world. I sympathise.) ‘I have to say…’ he continued. ‘This is the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me.’
‘To you?’ I replied sweetly. ‘My face is on the front page of the Western Mail.’
It was. And can you guess what photographic representation of me they found to accompany their blow-by-blow account of the whole incident?
Yes – in colour, in gold-braided regalia, gawping over the top of my glasses like Norman Wisdom on Prozac.
It was me as Will Hay. Gawd. There’s hubris for you, Griffith bach.
Griff Rhys Jones OBE, MA Cantab, FRSA, FRWCMD, D Lit (Hon) UEA, APU, Glamorgan, Cardiff, Essex, Fellow Emmanuel College, Cam (Hon), Fellow Bangor (Hon)
Why do we love ?
Disgracefully, the English are still allowed to hit their children a n wilson
Reasonable wife-beating. Reasonable Jew-baiting. Reasonable racism. Reasonable physical or verbal abuse of homosexuals.
The placing of the word ‘reasonable’ in front of these words is an immediately recognisable nonsense. Yet ‘reasonable chastisement’ of children is still permissible under English law – though not in Scotland or Wales.
It seems quite extraordinary that the law, which has gone so far in the last half-century towards protecting the person, and the sensitivities, of groups perceived to be vulnerable, should still permit the most obviously vulnerable –babies and small children – to be beaten.
As someone who was regularly beaten until I bled, from the age of seven or eight onwards, and threatened with beatings by my father – who did indeed thrash my elder brother – I take exception to the use of the word ‘reasonable’ coming anywhere near the noun that describes this horrible cluster of monstrosities.
To the physical pain must also, of course, be added the ritualised psychological torture – ‘Wait till your father gets home’ – for children being raised by old-fashioned thrashers at home. Or, in the case of those expensively educated at boarding school, the awful recitation of names expected to appear outside the headmaster’s study.
These gruesome announcements would be made sometimes the night before, to guarantee a Lubyanka-style sleepless torment of hours in the freezing dormitory, or at breakfast the next day, making it impossible to swallow the (in any case) nauseating food on offer.
Last year saw some truly appalling instances of what happens when adults are able to hide behind the legal phrase ‘reasonable chastisement’. There was the story, which we all wish we had not read because it was so painful, of Sara Sharif – murdered aged ten by her father,
whose compulsion to beat her got out of control.
And there was the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, following the revelation that the Church had regularly covered up the sadistic activity of this evangelical lawyer, first at Winchester College, then on various ghastlysounding, God-bothering summer camps, and then among the vulnerable youth of Zimbabwe and South Africa.
One of the reasons the crimes of Urfan Sharif (Sara’s father) and John Smyth went unrevealed for so long was that the law, along with society, had accustomed itself to the notion that chastising children was ‘reasonable’.
Of course, anyone who has been a teacher, and found themselves unable to control a mob of disruptive pupils, would long for the calm, obedient atmosphere that would descend on classrooms where it was permitted to apply chastisement – reasonable, or downright ferocious.
At my second boarding school, Rugby, there was actually a place, called the Birching Tower, where boys who had been especially disruptive were flogged, not by the School Marshall (a strongarmed sergeant major) but by the headmaster himself. This was in the mid- to late 1960s, and I can remember the exact moment when I knew the tide had changed.
I habitually cut rugger, preferring to get on my bike, with a sketchpad and a watercolour box, and to explore the local countryside. After a number of gentle requests from games masters to appear on the pitch – requests that I arrogantly ignored – I was told that I had to go to a certain classroom and meet a charming young master.
He was so young that I won’t name him here, in case he is still alive. We were all in love with his wife, who used to do the make-up for the school plays. We loved having the greasepaint
applied to our spotty foreheads by her sensual fingers.
I arrived in the classroom, and saw Mr X standing with a sheepish expression on his face. On the table in front of him was a cane. I looked at it. He looked at me, and we both burst out laughing. It was clear that he could not possibly hit me with it.
How utterly different from the psychologically diseased headmaster of my prep school, who had wielded his cane in a state of visible sexual excitement on a more or less daily basis.
I knew then, when Mr X laughed, in the basically genial and tolerant attitude of Rugby, that I would continue to be an arrogant little tick who cut the noisier, muddier games, deigning to turn up only for cricket in the summer, to ogle the senior boys in their eau-de-nil shirts –the most beautiful shirt colour I have ever seen.
As far as my ridiculously fortunate life was concerned, the era of ‘reasonable chastisement’ was over. Moreover, a whole era of history was, surely, in the past.
In Britain, it was the era that produced the Dandy and the Beano, where story after story ended with the Bash Street Kids or Minnie the Minx being slippered or caned.
A pathetic, moustachioed old actor called Jimmy Edwards, whom retrospect paints clearly as a tormented alcoholic paedophile, entertained TV audiences with a supposedly funny show called Whack-O! Clad as a ‘professor’ in mortarboard and academic gown, he would threaten to cane the ‘boys’, parts played invariably by other sad old gin-soaked queens.
Abroad, they called it le vice anglais. But those times are past, no? Why has it taken us, of all the nations in Europe and the British Isles, so long to see this obvious malaise for what it is?
I Once Met Truman Capote
In spring 1983, I was living in New York, failing to become a great Anglo-American novelist.
A local friend had worked as a secretary to the author John Cheever, who had died a year earlier. Now he, the friend, was organising an informal wake at a bar across town called The Guardsman, where the deceased had often come to linger of an evening.
The first thing I noticed when I arrived was a middle-aged man seated on a high stool at a table in the middle of the room, his tiny legs dangling down short of the floor. He was wearing rumpled grey trousers and what looked suspiciously like a blue crested school blazer. Five or six young people were standing attentively around him.
‘Truman,’ my friend hissed in my ear, as if the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s might not be instantly familiar. It was Capote all right: diminutive, sallow-faced, such hair as remained a sort of cornfieldblond stubble, pink-framed sunglasses, the trademark singsong voice. He smelled a bit musty, but with a patchy application of dynamite-strength cologne.
The great man and I had just one direct exchange. After a bit, he asked me my name and occupation, and when I mumbled the word ‘writer’, he said, ‘Oh?’
and enquired what I was working on.
‘Not much’ was the truthful answer, but I got up the nerve to mention the late Charlie Chaplin, who I always thought would make a good subject for a true-life novel of the sort Capote had practically invented in In Cold Blood. It was a bit like telling Mozart about the little piece you were larking about with on your piano.
Capote listened politely, and then began a long and magnificently obscene story about ‘my friend Charlie’ which concluded with an account of how, a few years earlier, a pair of feckless Bulgarian auto mechanics-turned-grave robbers had removed Chaplin’s body from its resting place in a Swiss cemetery in a bid to extort money from his family for its return.
‘Poor Charlie must have smelled worse than Gore Vidal by then,’ said Capote.
Capote himself died a year later, at 59. Vidal, unable to restrain his glee at the
When I tried to buy her tights from a woman as she emerged from the Ladies at an A303 service station, she became mildly alarmed. She started to back away, and her large husband got out of their car and advanced on us. ‘This guy giving you a hard time, luv?’ he asked.
Fortunately, by then I’d explained my reasons, and she reassured him. It was 1970, and the regiment to which I was attached as a young medical officer was being posted to Cyprus for
news, called his death ‘a wise career move’.
Some months later, I was again thinking of the strange tale of Chaplin’s exhumation when it was reported that Capote’s own ashes had briefly been stolen. After that, they were put up at public auction and sold for $44,000 to an anonymous bidder.
The Southern Gothic writer in him would have been sardonically amused by the idea of complete strangers competing to own his mortal remains.
Before he left the bar that night, Capote had unexpectedly given me a phone number, and invited me to call. I’d been told he could be a bit erratic in his behaviour by then, and that he suffered from nerves.
On 4th July 1983, I rang the number he’d given me, hoping to talk to him further about Chaplin. The instant he picked up his phone in Los Angeles, my upstairs neighbour in New York set off a deafening firework display to celebrate America’s independence.
Capote immediately hung up, and we never spoke again.
Christopher Sandford
An officer longs for ladies’ tights
a six-month UN tour, and we were having a farewell ball in the officers’ mess.
It was a Saturday, and I was dashing from Tidworth to Heathrow to collect my then girlfriend from a Dublin flight, when steam and smoke began to pour from under the bonnet of my Mini.
The temperature gauge was as high in the red as it could go.
I coasted down the hill into a very fortunately placed service station with a garage attached. I gingerly lifted the bonnet and peered in: the smoke was just from oil burning off a poorly maintained engine block, but the steam was from a boiling radiator. The broken fan belt hung limply over a couple of pulleys.
The garage part of the service station was closed, I was told, but I then remembered reading that one could improvise a fan belt from a pair of ladies’ tights.
Spotting a woman entering the Ladies, I lurked. I obtained her tights for £1, knotted them tightly around the two pulleys and started the engine.
The fan stayed motionless and the needle shot into the red. With no way of contacting my girlfriend, I was facing disaster.
A man who turned out to be the manager came over and pointed out that the tights should have gone around a third pulley.
I explained, ‘Stranded girlfriend … no way of making contact … Mess Ball...’
He said one young mechanic was working on his own car in the garage. He’d have a word. Five minutes later, we pushed the car in, and 20 minutes later I was on my way. They refused any payment, but the mechanic got a serious tip.
I was an hour late, and at Heathrow my girlfriend was sitting forlornly in an almost deserted arrivals hall. But the day had been saved, and the weekend was a triumph.
We’ve celebrated our 53rd wedding anniversary.
By Mark Conroy (Brigadier, Rtd), Richmond, North Yorkshire
Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past
Truman Capote (1924-84)
Sophia Waugh: School Days
Children behaving badly? It’s naughty but nice
I have a new hobby, which is in danger of becoming an addiction.
It was passed on to me by a colleague of whom I am rather in awe. She is young enough to be my daughter. Well, most of the department has that distinction nowadays. But it is glorious in its old-school approach, especially to bad behaviour. New classes, seeing her young, blonde prettiness, make the mistake of assuming she will be a pushover. Not a chance.
The hobby is scouring what are called ‘activities’ on our Class Charts page. Class Charts is the app on which you take registers, note misbehaviour, award good behaviour, look up the children’s addresses etc. It also has a button called ‘activities’, within which is a choice called ‘negative behaviour only’, wherein lie all the best jokes of the school day.
Most of the negative-behaviour marks are for really boring misdemeanours, such as not having the correct uniform or being late to lessons, but there are also some really enjoyable nuggets to be found. The school pond and its ducks provide many opportunities for bad behaviour, as do the various trees shedding branches around the site, and the scaffolding that has gone up everywhere.
A child somehow enticed a wounded crow into the corridor, which caused much fake hysteria among the young.
Among the best (or most inventive) was the boy who ripped off a lavatory seat and used it to slide down the stairs.
Then there was the boy who managed to worm his way into the space between the roof tiles and the ceiling and slithered around for most of the day. The school rang his parents to say he’d disappeared and gone off site.
‘No!’ cried the mother, ‘I have him on a tracking app and he’s definitely somewhere in the school.’
Then there were the two girls who decided to create a mudslide behind one of the buildings and spent their French
lesson rolling in the mud. They were particularly joyous, as they were not remotely the type of girls you would expect to engage in such revelry.
Quite the opposite. Their hair was bleached blonde, their faces fake-tan orange and their eyelashes the legs of countless dead spiders. But, suddenly, for an hour, they forgot that they were little Lolitas and remembered that actually they were children and found mud irresistible. I had to love them for that.
The (very occasional) physical violence is obviously not that funny, but the bicycling along the top corridor and dancing on the science tables somehow raise a smile, even if they shouldn’t.
We all love Just William – can’t we spare a little love for the modern-day miscreants, too?
Now that we share this passion, my colleague and I have raised the stakes and now aim to amuse each other in our
reports, rather than just state the bald facts. One little boy, who is never knowingly in a class, often manages to rack up a good four reports in a single lesson. Not content to play truant, he makes his presence felt around the school, shouting, slamming and dancing.
‘X disturbed my lesson by wobbling his bottom through the door at my class,’ I wrote, with a straight face, at exactly the same time as the teacher in the classroom opposite mine wrote, ‘X disturbed my lesson by gesticulating at my class through the window.’
Only ten minutes later, my companion-at-arms, two corridors away, added, ‘I was working alone in my room, when X shouted through the window at me, “Oi, you fat c**t.”’
‘Was it clear that he was shouting at you, or could it have been at someone else?’ came back the po-faced reply from the assistant head.
Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips
Hot underwear for cold weather
Thermal underwear has made huge advances – and
Talking about how cold you are is boring. But even if you have been stripped of your winter fuel allowance, there is no need to be a martyr to shivering.
Oldie-readers may recall the scratchy Chilprufe undergarments of their childhoods. Adult versions also existed. Vintage Chilprufe vests and bloomers sell for around £40 a set on Etsy. So there is clearly a nostalgia market – despite the discomfort involved in wearing pure new wool next to the skin.
But technology has made huge advances in man-made thermal underwear since Damart was founded by brothers Joseph, Paul and Jules Despature in 1953.
The French brothers, who had an existing fabric business, had the brainwave of using man-made fibres –first chlorofibre, and then thermolactyl – to make self-heating underwear. For many years, Damart was the only thermal underwear player in town.
But Damart was never cool, and today it has a multiplicity of competitors –including Prada.
No need to worry about the bulky waistlines of yore. Old thermal vests made everyone look fatter and unstreamlined. Modern thermals can be superslim and refined. Moreover, modern versions are ‘breathable’. It means they can ‘release’ sweat – rather in the way a Ventaxia unit releases kitchen smells – rather than imprisoning it as a cold and clammy sheath round the body.
Heattech from Uniqlo offers a lightweight but body-heat-promoting crew-necked, long-sleeved T-shirt.
Although acrylic and elastane are involved in the overall production, vests are 100-per-cent cotton on the inside. Since they come in a range of acceptable colours and two heat ‘settings’, there is no reason not to buy (around £15).
A superior thermal underwear is supplied by Patra. A heightened sensuality is offered by their 100-per-
‘I
think our new superthermal underwear is too thermal’
cent pure silk jersey short- and longsleeved vests, which use the naturally insulating properties of silk. The online catalogue (patra.com) is the best place to look (sleeveless with adjustable straps around £43; long-sleeved £61).
The sensuality quotient is even considered today by Damart. The collection now includes vests with invisible seams. For those who have never experienced it: once you have worn a seamless T-shirt – they are something of a rarity – you never want to wear a seamed version again.
Thermal underwear was once the domain of those who really did need it for survival – such as fishermen, alpinists and market traders. But there was always the problem of chafing.
There is also the problem of the massively overweight exuding buckets of sweat – like David Lammy, whose sketchy knowledge of Syria has recently been exposed.
I have no personal experience of exuding buckets of sweat, but a lot of thermal advertising now focuses on how the garments take the sweat away from the skin.
Patra boasts that the silk ‘absorbs, then wicks [dread word] away moisture’. No need to worry – how many oldies are actually working up a sweat in the winter?
Stick to traditional, roomy long johns
needn’t
look bulky
for the lower part of the body. Bottoms react badly to being heated up, and thermal pants promote yeasty, unhealthy environments.
The area is sensitive and its delicate chemistry should not be disturbed. Who remembers the 1970s product Femfresh? When it was introduced, it stoked anxiety in women and led to overuse. And so there was an upsurge in yeast infections. Moreover, men’s ‘sacs’ are designed to hang loose in order to keep cool. So it is not good to coop them up in a thermal environment – even if Prada supplies thermals for men costing £2,000.
And now to the string vest. What happened to this useful garment, once enjoyed across social and cultural divisions?
Henrik Brun invented the string vest in 1933. A commandant in the Norwegian Army, Brun one day picked up two fishing nets, previously used to catch herring. He fashioned them into a garment he correctly imagined would trap air close to the skin and provide insulation.
The string vest quickly found popularity in Norway. King Haakon VII was among those who praised Brun’s original design. A Norwegian company, Brynje, which used the slogan ‘Keeps you warm, dry and strong’, continues to market it today.
This was a highly practical garment. And imagine it on Kate Moss. In fact, Jean Paul Gaultier produced a range of string vests in the 1990s – they had an undeniable sexiness.
But sales were finally discontinued in this country, even by downmarket supermarkets, in 2007. No matter that it had royal approval from the King of Norway. The string vest’s death knell was sounded once it was immortalised by Rab C Nesbitt, Andy Capp and Stan Ogden of Coronation Street. Its image became conflated with unreconstructed males and that was that.
A shame they never got round to inventing string pants. Now those would have been really sexy.
Want to be a Latin lover?
Then learn how to speak it! Bijan Omrani admires an Oxford course that teaches you to chat in the greatest language of all
In August, I was asked to give a last-minute lecture at a Classics summer school in Oxford.
On arrival, I was given a useful handbook for the course. There were the usual things you might expect: maps, timetables, the correct way to use a punt.
The last few pages took an unusual turn: an elementary Latin phrasebook.
This was not some guide to old inscriptions in college chapels or formal hall graces.
The phrasebook was entirely practical. If you want to ask for a loo break in the language of Cicero, it’s ‘Licetne mihi locum secretum petere?’
To chase up an idling student, you ask, ‘Iamne pensa confecisti?’ (‘Have you done your homework yet?’).
On your morning break between lessons, a good phrase is ‘Quaeso, trade mihi potionem arabicam’ (‘Please pass the coffee’). In the afternoon, you call for crustula et potionem sinensem (‘biscuits and green tea’).
This was more than just a bit of fun. The classes, aside from a few guest lectures like my own, were entirely in spoken Latin. The students had come to learn or re-learn the language in a way entirely different from that which many Oldiereaders may remember, swotting up conjugations in Kennedy’s Latin Primer.
Nor was this summer school, run by an independent group called Oxford Latinitas, just a one-off. The university itself is beginning to embrace spoken Latin as a teaching method for its own Classics undergraduates.
The impact is remarkable. You can now hear undergraduates conversing in the ancient language in dining halls and classrooms. It goes far beyond the first tentative statements in the phrasebook, like ‘Non intellego’ (‘I don’t understand’) or ‘Quaeso, dic iterum’ (‘Please can you say that again?’) – which I used often. The discussion might range from Virgilian epic to the latest internet memes.
‘It’s not about teaching “Latin conversation”,’ says Dr Melinda Letts, a classics tutor at Jesus College, ‘or some sort of toga-wearing Roman reenactment. The whole point is to teach grammar, vocabulary and ultimately fluency in reading Latin texts.
‘It grew out of concern about the language proficiency of our undergraduates. Whether they had done A-level or started learning here, they were increasingly challenged by unseen translation and reading texts.
‘The students were as intelligent as ever, but sometimes I found them crying as they struggled to deal with translating. I thought there had to be a better way of teaching Latin.’
A visit to Rome in 2018 at the invitation of Charis Jo, founder of the Oxford Latinitas project, was eyeopening for Dr Letts. In Rome, a tradition of using the ‘active method’ to teach Latin had been maintained by various instructors. They included the renowned late Father Reginald Foster (1939-2020), the Pope’s Latin secretary, and the Accademia Vivarium Novum, where men from all over the world read, spoke and wrote only in Latin.
In 2021, aided by a gift from alumnus John Jagger, Jesus College started a pilot scheme to teach their undergraduates
elementary Latin and syntax consolidation by the active method.
From the first day, undergraduates were speaking, listening, reading and writing in Latin as if it were a modern language – not just puzzling over it on the printed page.
They move from answering simple questions – Ubi est Roma?
Estne Britannia insula parva? (‘Where is Rome?’ ‘Is Britain a little island?’) to explaining classic texts such as Virgil and Horace line by line in their own words and then discussing any points of interest – all in Latin. From this, it is a short distance to writing full literary essays entirely in Latin – which has been done, though it is not a requirement!
Now that the scheme has been running long enough to see a complete cohort through the entire Classics degree, and with the method extended to Greek, exam results have strikingly improved, both for undergraduates who are new to Latin and Greek and for those who studied them at school.
Harris Manchester College, where Dr Letts is Fellow in Classics, has been part of the scheme from the start, and two other colleges are participating. Others may follow suit.
‘It’s not just that it brings in better exam results, but the students are more confident … and joyous,’ says Dr Letts.
That’s what I saw after my lecture: students singing Horace’s odes into the evening and playing games in Latin. This is now a regular weekend activity in Oxford – the Noctes Musarum (Nights of the Muses).
I’m signing up for the next course as a student. ‘Salve, pensa conficio,’ I shall say, reciting from the phrasebook. ‘Hello, I’m just doing my homework.’
Bijan Omrani is author of Caesar’s Footprints: Journeys to Roman Gaul
Life in Ancient Rome – Ronald Searle
Town Mouse
My yogi dad, to the manor borne
tom hodgkinson
Even a confirmed and committed urbanite like Town Mouse needs a jaunt to the countryside every now and then.
So it was that, feeling a little jaded following a non-stop round of parties, I took myself off for the weekend to visit my father, Grandpa Mouse.
When I was a little mouse, Grandpa Mouse found God and moved to a spiritual retreat near the dreaming spires of Oxford. Each morning, he and his 20 or so whiteclad fellow residents – both men and women – get up at 4am for meditation.
They live in a Palladian mansion built in 1756 by the Harcourt family, who were descended from Norman invaders.
The house is on the bank of the Thames. It boasts a boathouse, family chapel, grotto, orangery, Tudor grave, ancient oaks and lovely Capability Brown grounds, across which little muntjac deer gallop.
It’s called the Global Retreat Centre, run by the Brahma Kumaris. It is next door to the village of Nuneham Courtenay, the place that – scholars reckon – Oliver Goldsmith was talking about in ‘The Deserted Village’. Lord Harcourt, whose family bought the estate in 1710, demolished the existing village to make way for his grand house and park. Goldsmith mourned the loss of the village he called ‘sweet Auburn’.
And, yes, it was a little odd when Grandpa Mouse ‘went weird’ as my brother and I now put it. I was 13 and Brother Mouse was 11. Brother Mouse, aka Will Hodgkinson, has written a fine book about it all, The House is Full of Yogis.
One day, Dad was a boozy Fleet Street hack with a Morgan at the front of his five-bedroom house in Richmond and a love of pinball machines and table tennis. And the next day, he was talking about the reincarnation of souls, the law of karma, man’s fall from the Golden Age and the coming apocalypse.
His group is called the Brahma Kumaris, an India-based organisation with the aim of bringing peace to the world. In our family, we call them the yogis. The serious devotees, like Grandpa Mouse, are celibate and vegetarian and also avoid onion and garlic, because those naughty alliums inflame the passions.
We went for walks in the blustery wind and sat for hours in the canteen, drinking tea and eating mince pies. Grandpa Mouse complained about the great con, as he sees it, of Covid, and the scandalous profits the drugs companies made from their ineffective and sometimes harmful vaccines. He praised Mr Trump’s health adviser, Robert Kennedy Jr.
As fathers and sons do, we occasionally bickered, generally when Grandpa Mouse interrupted one of my never-ending anecdotes. He can be testy, a little preachy and quite angry.
I was reminded of my brother’s observation during a recent holiday with Grandpa Mouse: ‘Forty years of meditation, spiritual study and contemplation on the infinite nature of the soul has not made one jot of difference to Grandpa’s inability to lose graciously at Monopoly.’
But mostly we enjoyed catching up and pondering the imponderables. And I loved the peacefulness of the retreat centre. Every hour, three minutes of restful music is piped throughout the house via its internal speaker system, and everyone falls silent. It’s called ‘traffic control’.
And, one evening, I joined the 6.30pm meditation and sat in silence for half an hour, as dreamy electronic music played and a female yogi sat on the stage. After a dinner of curry and soup, we sat round the wood-burning stove in the grand sitting room, before retiring for bed at 9pm.
There are 50 bedrooms and each is well-appointed with a single bed, new shower room, desk and cupboard; something like a monk’s cell but warmer and more luxurious. The centre holds regular retreats and conferences.
Grandpa Nev has two rooms: a bedroom and a study. It’s a very monk-like life. Visiting him here makes me think of the old monasteries, before Henry VIII smashed them up, stole their treasures and turned the monks and nuns out on to the road. Yes, there may have been some corruption among their ranks, but surely this was an unforgivably brutal act.
The monasteries and convents – there were around a thousand during the medieval period – were the retreat centres of their day. They provided healthcare, education and peace for the people. At a time when the population was around six million, this made one retreat centre per 6,000 people. Today, we’d need 60,000 centres to cover the population.
So it’s curious and rather wonderful that spiritual communities have started to take over the old aristocratic estates and return them to their original pre-Reformation role as centres for retreat, study and prayer. Nuneham Courtenay is not the only grand house that has been repurposed. Other examples are Sharpham House, Cumberland Lodge, Wickenden Manor, Charney Manor, Lee Abbey, the Ammerdown Centre and Dartington Hall.
The choice for this mouse – if I ever retreat from the boozy grind of modern Fleet Street – grows all the time.
Country Mouse
Mary and I embrace the Good Life
giles wood
I am a disciple of John Seymour (19142004), the original ‘bread-winner’.
His writing style captured the hearts of sedentary city-dwellers in the 1970s, pining for a wholesome self-sufficient lifestyle of the sort that has resurfaced today among off-grid smallholders.
Living, as we do, 15 minutes from a Waitrose, should guarantee a degree of nutritional contentedness. Not so. We maintain that it is impossible to buy a decent loaf there.
Yes, there is pane Pugliese from Italy, sourdough from San Francisco and German pumpernickel, but perhaps it is asking too much of a supermarket to supply an English artisan loaf.
On market days, a baker from Poland sets up his stall and profits from those leaving Waitrose without the staff of life.
His loaves sell at eye-watering prices – and he saw us coming. In an aspirational market town, whose school produced the next Queen of England, you don’t get much change from a fiver for a loaf with character.
Nope, I have never baked bread myself. I have always associated the practice with people who have suffered a nervous breakdown while working in the financial sector. Having downsized from the City to a terraced weaver’s cottage, he uses bread-baking as a form of soothing self-therapy and has reinvented himself as a kinder, more tolerant, open-toedsandal- and apron-wearing, stop-the-war Lib Dem voter.
Mary is the unlikely late-onset baker in my family. Mother’s Pride it ain’t. Her spelt brown loaves the size of a brick would go for at least a tenner at Daylesford.
It wasn’t an easy journey for Mary. There were hiccups. And jokes about tooth-breaking. But, with persistence, by George, she’s got it. Now each day the
industrious Ulsterwoman rises before dawn to bake a loaf fit for my consumption at my own breakfast around four hours later, according to ancient custom.
Mary’s curiosity had been piqued when she read about the Grant loaf made by wartime Britons since it required only five ingredients – flour, salt, sugar, yeast and hot water. But, pivotally, no kneading is required, and after 30 minutes of rising it goes into the oven, and it’s ready in 40 minutes.
The resulting brick-like loaf yields nicely to the bread knife, cutting moist, cake-like slices. Unlike some artisan breads, it does not fall to bits at the very sight of a toaster. It really is a lifeenhancer in the cottage.
Because ‘you have to support local’, we get our organic spelt flour from Doves Farm, Hungerford. This company pioneered the re-introduction of some of our kingdom’s lost ancient grains. They started with rye, which was a tricky crop in the Middle Ages. If rye got the ergot fungus on it, which is the same chemical used to synthesise LSD, whole villages could go down with ergotism.
Spelt wheat, along with einkorn, is a bearded long-straw wheat. Unlike the ghastly short-straw monocultures, which now proliferate in the English landscape, they neither wave romantically in the breeze nor do they support any life, save that of the driver of the 40-foot cropsprayers as he dispenses his monthly dose of Agent Orange.
Spelt, being very resistant to weed competition, fungus, damp and cold weather, needs much less nitrogen than modern crops.
It requires only a short growing season – so is ideal for autumn sowing. It ticks all the boxes for the sustainable grower. Furthermore, it could put the
‘controversial crop protection’ – ie pesticide industry – out of business.
The neo-Luddites and middle-class revivalists who gather at the Polish baker’s stall in the market-place grumble about the irony of having to have bread brought from London to the town when we are living slap-bang in the centre of the first agricultural revolution in England.
Wiltshire was no backwater in the Neolithic age. The first arable crops were grown at Windmill Hill, a few furlongs north of here. Archaeo-botanical evidence points to barley, spelt and emmer wheat being grown here from the late prehistoric era. Their seeds were likely gathered and disseminated from the legendary fertile crescent of the Middle East, via the Iberian peninsula, Palestine, Syria and Iraq.
The Bronze Age added even more crops. Oats, wild oats and rye, flax and woad were added to the mix. Fastforward to the 21st century to witness a middle-class revivalist grinding homegrown millet with a pestle and mortar, to fashion a primitive cake while watching prepping videos on YouTube.
The bestselling book Ultra-Processed People by Dr Chris van Tulleken has shocked many Britons, with its revelation that 60 per cent of the food we consume has no nutritional value – only texture and taste.
I can envisage a coming explosion of interest in the local allotment ‘community’ in growing ancient grains under neolithic conditions, using digging sticks and light wooden hoes to cultivate their soil. Not all of them sandal-wearers.
John Seymour grew wheat on a garden scale successfully. He didn’t have time to grind it in a stone quern.
But I have plenty of time. I could even fashion a flint sickle, with tiny blades hafted in wood. I could hold the head of corn in the hand and cut high on the stalk, as shown in ancient Egyptian tomb paintings. But perhaps not.
‘If you use my bread-making as an excuse to waste even more time,’ says Mary. ‘I will stop baking it.’
‘I like you too, but only in an “unattractive friend” sort of way’
Chas & Dave & me
Kate Garner was a little girl when she inspired her father, Chas, to write his first album with Dave, 50 years ago
Iwas born in 1971 at North Middlesex Hospital, Edmonton –same place as my dad.
But the year I was there, a cockroach plague forced all mothers and babies to evacuate to a maternity home in Bishops Avenue, the former home of Gracie Fields. And here I spent the first week of my life, in a cot in the ballroom!
That very same year, 1971, my dad, Chas Hodges, formed a duo with Dave Peacock – and thus Chas and Dave were also born.
My dad played guitar. Dave was on bass. They set off to a pub, The Charcoal Burner in Ilford. They played anywhere and everywhere – everything from rock ’n’ roll to singalong. This combined the music they both learnt from the family parties around a piano with the rock ’n’ roll bands of their youth. They were also in great demand as session musicians and played on countless other artists’ records.
Two very instinctive musicians, they shared the same taste in music and had a good ear for a good song. So they started writing their own. It’s the way every songwriter has to begin – playing songs for the listener to sing along to, and introducing new ones which might eventually earn their place in the singsong repertoire.
The following year, we left Edmonton and moved out to Broxbourne into a little bungalow in Old Nazeing Road, not far from the River Lea.
In my dad’s words, ‘To Kate, it must have really seemed like a new world, with grass and worms and bees and butterflies suddenly all around her.’ It certainly was – although more tangible through my subconscious when I was just a baby. It was a magical place to grow up, with a garden, which we’d never had in Edmonton – and as the place where many of the first Chas & Dave songs were written, including their first album, One Fing ’n’ Annuver. It turns 50 this year.
remember these songs well. This album was literally the soundtrack to my early childhood: the songs would often relate to my earliest memories, from a child’s perspective. Learning to do my shoe buckles up chimes with ‘Better Get Your Shoes On’. ‘Old Time Song’, a beautiful ballad my dad sang, always conjures up the image in my mind of him sitting by the fire, playing his guitar.
‘Old Dog and Me’ is the epitome of a sleepy summer’s day. Feeling the warmth of sunshine in a song, with the laid-back style Dave sang it in, you can almost see it.
I can see the front room too, where many of these songs began – where we also had an electrical fire one night, when a mouse chewed a cable and the TV blew up. Thankfully, no one was hurt – but I remember buckets of water going to and fro in the small hours.
years – couldn’t afford one – so I started noodling around on the piano and writing songs instead.
Come the early ’80s, we did buy a TV because Dad and Dave were starting to appear on Top of the Pops. It was an exciting time for the family, and lifechanging too. We had a day trip to Margate and I remember thinking, as we were munching our fish and chips, ‘How do all these people know my dad?’
The original ‘Gertcha’ song began its life on this album. It was a slower, bluesy arrangement titled ‘Woortcha’.
Dave, my godfather, told me recently about a friendly dispute in the dressing room of the Bridge House Tavern, Canning Town. It was between Steve Marriott and Ian McLagan of the Small Faces over whether it should be ‘Gertcha’ or ‘Woortcha’.
Londoners don’t always use the same Cockney rhyming slang. My dad and Dave, creative as they were, often made their own up. And they always sang in their own accents, which didn’t happen so much back then.
My dad always encouraged me in my music. He could see that my love for all the old songs we sang at family parties was more than a passing phase.
He bought me a gramophone and a box of 78s at a flea market when I was 12. This was a pivotal moment in inspiring my love for the dance bands of the ’20s and ’30s and in developing my style of songwriting.
I miss my dad every day, but I am thankful for the memories and for the music he taught me. I will always celebrate him in every note.
Dave still plays occasionally. He’s just joined me for my Christmas show at Hoxton Hall, a beautifully restored music hall in London’s East End. It was the kind of show that felt more like one big family party, encouraging everyone to sing along and share in the joy of music.
It’s what life is all about – and the very best way to remember my dad, too.
By this time I was four years old, and I
This might have been a strange sort of blessing. We didn’t have a TV for three
Kate Garner is a singer-songwriter. She presents The Stories Behind the Songs on Talking Pictures TV
Kate Garner and her dad, Chas Hodges (1943-2018), 1980. Below: Chas & Dave
Happy 100th wedding anniversary, Dad
Mary Kenny salutes her father, born in 1877
It’s a pleasant thought to me that my parents were married in 1925. How fascinating the arc of generational history can be. They perhaps didn’t imagine they’d have any offspring living (so far!) 100 years later.
My father was born in the faraway time of 1877 – I still have his passport issued after the First World War for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. As a young lad, he saw the Home Rule leader Charles Stewart Parnell, and as a young man met Anna Pavlova.
If a chap in his sixties fathers a child this year, it’s sweet to think he may have a child living, who still remembers him, a century hence.
Whenever I get the chance to nip across the Channel, from Deal to France (less frequently since, regretfully, Eurostar no longer halts at Ebbsfleet and Ashford), I am asked by a pal to bring back a sleeping draught called Donormyl.
The joy of this medication is that you can buy it over the counter at any French pharmacy, and you are not treated like some irresponsible idiot who has to be monitored for every aspirin acquired, as in Britain or Ireland.
In France, you ask for the tablets (which only cost a few euros) and the pharmacist says, ‘How many boxes?’
You are trusted, as an adult, to judge your medication requirements for yourself.
I am not necessarily advocating sleeping draughts – cold walks and hot drinks send me off to slumberland. But those who toss and turn with insomnia find this French remedy effective, and they appreciate the non-inquisitorial attitudes of the pharmacists who stock it.
My favourite French word – I’ve only just become familiar with it – is ‘fréquentable’.
It is subtle and meaningful and has an admirable range. It can translate as ‘socially acceptable’, ‘respectable’, or, literally, the kind of person you would wish to frequent.
There is also its opposite – ‘infréquentable’ – which stretches from someone you wouldn’t want at your dinner party, to bad or criminal company. It seems to be chucked around quite lavishly in political discourse, sometimes laden with heavy sarcasm.
It combines icy politeness with heavy complimentary – or uncomplimentary – intent.
In the dying weeks of 2024, a certain TV personality (now cast into darkness) aroused fury not just by his conduct, but by claiming that ‘middle-class women of a certain age’ were the only group offended by his unedifying shenanigans.
Oh, là là! Didn’t Gregg Wallace know that ‘middle-class women of a certain age’ have often been the real power in the land, and are the gatekeepers of what is deemed acceptable?
Hadn’t he read P G Wodehouse and appreciated the terrifying psychological dominance of Bertie Wooster’s aunts, Dahlia and Agatha? Had he never been told that if anyone wants to succeed in America, the secret is to network craftily with the matriarchs, who control so much?
Did he not know that when the British Raj was in full flower, it was the memsahibs who enforced all the social rules? One of the saddest little interviews I ever did was with a lonely elderly Anglo-Indian. He lamented that in his youth he could never marry, because the memsahibs wouldn’t allow a possible suitor at tiffin if he had the wrong so-called ‘chee-chee’ accent.
The suffragette movement was powered by middle-class women of a certain age, led by the indomitable Mrs Pankhurst. In America, their feminist cohorts campaigned for, and implemented, the Prohibition law to ban liquor, the better to curb the excesses of misbehaving men.
More positively, shall we say, the great campaigns to abolish slavery were supported and propelled by middle-class Christian women of a certain age.
Great reformers such as Florence Nightingale and Elizabeth Fry were typically middle-class women of maturing years whose energies were directed at vital social change.
We may thank the stonemasons and builders who brought us the great cathedrals like Notre-Dame.
But it was the pious women of the medieval times, according to the scholar Régine Pernoud, who created the context and commanded the culture in which these works of art and architecture were constructed.
Women of a certain age (which implies those over 50) have more confidence and energy to take on projects and speak their minds. They are – usually – no longer seeking flirtatious engagement with men, and are – usually – freer from anxiety about jobs and childcare.
The comedians’ traditional mother-inlaw joke is based on someone’s feeling intimidated by these alleged dragons. Significantly, such jokes have now been unofficially banned by the matriarchy’s cultural influence.
Perhaps the BBC wouldn’t have had so much trouble within the field of sexual crimes and misdemeanours if it had heeded the original middle-class woman of a certain age – Mrs Mary Whitehouse. She warned them to mind their manners: her spirit must be quite pleased by the defenestration of the TV greengrocer who didn’t.
The Seventh Circle of Train Hell
In the quiet carriage – with a drunk lady in a loud hat
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…
While some 50-somethings let themselves go, I always keep standards up.
I always schedule a bath the night before a train journey to calm my nerves – and out of respect for the poor soul they shoehorn into Seat C18.
I say ‘schedule’ because, thanks to a floor going woodwormy, we are now a one-bath household. Bad news when you’ve got a mother with meteorological bowels – a storm is always brewing. In the medical diary I keep for her, the best I can write is ‘dormant’. We are never far from an emergency evacuation.
I thought I was doing my bit for household morale by declaring my official intent for a bath: ‘If you need to, just knock and I shall leap out and towel myself off on the landing.’
No response – to me, anyway.
Instead, I overheard Mother say to Father, ‘He’s having a bath. The way he goes on, anyone would think he’d invented bathing.’
Father has been a little frustrated, ever since he found the remote control in Mother’s commode, and something unspeakable next to his Radio Times. Such is the bittersweet comic fruit of early Alzheimer’s.
Mother also hypersalivates. She needs a lot of love – and a lot of tissues. I’m getting some super-absorbent, disposable pillows shipped in from China. I’m still working on sourcing the love.
A journey to elsewhere offers some respite. Carving through the country on a train, like Betjeman and Larkin, seeing the real England through a smeared square, is right up my aspirational alley.
Better still, my randomly allocated seat is in the quieter coach. Good news: even the French Bulldog in the seat opposite seems to know it’s the quieter coach. Bad news: only the French Bulldog opposite me seems to know it’s
the quieter coach. There’s a lady in a loud hat, off to a race meeting, laughing like a drain.
In 12 hours’ time, I bet a cross race official will be dragging her back to the Tattersalls enclosure – judging from the tiny, crushed, pink cans, clinking on her table in rhythm with the rails.
Further down the carriage, a man excitedly yells the longest series of ‘OK’s on record, as a distant relative catches him up on a year of village gossip.
I can hear but can’t quite see a mother narrating her every thought and action to her two-year-old: ‘No, Mummy’s not going to put your arm back in your cardigan; Mummy’s looking out of the window. No, Nathaniel can’t have another biscuit because he had one for breakfast, which was not that long ago.’
Everybody looks like a stock character from a disaster movie. Just as that thought lodges itself in my frontal lobe, the train lurches to a sudden and decisive stop.
Initially, we were told the train had stopped to let another late running train through. Half an hour later, we were told the train that was late was made late by a problem with the train rails above a viaduct. To ensure our own safety, they would now turn the engine off while the train was ‘heightened’ to allow safe passage across the viaduct.
Two hours later, there came a frank
admission over the PA: ‘Just confirmation that the engine we turned off won’t turn back on again.’
Now stuck for three hours, I was slightly loopy on complimentary crisps. I looked out of the window. Despite the fact that we were in the middle of a rather average stretch of countryside, there was a handmade sign in a field reading ‘You are exactly where you need to be’.
I am no mystic, but it did seem that the sign had been positioned by some guiding intelligence to send me a message. The only trouble was I didn’t really understand what my new-purpose path was meant to be, because there wasn’t a lot going on.
Was I being commanded by a higher power to count deer or birds for a wildlife organisation? I went as far as looking at the World Wildlife Fund’s website, to see whether they wanted the public to count birds or deer. But whatever I typed, I just got a ‘Press here for badgers’ button.
As we were eventually shunted backwards by a Thomas the Tank Engine train to the nearest station, the French Bulldog, disappointingly called Frenchy, came and nestled next to me as if he knew we were at the beginning of the end of this non-journey.
His owner speculated, ‘Have you been using Radox recently? He’s mad for it.’ I smiled as England rolled past the window, in reverse.
Prue’s News
Turkmen delights
I’m slightly ashamed to say I begin to understand the advantages of a police state. It helps if you are a relatively benign dictator of a country with minimal corruption, a small population and lots of money, such as Turkmenistan. When it was part of the Soviet Union, almost all Turkmenistan’s revenue from natural gas and oil went to Mother Russia, and the country remained backward and poor.
Today, she keeps her money and spends it well. There are no beggars, hooligans, litter, unemployment or crime to speak of. Education and medical care are good, and the streets are safe. People are well dressed.
Turkmenistan is secular, worship being a matter for the individual. Housing is mostly funded by government
departments which compete with one another to attract the best workers. If you work for, say, the ministry of defence, you get a subsidised flat in a spanking new block, with a health centre, nursery education, playground and park – all free.
If you have lots of children, or look after your old parents, you can upgrade to a bigger flat. If you are still working for the department after five years, you can buy the flat at a much-reduced price. After ten years, you get it for free.
The price you pay for all this is No Free Speech (no political opposition, demos or jokes about the President).
No photographs of anyone in uniform or of any government building. This touchiness stems from an Instagram post of a street-cleaner in the capital, Ashgabat, sweeping a pile of horse manure to the edge of the gutter and then walking away – presumably to get a barrow. But the Instagrammer made out that this exemplified the city’s sloth and filth. Her post went viral. Ashgabat was deeply hurt,
Squeaky clean: Ashgabat
understandably: the city has a stated ambition to be the cleanest and whitest city in the world. To this end, all buildings are white; the big ones white marble. Cars, vans are trucks are all white and must be under seven years old.
Designed by international architects and town planners, Ashgabat consists of paved spaces, green parks, sweeping boulevards, magnificent roundabouts – all sporting enormous grand (and grandiose) statues and monuments, often gilded.
Our hotel was the shape of London’s Gherkin, but on a hill, visible from miles away. The entrance hall is the size of a tennis court. Our room would have made a suite at the Dorchester look like a dressing room. It cost $50 a night.
It’s said the President is trying gradually to relax the grip of government in favour of liberalisation. Can he do that, I wonder, without importing the worst of the West: crime, porn, divorce, teenage pregnancy, school truancy, lonely old people in care homes, half-dressed girls falling out of nightclubs, internet gambling and junk food? Mmm…
Prue Leith’s Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom is out now
Literary Lunch
Hugo Vickers on Muse to Power: The Untold Story of Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon
Kate Summerscale on The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place
Sponsored by
At the National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE TO BOOK TICKETS email reservations@theoldie.co.uk or call Katherine on 01225 427311 (Mon-Fri 9.30am-3pm). The price is £79 for a three-course lunch including wine or soft drinks l Vegetarian options available on advance request l Meet the speakers from 12 noon; lunch at 1pm l Authors speak 2.30pm
Ben Macintyre on The Siege: The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama
A N Wilson on Goethe: His Faustian Life – the extraordinary story of modern Germany, a troubled genius and the poem that made our world 22nd April 2025 11th March 2025
Sandy Nairne on Titan of the Thames: The Life of Lord Desborough
Andrew Pierce on Finding Margaret: Solving the Mystery of My Birth Mother
sister teresa
The Olympic Modesty Champion
My New Year’s Resolution? I must not show off. Join me?
‘Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it for a crown that will last for ever.’
(1 Corinthians 9:25)
St Paul was no stranger to the Olympic Games, nor was he disapproving of them as such – they were as much part of his life as they are of ours. And he was no stranger to strict training, something he favoured both for himself and for his followers.
What he stresses is the desirability of thinking beyond keeping physically fit – to a frame of mind that subjects all our behaviour and our whole being to the discipline that will turn us into practising Christians.
‘Similarly, I direct that women are to wear suitable clothes and to be dressed quietly and modestly, without braided hair or gold and jewellery…’
What would St Paul have thought of the 2024 Olympic Games? And what
would he have thought of the way the men were dressed? Much more flamboyantly than the women.
I watched the Olympics briefly on TV. They have come a long way since 1980, when they were last in my view.
The amount of bling that was around was startling. The baubles, bangles and beads were rather pretty, but were they not about showing off rather than about athletics?
The way the athletes ‘performed’ before they had even run their races – let alone won them – was also disconcerting.
St Paul again: ‘Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.’
(Philippians 2: 3-4)
I found myself thinking back to 1954, when Roger Bannister, with
minimal training and while he was practising as a junior doctor, was the first man to run a mile in under four minutes – and that on an uneven dirt path, rather than a sophisticated track.
Memorial Service
In the photographs taken during his run, Bannister has short hair (no room for braided sequins there), and he is wearing a simple white singlet and a pair of very ordinary white shorts. He remains a household name for his record-breaking mile. In 70 years’ time, how many of our contemporary athletes will be that famous?
Bannister, when asked if his four-minute mile was the achievement of which he was proudest, answered that he felt prouder of his contribution to academic medicine through his research into the nervous system.
He was an amateur athlete for fun, and a serious professional in what really mattered: surely evidence of true Christian values.
Rosemary Righter (1943-2024)
The Rev Canon Dr Alison Joyce, Rector of St Bride’s, the Journalists’ Church, celebrated the life of Rosemary Righter, chief leader-writer at the Times.
The Rector said, ‘Her outstanding contribution to journalism was the more remarkable, given the significant obstacles she faced when starting out as a woman in an overwhelmingly male industry, and there are many who owe her a profound debt of gratitude for her trailblazing work.’
Sir William Shawcross, Commissioner for Public Appointments, gave the first address: ‘We met in the early 1970s, when we arrived at the Sunday Times. ‘I thought she was wonderfully glamorous, with her long blonde hair,
billowing shirts and quite tight trousers housing limbs she was proud to say were voted “the best legs in Cambridge”. ‘I quickly learned that that glamour enhanced a brilliant intellect and a very courageous readiness to speak her mind.’
Righter met her husband, US writer Bill Righter, at Cambridge. In 1970, she worked for the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong, before moving to Newsweek and the Sunday Times – and then, in 1989, becoming chief leaderwriter at the Times
Her editor, Peter Stothard, called her the paper’s ‘intellectual rock and conscience’. Stothard recalled her wearing a badger mask at leader conference to mock the Times’s opposition to badger culling.
Bill Righter died in 1997. In 2003, she married writer Robert Elegant, refusing to change her name to Elegant-Righter.
The hymns were Hills of the North, Rejoice, Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise and Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer. Rosemary’s twin, Veronica Clegg, read Ecclesiastes 3: 1-13. Her nephew, Aidan Clegg, gave an address.
The choir sang Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, Thomas Attwood’s Come, holy ghost and Schubert’s Ave Maria. The organist played Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks. Righter’s Times colleague Hannah Betts read from John F Kennedy’s 1961 speech: ‘Only through charity can we conquer those forces within ourselves and throughout all the world that threaten the very existence of mankind.’
JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW
Bashful Bannister
The Doctor’s Surgery
Big Brother will be watching you
Brain
surgery, advancing at top speed, has dangerous implications dr theodore
You can’t stop the march of progress, even if (I was tempted to write especially if) it will lead to disaster. The problem with progress is that it is always Janusfaced. Two steps forward, one step back – or is it the other way round?
I read with astonishment, admiration and fear a recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine.
A youngish man with severe motor neurone disease, who had lost his muscular power of speech, had electrodes planted in his brain to help him to express himself in words – though the paralysis prevented him from doing so in the normal way.
Associated with the paper was a recording of the man’s unintelligible attempts at speech. The electrodes in the speech area of his brain transmitted impulses from the neurones to a computer that translated them into both written and spoken speech. The latter approximated his pre-illness voice, of which there had been a recording.
As the authors of the paper put it, ‘Brain-computer interfaces are a promising type of communication technology that can directly decode the user’s intended speech from neural signal.’
This technology is – or will be, once it becomes widely available – of immense value to people who have had strokes, or who suffer from other diseases that deprive them of the powers of speech and trap them, very largely, in a world of their own.
Not surprisingly, the degree to which people lose their ability to communicate with others is a powerful determinant of whether they wish to continue on life support. If they can’t speak, they are more likely to want to die.
The translation from neural impulse to speech was amazingly accurate – as accurate as a ‘normal’ person reading a text out loud. The potential vocabulary of the patient interpretable by the computer
dalrymple
was of 125,000 different words, so that there was almost nothing that could be said in ‘normal’ language that could not be said by this means.
Of course, this paper reports on an experiment at what we now call the cutting edge of science.
But, given the rate of technical progress, and the fact that a hand-held telephone contains more computing power than NASA had when it first landed a man on the moon, it probably won’t be long before the technique that caused me such astonishment will be almost banal and everyday.
This will be an enormous, indeed incalculable boon to aphasic patients around the world. According to the Stroke Association, there are 350,000 of them in the UK alone.
But it hardly takes much imagination to realise the sinister potential of this technology. In the wrong hands and used for the wrong purposes, it could be the ultimate tool of totalitarian surveillance.
And the wrong hands and the wrong purposes never fail to materialise.
A government – for our own ultimate good, of course – could oblige people to have electrodes implanted in their brains so that their thoughts could be centrally monitored. Those who had ‘wrong’ thoughts, according to the standards of the day, could be punished, eliminated or made to undergo thought correction.
Political correctness and cancel culture would be looked back on as laughably crude, the first baby steps to final enlightenment.
Almost 50 years ago, I had a patient who believed that his neighbours, very simple folk, had developed what he called ‘a thought scanner’ to read his thoughts. Of course, he was mad. He was also terrified, for there was nowhere for him to hide. His neighbours had only to point their scanner in his direction for them to know what he was thinking.
It’s often said that life imitates art, but here is a case of life imitating lunacy.
The Oldie, 23–31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk
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The Oldie v Le Vieux
SIR: I was an English teacher in Denmark for many years (I’m Danish). Now, at 73, I subscribe to your great magazine, and I love and adore it.
Just for fun, I have compared it with its Danish ‘sister’, Ældresagen (The Old People’s Mag), and to the French Vieux (Old)… Tell you what:
Your Danish sister is all about stairlifts, tight stockings, vitamins, exercise and that sort of practical thing … plus about where to get a discount strictly for the old.
The Oldie, well, you know it, full of humour, visits to manor houses, philosophical musings, celebs, interesting memories etc. Delightful!
Do you know what your French sister is about? It is … of course … almost entirely about AMOUR! How to go on being sexually active until you croak (in flagrante delicto, probably) at the ripe age of 110! And how to preserve your good looks, no matter how!
Jesus, I loved perusing Vieux and laughed myself silly in the Charles de Gaulle Airport, where I had bought this French mag. Oh, how I love the incurable French!
But I will never subscribe to the French mag, having fallen helplessly in love with The Oldie!
Yours for ever, panting in anticipation for the next issue, Henriette Madsen, Odense, Denmark
Time to say goodbye
‘We recycle everything, zero waste, grow our own, fully vegan...’
SIR: Richard Britton, whose wife died suddenly, after 43 years’ marriage, challenges us to tell our partners how much they mean to us before it is too late (‘Too late to say goodbye’, December issue) – a true case of carpe diem...
Sound advice, but, sadly, it came too late for me.
My partner was killed in a road accident. She was killed instantly, so there was no opportunity to say goodbye. As it does for Richard, that remains a dreadful sadness for me.
The situation is exacerbated in the case of fatal accidents, where, because of the nature of the injuries, many are warned not to see the body. And so one is deprived of a ‘final farewell’: a double whammy.
So, like Richard, I would urge readers, particularly those who think that ‘bad things happen only to other people’, to summon the courage to tell their partners how much they mean to them – while they still can!
Yours sincerely,
Mike Ricketts, London W5
Jonathan Miller’s Gospel
SIR: I share Country Mouse’s disappointment with Renaissance man and polymath Dr Jonathan Miller (‘Requiem for my atheist mother’, December issue). But rather than Miller’s being ‘almost unscientific’ when ruling out the possibility of an afterlife, I would say this is entirely unscientific.
I base this on the opinion of Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal and past
President of the Royal Society, who said, ‘We’re not aware of the “big picture” any more than a plankton whose universe is a litre of water would be aware of the world’s topography and biosphere.’
We simply do not know.
Geoffrey Wort, Stockbridge, Hampshire
Trans Twelfth Night
SIR: Gyles Brandreth (January issue) hoped that Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre might offer discounts to experformers of Twelfth Night parts; were I nearer, I might have tried to book for 19th January and arrived clutching my series of photographs from 1965 – a performance in which I played Olivia (pictured below right). My only regrets were that the pretty dress was an inch or two too short and my severe short sight made me look a bit squinty.
Sir Andrew Aguecheek might well take up the offer, as he is the author and playwright Nigel Williams. We both look a bit different today.
Yours faithfully, Dr Andrew Bamji, Rye, East Sussex
‘I didn’t
see you’
‘Wayne Byron,’ I replied, ‘half-back in the famous West Ham team of the fifties.’ Tom Stoppard heard this story and incorporated it in his play Arcadia.
Yours faithfully,
Bernard Ineichen, London SW10
Greek bears gifts
Castrated Drones Club
SIR: John Humphrys refers to drones as having the sexiest job (‘Attack of the thriller bees’, December issue). If anyone is dreaming of being born again as a drone, they might reconsider. The only bee with whom they can mate is the queen, so there is competition. If they’re successful, their penis will snap off in the process and they will die. If unsuccessful, they will return to the hive – but, along with all the other drones, will be turfed out by the workers to fend for themselves (and die) over the winter. You would have to ask: is it worth it?
Regards,
John Gilbertson, Dunino, Fife
Wayne, the forgotten Byron
SIR: Gyles Brandreth writes (January issue) of a confusion of Byrons. When I visited the temple of Sounion in Greece, the guide announced that various naughty people had carved their name on the ruins. She pointed out the name of Byron. ‘Which Byron was that?’ came a voice from the back of the crowd.
SIR: A N Wilson’s article ‘Britain’s Greek tragedy’ (January issue) makes gloomy reading (and he is certainly gloomy!) but addresses only the decline in the study of the Classics in schools. This decline is real, but in my view ignores several features of the scene.
First, I recall the Latin lessons at my grammar school in the 1950s, which were mandatory and far from inspiring – I doubt whether many potential Honour Mods candidates would have emerged from the process, still less turned into future statesmen of the nation.
Secondly, many state schools up and down the land, including primaries, are turning to Latin – and some to Greek – through the splendid work of Classics for All; and this teaching is all the more enthusiastic for having been adopted voluntarily alongside the national curriculum rather than being part of it.
And, thirdly, don’t forget the large numbers of ‘oldie’ learners who are making good use of their talents and time to take up the Classics as adult education, and finding a growing number of providers to meet the need. These people, students and teachers alike, engage from pure enjoyment.
Sounding my own trumpet briefly, I at 82 took and passed a Classical Greek GCSE last summer and am heading for AS (with some
trepidation, I admit). My fellow students have included a good many of similar vintage, all deriving immense satisfaction from our appreciation of the literature and culture of that fascinating period.
The Greek statesman and lawgiver Solon in about 600 BC remarked, ‘I grow old ever learning many things.’
Anthony F Bainbridge, Codford, Wiltshire
‘I
wanted to make him feel at home’
Jesus’s timetable
SIR: What evidence does A N Wilson have that Jesus spoke Greek? As the son of a carpenter from Nazareth, he would have spoken Aramaic, but how would he have learned Greek? Local evening classes? Stephen Halliday, Cambridge
Young hands do dishes
SIR: Loving your magazine … one arrived today, and I am devouring it as I type.
Nanette Newman (pictured) aged 90 looks EXACTLY the same as when she was on our screens advertising a washing-up detergent (which I still use while following her advice!). Very few people never ever seem to age; Nanette is one of them.
Monima O’Connor, Cardigan, Wales
Andrew plays Olivia
History
Conflict that made the Maltese cross
The Great Siege of 1565 was a crucial clash of religions and empires
david horspool
In around December 1564, Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire for more than 40 years, issued a decree.
‘I intend to conquer the island of Malta and I have appointed Mustafa Pasha as commander of the campaign. The island of Malta is a headquarters for infidels.’
What the Sultan wanted, the Sultan got. By March the following year, a great fleet of 130 galleys and many more auxiliaries was ready to set sail from Istanbul.
Stopping to pick up even more troops from the Peloponnese, the Sultan’s armada made steady progress. On 18th May, it was spotted off Malta. The Great Siege of 1565 had begun.
As a new book on the siege by Marcus Bull argues, there is something peculiarly fascinating about these encounters. A siege stands at the very beginning of Western literature, after all, in Homer’s Troy.
Bull points out that the Iliad is unusual in concentrating more on those conducting the siege – the Greeks – than on the besieged Trojans. I think he is right that, mostly, sieges grip our imagination for the plight of those inside, rather than outside, the walls.
Perhaps Virgil agreed, which is why his hero, Aeneas, suffers no shame from having been on the losing side at Troy. Bull draws examples from across global history, often of doomed resistance, as of the Texians – and Davy Crockett – at the Alamo.
For British readers, Rorke’s Drift, the siege depicted in the film Zulu, springs to mind. In the 20th century, the siege of Leningrad provides the same themes on an epic, savage scale, with humane punctuation provided by the première of Shostakovich’s symphony, while the city was still under siege.
The amphibious face-off at Malta is something of a classic of the genre. It is no surprise that, immediately afterwards,
Suleiman the Magnificent (1494-1566)
it was being written up and celebrated as much for its moral lessons as for its geopolitical ones.
It became a staple of the story Europeans told about themselves; so much so that Voltaire could write that ‘nothing is better known than this siege’ – a remark that hardly rings true today.
Bull shows that the siege certainly is worth knowing better. If observers at the time saw it as a clash of religions, as well as empires, they were right to do so.
Suleiman’s ‘infidels’, whom the Ottoman fleet hoped to expunge, were not any old Christians. Malta was the latest, and last, place of refuge for the remaining military order spawned by the Crusades, the Knights of St John, also known as the Knights Hospitaller.
The Hospitallers had begun life as an organisation committed to caring for pilgrims in Jerusalem. Unlike the Knights Templar, they had not started out as a military order. But, as the Holy Land became more dangerous for pilgrims, the Hospitallers began to provide protection, too. With the arrival of the crusading era, beginning in 1096, the fighting element began to dominate.
The order never gave up its founding aim. After they were forced out of Jerusalem, everywhere they went they set up a hospital and devoted a proportion of their resources to it. But the balance had tipped. They could have contracted out the fighting, but instead they reduced the caring to secondary status.
By the time of the siege, the Hospitallers had already been chased
away from their first resettlement, in Rhodes and on the Turkish coast at Bodrum. Malta had been granted to them by the King of Spain (and Holy Roman Emperor), Charles V. This may have been a token gesture: the annual ‘rent’ of a falcon gives the impression that Charles didn’t think Malta was very valuable.
Then again, putting the Hospitallers there and charging an honorary payment might imply that he saw Malta as having strategic importance, and wanted to flatter the Knights into protecting it.
If Malta was of strategic importance to Western powers, the West had a funny way of showing it. You cannot help but draw modern parallels with Ukraine, when reading of an outgunned, outnumbered ally receiving just enough help – financial and military – to survive, just in time.
The knights came from all over Europe – from France, Spain, Italy and even Scotland and England. But it was on Habsburg Spain, the Ottomans’ chief rival and the richest polity in Europe, that the main burden fell.
Any sense of a united front against a religious foe was hampered by the inconvenient fact that France, the Habsburgs’ inveterate rival, was actually in alliance with Suleiman’s Ottomans.
This was despite the fact that the duly celebrated leaders of the Maltese Hospitallers were French. Their Grand Master, Jean de la Valette, gave his name to the new capital city that rose after the siege, Valletta.
I hope it’s not a spoiler to say that the siege failed. Bull gives a vivid account of a close-run thing, in which heroism was intermixed with luck. The opposing empires, of course, regrouped, but eventually only Malta remembered.
It would not be the last time the island paid the price for its importance to others.
The Great Siege of Malta by Marcus Bull is out on 30th January
Cars drive me crazy
Modern car design produces terrible drivers, says Henry Jeffreys
My wife has been studying for her driving theory test. My god, it’s a lot more complicated than when I took it. There are questions on things like cardiopulmonary resuscitation. And yet, as the test becomes harder, the standard of driving on the roads is getting worse. Indicating seems to have become optional. People just drive and expect you to predict what they’re going to do. It’s even worse on motorways and A roads, where hardly anyone signals before changing lanes. Many people don’t change lanes at all; they just sit in the overtaking lane, totally oblivious to the queue of drivers lining up behind them.
It makes me rather miss the reckless bad driving of old. You know where you are with a boy racer, and you give him lots of space, but the oblivious driver is harder to predict and all the more dangerous for it.
Why has this happened as the test becomes harder? The blame lies with the sort of cars people drive today.
A second-hand-car dealer told me recently that all his customers care about now is the colour and how easily they can connect their phones. People use their cars more as if they’re browsing the internet than as if they’re engaging with the road. In fact, a lot of the time they are browsing the internet.
And they’re doing this while piloting a two-ton 100mph death machine that’s impossible to see out of because the crash-protection regulations mean the roof pillars have to be as thick as tree trunks. Great for the passengers; not so good for pedestrians, cyclists and other road-users.
Sadly, we aren’t going back to pre2000 analogue cars – so the answer is to make the practical test much more rigorous. This will, of course, have to wait until after my wife takes it, as she passed the theory first time.
Henry Jeffreys is author of Vines in a Cold Climat
Join the Oldie for a tour of
Gardens of the Côte d’Azur
With Kirsty Fergusson 19th to 26th June 2025
A perfect opportunity to visit some of the most renowned gardens of the Côte d’Azur, with Kirsty Fergusson, who led our trip in 2015.
Kirsty has persuaded old friends to open their garden gates. So, we will be visiting the Hanbury Botanic Garden with Caroline Hanbury, the Gardens of Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild at Cap Ferrat, Eze, the Maeght Foundation at St Paul-de-Vence, Monaco, Menton, Grasse and Valbonne. And we will end at the Matisse Museum – before lunch at La Petite Maison.
We will be staying at the Hotel Napoleon in the heart of Menton, and every evening we will have dinner at Restaurant Port Garavan, which looks out onto the Mediterranean.
ITINERARY
Thursday 19th June Depart Gatwick on BA 2572 at 10.15; arrive Nice at 13.20. Welcome drinks and snacks at the hotel, while Kirsty tells you all about it.
museum and its sculpture park. Lunch at La Colombe D’Or, followed by a free afternoon.
Monday, 23rd June Grasse, La Mouissone. Owner Lady Maggie Lockett will do a very good picnic lunch. Villa Fort France with Valerie and Pierre de Courcel.
Afternoon visit to Le Clos du Peyronnet, William Waterfield’s garden. Friday 20th June Morning tour of La Mortola and lunch at Villa Boccanegra. Afternoon visit to Hanbury Botanic Garden, courtesy of Caroline Hanbury. Saturday, 21st June Market day in Menton. Afternoon visit to Les Colombières. Sunday, 22nd June St Paul de Vence; Maeght Foundation, a modern art
Tuesday 24th June Cap Ferrat: gardens of Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild and Villa Kerylos.
Wednesday 25th June Morning turn of La Serre de la Madonna, Lawrence Hidcote’s garden. Lunch and visit to La Citronnerie.
Dinner at Casa Fuego, which shares a chef and owner with the 3-star restaurant Le Mirazure.
Thursday 26th June Morning visit to the Matisse Museum, in Nice. Lunch at the legendary La Petite Maison. At 5.30pm we depart Nice on BA2623, arriving at Gatwick at 6.35pm.
HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 or email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Price £3,250 pp excluding flights. Non-refundable deposit £750; balance by 1st March 2025. Supplements: single room: £400; sea view: £400. Includes all meals, wine with meals, transport and entrances.
Above: Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild. Right: Hanbury Botanic Garden
If you drink, don’t drive. Don’t even putt.
Dean Martin
The English approach to ideas is not to kill them, but to let them die of neglect.
Jeremy Paxman
Dear the schoolboy spot
We ne’er forget, though we are forgot. Byron, Sweetness
In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.
Robert Frost
Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Bad humour is an evasion of reality; good humour is an acceptance of it.
Malcolm Muggeridge
The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them.
George Bernard Shaw
Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.
Hilaire Belloc
Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.
Albert Einstein
Clothes with words on them
Earlier this year, I was at a festival of crime-writing where at least ten of the participants were wearing rock-tour T-shirts from the 1970s: Led Zeppelin; King Crimson; Deep Purple.
These weren’t replicas but vintage unwashed. I couldn’t
Commonplace Corner
These critics with the illusions they’ve created about artists – it’s like idol worship. They only like people when they’re on their way up. I cannot be on the way up again.
John Lennon
An archangel a little damaged Charles Lamb on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1816
Life is divided into three terms – that which was, which is and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future.
William Wordsworth
quite believe the pride with which they were being worn.
‘What are you doing?’ I wanted to ask. ‘First impressions are made inside seven seconds – and you want to lead with this? Has nothing happened to you since you heard Hawkwind headbang their way through Silver Machine at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in 1973?
‘Don’t tell me you’re in a rock band as well? Oh, you’re the drummer. Don’t you have children, or grandchildren, to put you right?’
Shortly afterwards, at a party, I met a girl called Cindy wearing a Katharine Hamnett number: ‘CHOOSE LOVE’.
‘Actually, I was thinking of choosing hate,’ I wanted to reply. ‘Why are you virtuesignalling as if it’s 1984?’
It reminded me of the old
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
W B Yeats
Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.
Confucius
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Mark Twain
Don’t let your sins turn into bad habits.
St Teresa of Avila
It is vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual.
Jeremy Bentham
On the stage, he was natural, simple, affecting. ’Twas only when he was off, he was acting.
Oliver Goldsmith
Neither man was talkative and each was grateful to the other for not being talkative. That is why from time to time they talked.
Saki, The Disappearance of Crispina Umberleigh
I’ve decided to pick my moment to retire very carefully – in about 200 years’ time.
Brian Clough
joke about how you find out whether someone is vegan or not. They tell you.
Then I remembered those super-proud men who wear ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ T-shirts. Why? Do they honestly think it’s going to change the course of radical feminism for the better?
On a hot train in London in
SMALL DELIGHTS
Overstaying your parking time and returning to your car to find you haven’t got a ticket.
REG CLARKE, STANMORE
Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk
the summer, I was confronted with even more shirtshouting. A man with a fishing rod boasted the slogan ‘Master Baiter’. Another claimed, ‘I’m not a weatherman but you should expect a few inches tonight.’
The man opposite had an enormous ginger beard and seemed friendly enough until I saw his slogan: ‘My wife says I have only two faults. I don’t listen. And something else.’
He smiled at me and I smiled back as if I was in on the joke. I wasn’t.
My friend Patrick Hughes has a business card which he hands out to particularly dull people at parties. It reads: ‘Why are you telling me this?’ Indeed. Just stop it.
JAMES RUNCIE, author of The Grantchester Mysteries
John Lennon (1940-80)
Wallis in Warlordland
NICKY HASLAM
Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson
By
Elliott
Paul French
& Thompson £25
The upward re-evaluation of the woman who would eventually become the Duchess of Windsor continues apace.
The scurrilous smears on her character, devised and disseminated by Stanley Baldwin’s government in a (largely successful) strategy to demonstrate she was an unsuitable wife for a future king, are proving to be unfounded, if not mendacious.
This book focuses on 1924 – the scant year that Wallis, then Mrs Win Spencer, spent in Shanghai and Peking. Those were conveniently mysterious and inscrutable settings enabling Special Branch to fabricate, ten years later, the salacious China Dossier.
But, as the author states, faraway London society would believe any rumour about a single woman alone in so anarchical an environment.
Quite apart from debunking many of the canards that besmirched his subject, Paul French, who has lived in and frequently written about China, gives an intriguing and erudite picture of the time Wallis was there. He shows the chaos of a land still writhing in prolonged death throes, following centuries of despotic rule and the fall of the Qing dynasty a decade earlier.
Troops from ragtag armies, bloodlusty brigands and bandits, fratricidal tribesmen fuelled on exotic drugs, warlords vying for supremacy, deposed statesmen and power-hungry generals proliferated unchecked over the vast
mainland. Nowhere was safe; a violent death was the norm.
Eventually the leaders – some upstarts, some imperial elite: Paul French ably distinguishes Chiangs from Cheongs, Soongs from Sungs, Koos from Kais, Sens from Yens, Kai-Shek from Shih-Kai – imposed some kind of order, but China was indubitably a hotbed of lawlessness.
Many Westerners had travelled to the recently opened-up, if dangerous, Far East; some to make fortunes, many to
explore its exoticism. Others – aesthetes such as Harold Acton – went to experience the ancient culture still manifest in art and customs in Peking and its Forbidden City. It was therefore not unique, but certainly plucky, of Wallis Spencer to make such a journey.
In September 1924, after six weeks aboard the Empress of Canada, Wallis stepped ashore in Hong Kong –comparatively peaceful owing largely Wallis Simpson in Peking, 1924
to a populace zonked on opium –produced, according to Sir Francis Rose, by the British Government, packed in metal cylinders stamped with the royal cipher.
Wallis had come to join her husband, Win Spencer, a lieutenant in the US Navy posted to Canton, resolved to make a success of their marriage, despite his violent temper and alcoholic abuse.
Spencer met her, apparently off the sauce. They took a taxi to the glamorous Repulse Bay Hotel, created by Elly Kadoorie, whose next project would be the Peninsula.
After this second honeymoon, the couple moved to an apartment in Kowloon. Win’s drinking and violence resurfaced, along with a predilection for forcing his wife to brothels purveying every kind of perversion.
It was rumoured that Spencer himself was gay, though not one of the elegant, amusing handsome examples that would always attract, and be attracted to, Wallis. During these weeks in Hong Kong, Wallis had an operation ‘on her insides’ for a problem that had long troubled her.
Naturally, in the China Dossier, this was transmuted to an abortion.
Wallis now realised a divorce was the sensible option. No dice, because of her American citizenship. But the International Settlement of Shanghai, then the most Americanised in Asia, might grant one, even though that required two years of Chinese residency. Wallis would take a chance on a quickie.
With Mary Sadler, another navy wife, she sailed a daunting 800 miles to this gaudy, pulsating, treaty port. But, divorce or not, she would see Spencer only once again in her life.
While gunshots and battle cries could be heard from the terrace of Shanghai’s hotels and poolside restaurants, life inside the Settlement’s boundaries was both sedate – gentlemen’s clubs, tea dances, the racetrack – and raucous. In the maze of lanes behind the elegant Bund, there were shops for every kind of need or artefact (including, as Wallis soon discovered, rare antiques).
The film director Joseph von Sternberg writes of the vast, manystoreyed Da Shijie amusement ‘tower’, where on the first floor there were gaming tables, singsong girls, magicians, slot machines, pickpockets, caged birds and acrobats. One flight up had actors, pimps, midwives, barbers, ear-wax extractors. Above were jugglers, herbal medicines, more girls and – a novelty – several rows of exposed toilets.
The fourth floor had shooting galleries, ice-cream parlours, fan-tan tables, massage benches, acupuncture, dried fish intestines and dance platforms.
The fifth featured girls with cheongsams slit to the armpit, storytellers, peepshows, masks, a mirror maze, a temple, rubber goods and a stuffed whale. On the roof were tightrope-walkers, seesaws, mah-jong tables, firecrackers, lottery tickets and marriage brokers.
While every foreigner’s movements were monitored by their Legation’s agents, they all visited such places, Wallis among them. She had made friends with the good-looking, impeccably dressed and amusing English architect Robbie Robinson and John Ventors, whom she discreetly described as his ‘business partner’.
They admired Wallis’s sleek appearance, innate chic, discerning taste and sense of fun, introducing her and Mary Sadler to Shanghai’s ‘400’, gin cocktails and dancing at jasminescented nightclubs.
In these lanes. there were also many degenerate bordellos. The madams and whores were, surprisingly, mostly American girls who had fled San
Francisco after the devastating earthquake a decade before. It seems unlikely that, with such male escorts, the fastidious Wallis would visit places of such ill repute.
She remembered her weeks in Shanghai with sun- and moonlit pleasure. There were only a few clouds. No divorce was forthcoming, and another unsuccessful operation –‘abortion’ in the Dossier – on her painful internal condition.
Despite these setbacks, Wallis planned another journey, to make what she herself described as a ten-day ‘shopping trip’ to Peking. There has always been a theory that she was a courier for secret and sensitive US documents. Even if so, it was incredibly brave to undertake travelling the 700 miles through the war-racked interior to the capital.
The film-famed Shanghai express was deemed too dangerous. Instead, she took another rusty ocean coaster northwards and upriver to typhoid-plagued Tiensing, snowbound Peking’s inland port, to be met by a colonel from the US Marine Corps Guard (which gives weight to the courier theory).
In the warmth of the Grand Hotel, safe inside the Tartar City, Wallis met former acquaintances and, importantly, a former close friend, Katherine Bigelow, now married to Herman Rodgers, the rich heir to a railroad fortune.
This cultured couple had decided to spend a few years in Peking. They asked Wallis to stay at their beautifully appointed Hutong near the Forbidden City. Her lotus was about to bloom.
The romance of Peking in the spring and summer months Wallis spent there is ably described by Paul French.
The city still clung to its imperial past. The ancient names of streets, temples, palaces – the Temple of Azure Clouds, the Alley of Sweet Rains, the Pool of the Black Dragon – were still in everyday use.
Wallis, an obsessive collector of jade, porcelain and bronzes, combed the many markets. At dawn, she rode fiery ponies in the Fragrant Hills. At night, she mixed with aesthetes such as Harold Acton and Desmond Parsons, the cultivated Italian ambassador and author Daniele Varé (a friend of my father), the writers Robert Byron and Willie Maugham, Hollywood’s famed ‘Chinese’ star Anna May Wong and the decorator Georges Sebastian.
There was actual romance too, with the dashing Alberto de Zara – though not with the often-suggested Roman diplomat Count Ciano, married to Mussolini’s daughter Edda, who had her own warlord lover, Zhang Xueliang.
Nor is there any proof that Wallis tried to ensnare her host, Herman Rodgers. A decade later, fleeing the furore caused by her involvement with the King, it was in the Rodgerses’ house in France that Wallis, distraught, listened to his abdication speech.
The lotus life continued into the autumn until the country’s unruliness came to a head with Chiang Kai-shek’s supremacy. Westerners forsook China’s Eastern allure, Wallis among them.
Having sailed across the Pacific, she landed in San Francisco and immediately underwent yet another unsuccessful operation, followed by hospitalisation.
But if it is clear that there was something abnormal in her anatomy, Wallis Windsor’s courage, charm, capability and vivacity were impeccable.
Nicky Haslam is author of Redeeming Features: A Memoir
Capital gardens
DAVID WHEELER
Lost Gardens of London
By Todd Longstaffe-Gowan Modern Art Press £25
L P Hartley’s celebrated one-liner – ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’ – is convincingly refuted between the covers of this handsome new book.
We Brits have been gardening in much the same ways for centuries. Extant evidence (Chatsworth, Stowe, Levens, Stourhead, the Oxford Botanic Garden and Kew, a seedling establishment as long ago as the 1750s, for goodness’ sake…) is abundant.
And if that doesn’t convince you, Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s revelatory chronicle of ‘lost’ London gardens – yes, just London’s – provides the pudding’s indisputable proof.
London’s ‘garden legacy’ is vast. There were aristocratic establishments –palaces, mansions, villas – to match (in grandeur, if not in acres) some of the above-mentioned country places. Kew, remember, was once rural.
But one of the many joys described by Longstaffe-Gowan are the less wellknown – the capital’s workaday allotments, redundant squares, amateur botanical gardens, hobby menageries and aviaries, nurseries and ‘gardened’ cemeteries. Oh, and let’s not forget such defunct artificial mounts and other ‘swellings’ such as decorative hillocks and ‘a “mountain of filth and cinders”
at Battle Bridge’, somewhere near King’s Cross.
The book’s endpapers map is a good place to start. Formal gardens slope gently riverwards to the north bank of the Thames from princely houses along the ‘salubrious’ Strand – behind the Savoy, behind Somerset House and further east.
One such was Northumberland House, a stately pile demolished in 1874 to make way for Bazalgette’s Victoria Embankment – which saw its ‘precious spoil carefully removed and repurposed or sold and the garden’s shrubs dug up and transferred to the Embankment’s new public gardens’. Gardeners never did like waste.
Rare and exotic animals were shown and traded in various 18th-century tea gardens, taverns and inns in Tottenham Court Road, Haymarket, Ludgate Hill, Charing Cross and elsewhere.
London’s residential squares were the ‘pride of London’s planning, the desiderata of urban improvers since the reign of James I [promoting] novelty of design, elegance and spaciousness’. Following several losses, it took a Royal Commission as late as 1927 ‘to consider whether and on what terms squares and enclosures should be protected as open spaces’.
Euston Square, a nine-acre plot on the grounds of Bedford Nursery (north of Tavistock Square), was reported in 1802 as being ‘laid out with superior neatness and beauty’. It incorporated ‘a handsome little Dwelling-house, in the cottage style, besides Green-houses, a Pinery, Stovehouses, &c &c’. But, because of the later-built (1830s) adjacent Euston
Station, it ‘never achieved the acclaim of its rival, Eaton Square’.
Vauxhall Gardens, ‘among the most significant cultural innovations of 18th-century London’, stood on the south side of the Thames, close to today’s Vauxhall Bridge. It occupied an earlier ‘notorious “rendezvous for the ladys and gallants” near St James’s Park, which had been “shut up and seized” in 1654 by Oliver Cromwell’.
There’s humour, too. LongstaffeGowan enjoyably quotes from a fiction where one Elinor Rapsley laments the fact that her new town garden is ‘a naked waste: “too large to be ignored … too small to keep giraffes in” ’, and that her ‘bedraggled and flowerless borders are ravaged by “a congress of vegetarian cats” ’.
Oldies may not wish to reflect on cemeteries, but there they are and there they (mostly) remain. They weren’t always the ‘loathsome place, managed with disregard to health and decency’.
One, Victoria Park Cemetery, former haunt of ‘loafers and roughs of the East End’, was eventually converted into ‘a charming little park for the people of Bethnal Green’. It was reopened in July 1894 and renamed Meath Gardens –honouring Lord Brabazon, Chairman of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, who had inherited the Earldom of Meath.
Longstaffe-Gowan concludes with poignant words from the Times regarding the ‘sacrifice’ of one particular burial ground-cum-Victorian public garden in May 1883. ‘Every little space where the wind can freely circulate,
Summer Fashions for 1844, from Lost Gardens of London
A Life in Books – Lady Antonia Fraser Harold Pinter’s right royal cricket bat
In the nursery, he was known as Oliver Crumble – a foolish figure who would show signs of weakness at any given moment.
Yet when I came to choose the title of my biography, after working on the subject for five years, I selected Cromwell, Our Chief of Men (1973). This was the opening of Milton’s stately poem and there was no doubt that Cromwell had moved from a nursery joke to the lord of all as a direct result of my researches.
The title of the book caused less confusion than my later work, The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in 17th-Century England (1984).
The brilliant – and brilliantly polite – writer Claire Tomalin exclaimed, on hearing it, ‘A Week with Ethel! That is an interesting title.’
When I published my Cromwell book, I had speaking lessons with a friendly young woman don. She gave me an excellent tip: concentrate your mind and thus your eyes on one particular member of the audience. That will give you a rapport, which will gradually develop into an invisible alliance.
My first important speech was at London University, concerning Cromwell’s intentions towards Parliament. It came in advance of the first reviews.
I was ready. I picked on a surlylooking fellow with unmistakable thick
and air charged with human breath and all the vapours emanating from human habitations can, in however small a degree, be purified by contact with leaves and grass.’
Etchings, engravings, drawings, early and contemporary photographs are reproduced on almost every page. They comprise a fertile seedbed of visual information that illuminates a thoroughly entertaining, page-turning horticultural and social narrative.
It proves – to gardeners at least –that the past is not a foreign country. They didn’t do things so very differently there.
Lost Gardens of London accompanies an exhibition at the Garden Museum, London (until 2nd March 2025).
David Wheeler is gardening correspondent of The Oldie
hair and concentrated my words on him. My spirits lifted. In the end, I felt the applause was quite genuine.
As my young don walked me away, she said, in what I took to be an admiring manner, ‘Phew! That was bold.’
I smiled easily. ‘You told me how to do it.’
‘Yes, but to pick on him…’
My smile became slightly less easy. ‘Who was that? The one with the hair.’
She mentioned the name of the leading authority on Cromwellian finances with whom, rather uppishly, I had decided to disagree. He gave me the only really bad review.
Oliver Cromwell attracted rather a different reaction in Ireland.
My first major outing was to Drogheda, scene of the famous siege in 1649. I was trying to identify the road that led to the original road of entry when I saw a Catholic priest standing by a small car with two nuns.
‘Oh, hang on,’ I said to Hugh Fraser, my husband. ‘I’ll just ask him the way to Cromwell’s Mound.’
Off I trotted.
‘Excuse me, Father, but regarding Cromwell’s Mound…’
With a look of horror, the priest pushed the two nuns into the car and prepared to leave.
‘Idiot!’ hissed Hugh. He walked with great politeness towards the priest.
Requiem for a brother A N WILSON
Constellations and Consolations
By Sarah Sands
Austin Macauley Publishers £14.99
This book is drenched in tears, but it isn’t soppy.
It is a tribute to the author’s dead brother, Kit Hesketh-Harvey (1957-2023), best known from his cabaret act Kit and the Widow. The routine was hardly Flanders and Swann. The evening would begin with wittily constructed lyrics, seemingly designed to appeal to middle-class, middle-minded audiences, but pretty soon you knew that, somewhere along the line, things were going to get out of hand.
Part of the joy of a Kit and the Widow concert was the discomfort of the audience wondering whether it was all
‘Good morning, Father,’ he began. ‘My wife, the daughter of the pious Lord Longford, is writing a study of the hideous assassin Oliver Cromwell and she wondered…’
‘Thataway!’ said the priest with absolute calm.
Later I discovered a Cromwell section in a Dublin museum. It opened with a question: ‘Which is worse, the drink or Oliver Cromwell?’
The answer was: ‘The drink. Because everyone the drink kills goes to Hell, whereas everyone Cromwell kills goes to Heaven.’
Hugh suggested that I should keep this answer handy so as to remember to avoid either Cromwell or the drink.
‘Or Drogheda,’ he added as an afterthought.
It is possible to combine a tour of the cricket grounds of England with an inspection of Cromwell’s battlefields –which meant that Harold Pinter, my second husband, and I could each pursue our current interest and add to each other’s pleasure. Thus the research for the Battle of Worcester in 1651 remains an interesting joint memory.
I shall never forget the oak where Charles II took refuge after the battle. I had the honour of squatting on its royal branch. And Harold, now in heaven, undoubtedly recalls the bat he bought in Worcester that day, made out of special, royally treated wood.
right to laugh at material that gradually became more and more smutty and/or off-limits for other reasons.
I usually take it as a bad sign when people are described as ‘good with children’; but Kit was good with children (not just his own) – kind, funny, imaginative, sensitive to their shyness.
‘OK. But if we get married, you will pretty much do everything?’
I coincided with him staying in a number of different houses, and was always impressed by the fact that, while he was clearly a star turn, he was attentive to the shy, the mousy, the unconsidered guest.
Seeing him talk to the shy reminded me of a description of Wilde at a Chelsea dinner party, when everyone expected him to be talking to the famous people in the room, but Oscar sat with the vicar’s wife – and, of course, had her in stitches.
Kit was multi-talented – musical, a brilliant mimic, a very good speaker and a lyricist of genius. When I heard that Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, was dead, I felt such sadness – not because I had any feelings one way or the other for the politician, but because it would no longer be possible for Kit to sing his absolutely outrageous song ‘Robin Cook, Robin Cook’ to the tune of ‘Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen’.
And it was sad – however obvious the double entendres had been – when we no longer lived in the Bush era.
Not all the lyrics were smutty. The Pole’s lamentation that all the plumbers in his native land now live in Willesden Green, sung to the melody of Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu in C sharp minor, Op 66, is truly beautiful, as is his song about the Norwegian backpackers on the London Underground.
Kit died alone in the bath, listening to Radio 3, in the cold converted church vestry in Norfolk which he had made his home after a painful Covid-lockdown divorce. When his sister, Sarah, heard the news, she asked the villager who had found Kit whether he had hanged himself, and was relieved to hear he had died of natural causes.
Sarah Sands’s first husband was Julian Sands (1958-2023), the actor who sprang to fame as the beautiful blond boy in Merchant Ivory’s production of E M Forster’s A Room with a View In the same year that her brother Kit died so young, Julian Sands went missing on a hike in the Andes and their son, Henry, went to recover the body.
This book is a tribute to both of them and, if C S Lewis had not already used the title, it could have been called A Grief Observed. It is beautifully done, and takes the form of a pilgrimage to English cathedrals (Kit began as a chorister in Canterbury), to Norfolk churches and to the Hanseatic and Baltic ports.
Part of the story is Sarah’s discovery of choral music, and the part it plays in our inner lives. She quotes Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was asked how he would like to be reincarnated. He replies, ‘As
music. But, in the next world, I shan’t be doing music, which is all struggle and disappointment. I shall be being it.’
Kit Hesketh-Harvey was a man of faith. Many of those quoted in this book, such as his old tutor Sir John Rutter, or the former Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, are not believers in the formal sense of the word – any more than was Vaughan Williams. But they find in music, especially choral music, a language that transcends materialism, which speaks to the soul.
So it turns out that a tribute to a man who was best known for his comic lyrics leads us into the company of J S Bach, Brahms and his favourite composer, Charles Villiers Stanford.
Two of Kit’s works celebrated in the book are religious cantatas – one in memory of a sapper killed after five months in the Helmand province in Afghanistan, and the other to celebrate an extraordinary processional cross, where his words were set by Roderick Williams.
Along the pilgrim’s way of this book, we see some wonderful Norfolk seaboards and think of some great composers, yet what remains with us is the overpowering love with which it has been written.
A N Wilson is author of Goethe: His Faustian Life (Bloomsbury)
Ira got rhythm
CHRISTOPHER BRAY
Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words
By Michael Owen
W W Norton & Co £30
The maid was so shocked to see her employer singing at his desk that she sought out the lady of the house: ‘Don’t Mr Gershwin never go to work?’
Yes, he did – so much so that ‘Don’t Mr Gershwin never stop working?’ would have been a better question.
As the subtitle of Michael Owen’s celebratory biography makes plain, Ira Gershwin (1896-1983) lived his life in words – words that, as for any real writer, didn’t come easily.
In the time it took Ira to come up with a lyric, his brother George (1898-1937) could knock off half a dozen tunes. So impatient was the melodist that he often called on other lyricists to fill in for Ira.
George’s first big hit, Swanee, has words by Irving Caesar. Buddy DeSylva wrote the lyrics for Blue Monday (the symphonic jazz opera George and
Ira would later transform into Porgy and Bess).
But the songs for which George Gershwin remains best known were pretty much all written with Ira – and vice versa. This last might seem an odd point to make, but it needs to be remembered that, in 1937, the 38-yearold George died of a brain tumour.
Ira, George’s senior by three years, lived on for nearly 50 years, and while it would be absurd to say that he did nothing but write, nonetheless in that half-century he wrote an awful lot.
Over the second half of his career, Ira wrote the words for melodies by composers as varied as Kurt Weill, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen and even Aaron Copland. Of the great American lyricists, only Johnny Mercer worked with more tunesmiths than Ira.
Owen, who runs the Ira Gershwin archive, never makes clear whether Ira took pleasure from this involuntary dispersal of his talent. Still, the fact that he was obliged to spread himself around allows us to see a little more clearly how different musical partnerships work.
It turns out that Weill liked to compose with a finished set of words in front of him. Gershwin G, on the contrary, was adamant that he came up with a melody and Gershwin I fitted words to it (unless they were working on a comic song, in which case the tune was shaped by the words).
Arlen felt the same way. So much so that if he wasn’t happy with a lyric, he’d call in another writer to help. So it was that Ira’s words for A Star Is Born’s The Man That Got Away were written long after the melody had been completed – indeed, long after Johnny Mercer had written a lyric called I Can’t Believe My Eyes to the same tune.
Little wonder, perhaps, that, in 1947, when Ira was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee he jokingly wondered whether they were going to ask him what came first – words or music?
Ira compared his work to that of a
‘My GP says I’ve a fat intolerance, but that can’t be true. I think you and I get on quite well’
gem-setter. His job was to make an already beautiful song sparkle. One such jewel is the gorgeously slangy refrain in Of Thee I Sing’s title number. Back in 1931, when the song was new, critics pronounced themselves shocked by Ira’s mash-up of the language of courtly love with the lingo of the street. Ninety-odd years later, a line such as ‘Of thee I sing, baby’ seems like the inaugural embodiment of 20th-century mass culture.
Not that Gershwin was any kind of pop ignoramus. He started out writing poetry, and though the snatches of verse Owen includes here aren’t anything to rave about, Gershwin plainly knew about technique.
Writing Fascinating Rhythm, he and George almost fell out. George insisted that the song have some two-syllable rhymes, even though Ira correctly pointed out that George had written a tune in which the lines in question ended with ‘a [musical] spondee, and … the best one can do with spondees are near-rhymes’.
Ira always did the best he could. If he wasn’t the wittiest of the great lyricists (that would be Cole Porter), nor the most heartbreaking (that would be Lorenz Hart), he was the writer who made the most impression on the common consciousness. Many of his song titles – I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’, Someone to Watch Over Me, Nice Work If You Can Get It, They Can’t Take That Away from Me – are now part of everyday speech.
W H Auden was right to urge Faber to publish Ira’s sedulously annotated Lyrics on Several Occasions. Faber, alas, paid Auden no regard. Michael Owen’s searchingly detailed life is a fitting companion to that book.
Christopher Bray is author of Michael Caine: A Class Act
OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH Burmese Dave
HARRY MOUNT
Our Evenings
By Alan Hollinghurst Picador £22
I wonder whether Alan Hollingurst is a fan of Brideshead Revisited
Several of his previous novels –The Swimming-Pool Library and Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty – have a Charles Ryder figure: an insider-outsider, with an entrée into British society but reluctant to take
up the invitation, while observing absolutely everything.
The mini-Charles Ryder in Our Evenings is Dave Win, 13, a halfBurmese boy at a rural boarding school with a devoted, widowed mother. There he meets grand, entitled, unpleasant Giles Hadlow – Sebastian Flyte is much nicer.
And for the next half-century, their lives are intertwined. Dave becomes a talented actor of middling success, growing slowly more confident in his homosexuality. Giles becomes a swaggering politician, a prominent Brexiteer.
Apart from an extremely dramatic, shocking ending – which it would be cruel to give away – this is a gentle, slow-moving novel. But, still, its 487 pages zip by, thanks to those superhuman observational powers and Hollinghurst’s addictive prose. You gulp it down even when there isn’t much action.
Hollinghurst has an eye for detail that seems to have hoovered up everything he’s seen in his 70 years. The details are so well chosen that they throw sharp light on his particular characters and the world in general.
So Giles’s chic, French grandmother wears ‘a fine blue mist of a scarf’. When a fire is lit, he notices the ‘flames sauntering the length of a twig’. A friend of Dave’s mother strolls into the sea, ‘as if looking for something else’.
Hyper-vigilant Hollinghurst must be referring to himself when he talks about a young Dave, driving with his lost mother: ‘I knew the way myself, in the passive, subjective way of the child who is driven and notes things the concentrating driver doesn’t see.’
He is particularly good on the subject of race. Anyone who thinks a white male novelist should write only about white men must be directed to Our Evenings
Dave has to police his Burmese origins constantly throughout his childhood. Sometimes, Burma is ‘allowed to be beauty and adventure but mostly it was an avoided subject’.
When the genteel, postwar British middle classes are disconcerted by Dave’s Burmese colouring, he and his mother have an unspoken tactic: ‘Assume that any person thrown by my appearance was puzzled by something else, and solve that other puzzle for them.’
Hollinghurst must also be the best observer of English class around (I must confess my sister edited the book, incidentally). He doesn’t mock or exaggerate Dave’s middle-class, provincial life but simply captures it.
So there’s Gilbert, the jokey card of a husband, who declares of a boarding house’s dinner, ‘The food here’s inevitable.’ Or, at Uncle Brian’s house, there’s the black-and-white mat in the loo that says, ‘PLEASE AIM STRAIGHT’.
Dave also has to deal with the shocked opposition to homosexuality, veiled in jokes, of postwar middle England. Uncle Brian talks of a friend being ‘married to some well-off fruit’. A teenage Dave notices how the taboo subject is ‘absorbed and deflected’ by everyone.
There are several closely described – but not salacious – gay sex scenes.
Hollinghurst is even better at the treatment of homosexuality by heterosexuals; as with the character who is ‘one of those heavily gay-friendly men who, after a while, as intimacy deepens, have awkwardly to come out as straight’.
Dave and Giles are a testament to how the same public school can turn out wildly different types. Dave is a sophisticate, not least thanks to the intense musical education he gets at school (which Richard Osborne writes about on page 61). But, thanks to his Burmese origins, he is for ever an outsider, stared at in later life with ‘the suspicion that I shouldn’t be here, and the subtler suspicion that, since I was here, I might be someone important’.
Hollinghurst excels in the study of power, via the study of Giles Hadlow. Giles has the familiar veil of good manners that fails to mask his unpleasantness – ‘beaming courtesy with an edge of condescension’.
And the schoolboy Giles declares in a school speech how he sees his role as House Captain: ‘I have the power. You don’t.’
Rarely has the nature of many 21st-century politicians been so acutely captured.
Harry Mount is author of How England Made the English
‘Who ordered the carrion?’
FILM
HARRY MOUNT
WE
LIVE IN TIME (15)
If I wanted to show a Martian how irritating young London professionals can be, I’d buy him a ticket to We Live in Time.
It’s meant to be a wry weepie: the tale of a super-hot couple – top chef Almut (Florence Pugh) and Weetabix executive Tobias (Andrew Garfield) – who find true love, have a perfect baby and live in a rose-covered cottage, foraging for herbs to go with scrambled eggs from their own hens. But they live unhappily ever after, when Almut gets ovarian cancer.
It should be heartbreaking, along the lines of Love Story (1970). But Ali MacGraw was meltingly charming and Erich Segal’s deceptively simple screenplay made for a real tear-jerker. Who can forget ‘What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?’ Or ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry.’
Arts
Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield are as lovely-looking as Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal. Pugh is an excellent actress and Garfield is a much better actor than O’Neal.
But they’re only brilliant at acting very annoying people. Screenwriter Nick Payne must have thought he was creating whip-smart wits. In fact, they’re humourless when they think they’re funny; dim when they think they’re clever; selfish when they think they’re kind. Just like a lot of people in professional London.
The dialogue is woefully uninspired but, still, it reflects just the sort of thing entitled dimbos say: ‘I’m like, back the f*ck off’; ‘I need to figure this shit the f*ck out.’ In this dreary, low-intellect world, love means always having to say ‘f*ck’ – and thinking you’re edgy and original for saying it.
There’s a secondary plotline. The dying Almut still longs to win an international chef competition – which she must keep secret from Tobias because it compromises her cancer care.
This supposedly life-affirming plotline is depressingly irritating. Cue shots of Almut and her sous-chef applying herbs to bits of fish with tweezers.
Cue one of the least romantic lines ever, from Pugh to Garfield, in the early, heady days of their romance – ‘Do you like tapenade?’ – as they go on a long, tedious tour of
upmarket delis after their first night of love.
This film doesn’t know what it wants to be. Sometimes it tries to be a romcom, with comic situations that fall awkwardly flat. You can tell that the scene where Almut gives birth in a petrol-station loo is supposed to be funny, thanks to the two salt-of-the-earth shop workers who end up – wow! – having to act as midwives.
But there isn’t a single line in that scene you can actually call funny. While she’s giving birth, Almut declares, ‘There’s a huge f*cking lump between my legs.’ Not funny and not clever.
Romcom masters like Richard Curtis pack every scene with funny lines, and always move the plot along at top speed. Or take Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, out on Valentine’s Day. You can bet that Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth will use all their supreme comic acting ability to squeeze the comedy out of every single situation.
We Live in Time gives the impression of feeling it can smugly rise above the tight strictures of the romcom because it’s about something so tragic. The fact that it’s all so sad doesn’t mean a cancer doctor saying ‘It’s OK not to be OK’ is moving, rather than emetic.
Tragedy requires the same tight tramlines as comedy. It’s not enough to show Florence Pugh vomiting and having a nosebleed to make you feel sorry for her. You must like her in the first place and must long for her to live.
I’m afraid that, just as with Oscar Wilde’s reaction to The Old Curiosity Shop – ‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing’ – I was longing for Almut to die. At least that would mean the film’s overlong 148 minutes were about to draw to a close.
What a ghastly smugfest of a non-rom non-com.
Pretty; boring – Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh
THEATRE
WILLIAM COOK
THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE London Coliseum, until 21st February
‘Is it still the same plot?’ asked the man sitting beside me, anxiously, at the first night of this new revival of Gilbert and Sullivan’s witty, warm-hearted comic opera.
Maybe he was just joking, but I shared his trepidation. Nowadays you never know what a radical director might do to ‘improve’ a Victorian masterpiece, even an evergreen classic such as The Pirates of Penzance.
Our fears were utterly unfounded. English National Opera’s rendition of this timeless entertainment takes no tiresome liberties with race or gender. It doesn’t interfere with Sir Arthur Sullivan’s divine score. It doesn’t tamper with W S Gilbert’s sacred text. Even the costumes are reassuringly traditional. The only concession to modernity is Alison Chitty’s bold, abstract set.
This production was first staged in 2015, directed by Mike Leigh, this magazine’s Oldie of the Year awardwinner as our Silver Screen Golden Oldie. Anyone who’s seen Leigh’s splendid biopic, Topsy-Turvy (1999), will know how well he understands Gilbert and Sullivan, and how much he admires them. His staging is similarly conscientious and discreet.
‘I have no interest in directing musicals or, far less, Gilbert and Sullivan,’ he said, when Topsy-Turvy came out. Thank heavens he changed his mind.
Ten years on, the cast is different, but everything else is the same. Full marks to Sarah Tipple, billed in the programme as ‘revival director’, for honouring Leigh’s original vision, rather than trying to impose a new identity on this reboot. As in Leigh’s evocative movie, the sole focus is Gilbert and Sullivan’s wonderful words and music. Free from any directorial interference, the bonhomie and beauty of their unique collaboration shines through. What a lovely way to brighten up these long, dark winter nights.
When The Pirates of Penzance opened, in 1879, Gilbert and Sullivan were riding high on both sides of the Atlantic. Their HMS Pinafore had been a huge hit in America as well as Britain. They even premièred their new show in New York, rather than in London, in a bid to scupper the piratical American producers who’d been mounting unauthorised versions of their work.
Commercially, their Pirates of Penzance was just as successful as HMS Pinafore.
Critically, it represented yet another step up. It was attractive and accessible, but it had more depth and subtlety. I’ve seen it umpteen times, and yet I never tire of it. Gilbert’s ingenuous lyrics are full of satire and self-mockery, and Sullivan’s moving, uplifting melodies are sublime. As in all the best creative partnerships, they spurred each other on.
There are several hilarious singalong hits (‘I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General’; ‘A Policeman’s Lot is Not a Happy One’…), but the lesser-known numbers are just as catchy, and even the spoken dialogue is full of laughs.
Gilbert’s sense of humour seems remarkably modern, partly because of his immense influence on so many of the humorists who followed him. Lyricists from P G Wodehouse to Sir Tim Rice have cited him as an inspiration. Would we have ever heard of Monty Python without Gilbert and Sullivan? George Gershwin and Cole Porter were among their many famous fans.
‘I have always held that English is (next to Italian) the very best of all European languages for singing purposes,’ declared Gilbert. The
linguistic gymnastics of his librettos bear this out. Like Dickens, he paints his characters with broad brushstrokes, yet they still seem real – as the critic Herman Klein once put it, ‘such weird, eccentric yet intensely human beings’.
There are plenty of fine performances, particularly John Savournin’s Pirate King (shades of John Cleese and Eric Idle) and Major General Stanley, played by ENO veteran Richard Stuart – how heartening to see a man in his 70s wrestling heroically with this asphyxiating, breath-defying role.
Yet the real stars are the chorus, and it’s in the ensemble numbers that this show takes off.
‘Comic opera should appeal to both the eye and the ear,’ said Gilbert. With his love of panto, I think he would have liked this colourful production. As this enormous stage filled up with pirates and policemen, it reminded me of the Pollock’s Toy Theatre I cherished as a child.
When Mike Leigh was asked why he liked Gilbert and Sullivan, he said, ‘It makes your foot tap and it’s funny.’
And who could ask for more than that?
Sea shanties: the Major General (Richard Suart) and Pirate King (John Savournin)
RADIO VALERIE GROVE
I wonder where the radio habit will go, when there’s nobody left who remembers the wireless turning crackly as the dial hit Hilversum.
Assuming that all audio is available any time for ever, ‘Listen to this and all other episodes on BBC Sounds, or wherever you get your podcasts’ used to seem a young, ‘entitled’ thing.
My family did inherit the soon-to-bearchaic habit, waking and retiring with their radios on. Still, the youngest at 42 is also a podhead, and the eldest lives abroad and picks up everything on her phone. I may be (with Oldie-readers) among the last radio addicts. But that addiction is now on a falling trajectory.
News first. I do get my news from the trusted BBC rather than social media (of course), but I often shout at the radio, ‘Call that news?’
I switch off lickety-split at the jaunty Archers theme, and at any sign of infantile humour. ‘I can shout butt jokes and terrify the Radio 4 audience,’ bragged a comedian with a stoma, in Bad Bod Squad, recently. ‘I’m making a sandwich and having a poo! I’m having a poo right now!’ Thank you for sharing.
The vox pop is increasingly switchoffable with incessant tales of woe. For nine years from the mid-’80s, there was a programme called Never the Same Again. It was about tragedy suddenly striking a family out of the blue, changing their lives for ever. Murder, desertion, abduction, confessions of a gay son (that dates it), car crashes, amnesia... It seemed groundbreaking at the time.
Now, piling Pelion on Ossa, they give us several in a row in a relentless stream. They’ve added creepy background music (‘the tinkling piano in the next apartment’), intruding into even the besttold narratives.
Like a human YouTube, I have accumulated a store of cassettes and CDs – hundreds of gold-dust episodes of Private Passions, In Our Time and Desert Island Discs, interviews with the departed, brilliant plays, concerts and unforgettable things like Gyles Brandreth’s The Trials of Oscar Wilde, with Martin Jarvis doing all the voices –still available on Audible.
So when the new I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue series started, I could ask – all but one of the original cast being dead – is it as funny as the ones from 1992? I happily found that Miles Jupp and Lee Mack are every bit as chortleworthy – with ‘that lovable giant now known as the SKY
BFGBTQ+’ and ‘the River Exe, formerly known as Twitter’ – as in the heyday of Humph, Barry and co, with their carpe diem (fish of the day), bidet (‘two days before D-Day’) and droit du seigneur (the gents is on the right).
Goodbye to Mishal Husain – my favourite among Today interviewers.
It’s also curtains for Drama on 3. One of the last was the wonderfully weird War with the Newts by Czech author Karel Čapek, revived by a top team: writer Ed Harris, producer Joby Waldman and director Jeremy Mortimer. I love the voice of Alexei Navalny, even if it is really Benedict Cumberbatch, telling his story of life in Russia in his memoir, Patriot.
File on 4 aped the Sunday Times, revealing the massive increase in C-grade international students funding our stricken universities, who admit them despite their having only a glancing knowledge of English. (‘I refute that,’ declared Vivienne Stern, who represents the vice-chancellors – despite evidence from the whistle-blowers.
The excellent Helen Lewis and Armando Iannucci, with Strong Message Here, always have fluent and funny conversations. And 2024’s Reith lecturer, New Zealand-born Gwen Adshead, was a Reithian exemplar of clarity, giving her exegesis on violence without a single ‘So I was like…’
Audio is alive. You can listen any time! But sometimes you need to get programmes in the transcribed version, to be amused, eg ‘Michael Foote [sic] was criticised for wearing a donkey jacket to the Senate app.’
TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON
It’s 36 years since 21st December 1988, when a bomb destroyed Pan Am flight 103 as it passed over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing all 243 passengers, 16 crew and 11 of the Lockerbie residents who were getting ready for Christmas.
The body parts were scattered over a field and Rosebank Crescent, one of whose houses was destroyed by the plane’s rear fuselage.
The Lockerbie bombing – now dwarfed by 9/11 – was the biggest act of terrorism in British history and the largest attack on the country since the Second World War. Abdelbaset alMegrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer who died of cancer in 2012, was the only person convicted of the crime.
But, according to Jim Swire, whose 24-year-old daughter, Flora, was one of the 43 British citizens on the flight, Megrahi was set up and the real perpetrators have yet to be punished.
It’s not a view shared by everyone, but Sky’s five-part drama, Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, based on the book The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice by Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph, makes his case with gravity and force.
Written by Scottish playwright David Harrower, the miniseries tells the story of Swire’s decades-long attempt to discover who killed his daughter.
As an exploration of unendurable human suffering, it is not easy watching. As a tale of rampant lies, cover-ups, oilfields, Wikileaks, prisoner-transfer
Devoted dad: Colin Firth as Jim Swire in Lockerbie: A Search for Truth
deals, bribery and geopolitical rabbit holes, it makes a Robert Harris thriller look under-plotted.
We discover that the flight was only half full because the US Embassy had received a bomb warning. So they prevented their own staff from flying home for Christmas. The USA paid millions of dollars to two central witnesses. And the forensic evidence central to the prosecution has been discredited.
Colin Firth, taking on the most emotionally complex role of his career, is outstanding as Swire, the introverted Bromsgrove GP and spokesman for the UK Families Flight 103 group.
An Etonian with an inbuilt trust in the establishment, Swire never before had cause to doubt that what British and American governments told him was true or that the courts of law did the right thing.
Following the evidence, Swire has no idea where it will lead. He visits the Transport Secretary Cecil Parkinson, who blocks his questions at every turn.
He takes a fake bomb onboard a flight to Boston to prove that security is non-existent. He covers the walls of his study in press clippings, photographs and leaked memos. He goes alone to Libya to negotiate with Gaddafi, fully expecting to be taken prisoner He attends every day of the nine-month trial in Utrecht, believing Megrahi is guilty, until the evidence points the other way.
After that, he describes Megrahi as the 279th victim of the bombing.
‘I am only a tiny peg in a far greater game,’ Swire says. He is also a dog with a bone which he never, ever lets out of his bared teeth.
Catherine McCormack, who plays Swire’s wife, Jane, inhabits the role with equal intelligence. She has lost both her daughter and her husband, whose obsession with justice is his attempt, she recognises, to avoid the onslaught of grief. Jane, who has nightmares every night about her daughter’s last 15 seconds, wants to live once more with the living, but Jim cannot.
The director, Otto Bathurst (who previously directed Peaky Blinders), allows the story to be both a character study of a man whose quiet life broke in half and a social history of a time when we were more innocent than we are now.
The colour board is bleak: a grim brown house, grim cafés and offices, dowdy clothes and dowdy hair styles, with everything getting grimmer and dowdier by the minute. Camp Zeist, where the trial took place, is replicated
‘Can I join you until spring?’
to scale. The seating plan in the court is exactly as it was.
The material has been fact-checked so many times that it can feel like a docudrama. While the production team have allowed for different perspectives, the series is unavoidably part of Swire’s campaign. There is no happy ending, because Swire’s search for justice has not yet ended. The evidence still doesn’t hold up. A good deal remains hidden from us. This superb drama proves how vulnerable the official version of events still is. Lockerbie: A Search for Truth deserves to have the same impact as ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
MUSIC
RICHARD OSBORNE
ALAN HOLLINGHURST’S MUSIC
I’d just acquired Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel, Our Evenings, when a message arrived from a schoolmaster friend. He suggested that I’d be amused by a reference to Radio 3’s Building a Library on page 457. The protagonist regrets the programme’s replacement with ‘unscripted chat’ of those ‘concise and unanswerable lectures’ on which he’d grown up.
It isn’t Hollinghurst’s first reference to the programme. In his Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty, there’s an amusing breakfast scene played out against ‘a sharp young man’ comparing recordings of Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben.
I’ve often wondered who the ‘sharp young man’ was, given that I was the only
person at the time to have covered Ein Heldenleben on Building a Library – not to mention having had the privilege of being edited by Hollinghurst when I contributed occasional pieces to the TLS in the 1980s.
I’d long known that his novels are rich in musical content. No other major English novelist since E M Forster has deployed music with such insight, affection and strategic guile.
Hollinghurst doesn’t do ‘state of the nation’ novels. Yet the sheer historical sweep of works such as The Sparsholt Affair (1940 to 2015) and Our Evenings (late 1950s to 2020) conveys a consistent feel of shifting cultural values where music is concerned – what Michael Henderson, writing about Desert Island Discs in his radio column in The Critic, recently identified as the alarming lack of interest nowadays ‘in music before the arrival of pop’.
It reminded me of Hollinghurst’s 1998 novel The Spell. The shy, wellheeled civil servant Alex Nichols decides that the ‘familiar novelties’ of the Op 76 Haydn string quartet playing on the car radio ‘will always be there’.
Reaching into the glove box, he takes out Monster House Party Five, ‘a three-CD compilation of 40 pounding dance tracks’ – an augur, it turns out, of the sex- and drug-fuelled house party he’s about to experience in deepest Dorset.
The host is Robin Woodfield, an architect in his late 40s, whose young boyfriend was once Alex’s partner. When Alex’s fling with Robin’s dangerously volatile 22-year-old son, Danny, comes to its inevitable end, it’s music that provides the analogies.
First, there are the early signs of break-up, ‘like the seen but noiseless drum strokes of a tympanist checking his tuning’. Then Danny. ‘He’d be a great lover; that would be his career, though he knew next to nothing about love, just as some great musicians know nothing about music, beyond their gift for making it.’
Alex eventually finds a grown-up partner, who promises ‘mornings of ruins and evenings of L’elisir d’amore’. There are worse fates.
In tune: Alan Hollinghurst
It’s in The Folding Star, the tale of a 33-year-old English tutor, Edward Manners, steeped in his father’s music and his own love of art history, that the deepest notes are struck, both in the portrait of the 17-year-old Luc Altidore – shades of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes but more devastating – and in the novel’s engagement with music itself.
Describing how music, like love, ‘seemed to admit to me a new dimension of luminous purpose’, Edward cites his schoolboy self on first hearing the music of Janáček – ‘the most convulsively lifelike music I had ever heard’.
And here is Janáček again in Our Evenings. In a nodal scene, the civilising English master, Mr Hudson, puts a Janáček LP on the turntable as a musical nightcap for him and the secretary of the Record Club, Dave Win.
Dave is Hollinghurst’s latest protagonist: a biracial English boy, son of a single parent Home Counties mum. We first meet him, aged 13, as he takes up a boarding-school scholarship endowed by the Hadlow family: deeply civilised left-wing plutocrats, whose bully-boy son, Giles – later a right-wing Tory MP – is Dave’s exact contemporary.
Even as Giles is calling the studiously correct Mr Hudson ‘a ruddy ponce’, so we meet Dave’s housemaster, a deviously probing fellow, albeit wise enough to temper his misgivings about the Record Club.
‘And what was it tonight?’
‘Janáček, sir: On the Overgrown Path,’ – Dave mingling mischief with self-preservation by withholding the movement’s title, ‘Our Evenings’.
It’s a representative scene, given that the passing on of a love of classical music and opera to the susceptible young –the listeners of the future – has long been one of the principal glories of the Mr Hudsons of our world.
Later, David Win, now a professional actor, is the speaker of Matthew Arnold’s verses in an Aldeburgh performance of An Oxford Elegy, that absorbing and rarely-heard late work by Ralph Vaughan Williams: another unignorable figure in the Hollinghurst musical landscape.
Rowan Atkinson has just recorded this for Signum Classics with gifted Oxfordbased musicians – a rich subject for another time.
GOLDEN OLDIES MARK ELLEN
BRING ON SPINAL TAP II
The funniest film ever made about rock music is – for better or worse – about to get its second act.
Sequels are a high-risk business – so perhaps we should adopt the brace position for Spinal Tap II, scheduled for release this summer.
The original in 1984, let’s not forget, was a game-changer. Directed by Rob Reiner (who later made Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally), This Is Spinal Tap was largely improvised, shot in just five weeks and pioneered the hand-held-camera, spoof-documentary format, since echoed by The Office and countless other comedies. It follows the sinking fortunes of a touring English heavy-metal band on a doomed and hilarious attempt to delight their American audience.
And its portrait of this hopelessly deluded, absurdly stretchtrousered, knackered old combo radiates more unvarnished truth about life in the rock world than any real footage ever revealed.
Lampooning Martin Scorsese in The Last Waltz, Reiner played the starstruck Marty DiBergi fishing for insight and pearls of wisdom from the group’s
three stars who are haunted by the spectre of their life of prolonged adolescence heading for a brick wall. Like most rock acts, they’re supremely unsuited to the rigours of the real world.
A series of catastrophes befall them, so familiar to the pop sphere that some musicians thought the film was a documentary. Their gigs are constantly ‘downsized’ owing to lack of demand. Their onstage equipment breaks down, trapping the bassist in a giant, transparent pod. They get lost trying to find the stage. No one turns up for their in-store album signing.
The manager is disastrously replaced by the singer’s girlfriend, rightly suggesting that musicians’ other halves are often the root of terminal friction. Their hubris melts to embarrassment and then rage as the whole world turns against them and they look around for someone to blame. Reminded that a review of their album of pretentious rock psalms asked, ‘What day did the Lord create Spinal Tap and couldn’t he have rested on that day too?’, they know deep down it might have a point.
Once you’ve seen Spinal Tap, you see rock music in a whole new light. You sense that most bands are fractious and on the point of falling apart and that concerts minus self-belief just seem like cartoonish theatre.
Can the sequel speak as truthfully about rock’s advancing years? The three main stars are back, one now in his 80s, and we’ve had appetising leaks of the plot. The late manager’s widow inherits a contract requiring the band to re-form for one last show. The guitarist has been running a cheese and guitar shop. The singer did the music for a true-crime podcast. The bassist wrote a symphony about the devil (who wears a hairpiece), McCartney, Elton John
might let real
Rock
EXHIBITIONS
HUON MALLALIEU
THE VAUGHAN BEQUEST OF TURNERS
National Galleries of Scotland and Ireland, 1st to 31st January Henry Vaughan (1809-99) left 69 Turner watercolours to Edinburgh and Dublin, dividing them into collections of 38 and 31.
His thoroughly sensible conditions were that they should be displayed free of charge and only in January, when exposure would damage them least. That has happened every year since.
In case eyes could ever be wearied at seeing the same old Turners every winter, 2025 will be different. In celebration of the 125th anniversary of Turner’s birth, and ‘for once in a lifetime’, the two galleries have swapped their holdings. Unexpectedly, perhaps, an 1801 view of Edinburgh from below Arthur’s Seat belongs to Dublin.
Not unexpected at all, thanks to Mr Vaughan’s foresight, is the splendidly unfaded state of all the watercolours.
That is not all for drawings-lovers in reach of Edinburgh. Turner will share the galleries in the Royal Scottish Academy building (now part of the National Gallery complex) with From Dürer to Van Dyck – a selection of 50 Flemish, Dutch, early Netherlandish and German drawings and watercolours from the great Chatsworth Collection (to 23rd February). Among them are nine Rembrandts and 11 Van Dycks.
As an art historian – and a one-time dresser to Willie Rushton at the Mermaid Theatre – I particularly relish Rembrandt’s perfect 1630s pen study of
Left: A Ship against the Mewstone, at the Entrance to Plymouth Sound, c 1814. Below: Ostend Harbour, c 1840. Bottom: Edinburgh from below Arthur’s Seat, c 1801. All by JMW Turner (1775-1851)
an actor running through his lines. For a long time, because of the bishop’s robes hanging behind him, this was thought to represent St Augustine at his studies.
Only in 1979 was the sitter rightly identified as Willem Bartholsz Ruyter (1587-1639), a popular actor with a travelling troupe, and an Amsterdam innkeeper. There are Rembrandt drawings of him in the
V&A and the Rijksmuseum, which enabled the identification.
Chatsworth curators have even worked out that this must have been one of his last appearances. He is playing Bishop Gozewijn in a tragedy written by Joost van den Vondel, first performed in 1638. Rembrandt knew Vondel and may well have watched rehearsals.
Until 5th January, there is a further treat in Dublin, an exhibition of work by the watercolourist Mildred Anne Butler (1858-1941). She worked on an unusually large scale, capturing birds, trees and light exceptionally well. Her Shades of Evening, a building of rooks, has long been a favourite of mine.
The Oldie February
GARDENING
DAVID WHEEELER
SPECTACULAR AURICULAS
‘Free livestock with every plant!’ ‘What?’
‘Sure. Free. No extra charge.’
Thus my casual exchange with a leading nurseryman specialising in auriculas.
I was only momentarily puzzled. Auriculas – primrose-family aristos – are famous for harbouring the pesky vine weevil, an insect that feeds on diverse plants, especially those grown in containers.
Worse, they operate pincer-movement tactics akin to those warmongering Turks of the eighth century BC. Their twin mode of attack has the adults munching on the plant’s leaves in one season, while the larvae feed unseen on roots in another.
And when the plants are grown huggermugger, as they are in nurseries, the critters can romp through a colony like –well, not quite like – a plague of locusts.
A wilting auricula plant signifies the presence of half-inch-long, destructive C-shaped grubs, feasting below ground. Irregular notches on the leaves during summer tell you the adults are salading happily on the foliage.
The Royal Horticultural Society recommends removal of the aboveground blighters by hand: ‘On mild spring or summer evenings,’ it says, ‘inspect plants and walls by torchlight and pick off the adult weevils. Shake shrubs over an upturned umbrella, newspaper or similar to dislodge and collect more. In greenhouses, look under pots or on the underside of staging benches where the beetles hide during the day.’
There – that’ll amuse you after a few sundowners.
The introduction of pathogenic nematodes – microscopic parasitic marauders – is one biological (nonchemical) way of eradicating the larvae,
says the Society. A selection of products is available in inexpensive sachets.
Over-the-counter systemic poisons, such as Provado Vine Weevil Killer, are effective but less friendly. Apply strictly according to the manufacturers’ instructions. And, as with anything even vaguely scientific, check with the experts first.
Auriculas are spectacular, attracting novices and diehard alpine-plant-lovers equally. Clubs and specialist societies stage spectacular springtime shows and competitions (details at auriculaandprimula.org.uk).
Being small and happy in pots – the above plague notwithstanding – auriculas, commonly called bear’s ears, because of their leaf shape – are ideal for ageing, unfit or disabled gardeners whose green fingers – if little else – still function.
Traditionally, auriculas were grown in long toms – small terracotta pots deeper than they are wide, to allow tap (extended) roots to delve. Loved by the Victorians, the planted pots were often displayed in auricula theatres – ornate, shallow staging structures, where mirrors were sometimes placed on the back wall, enabling more of the plants to be seen. An A-shaped stepladder makes a good substitute, but overhead cover is advised. Avoid sunny aspects.
John Innes No 2 compost with some added grit is best. Auriculas want moist – not soggy – soil. That said, border auriculas grow superbly in open ground.
Yes, the ‘border auricula’. You need to learn the plants’ various classifications: others include fancies, selfs, edged, alpines, doubles, striped, laced…
My own faves are those ‘dusted’ with farina, which need to be carefully irrigated to avoid water spoiling their beautifully
ghosted pips (individual flowers) or heavily meal-encrusted leaves – hence the wisdom of growing them undercover. Fabulously exotic in appearance, this group displays pips in shades of green, lemony yellow, blue, maroon, cornelian, black and grey, often in alluring combinations.
Edged auricula
‘Jessica’
‘Jessica’, ‘Grey Hawk’ and ‘White Ensign’ are among my darlings. Garden centres seldom stock many auriculas –their fussy upkeep is problematic. Instead, google ‘auriculas’ and you’ll find numerous specialist mail-order nurseries.
Now’s a good time. Pip pip!
David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal
KITCHEN GARDEN DAVID COURTAULD SORREL
In these dark days of winter, most of the vegetable garden is dormant. Yet there is one clump of bright green that continues to thrive, whatever the weather. This is the sorrel which I planted three years ago. When it occasionally loses its colour and dies down, it regrows within a few weeks.
I used to grow another, larger and taller sorrel which developed flowers and seed at the end of summer; its leaves faded and didn’t come back until spring. But it lasted nearly three years before becoming exhausted. This is common or broad-leaved sorrel, whereas the smaller plant which has replaced it is known as French sorrel. Employing the terminology of medieval battles, common sorrel has
arrow-shaped leaves while the French variety has leaves more like a shield.
Having now grown both, I can say that the French sorrel is greatly superior. It doesn’t have the fibrous texture of the common sorrel, the plant does not run to seed and it has a less acidic taste.
Sorrel can be readily grown from seed, indoors from February or outdoors in spring. Once established, it requires little attention and the leaves can be picked for a variety of good things in the kitchen.
Sorrel soup is probably the most popular, made with onion and potatoes, and if you’re using French sorrel, the fibreless leaves can be puréed and left uncooked to retain their greenness. This was the ‘soup of oseille’ which Charles Ryder enjoyed in Paris in Brideshead Revisited.
Elizabeth David was a great fan of sorrel omelette, and Rick Stein enthuses over a sorrel sauce with salmon, first made at a Michelin-starred restaurant in France. I have had some success recently with a sorrel salsa, which you can make by blending the leaves with capers, spring onions, mustard, wine vinegar and olive oil. It has proved itself with roast chicken and fish.
Sorrel has been classified as a herb and a vegetable. It is interchangeable with spinach when, for instance, added to poached eggs. And if the sorrel is a bit sharp for some tastes, it should be combined with spinach.
COOKERY
ELISABETH LUARD LIQUID GOLD
Soup! There are times in the depths of winter when nothing else will do. A thick, comforting bowlful of what granny – your own or someone else’s – used to make.
Curl up by the fire with Anne-Katrin Weber’s deliciously warming Greens & Beans – originally published in Germany, where a main-course soup followed by a substantial dessert is the traditional midday meal. Uninhibited spicings and imaginative finishings make all the difference.
Haricot beans with celeriac are finished with a pine-nut gremolata that includes olives, lemon zest and chilli. Black-eyed beans with cabbage flavoured with ginger and garlic are served with a dollop of coconut yoghurt. German Spätzle – squiggly flour-and-egg dumplings that look like pasta – are served with an Italianate lentil stew, finished with balsamic vinegar.
For a plethora of good things in bowls – vegetarian, though you won’t notice –you’ll have to buy the book. Here’s a couple of winter warmers with added sunshine.
Yellow-split-pea and sweet-potato soup
A soothing combination of pulses and roots is softened with coconut milk and sharpened with lime juice. Serves 4.
500g sweet potatoes, peeled
3 tbsps vegetable oil
20g fresh ginger, peeled and diced
1-2 garlic cloves, peeled and diced
800ml vegetable stock (you may need a little more)
200ml coconut milk
100g yellow split peas
2 tsps coriander seeds, crushed
1 tsp chilli flakes
Small bunch leaf coriander, chopped
2-3 tbsps lime juice
Salt and freshly-ground pepper
Chunk the sweet potatoes into bite-size pieces. Heat a tablespoon of the oil in a roomy pan, and lightly sauté the ginger and garlic. Add the sweet potatoes, stock, coconut milk and split peas. Bring to the boil, turn down the heat and simmer for 15-20 minutes, till the potato and peas are soft.
Meanwhile, in a small pan, heat the rest of the oil and fry the coriander seeds and fresh leaf coriander for 2-3 minutes, stir in the chilli flakes, remove from the heat and reserve.
Season with salt and pepper, then blitz to a purée in the processor. Taste, sharpen with lime juice and serve in bowls, drizzled with the coriander-flavoured oil.
Black-bean chilli with quinoa and chocolate
No need to hit the transatlantic highway for a Latin American fix. Tuck up by the embers with a hot-water bottle and a blanket and watch the pretty snowflakes drifting past the window. Serves 4 (with leftovers for tomorrow).
150g quinoa, well rinsed
1 medium onion, skinned and diced
2 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
3 tbsps olive oil
400g carrots, scraped and thinly sliced
About 2 tsps chilli flakes
2 tsps ground cumin
250g green beans, trimmed and halved
500g ready-cooked black beans, rinsed and drained
Scant 1 litre vegetable stock
800g tinned tomatoes, chopped
25g dark chocolate, roughly chopped
Handful leaf coriander, chopped
Salt
Cook the quinoa till soft in salted water for 15-20 minutes, then drain and keep it warm. Fry the onion and garlic gently in the olive oil till translucent. Add the carrots, chilli flakes and cumin and sauté briefly. Add the stock and tomatoes and bubble up.
Turn down the heat and simmer for 15 minutes. Add the green beans and the readycooked black beans and simmer for another 10 minutes till the stew thickens. Stir in the chopped chocolate and let it melt.
Fluff the quinoa with the chopped coriander. Divide the bean stew between bowls and top with the quinoa.
RESTAURANTS
JAMES PEMBROKE
SPICE OF LONDON LIFE
It’s time for spice.
I spent November and December researching the capital’s finest Asian restaurants.
For two of my visits, I made the mistake of taking along my friends Cecily, aged 11, and Ophelia, aged 8, who are a delight in a pizzeria but they can’t bear spice. They find it in all sorts of everyday plain foods. So, for example, they won’t touch Cumberland sausages; they can eat only those pink Richmond ones.
Bread must be white and sliced because ‘brown tastes of mud’. There is only one type of meat – chicken – but, perversely, they opt only for leg.
The rest of their meagre diet, whose lack of variety would shame a fussy caveman, consists of pasta and pesto, pizza (without cheese) and Weetabix under an avalanche of sugar (white). They claim they’re partial to a banana, which I hope is true because it’s their only chance against scurvy.
I thought I’d educate them in the safety of Stepfordesque Clapham. So I took them to ultra-cool Tamila, the younger sister of the brilliant Tamil Prince in Islington. I had visions of them devouring piles of poppadums, but Tamila is part of the new wave of Indian restaurants that eschew the standard Anglo-Indian dishes of yore: korma, jalfrezi etc.
The waiter assured us in the hurricane
of music that the chicken lollipop and a masala dosa weren’t spicy, but he knew not of what he spoke.
Ophelia’s face went scarlet; even the garlic naan was binned, and I ordered two mango lassis to put out the flames. I’ll definitely return for lunch, when the music is down, for the best-ever chicken tandoori.
Two days later, imagining their mouths might have recovered, I took them to YiQi Pan Asian in Chinatown. I was wrong.
On entering with serious trepidation, Ophelia snarled, ‘My mouth is still on fire from Thursday.’
You’d have thought I had lured them to a 19th-century opium den run by a white slaver. She ordered a hillock of plain rice and used a prawn cracker as a scoop. Cecily went for egg-fried rice, but its off-brown colour raised alarm bells of oriental trickery. I tried to bribe her with a prawn from my delicious creamy pumpkin with king prawns, but I forgot to fire-hose off the sauce.
I changed the guest list for my dinner at Hunan, in Belgravia, which must be the most expensive Chinese restaurant in London. After 18 courses and paying £60 for the corkage on the bottle of PernandVergelesses my daughter brought, I imagine you’ll understand why.
I’m still no good at very, very small canapé-style portions. We all agreed we had really just been to a very good drinks party rather than dinner.
Not so after our visit to Sri Lankan Machan, in Farringdon, which we found after the singalong at The Idler’s Christmas party, at the Betsey Trotwood pub. Typical of the area, it’s a bargain – £80 for two. Go for their Chilaw crab curry (£15.50).
Finally, to raucous Kiln in Soho with 20-somethings Bevan and Jacob, who are the chilli opposite of my two little friends. The largely Laotian menu is all small plates. So we ordered all the meat dishes – often twice. And, in the absence of a pudding menu, we headed to Gelupo for soothing if absurd ice creams like ricotta sour cherry or Gorgonzola and walnuts. I can’t help thinking Cecily and Ophelia are Wall’s-vanilla girls.
DRINK
BILL KNOTT
GUINNLESS PUBS
As a publican, you can run out of a particular beer and your regulars might moan a bit – as regulars are wont to do. But, in all likelihood, they will simply order another of the beers on offer and chunter into that instead.
Except one. Run out of Guinness, and – as the past few weeks have proved –
you could have a full-scale mutiny on your hands. The 20-per-cent spike in sales over the last year seems to have caught the brewery by surprise, and many pubs’ normally lucrative preChristmas trade has been stymied by a distinct lack of the black stuff.
An unexpected surge in the number of social-media ‘influencers’ who have discovered a fondness for the 260-yearold beer is, apparently, partly to blame. To quote a 1980s advertising campaign, ‘Guinnless isn’t good for you’.
Advertising has been central to Guinness’s success ever since artist and illustrator John Gilroy painted the original Guinness toucan in the 1920s. His collaborator and copywriter at advertising agency S H Benson was a young Dorothy L Sayers, who wrote whimsical verse to accompany the beaky bird: ‘If you can say as he can/Guinness is good for you/How grand to be a Toucan/Just think what Toucan do.’
Various Chief Medical Officers over the last century have begged to differ from Ms Sayers’s assertion that Guinness is good for you. But Guinness’s marketing has always kept them ahead of the competition, particularly by associating their product with elite sport.
The Guinness Six Nations, which kicks off next month, is a case in point. On the championship’s promotional material, the Guinness harp is the same size as the rugby ball. In France, where the sponsorship of sport by alcohol brands is forbidden, the word ‘Guinness’ is replaced by ‘Greatness’ … in the same colour and typeface. Guinness doesn’t miss a trick.
Guinness has always been my default pint in any pub where I don’t trust the draught bitter. And their ‘widget’ cans, first introduced in 1989, are a stand-by in my fridge, a vast improvement on the sixpacks of draught Guinness bottles in the late 1970s that were sold with a ‘creamer’ – a black syringe. You would pour the beer flat, and use the syringe to pump up the head. It was a delicate operation, best performed soberly over a sink.
And now there is the Guinness Nitrosurge. This £30 device clamps over a special pintsize Guinness can (about £2 each) and uses ‘innovative ultrasonic technology’ (no, I don’t know either) to deliver a perfect pint at home. Having watched several YouTube videos about the Nitrosurge with increasing bafflement, I think I'll stick with the widgets. But maybe those disappointed regulars at the UK’s Guinnless pubs will feel compelled to invest in one.
Is it too cynical to suspect Guinness of a clever piece of marketing? It wouldn’t be their first.
This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines, a crisp Grillo from Sicily and two beefy reds to ward off the winter chill: a Malbec from Mendoza, the grape’s adopted heartland, and a robust, complex Biferno from the south of Italy, made with Montepulciano and Aglianico grapes. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.
Grillo Sicilia DOC, Manieri, Italy 2022, offer price £9.50, case price £114.00 Straw-yellow, with zippy acidity and gentle flavours of pear and peach.
Malbec ‘La Niña’, Don Cristóbal, Mendoza, Argentina 2023, offer price £9.95, case price £119.40 Young, vibrant red with bags of cherry fruit, smooth tannins and a long finish.
Biferno Riserva, Tor Del Colle, Molise, Italy 2018, offer price £9.95, case price £119.40 Plenty of bottle age lends complexity and roundness to this muscular, velvety red. Mixed case price £117.60 – a saving of £27.99 (including free delivery)
HOW TO ORDER Call 0117 370 9930
SPORT
JIM WHITE
IT ′S JUST NOT CRICKET
When I was a teenager, one thing used to sustain me through the dark nights of January and February. In bed, I’d plunge under the covers with my transistor radio and tune into Test Match Special.
I’d listen for hours to crackly coverage of Illingworth, Edrich and Snow battling away in Brisbane, Bangalore and the Basin Reserve, the dulcet tones of Brian Johnston and John Arlott transporting me to places of exoticism and glamour. The next morning at school, bleary-eyed, we cricket fans would gather and compare how long we had stayed the course. Did you make it through to stumps? We’d ask. And even if you hadn’t, you’d claim you had.
However bright those memories are, I now realise there is something false about them. Not least because it could not have happened every winter.
Some years, England would be in the Caribbean, where the time difference was not so attuned to bedtime listening. Sometimes, they’d be in Pakistan, where the airwaves seemed permanently fugged and the coverage intermittent at best.
But when it did happen, for a couple of nights across a couple of weeks, under the covers I’d be off to another place, where the sun was shining, the crowd was getting noisy and English batsmen were failing to come to terms with the local conditions.
The very rarity of it made the idea captivating. We were restricted to a few days of magic and that was it. And it is not like that these days.
Now, in the English off-season, there is cricket on all the time. This winter, England appear to have embarked on a neverending world tour, playing in Pakistan, the West Indies and New Zealand, before they head off to India at the end of January.
Then there are the one-day franchises: the Indian Premier League, the Australia Big Bash, the New Zealand Super Smash and the Fijian Crash Bang Wallop. There are so many I may have made the last one up.
While that might sound a lovely opportunity to escape from the enveloping murk, it quickly all merges into one seamless blob of ever-lessening value. Does anyone even know who won the last IPL, let alone care?
And while the likes of Harry Brook and Joe Root have the ability to be as entertaining as any players in the history of the game, the fact is, as every winter’s cricket programme demonstrates, in sport less is more; beauty is enhanced by a lack of availability.
Oddly, this is something the
administrators of sport in the USA have long recognised. Every American football match is sold out, but the arch-capitalists of the NFL have never extended its programme. Their season remains short, tight and sparse. Every game is consequently an event.
Our football, on the other hand, has never learned from its cousin across the pond. Those in charge of the game are forever expanding its formats, adding new competitions, always looking for more. The 48-team World Cup to be introduced in Saudi in 2034 is the very nadir of over-stretch.
But even Gianni Infantino and his laughably greedy FIFA establishment are models of restraint compared with cricket’s worldwide administrators.
The fan craves proper competition, nurtured over time, marinated in rarity. The participants are being driven to physical and mental exhaustion by the ever-expanding demands. But still the organisers plaster the schedules with meaningless thrashathons, hoping that somehow the money will roll in.
Sometimes, as I remember those nights under the bedclothes when I was trying to hear what was going on Down Under, the past really does seem a better place.
MOTORING ALAN JUDD
MOUSE IN THE MACHINE
A nonagenarian farming friend – a widow – went to start her Skoda Yeti. Nothing happened.
She likes her Yeti, a rugged, simple and hitherto reliable vehicle. After checking the usual suspects – battery, fuel etc – she summoned help. The culprits were mice.
It’s not unheard-of for mice to interfere with engines – nice, warm, dark places in which to nest – especially in cars left unattended in garages or barns for long periods.
But this Yeti lives outside and is used daily. It transpired that the invaders were feeding off the wires behind the dash, a nourishing nibble because environmentallysensitive Skoda had replaced plastic coating of these wires with soya.
This is an example of how the law of unintended consequences commonly applies to things done for virtuous reasons; not for nothing do we observe that no good deed goes unpunished.
Another example is the complex mess of vehicle and driving taxes, all intended to make personal mobility less environmentally damaging.
VED – vehicle excise duty – used to be straightforward, with almost all cars paying the same. But meddling during recent decades, with the best of intentions, has resulted in the amount of VED you pay varying with engine size, emissions, year of first registration, year of purchase and what you paid for it.
We owned a VW that paid £130 tax, but the same car registered a year earlier paid £30. Registered now, it would pay £140. If you buy a new car costing £40,000, you pay punitive taxes for the first five years. It’s effectively a wealth tax because it’s probably no more polluting – possibly less – than a car costing £39,000. First-year fuel duty for most new non-EVs (electric vehicles) is to double from April, when EVs will also start paying it, albeit at a lower rate.
That’s just for keeping a car on the road. If it moves, you pay fuel duty of 52.95p per litre and VAT on top of that, effectively a tax on a tax. Yet it’s not having the desired effect.
EV sales have declined and many of those that are sold, being heavier than combustion equivalents, are more polluting by every measure except tailpipe emissions. At the same time, the anticipated decline in petrol and diesel sales will mean much less tax revenue.
Alternative taxation schemes – roadpricing; charging per mile – have been aired. So far, I’ve come across none as persuasive or practical as that proposed in a recent book, Critical Mass: The One Thing You Need to Know About Green Cars by Felix Leach and Nick Molden.
Exhaustively researched, it argues that current measures of a vehicle’s environmental impact are inadequate and misleading. The most reliable single measure is mass – vehicle weight –multiplied by distance driven. Some 83 per cent of regulated pollutants are strongly linked to vehicle weight (think of tyre and road wear, batteries and manufacturing emissions).
Thus the simplest, most economical and fairest way to tax drivers, they argue, is in line with a formula combining the weight of car with annual distance driven. To replace current tax revenue, the average car in the UK would be charged initially at 2p per mile, rising to 8p once all cars are electric.
But if you bought a car weighing 150kg less than average or drove 1,000 fewer kilometres a year, you would save £100 in tax annually. A benefit, therefore, for you and the environment.
Policy-makers should study these 297 densely argued pages before devising further tax complications. But will they?
Matthew Webster: Digital Life
How to get away from advertising
I have never much liked ads interrupting television programmes, especially when they come in an episode of Poirot just before he reveals the murderer.
They ruin the mood and disrupt the flow, and we lose any dramatic tension created by the performers. I understand that it’s how commercial TV channels keep the lights on and, in the pre-internet days, one simply had to put up with it.
These days, it doesn’t have to be that way. If, like me, you watch your television by way of a broadband connection – using, perhaps, the BBC iPlayer, ITVX, YouTube, Amazon, Netflix or one of the countless other channels – then you will have realised
Webwatch
For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk
justwatch.com/uk
Shows where you can watch the film or TV programme you are after; especially good for finding older programmes.
classictvads.co.uk
Watch classic TV adverts from the 1960s onwards. Pure nostalgia.
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
that, if you pay up, you can avoid the ads. What a blessed relief.
When streaming first became popular, through the efforts of Netflix, it was presented as liberating the viewer from the burden of watching advertising in return for a monthly fee. It took off like a rocket.
Hundreds of other channels followed suit. Most now offer a free, ad-supported version, and an ad-free, paid-for version. It’s not cheap, but it’s worth the money.
The best value I have found is ITVX, which costs £60 pa and has a huge library of favourites (including Poirot), as well as live TV. If you watch it live, you’ll see ads, but if you watch the same programme on catch-up, you won’t.
You don’t even need a TV licence if you never watch anything live on ITVX (or on any of the other streaming channels), although you will have to stump up the £169.50 pa if you watch anything at all on BBC iPlayer, live or otherwise.
If you subscribe to Amazon Prime and pay a supplement (£130 pa in total), you can watch a huge number of films and TV programmes, all without ads.
Amazon is also the easiest way to access many other channels. I recently bought a month of the Discovery+ channel through Amazon so that I could watch the autumn rugby internationals. At £30, it was a bit steep, but it was just for that month – so manageable.
However, this ad-free Eden is under threat. The advertising snake is lurking
to tempt the streamers into sinful ways, by persuading them to find new techniques of chiselling out more money for themselves.
Hence, they are all seeking ways to show us advertising, despite our subscriptions, and you can see why.
Given that they know exactly what and when we watch and for how long, they have unprecedented opportunities to target us with highly tailored ads, and charge advertisers accordingly.
The irony is that these services once promoted themselves as the antidote to intrusive advertising, but are now re-inventing the business model they originally set out to destroy.
They can also see huge opportunities for growth: the vast majority of TVviewers (about 75 per cent) are still only watching live TV. However, these are mostly we oldies, because, according to Ofcom, more than half of 16- to 24-yearolds are watching almost no broadcast TV at all. They much prefer to use one of the streaming services.
For once I align with the youngsters. I watch sport live – but that’s about all. I even tend to watch the news a short while after it has been broadcast.
We are witnessing the growing-up of a new industry that is still feeling its way. Netflix launched its streaming service in 2001 – only 14 years ago. So it’s barely a teenager, and most of the others are much younger.
And, as with any teenager, there will be big changes – mark my words.
Neil Collins: Money Matters
Green trusts? Gone with the wind
Congratulations to Beatrice.
In case you don’t know her, she’s a wind farm in the North Sea. Just before Christmas, she joined the select band of wind farms to receive more than £1 billion in subsidies from the taxpayer.
She’s been whirring away for seven years, and at this rate we will pay the £2.2 billion cost of the farm by 2031.
Not a bad return on someone’s investment, then, at the taxpayer’s expense.
The subsidies are paid through a
magnificently complex series of steps. If you want to see how it is done, go to Eigen Values on Substack (warning: contains some financially upsetting scenes) because the Government won’t tell you. Neither will it admit that the fiction of cheap offshore wind has made the UK’s electricity prices the highest in the developed world.
You might have thought that, with all this free money, everything connected with this industry would do well. That’s
what the enthusiastic buyers of batterystorage investment trusts thought. The electricity generated at night on the farms would be wasted if there was no way of storing it. Build the storage, wait for the cheap juice to flow in, sell it expensively during the day and pay the difference in juicy dividends.
There are three of these listed trusts and, as so often, life hasn’t turned out quite the way investors expected. After an initial spark of enthusiasm, the prices
of all three have dwindled. Investment trusts typically trade at a modest discount to the value of their underlying assets. So today’s discounts of around 50 per cent are close to disastrous.
The business turned out to be rather more difficult than simply connecting up a big pile of piles and waiting for the juice to flow in. Modern batteries are a world away from the lead-acid monster in your (petrol) car. Matching intermittent wind
with fluctuating demand is harder than it looks.
As the investment trust-watchers at McHattie say in their excellent newsletter, ‘The teething problems have been fairly severe and extreme, but this industry has a good opportunity now to recharge and to establish a new equilibrium.’
All three trusts (acronyms GSF, GRID and HEIT – find them on the AOC website) have gone down together,
although they are far from identical. We are going to need battery storage if we are to come within a country mile of those fantasy net-zero targets – so there should be value there for the patient and brave.
After all, if the Government can throw almost unlimited amounts of money at little Beatrice, why should it stop there?
Neil Collins was City Editor of the Daily Telegraph
The Oldie Trip to Hidden Paris
With Patrick Bade 3rd to 7th December 2025
The Oldie has always resisted a trip to Paris because we’ve all ‘been there, done that’. But then Kirker told us they have this chap, Patrick Bade, who can take us to parts the other tours won’t reach: those secret corners and less-known museums and galleries that will delight even those who feel they already know the city well.
After a stint at Christie’s Education, Patrick lectured on art and opera at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, the V&A and the National Gallery. He now lives in Paris for part of the year.
Patrick writes, ‘Over the course of a lifetime I have spent a great deal of time in my favourite city, building up a wealth of knowledge about places that most visitors never spare the time to visit. I’ve also chosen a few of my favourite restaurants.’
We will be staying at the 4-star Hotel Royal St Honoré situated on the Rue St Honoré, close to the Place Vendôme, the Opéra and the Louvre. It has 68 bedrooms furnished in a classic style, a beautifully renovated reception area and a breakfast room with Louis XVI wood panelling.
ITINERARY
Wednesday 3rd December – arrival Depart London St Pancras 12.24 on Eurostar; arrive Paris 15.47. We’ll enjoy dinner at Le Comptoir des Petits Champs.
Baker, we will then take the funicular, which was built in 1900, to Sacré-Coeur. In the evening we will enjoy dinner at Brasserie du Louvre.
Saturday 6th December
Thursday 4th December
We begin at the Musée Jacquemart-André to see the impressive collection of Édouard André and his wife, Nélie Jacquemart. Lunch in the museum’s lovely restaurant. We then visit the Palais Garnier, built between 1861 and 1875. Optional afternoon walk through Les Passages, led by Patrick.
Friday 5th December
This morning, we will visit the museum devoted to the life and works of Gustave Moreau (1826-98). Here we will discover more about this Parisian artist and see a variety of his paintings and drawings, including the profoundly moving Orpheus at the Tomb of Eurydice. Later we go to the Phono Museum in Montmartre, which is dedicated to the history of recorded sound. Nearly 300 machines are on show, all in working order. Thinking of Mistinguett and Joséphine
This morning we will visit the vast flea market at Porte de Vanves, where 400 traders offer everything from 18th-century antiques to coins and posters. This will be followed by a visit to the Art Deco church Saint-Antoine-de-Padoue. We will then enjoy a lunch at Chez Walczak, Aux Sportifs Reunis, dedicated to the singer-songwriter Georges Brassens and to old sporting heroes. This afternoon, we will go to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, one of the great collections of decorative arts in the world. Located next to the Louvre on the Rue Rivoli, it was closed for ten years and reopened in its current dazzling form in 2006.
Sunday 7th December
This morning we will visit the Carnavalet Museum and enjoy a walk through the Marais. We then enjoy a late lunch at Brasserie Nord before making our way to the Gare du Nord for the Eurostar back to London. Depart Paris 17.13; arrive London St Pancras 18.32.
HOW TO BOOK: Call Kirker Holidays on 020 7593 2284, or email oldie@kirkerholidays.com.
Price per person: £2,995, which includes return Eurostar Plus tickets, four nights' accommodation with breakfast, four lunches and dinners with wine at local restaurants , all entrance fees and gratuities and the services of the Kirker tour lecturer. Single supplement: £575. A non-refundable deposit of £500 will be required, with the full balance due on 31st May 2025.
Above: Paris awaits you… Right: Sacré-Coeur, Montmartre
Carrion crow
by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd
‘The crow will tumble up and down At first sight of spring.
And, in old trees about the town, Brush winter from its wing.’
John Clare (1793-1864), from Crows in Spring
The first bird Carry Akroyd illustrated in this column was the hooded crow (Corvus cornix).
The hoodie’s European range dwarfs that of the carrion crow (Corvus corone), although their habits and habitat are identical. They even hybridise, as in the Highlands of Scotland.
Maps show that carrion-crow habitation replicates almost exactly the hoodie’s absence: eastern and southern Scotland, England and Wales (not Ireland). Yet the carrion has over 1m UK territories, the hoodie 285,000.
Familiarity has bred poems:
‘Why solitary crow? He in his feathers
Is a whole world of crow – of a dry-stick nest,
Of windy distances where to be crow is best,
Of tough-guy clowning and of black things done
To a sprawled lamb whose blood beads in the sun.’
Norman MacCaig (1910-96), from Solitary Crow
In Shakespeare, all scavengers signal trouble:
‘And in their stead do ravens, crows and kites
Fly o’er our heads, and downward look on us.
As we were sickly prey; their shadows seem
A canopy most fatal, under which
Our army lies, ready to give up the ghost.’
From Julius Caesar, Act 5, Scene 1
The poet most obsessed with the carrion crow was Ted Hughes (1930-98).
His 1970 book of poems, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, was mostly written in the 1960s between two
personal disasters: the suicide of his wife, Sylvia Plath, and the suicide six years later of his mistress, Assia Wevill (for whom he left Plath), and their child, Shura, with whom Wevill shared her fatal sleeping pills.
Crow is dedicated to Assia and Shura.
One of its triggers was a nightmare he had of a man in a desert holding a pistol loaded with one bullet. A crow sat in a nearby tree; the man could not decide whether to shoot the bird or himself.
Trickster mythology, which Crow embodies, is global in embracing the trickster, who comes in many creative and destructive guises – among them, for Hughes, the King of Carrion crow.
‘In the beginning was Scream
Who begat Crow
Screaming for Blood Grubs, crusts Anything’
From Ted Hughes, Lineage (Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow)
One thing the poets know: crow will have the last laugh. We know it too.
‘I’d like to see the ban on shooting crows lifted,’ reported The Oldie’s Prue’s News in December 2024.
So would every gamekeeper, now bound by oppressive bureaucracy. A 2019 ban made it a criminal offence to take an unregulated shot at 15 other ‘pest birds’, including magpies and even the tasty woodpigeon (population over 5m).
Swoop Sing Perch Paddle by Carry Akroyd and John McEwen is out now
Travel
Fit for an Emperor
Pierre Waugh grew up in the sleepy French town of Saintes, once the mighty ancient Roman capital of Aquitaine
Ihave learnt to specify, ‘It is a small town between Bordeaux and La Rochelle,’ after mentioning my home town, Saintes, to my English friends.
‘Ah! The wine!’ some cheer. ‘Ah! That lovely, lovely seaside!’ others fantasise.
When I assure them that the town in which I spent my first 14 years offers nothing of the sort, I see their eyes glaze over in disgust.
Then I start revealing Saintes’s greater treasures; that it was one of the three capitals of Gaul under the Roman Empire; that it was home to Monsieur Guillotin, inventor of the guillotine, and to Eleanor of Aquitaine and her son, Richard the Lionheart, during a vital battle for his accession to the English throne. I try to continue my catalogue of merits – but I am interrupted.
‘Everyone would have heard of this Saintes if it was so important,’ they cry.
Yet I tell no lie. Its dingy Roman and Romanesque remnants may have been overshadowed by the more fashionable neoclassicism of Bordeaux and La Rochelle, but Saintes still holds its own as an improbably important town.
Saintes has become a forgotten hill-fort, once pumping with ambition to preserve it as a bastion of culture. With a constant rotation of businesses taking over the same shop windows, Saintes is a tired and certainly dirty old town.
The 1st-century AD amphitheatre and Saint-Eutrope Basilica, Saintes
Anything of interest to Saintes began in 22 BC. After Julius Caesar’s successful plunder of Gaul between 58 and 51 BC, little had been done to integrate the newly conquered territory into Roman
ways, and some proper political administration was required.
Caesar’s successor, Augustus Octavian – the first Roman Emperor –commissioned his trusted delegate
Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa to divide the land into manageable provinces.
Three were drafted: Gallia Belgica (the
north-eastern part of modern-day France, reaching into Belgium, Luxembourg and Western Germany); Gallia Aquitania (now central and western France); and, finally, Gallia Lugdunensis (stretching from the north-west to the south-east).
The new province of Gallia Aquitania needed a capital city. A road – the Via Agrippa – was built from modernday Lyon (capital of Lugdunensis) as far as the Romans were willing to pave in search of a sturdy hill. They eventually stopped at an elevation of 150 feet to build Saintes. They gave their capital city the name Mediolanum Santonum.
The town’s hot and humid climate clearly chimed with the Roman colonists, who transported all their customs to the new settlement. An amphitheatre with a capacity of 25,000 was built, along with baths and a forum.
One of Saintes’s most notable ruins shows that a perfect harmony had been struck between ruler and ruled. In 18 AD, an immense double arch was commissioned by some obsequious Gaul in honour of Germanicus, the Emperor Tiberius’s adopted son.
Under Roman occupation, Mediolanum Santonum became a true example of the civilised world.
The finest Roman wines – containing peppery lead – were guzzled in the reclining position, and magistrates concerned themselves only with the next grand design. With an aqueduct to supply the city with fresh water and mitigate the effect of heavy drinking, you wonder how such an ideal way of life
Le Vieux Pont de Saintes (left), demolished in 1843. The Arch of Germanicus (18 AD) was rebuilt by the river
could have come to an end.
St Augustine denied that the rise of Christendom was to blame for Rome’s downfall. Gibbon at least hinted that a new faith would have had an impact. Yet Saintes’s future changed on the creation of its first martyr, St Eutropius.
At some unknown moment in the 3rd century AD, a contingent of eager Christians was sent by Pope Fabian to proselytise Gaul. Eutropius was given the people of Saintes to preach to; and, by all accounts, he proved successful.
A certain Eustella, the daughter of the city’s Roman governor, converted to the faith after hearing Eutropius’s counsel. He was violently chopped to pieces in punishment. His relics can still be found in the crypt of the Basilique SaintEutrope – an impressive 11th-century building whose steeple competes for height with St Peter’s Cathedral, half a mile away.
After a typical period of anarchy at the hands of Germanic pillages, Saintes, like most of France, was eventually subsumed into the Frankish empire in the 6th century. The city managed to sustain its cultural significance by maintaining its religious reputation. L’Abbaye aux Dames, an immaculately preserved 11th-century Benedictine nunnery, testifies to the wealth and traction of a city so hooked on Holy Grace.
Saintes was also an important resting point for the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Sculpted scallop shells still dapple the town, marking it as being part of the pilgrim route.
Pierre Waugh, aged 7, by the Arch of Germanicus
The flamboyance of St Peter’s Cathedral
was ill-fated. During the wars of religion of the 16th century, the cathedral’s towering height and beauty only incensed a group of rabid Protestants. The edifice was brutishly sacked, and the cathedral never recovered. Its stark, bare interior testifies to the destruction of a vision on which the city had first been constructed: the pursuit of greatness.
After the wars of religion, Saintes became less of a secure ground, and began its steady decline. It produced no great figures of the Enlightenment. It contributed little to the Revolution.
And a general lack of innovation left its despondent population forgetting its former glory. In 1848, Victor Hugo paid a visit to Saintes, just as the ancient Roman bridge connecting the city’s two banks was being demolished. He sighed.
Unfortunately, the trend of sacking the town has not ended. When I was growing up in Saintes at the beginning of the millennium, there was a public walkway lined with original Roman columns. These have since gone: not for preservation, but to be dumped.
And the local reaction to my father’s decision to open an English food shop – cheekily called La Perfide Albion –shows that Saintes may have indeed lost its cosmopolitan spirit first introduced by the Romans.
Still, as I reflect on the ruins that surrounded me in my childhood, I remember the scent of cold, damp stone with great affection. For all its drowsiness, Saintes offered room to wonder. Standing at the centre of the surviving amphitheatre, you can almost hear the spectral cheers of a once animated city.
Its future may be uncertain, but not its past – one of the finest in the history of France.
Pierre Waugh is a writer, currently finishing his MA dissertation on Aldous Huxley at Durham University
Overlooked Britain
Eastern promise in West Bucks
The Chinese Room at Claydon House hits the jaw-dropping heights of Georgian Chinoiserie
lucinda lambton
The Chinese Room at Claydon House in Buckinghamshire cannot be beaten in the British Isles for jaw-dropping, exotic beauty.
Furthermore, it’s surrounded with a quantity of rooms that are decorated in a quite sensationally lavish way.
The Chinese Room was executed by Luke Lightfoot, described as ‘an ignorant knave with no small spice of madness in his composition’. These were the despairing words of Sir Thomas Robinson, written to Claydon’s owner Lord Verney in 1769, when Robinson was trying to convince him of Lightfoot’s dishonesty.
One upsetting change is that the blue and white – ‘so aggressively unChinese’, according to my friend Alan Dodd – was in fact originally painted buff and pink.
But, aside from this, all has remained the same and is absolute perfection.
Claydon was a Tudor house –converted to a chastely classical dwelling, bang in the middle of the Buckinghamshire countryside. It was of considerable charm.
Ralph Verney inherited the house in 1752. With the fashionable taste of an immensely rich Whig landowner and peer who had drawn up plans for the house in the classical style, he employed Luke Lightfoot as the architect, master mason, carver and surveyor of works.
All over the house, plasterwork and carving of unbeatable glory were the happy outcome, with neoclassical, rococo and neo-Gothic motifs swarming over
walls, culminating upstairs with the Chinese delights.
The woodwork looks like whipped cream – what scrumptious joy it is, to be sure! One fireplace from Italy, covered with writhing babies, alone cost £1,000.
There were, though, worries to this grand affair. ‘The more you sift into this ignorant villain’s conduct, the more you will be astonished,’ wrote Robinson of Lightfoot, suggesting that the ‘rogue’ be brought to justice.
As a ‘last resort’ to avoid litigation, Robinson was dispatched to see Lightfoot. ‘He received me in his parlour with his hat on his head, an austere look, fierce as an Eastern monarch. His eyes sparkl’d fire, his countenance angry and revengeful – did not ask me to sit down, his manners were indeed remiss.’
The Chinese Room by Luke Lightfoot
In other words, the mission failed. And they went to war. The Chancery case of Verney v Lightfoot was heard on 12th April 1771. The claim was that of the £30,000 paid to Lightfoot for work and materials, only £7,000 could be accounted for.
A compromise was reached, with Lightfoot making over properties to Verney. Lightfoot retired to Dulwich in 1779 to become a victualler. His son, Theophilus Lightfoot, emigrated to Australia, where the family name survives to this day, using Verney as a Christian name in each succeeding generation.
Sir Thomas Robinson, ‘a gentleman architect’, was then commissioned by Lord Verney to embellish Claydon still further in 1769. A palace of colossal
proportions was planned to outshine all its neighbours. One of them, as ill luck would have it for his pride and his pocket, was Stowe – huge and endowed with what Horace Walpole called its ‘inexpressible richness’.
According to an anonymous contemporary critic, both men were ‘unfettered by considerations of prudence’. Robinson, said the critic, looked like a pair of scissors – ‘a giant whose legs could barely support him’.
Verney’s exotic tastes extended to his equipage, said the critic, with ‘a brace of tall negroes, with silver French horns behind his coach and six, perpetually making a noise like Sir Henry Sidney’s trompeters in the days of Elizabeth, blowing very joyfully to behold and see’. Their building was just as ostentatious but it was to be their downfall.
1754, right up against the front of the old 16th-century house, which then had been encased in plain red brick to cover the older mansion.
Verney then extended the house full whack further, by creating three major reception rooms on the ground floor as well as a suite of extraordinarily grand apartments, with every one of them, upstairs and down, a peerless peach.
Luke Lightfoot had also turned out to be a woodcarver par excellence. With two men, he did Verney proud in a quite stupendous way, also creating superb work as a cabinetmaker.
In 1768, he designed a great, domed rotunda as the
entrance hall, as well as a massive 90-foot-long ballroom.
Lord Verney was ruined by all his expenditure and died a bankrupt in 1791. A year later, it was demolished and Lightfoot’s wing was left to stand alone.
The stables had been the first to be built in
But, in the end, sadness loomed, in that Lightfoot was dismissed for never finishing the work.
All these rooms deserve mention, particularly the saloon and the library, with their magnificent fireplaces, pediments on fluted columns and Corinthian columns as door surrounds.
The vivacious marble putti and the coffered ceilings are unusually splendid, with their quite fantastical decoration. Lightfoot called it ‘a work such as the world ever saw’.
Claydon’s Chinese Room is the king of this show. I must stand and yell out loud that it may well be the king of all rooms in the whole of the British Isles.
Left: the Blue Room Below: the Great Eating Room
The library
On the Road
A matter of life and death
Don McCullin, 89, our greatest war photographer, tells Louise Flind about Syria, Vietnam – and the joy of Roman statues
Would you like to cover Syria now?
I was asked to go to Syria today by Charles Glass [the journalist kidnapped in Lebanon in 1987]. I said, ‘No, I’ve just had my toe off.’
Are you optimistic about Syria?
I think things will go quiet for a bit and then flare up again.
Anything you can’t leave home without? PG tips.
Is there something you really miss? My own bed.
Do you travel light?
All my life I’ve had the burden of carrying 25 pounds of camera equipment.
Did you draw as a child?
I lived in a tenement slum house in Finsbury Park, and my father used to allow me to paint pictures on a piece of paper stuck to the wall.
Where were you when you first picked up a camera?
In the RAF Photographic Unit, at 18.
What was your first big break?
I photographed some local boys in a gang war. I took the pictures to the Observer
What led you to war photography?
In a café in Paris on my first honeymoon, I looked over a man’s shoulder at a newspaper of an East German soldier jumping over barbed wire into the West. It was 1961 and I went straight to the wall in Friedrichstrasse, taking pictures for five days. The Observer published them.
Your friend Nick Tomalin was killed in the Golan Heights in 1973. How did you avoid dying alongside him?
Fate has played a major hand in my life. The night before Nick died, he borrowed my combat jacket. He got a lift at 6am. I asked him to wait for me. I saw him four hours later, dead on the Golan Heights in my jacket, with half his entrails hanging out. Just awful.
You said at the Oldie Literary Lunch, ‘The bathroom is more dangerous than Vietnam.’ What bugs you about old age?
That I’m now coming up against doctors and surgeons more often to keep this old carcass going.
Will you cover Gaza & Ukraine? I wouldn’t last two minutes.
Do you prefer photographing Somerset and Roman ruins to war reporting? I wish I’d gone down this path years ago instead of all the wars. I feel slightly guilty about being rewarded for it.
Do you still develop your own pictures? Yes – the chemistry is like smoking three packs of cigarettes a day.
Have you ever run out of film?
If you’re in a battle, you ration yourself.
Do you prefer your pictures to be black and white and look dark?
I want them to be foreboding and unpassable. There was no point in me risking my life and not bringing back war’s most hateful shamefulness.
What been your hardest mission?
In Biafra, where I saw thousands of children dying of starvation.
What are you most proud of?
Under gunfire in Cyprus, two British soldiers coaxed this old lady who couldn’t walk. I thought, if someone doesn’t speed that woman up, she’ll be dead in the next two minutes. I scooped her up.
What’s the oddest thing you’ve eaten?
In Vietnam in 1965, I went on a patrol in the jungle for five days. An American sergeant gave me a big hamburger. I golloped it down and later he told me it was rat meat.
Where did you go for your new book, The Roman Conceit?
To Dresden, Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum, Istanbul, Antalya, Rome and Copenhagen. I photographed beautiful Roman statues.
Are you a traveller?
I’ve probably travelled more than David Attenborough…
Where did you go on your honeymoon?
Catherine and I have had a permanent honeymoon. We’ve been on extraordinary journeys together.
Are you brave with different food?
The writer Barnaby Rogerson says I don’t like foreign food. I took pâté and sardine tins on assignments.
Do you have a go at the local languages? I can barely speak the King’s English properly, from my background.
What’s the strangest place you’ve slept?
In Vietnam, in a corrugated shed under a table, in all my clothes, next to a dead North Vietnamese soldier. And four terrible days in a Ugandan prison. We saw prisoners’s bodies being taken to the Nile to be fed to the crocodiles.
What’s your biggest travel headache?
Walking half a mile to an airport gate. I’ve always said I don’t want to sit on the electric vehicle with all the old ladies. If I did, I’d put a bag over my head.
What are your travelling tips?
Don’t flash your valuables around – and the most important thing, apart from the safety of your life, is your passport.
The Roman Conceit by Don McCullin is out in February
Taking a Walk
Hunting for King Harold, the Essex Man
patrick barkham
I was forewarned about the view. But it was still the best kind of shock when I parked beside a forbidding set of barns and climbed out of the car.
I had driven up the hill from the fabulously named village of Bumble’s Green in south-west Essex. And there, beyond the disused farmyard and a weedy bank of earth, was an almost aerial view of London. Everything was laid out below: the Shard and the cluster of pinnacles that marked the City, along with the Telecom Tower and the London Eye. In the near distance was the bright, shiny rectangle of the Spurs stadium. To the west was the arch of Wembley.
It was like being on a ledge, peering down at the city, which looked misty and calm in the far distance. In the near distance was the dark, oaken outline of Epping Forest, and the flash of dirty white boxes – trucks on the M25, dipping through the trees. But the motorway was mostly hidden in the curves of this unexpectedly pretty landscape, and the wind was favourable, dispatching its roar in the opposite direction.
I set off to explore Harold’s Park Farm, a 200-hectare farm on the edge of London, with Ivan de Klee, a knowledgeable and enthusiastic young ecologist who is overseeing the transformation of this land.
The Harold was Harold Godwinson, our last crowned Anglo-Saxon king, for whom these clay hills were a hunting ground – a deer park. It’s still there, in a way. The fields, hedgerows and copses were bristling with wild deer.
Today, the landscape is being returned to something even closer to its 1066 look: the farm has become a rewilding project. Nattergal, a company that wants to make nature restoration an attractive investment for the suits sweating away in the City, has stopped the ploughing.
The last crops have been harvested. Farm income will henceforth sprout from developers buying biodiversity net-gain credits – by restoring nature here, they will be permitted to build new homes in other folds of Essex. Bumble’s Green
locals are delighted they’re getting nature rather than concrete.
We walked downhill, discovering surprising dips and hollows, and dells of brambles covering derelict farm ponds that will be brought back to life. A red kite inspected us from the sky.
At the edge of a small wood, Ivan pointed out the coppiced hornbeams, a sign that this is a very old fragment of forest. These venerable stools had sprouted multiple twisting trunks, which waved like triffids.
Along the edge of a field that bore its last – mostly failed – crop of oats, we found tiny seedlings in the cracked soil: baby hornbeams. ‘The land is chomping at the bit to recover,’ enthused Ivan. ‘Every single field margin is jumping out already.’
The hornbeam saplings will require some assistance, however. The rewilders must cull deer to reduce the browsing pressure that is preventing most natural regeneration and leaving sparse tangly, species-rich understorey in the old woods.
We turned east, passing the remains of a pond, and climbed up again, following a hedge that already looked wilder without its traditional end-of-the-season haircut.
Occasionally, emissaries from the city headed in our direction – two police helicopters circled hawkishly above, before peace descended once again.
The loss of food-growing land to rewilding is criticised. But Ivan argued that, for centuries, Harold’s Park Farm was the ‘wood pasture’ that will be created here again. The old grasslands weren’t ploughed up until the early 1950s, when giant oaks were dynamited in the name of agricultural improvement. ‘Unless you invest in the land drains here, it’s basically unfarmable,’ said Ivan.
As a parliament of rooks cried out, we circled past the previous agricultural wheeze – a field of Christmas trees – and back to the farm.
I can’t wait to return to this ledge above London on a spring day to see the land bursting back into life.
Across
1 Novel cult on ice arranged murder, for example (10,4)
9 Simple role in convalescent home (7)
10 The remainder are accommodated outside university (7)
11 Bird is injected with thiamine (4)
12 Official from Foreign Office could initially betray trust (10)
14 Concern of doctor bottling anger after reflection (6)
15 British there upset new men in order (8)
17 Period in which there’s universal grief (8)
18 Bent copper shifting derv (6)
21 Repeated blows to recovery? (4,2,4)
22 Film extract from magazine (4)
24 Germany has courses for operators of vehicles (7)
25 Fruit variety eaten by horse occasionally (7)
26 Money spinner? (3-5,6)
Down
Genius crossword 448 EL SERENO
1 A handler of money - is he a criminal in credit? (7)
2 This must be ruled out of court, mustn’t it? (7,8)
3 Listeners will have time for right food (4)
4 Wait on guests to reveal the power of speech (6)
5 Note, in part of speech, artist showing bit of backbone (8)
6 Flower naturist cultivated? I’m not sure (10)
7 Born in penury and delivering pure rough diamonds (15)
8 Mystified, and taken in subject to source of bail (6)
13 Smuggled drugs in Greece and America for entertainment (5,5)
16 America developing muscle and losing Democrat (5,3)
17 Setter’s up on king, and difficulty with Japanese ruler (6)
19 Parking in it does upset bank (7)
20 Be able to pay a fine and cross (6)
23 A short holiday going north for a drink (4)
How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. Deadline: 5th February 2025 We do not sell or share your data with third parties.
First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25. Two runners-up will receive £15.
NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.
Winner: John and Sue Beech, Coventry, West Midlands
Runners-up: Pauline Stainton, Goole, East Yorkshire; Alan Theakston, High Coniscliffe, Durham
‘There’s a chance of a shower, darling.’ ‘OK, I’ll bring my umbrella.’
The international South player left his metaphorical umbrella behind on this Six Clubs from the 2024 Spingold Trophy in Toronto. Plan the play on an opening spade lead to dummy’s bare ace.
Dealer South Neither Vulnerable
The bidding South West North East
2NT (1) Pass 3 ♠ (2) Pass
4 ♣ Pass 4NT (3) Pass
5 ♣ (4) Pass 5 ♦(5) Pass
6 ♣ (5) end
(1) 20-22 ‘balanced’ but a practical approach. (2) Within a transfer structure, 3 ♦ shows hearts and 3 ♥ shows spades. This frees up 3 ♠ to show the minors, usually slammy. (3) Roman Key Card Blackwood agreeing clubs. (4) Zero or three of ‘ ve aces’ (including ♣ K). (5) Asking for ♣ Q – answer no. At trick two, declarer led a low club, East (correctly) playing low. In a moment he will wish to forget, declarer went up with the ace – and down went his slam (now with two unavoidable trump losers).
He neglected to make the safety play of inserting the eight – prepared to sacri ce the overtrick to ensure his slam if East held all four clubs (assuming East could not ru a second spade).
Meanwhile, at the other table, North-South reached the giddy heights of Seven Notrumps. Declarer won West’s diamond lead (ten, knave, ace). He crossed to ♠ A, back to ♣ A (West discarding), cashed ♠ KQ (discarding clubs) and ran all his red-suit winners.
On the last, East was squeezed, forced to discard from ♠ J and ♣ QJ in front of declarer with ♠ 8 and ♣ K8. Grand slam made.
ANDREW ROBSON
Competition TESSA CASTRO
IN COMPETITION No 314 you were invited to write a poem called Sorted. Peter Hollindale’s narrator was asked at the pearly gates, ‘At Tesco did you shop sustainably,/Or grease the palm of a palm oil millionaire?’ Basil RansomeDavies looked at The Last Judgment on the Sistine wall, a kind of eschatological sorting hat. Christine Acres described sorting photographs, with ‘sports teams, all labelled underneath’ and Victorian ‘great, great whoevers without any names’. Hedley Russell gave a series of crossword clues, all giving the answer SORTED. Dorothy Pope praised the pillar box, collecting post to be sorted. Richard Langridge solved in a fanciful way the real problem of dog poo.
Commiserations to them and to Heather Uebel, Frances Aitken, Max Ross, Albert Caton, Ian Higgins, P Hayes, Jenny Jones, Sheila Gray and Erika Fairhead, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Simon Webb.
I’m sorry, Ashley, if that was your name; You know, you were the boy at my first school I’d wrestle with, each lunchtime just the same.
I’ve lost your face; I’m a forgetful fool. Your face is now replaced in all the scenes That I replay, when thinking of the past, With another Ashley’s face, scooped from my teens,
A second Ashley, and for me, the last. It might be that this is a shocking thing; This loss of faces, places and events. I hope it’s just a sort of tidying, A sorting out – that is my wan defence. My conscience says my past is all distorted: My brain, by contrast, merely thinks it’s sorted.
Simon Webb
What creatures roamed among those ancient trees?
Bears, ogres, witches, dark malevolencies, Cunning and hungry, seeking out their prey, Devouring travellers who had lost their way.
The wolves were worst. They loved to tear Apart small, red-cloaked girls with golden hair, Flatten with fetid breath frail homes of twigs, Soft straw or bricks, and gobble frightened pigs.
And now? It’s sorted. Tourism rules OK. All pests have been exterminated, the way
Open for hordes of visitors to come along in droves,
To cycle, ramble, picnic in sanitised, safe groves.
The bones of slaughtered creatures, buried deep
Beneath the forest floor, twitch in their sleep.
Veronica Colin
The socks are matched and neatly stored away,
Sorted by colour, thickness, old and new. The kitchen’s redrawn: one drawer’s ‘everyday’
And one is ‘best’ (all polished) with a view To future tidiness. The flowerpots Are washed and stacked by size, awaiting spring.
The plastic bags (believe me, there were lots) Are now untangled, rolled up. Ditto, string. In perfect order all the books insist They’ll stand tall on their newly dusted shelves.
But still the nagging doubts and fears persist:
How long before they all un-sort themselves?
D A Prince
Snowflakes circle to the ground, Iced butterflies, they dance around Driven by the gusting, careless wind, Winter’s innocents; these have not sinned As we sin, tumbling from a leaden sky Wondering when and where and why We fall, until at final breath We find we’ve danced ourselves to death. And yet, behold: by unseen hand
The snow lies silent on the land, Each flake sorted, each in its place, Whilst we stay lost in time and space.
I sip whisky, heap logs upon the grate, Fending off the freezing day, I’m safe inside, but can’t avoid our fate: Come spring, we too shall melt away.
Rob Salamon
COMPETITION No 316 Looking at a photograph of Piccadilly Circus in 19(9, I was astonished by the full-skirted women who’d climbed the twisty stairs to the top deck of the bus. A poem please, in any connection, called The Bus. Maximum 1) lines. We cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 31)’, by Thursday )th February.
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 20th January 2025
Books & Publishing
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 20th January 2025
Forgive prodigal daughter
QHaving cut off completely from our daughter because of her rudeness, we tried to make up and spent a surprisingly happy day with her and her husband. However, just before we parted, she exploded again, saying very hurtful things. We’ve decided this time to cut off completely. But recently she texted us, just saying, ‘Hello’. I think we should stick to our guns, but my wife wants to give her one more chance. What do you think?
Name and address supplied
AWhile it’s true you have done what you can, I think cutting oneself off completely from a close family member is always a bad idea. If you possibly can, always keep just a tiny connection alive. Your daughter’s ‘Hello’ was a reaching out to you and her way of apologising. Some people are just unable to say ‘sorry’. If you can’t bear to talk to her, let your wife keep the channels open, even if it’s just with the occasional emoji.
What to give a dying friend
QI have a very old friend who lives a long way away, but he comes up once a year for his birthday. Now his wife tells me he has cancer and doesn’t have long to live. So I don’t suppose they’ll visit me this year. However, if they do, what do I give him? I have already ordered a cake and planned the evening, but I don’t suppose they’re thinking about it. I can hardly wish him a happy birthday, and it seems tactless to send him a present he may not live to enjoy. Of course, this isn’t about me, but I want to do the right thing and I don’t know how to handle this situation. Name and address supplied
Ask Virginia
virginia ironside
AHow very sad. But don’t be stuck for presents. There are lots of things you could send him. Books – or a talking book might be better. Delicious food, chocolates, or a subscription to a streaming service such as Curzon Home Cinema, or the British Film Institute. Both offer some wonderful old and foreign films to download. Or just a letter expressing how much he’s meant to you during his life.
Or, if he’s at home, just send delicious ready meals now and again. I’m sure anything would be much appreciated.
Mobility scooter alert
QThe lady who wrote to you (November issue) about her fear of crossing the road on her mobility scooter is very sensible to wait for a break in the traffic, no matter how long she has to wait. I’ve had a mobility scooter for over seven years and there are constant dangers. While some drivers slow down, smile and wave me across, it’s difficult to judge cars coming at speed. Some cars don’t indicate when they’re about to turn. There are also e-scooters, bicycles and pedestrians glued to their mobile phones.
I urge your reader to get scooter insurance. Mine covers me against accidents and breakdown, and also against vandalism and theft. The hazards of riding a scooter are worse than for a pedestrian and some scooter-riders can become over-confident.
Angela W, Rochester, Kent
AAnd what might be even safer would be to make herself more visible. A bright red scarf attached to a tall stick attached to the scooter might help.
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American manners lesson
QIn my small circle, we have a new American friend with whom we regularly socialise. Although urbane and sophisticated and otherwise beautifully mannered, after some time in England he appears oblivious of the British custom of placing one’s knife and fork together (at half-past six) when one has finished eating. Instead, he leaves his cutlery at wild angles on the plate, which I believe is the American way. Our friend is sensitive – how do we point out this solecism, which I have already seen raise eyebrows, without embarrassing him?
Don Peters, address supplied
AI would just leave it. But if you must pursue it, drag the conversation round to the differences in manners between the two cultures – and mention this one. I am surprised your ‘polite’ friend hasn’t already observed how his English neighbours leave their utensils on their plates and copied them.
A couple of other readers have received upsetting emails threatening to expose them as masturbating in front of online pornography. A lady over 70 called Samantha said she gets similar emails (they think she’s a man because her email is Sam). ‘Please reassure the elderly gentleman that there is no way they can see him, otherwise they would know I am a woman,’ she writes. Alan also amusingly replied to them that they couldn’t possibly see him because he keeps the curtains closed. He also recommended that our reader report the matter to report@phishing.gov.uk.
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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