The Oldie March 2024

STEPHEN FRY ON GAZA

WIN

RONALD SEARLE

A TRIP TO LISBON

THE STORY OF ST TRINIAN’S

See page 21

‘The Oldie is an incredible magazine – perhaps the best magazine in the world’ Graydon Carter

March 2024 | £5.25 £4.13 to subscribers | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 436

Diamond songs are forever Shirley Bassey by Don Black

Awfully delicious offal – Prue Leith What the Romans did for us – Professor Paul Cartledge

Win a holiday to Lisbon Find out more on page 21

Don Black on his Bond hits page 14

Features 14 How to write a Shirley Bassey hit Don Black 16 Billy Wright, football king, at 100 John Price 18 Photojournalist Jimmy Jarché uncovered Peter Suchet 23 My aunt, the first St Trinian’s girl William Freeman 24 1964 – a year to remember Christopher Sandford 29 In praise of ffolkes, a genius cartoonist Dean Patterson

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 11 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: What were AA route maps?

Sharon Griffiths 12 Modern Life: What is a Brexit tackle?

Richard Godwin 33 Prue’s News 35 Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips 37 Oldie Man of Letters A N Wilson 39 Small World Jem Clarke 40 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson

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Jarché's hidden camera page 18

41 Country Mouse Giles Wood 42 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 44 School Days Sophia Waugh 46 God Sister Teresa 46 Memorial Service: Anthony Holden James Hughes-Onslow 47 The Doctor’s Surgery Dr Theodore Dalrymple 48 Readers’ Letters 50 I Once Met … Ryan O'Neal Jason Morell 50 Memory Lane Peter Duffell 63 Commonplace Corner 63 Rant: Computer diaries Alex Games 65 History David Horspool 89 Crossword 91 Bridge Andrew Robson 91 Competition Tessa Castro 98 Ask Virginia Ironside

Books 52 Charles III: New King. New Court. The Inside Story,

by Robert Hardman Hugo Vickers

Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips eoldie@ Art editor Michael Hardaker subscri Supplements editor Charlotte Metcalf ption. co.uk o Editorial assistant Amelia Milne r phone Publisher James Pembroke 01858 Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer 438791 At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

It was 60 years ago today... page 24

53 Legion: Life in the Roman Army, by Richard Abdy Paul Cartledge 55 John Carr of York: Collected Essays, by Ivan Hall Clive Aslet 57 Lou Reed, by Will Hermes Will Hodgkinson 59 Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, by Rob Henderson Ivo Dawnay 61 What Will Survive of Us,

by Howard Jacobson Jasper Rees

Arts 66 Film: The Holdovers Harry Mount 67 Theatre: Plaza Suite William Cook 68 Radio Valerie Grove 68 Television Frances Wilson 69 Music Richard Osborne 70 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 71 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

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74 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 74 Restaurants James Pembroke 75 Drink Bill Knott 76 Sport Jim White 76 Motoring Alan Judd 78 Digital Life Matthew Webster 78 Money Matters Neil Collins 81 Bird of the Month: Waxwing John McEwen

Travel 82 Delft, Vermeer’s blue porcelain city William Cook 84 Overlooked Britain: in Bucks with the Hellfire Club Lucinda Lambton 86 On the Road: Stephen Fry Louise Flind 92 Taking a Walk: psychedelic Derbyshire Patrick Barkham

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The Oldie March 2024 3

The Old Un’s Notes Happy 50th birthday, Bagpuss!

It was half a century ago that the saggy, pink-andwhite-striped cat, a group of eclectic toys, a girl called Emily and a shop that never sold anything were introduced.

The show was created by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin. Bagpuss was intended to be a ginger marmalade cat, but a mistake in the material-dyeing process resulted in the cat we came to know and love.

The shop was filled with broken and lost treasures, repaired by mice from the Marvellous Mechanical Mouse Organ. It was all discussed by ragdoll Madeleine, Gabriel the toad and wooden bookend Professor Yaffle.

Each episode began with the same sequence of nostalgic sepia photographs, tinny music and the magical moment when Bagpuss slowly wakes and the screen turns to colour.

Postgate (1925-2008) narrated and voiced most of the characters, introducing children to new ideas, songs and traditional folk tales. It ran from 12th February to 7th May 1974.

There were only 13 episodes, but Bagpuss’s popularity endures. It came first in a vote for favourite children’s TV programme in 1999 and garnered a recent cameo appearance in the Netflix series The Crown.

50 years on: Professor Yaffle and Bagpuss

Each episode ended with the words ‘Even Bagpuss himself, once he was asleep, was just an old saggy

cloth cat, baggy and a bit loose at the seams. But Emily loved him.’

And the Old Un did, too.

Among this month’s contributors Don Black (p14) is one of Britain’s leading songwriters. He wrote Diamonds Are Forever, The Man with the Golden Gun, Thunderball and On Days Like These. He won an Oscar for Born Free.

Mary Killen (p35) and Giles Wood (p41) wrote Country Life: A Story of Peaks and Troughs. She writes the Dear Mary column in the Spectator and is author of How the Queen Can Make You Happy.

Professor Paul Cartledge (p53) is Professor of Greek Culture Emeritus at Cambridge University. He is author of Thebes: The Forgotten History of Ancient Greece and Alexander the Great.

Clive Aslet (p55) was editor of Country Life. He wrote War Memorial and The Story of the Country House. His latest book is Sir Edwin Lutyens: Britain’s Greatest Architect?

The Old Un already finds it hard to find Dubonnet, Black Magic chocolates and pectin at the supermarket.

Now comes more severe news: Andrews Liver Salts have disappeared from the shelves. Dwindling supplies can be found online, but they are horribly expensive.

The alternative, when one has over-indulged, may be Alka-Seltzer – but it somehow lacks the intensity of Andrews. Can Oldie-readers suggest home remedies?

Throughout late 1962 and early 1963, British newspapers were dominated by headlines about Soviet espionage, sexual scandal on London’s streets and a Whitehall cover-up.

Reporters were sent to jail for refusing to reveal their sources, a well-respected minister was forced to resign, and Macmillan’s government almost fell.

Profumo? No. It was the less-remembered furore around John Vassall, an Admiralty clerk who in 1962 was revealed to be a Soviet spy, having been entrapped by the KGB while working in Moscow in the mid-1950s.

A new book by Alex Grant, Sex, Spies and Scandal: The John Vassall Affair, is a timely reminder of how big the Vassall story was at the time, and how it lit the fuse for Profumo’s downfall a few months later.

Grant’s book contains The Oldie March 2024 5

Important stories you may have missed OAPs booked to Majorca fly to Menorca after airport mix-up Daily Mirror

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newly released MI5 files, which show how Vassall managed to spy for so long, and how in jail he rubbed shoulders with George Blake.

It also reveals the name of two Conservative MPs – Fergus Montgomery and Sir Harmar Nicholls – with whom Vassall said he had sexual relations while he was spying.

As a gay man, Vassall was shown no mercy by the British press or the courts. Sentenced to 18 years in jail, he served ten years, despite telling MI5 everything.

1963: Vassall and Profumo

Many of his old friends and lovers were dismissed from the civil service or persecuted.

The Vassall headlines continued into 1963 (pictured) – quite a year for political scandal. In his poem Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin was spot-on: Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP.

‘I spend way too much time commuting to work’

Lord Arbuthnot emerged from the Post Office Horizon scandal with credit, having championed the wronged sub-postmasters since his days as a Conservative MP. In addition to his campaigning, his lordship is a self-proclaimed atheist.

Nothing wrong with that, perhaps, but his baronial coat of arms, which features a peacock’s head, strawberry leaves and a buck’s head, carries the motto Deum Laudans.

Should he not insert a Non? An oral-history film has been made about Hereford Cathedral Close.

Chris Pullin, a recently retired canon who lived on the close for years, noted that homeless people were often drawn to the area. When he took them tea, they would be particular about their biscuit orders, specifying which brand they would like.

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HOLIDAY WITH THE OLDIE Go to www.theoldie.co. uk/courses-tours 6 The Oldie March 2024

‘I don’t want to fork.

I just want to spoon’

Pullin respected this fussiness, calling it a last thread of human dignity.

But even the godliest priest has limits, and the admirable Pullin was driven to distraction by the close’s buskers.

After Pullin begged one man to play elsewhere, the man complained to tourists, saying, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this man wants me to go away!’

Pullin shrivelled as the busker, still talking to the crowd, continued, ‘You like my music, don’t you?’

Pullin recalls, ‘It was fantastic, because they all shouted out “NO!” ’

Betty Boothroyd’s memorial service at St Margaret’s, Westminster, was not full, with noticeably few political heavyweights.

Sidesmen discreetly shepherded people towards pews near the front. West End theatre managers call this ‘dressing the house’. Should the mighty Boothroyd not have packed the church?

Speaker Boothroyd, being little impressed by rank, was less popular with ministers and officials than she was with backbenchers and Oldiereaders. And maybe the service was held too late (almost eleven months after her death).

‘The Coronation, party conferences and Christmas got in the way,’ offers a family friend.

Nigel Lawson’s memorial service was held six months after his death and drew a much bigger crowd. Roy Jenkins ‘filled the Abbey’ barely two months after his demise.

Memo to memorial-service organisers: move fast.

In his tribute to Anthony Trollope (February issue), Gyles Brandreth mentioned BBC TV’s 1974 serialisation The Pallisers, starring Susan Hampshire.

All 26 episodes were written by the novelist Simon Raven (1927-2001). Recalling this epic undertaking, Raven said that, despite ‘some bad patches’, he had no regrets about the time he’d spent with ‘honest’ Trollope and his people.

He added, ‘For nearly five years, I lived almost constantly with them: ate and drank, scoffed and prayed, gambled, cheated

‘It’s a rescue dog. He was living in hell…’

and intrigued with them; won and lost with them.

Trollope’s people.’

Raven went on to write many more television series, including Edward and Mrs Simpson and Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love.

Yet he never owned a television himself. Every year, there would be a knock on the door of his digs in Deal, and someone from the TV licence office would ‘come snooping round’ and he would have to prove he wasn’t hiding a set under the bed.

Raven said, ‘Reactions

varied from the frankly incredulous to the rather hostile. One was made to feel it was one’s duty to have a television.’

At last, a marathon for oldies!

You don’t have to run – or even walk. Ladies and gentlemen, take your seats for the rocking-chair competition.

It’s a Czech tradition, often used in the country as a fundraiser. The objective is to outdo fellow rockers in how long and how quickly you can rock your chair. It’s now taken off in Australia, Cuba and Ontario. A big event takes place in Kansas this March.

Arulanantham Suresh Joachim is mentioned in Guinness World Records for his record of 75 hours of rocking. He played guitar and read at the same time as he smashed the record.

As rocking-chair aficionados like to say, do just sit there – and keep on rockin’.

The great J P R Williams, who has died at 74, was as competitive on the page as he was on the rugby field for Wales.

In 1979, publisher Robin Baird-Smith brought out his

autobiography. In the previous year, Gareth Edwards, his fellow Welsh rugby legend, had published his autobiography, which had sold more than 80,000 copies.

RIP JPR

Baird-Smith says, ‘A persistent theme in my conversations with JPR was that he was determined to outsell Gareth’s volume. He went on and on about it.

Well, we did our best, and ended up selling 65,000 copies – an achievement not to be ashamed of.

‘The subject was never mentioned again between JPR and me, but I could sense that underneath he was fuming.’

The Oldie March 2024 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

The Bob Monkhouse Guide to Orgies

TRINITY MIRROR / MIRRORPIX / ALAMY

The sex-mad comedian wrote blue gags for Max Miller – and told me a wonderfully filthy joke Well done, King Charles, for making us all more prostate-aware.

I have been personally prostateconscious for many years, thanks to one of the kings of comedy, the late, great Bob Monkhouse, who died of prostate cancer, aged 75, in December 1973.

Bob was a very funny man and an almost proselytising sex enthusiast.

Visiting his home, I was struck by the larger-than-life-size photographs of naked glamour models adorning the walls of his basement bathroom.

‘Anyone you know?’ he quipped.

‘Not yet,’ I said, gamely. (I was quite young at the time.)

‘Have you ever been to an orgy?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I answered truthfully.

‘Orgies are fun,’ he said, ‘but quite a challenge. The awkward part is afterwards when you’re not too sure who to thank.’

Bob ended his career as a prolific and skilful TV game-show host, having started out in the 1940s – as a lad – writing material for the Beano and the Dandy. In the early 1950s, he told me, as well as selling blue gags to the great Max Miller, he turned his hand to erotic fiction. Writer, cartoonist, gag merchant, actor, entertainer, he was hugely versatile – and sex was his great passion, from adolescence until prostate cancer felled him.

He quizzed me on the state of my libido and asked me how recently I’d had my sperm count checked. He told me he’d been worried about his and had gone to see his doctor, who invited him to go behind a screen and produce a sample.

Bob demurred. So the doctor gave him a small jar and told him to go home, produce the sample and return it to the surgery the next day.

‘I went home with the jar,’ Bob told me, ‘and retreated to the basement bathroom to get on with it. Just for a change, I thought I’d use my left hand,

work of art in my lifetime, it’s nice to think I could be a small part of one once I’m gone. (Artist friends of mine, please note: there will be a modest legacy attached to the request.)

No monk: Bob Monkhouse (1928-2003)

but that was a mistake. So I tried with my right as usual. Nothing doing – so I called in my wife to help. She gave it a go, but still no joy; so she called in her mum, who was visiting.

‘My mother-in-law put a flannel round it and tried using both hands. No go. We just couldn’t get the lid off the jar.’

When Bob died, he was cremated. I used to think I wanted a proper burial in a graveyard, with a handsome headstone, but I am beginning to have doubts.

Graveyards can be pretty bleak in winter and, over time, headstones can be moved or vandalised and the inscription often fades away.

I have always liked the story of the Yorkshire lady who put her husband’s ashes into a handsome boxwood hourglass (it looked like a large eggtimer), explaining, ‘He did nowt useful during his life. He can do something useful now he’s dead.’

My current idea is to bequeath a portion of my ashes to a notable artist and invite them to mix a bit of me into their paint, so that I might end up on one of their canvases, and possibly even on the wall of a great art gallery.

‘I suppose,’ A A Milne reflected, ‘that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality.’ If I haven’t created a lasting

Regular readers will know that I have a podcast, called Rosebud, in which I interview interesting people about their first memories.

I have had 49 stellar guests to date – the episodes featuring Judi Dench, Michael Palin, Joanna Lumley and Rob Brydon have been the most downloaded.

And for the 50th episode, I am hoping to have a conversation with someone, famous or not, who could fairly be described as the most intelligent person in the country.

A couple of months ago I asked Oldie-readers for their suggestions and, ahead of historian Mary Beard and artist and author Edmund de Waal, the name most often proposed has been that of Martin Rees, Lord Rees of Ludlow, OM, FRS, FRAS, born 1942, cosmologist, astrophysicist and Astronomer Royal.

I am going to drop him a line to see whether he’s up for it.

Amusingly, in all seriousness, two readers proposed themselves as the most intelligent person in the land. When I asked the legendary interviewer Michael Parkinson who was his most intelligent ever interviewee, he said at once, ‘Dr Bronowski.’ The joy with Jacob Bronowski (1908-74), Polish-born mathematician, philosopher and TV presenter, was that he was not simply brilliant, but also amusing. And shrewd.

‘The world is full of people,’ he noted, ‘who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.’

We know the feeling, don’t we?

Gyles Brandreth: Can’t Stop Talking! is at the Cadogan Hall, 26th April The Oldie March 2024 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

Don’t tell me I’m losing my mind I won’t be taking a new test that predicts Alzheimer’s

matthew norman How many people marooned in late middle age across this godforsaken planet show no signs whatever of cognitive decline?

Most typically, this will manifest itself as the sporadic failure of short-term recall – although I write smugly in the abstract as one of the lucky few. My own short-term memory remains indecently perfect.

How many people marooned in late middle age and beyond across… Forgive me, I find myself momentarily paralysed by an inexplicable sense of déjà vu.

Anyway, there is news for anyone routinely chilled by a frisson of terror when they open the fridge door and stand there blinking in bemusement as to why.

Scientists at the University of Gothenburg have invented a blood test to detect embryonic Alzheimer’s up to 15 years before it becomes symptomatic.

One appreciates their efforts, but would anyone in their right mind wish to know that it will inevitably go wrong within the next decade and a half?

‘Know thyself’ counselled the Delphic oracle, and by and large this is sound. It is useful to know thyself, for instance, if you’re a home-repairs imbecile who on no account should tinker with domestic electronics. I write as one whose solution to a menacingly hissing plug was to cut the wire with metal scissors. Apart from my unofficially annihilating the world record for the backwards long jump, no good came from that.

What the Delphic oracle never advised, so mainstream classical scholarship believes, was ‘Know thy future illnesses when there is bugger all to be done to avoid them.’

Geriatricians would dispute this, positing that mental and physical exercise, and the early involvement of promising drugs, could delay or mitigate dementia. Even if that’s true, the weight

of perpetual fear would crush whatever infinitesimal joy one can expect after youth, like one of those machines that turn cars into dense little metallic cubes.

It is here that we summon to the witness box the actor Chris Hemsworth.

Mr Hemsworth will be familiar to you as Thor from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which guise he has wielded his mighty hammer Mjölnir with charm, wit and unfailing grace. As a key member of the Avengers, he has on multiple occasions joined Iron Man, Black Widow and others to save the cosmos.

If only for those of us who struggle to distinguish reality from fantasy (possibly a more reliable predictor than the new Swedish blood test), it was especially poignant to learn a few months back that, just before turning 40, the Norse deity/ Australian beefcake discovered via genetic testing that he is at heightened risk of Alzheimer’s.

The trauma has driven him into what we must hope is temporary retirement.

Who will protect Asgard from the Frost Giants and other mortal foes with the son of Odin off games?

Modern medicine is magnificent in so many ways, especially in countries, such as Sweden, with first-world health services.

Even here in the UK, it is generally admirable. But its obsession with testing is an ever mounting threat to the sanity.

Were I seeking an alternative career to my current one (deleting several hundred nihilistically irrelevant emails each hour – intellectually rewarding, yes, but hard to monetise), one option would be being continually tested.

Fretting about an illness so far ahead feels like a neurotic indulgence too far

In recent weeks alone, invitations have arrived to age-related examination of the lungs and bowel. Meanwhile, a cardiologist has recommended an MRI of the heart, on the off chance of finding cardiomyopathy, owing to the same squiggles on an ECG that were first noted on another six years ago.

Such a scan would doubtless find something that suggested further investigation, which in turn would detect an anomaly that needed another check that would alight on something else, and so on.

The phenomenon is known in the United States as the cascade effect. For every preventable death averted, hundreds of thousands of lives are exposed to the kind of stress that contributes to hypertension, diabetes and other conditions that require lifelong medication.

Several times lately, I have stood outside the newly parked car perplexedly searching the pockets for the key, until that wholly unimpaired, Sherlockian brain cracked the conundrum from no more glaring a clue than the sound of the engine running. In the aggregated time spent hunting for spectacles perched insouciantly on the end of the nose, I could have finished the apprenticeship and be working as an electrician.

Whether these are early warning signs of a hateful disease or what the medical jargon used to know as getting on a bit, I do not want to know. With another world war visible on the horizon and Donald Trump an even-money shot to return to the White House within one year, fretting about an illness ten or 15 down the line feels like a neurotic indulgence too far.

Ignorance may not be bliss, but it is a comfort. The clearest sign of a properly functioning brain in this monstrous age is to cleave as close to hedonism as courage permits – and to dwell as little as possible on Armageddon.

The Oldie March 2024 11

what were AA route maps?

It was the first excitement of holiday – when the route map came from the AA or RAC. The promise of exotic journeys through unknown territory – but with someone to guide you all the way.

Before satnavs and Google maps, there was the personalised route. You wrote to the motoring organisations telling them where you were going, and they would send you a personalised strip map, duplicated, stapled and – in the case of the RAC – written in incredibly faint blue ink. Which is probably why my dad deserted them for the AA. More legible.

Those were the days when motoring was still an adventure, when main roads still went straight through towns and you devised your own regular stops which became part of the holiday tradition – heading north always meant fish and chips in Thirsk; Wales was tea and Welsh cakes in Bala.

And, of course, Devon and Cornwall meant ice cream on the Exeter bypass.

Before the M5 was invented, Exeter had

what is a Brexit tackle?

A Brexit tackle is a tackle so emphatic that it takes an opponent out of the game – rather in the manner that a referendum might take a nation out of a customs union.

I learned the term while watching my nine-year-old son play football with his school team. ‘Brexit him!’ they would cry whenever an opponent went on a promising run. Sometimes, one of them would add, ‘Brexit means Brexit!’ And then fall about laughing.

As you might imagine, this was initially a source of confusion among the middle-class Bristol parents – and I’m sure it will not shock you if I tell you that 100 per cent of us voted Remain. Had Farageism seeped undetected into the playground? Had one of their favourite 12 The Oldie March 2024

an early bypass which was notorious for queues. Enterprising locals would walk up and down the stationary traffic with cinema-usherette-style trays selling ice cream, soft drinks and newspapers.

Amazingly, the AA’s first personalised routes before the First World War were actually handwritten, with the route on one side, places of interest on the back.

By the late 1920s, they were sending out more than half a million routes a year.

(And they had bought a duplicator.)

Most popular were their ‘through routes’, guiding nervous drivers through big towns and cities. My father, driving a Morris Minor from our home in rural Wales, went straight though the centre of Birmingham, while my sister read out each careful direction. A real live satnav.

They even did most foreign cities, too.

From 1912 to 1999, when the last routes were posted out, they helped millions of motorists.

It was an incredible operation involving a lot of people doing a lot of literally on-the-ground research. For all those novice motorists, first-generation car-owners, it was liberating. It gave them the confidence to strike out on their own.

Motorways saw the end of strip maps,

though maps and books of through routes continued to be popular.

Now it’s all online, of course. You can plot a route yourself to and from just about anywhere, do vast stretches on motorways and pull up pictures so you’ll recognise the turnings.

But it’s not the same as following that duplicated route made just for you, with the taste of ice cream after a two-hour wait on the Exeter bypass…

Sharon Griffiths

YouTubers been slipping them Vote Leave propaganda beneath our noses?

Eventually, one of them explained that they had learned the term at an out-ofschool sports club. Indeed, the term ‘Brexit tackle’ seems to be increasingly widespread in grassroots football where it is understood as a quintessential part of the British game. Something that the last defender might commit to prevent a last-minute equaliser even at the cost of a red card.

In extreme circumstances, the defender may even commit a ‘hard Brexit’: the sort of bone-cruncher that ensures the crunchee plays no further part in football, ever.

The likes of Roy Keane, Neil ‘Razor’ Ruddock, Stuart ‘Psycho’ Pearce, Norman ‘Bites Yer Legs’ Hunter, Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris and Liverpool’s Tommy Smith were masters of the Brexit tackle.

‘Tommy Smith wasn’t born – he was

quarried,’ as Bill Shankly said of the formidable centre-half.

But I can’t help thinking that there’s something else going on here. To us grown-ups, the word ‘Brexit’ is shorthand for all sorts of highly specific gripes and moans. Since 2016, it’s prompted red-faced rants and rancorous familial disagreements.

To schoolchildren, it’s just funny. And thus, eroded through overuse, ‘Brexit’ has slipped into the British folk lexicon.

It now simply means something clumsy and bloody-minded, emphatic and irreversible. ‘Break his legs!’ ‘Bring him down!’ ‘Brexit means Brexit!’

A suitable epitaph for an era?

Perhaps. Though whether our national sending-off is a price worth paying for some wider victory – or a meaningless act of petulance – is, I suppose, still open to debate.

Richard Godwin

'I know this lends itself to a funny cartoon... but you're still letting a horse into a bar'

The Man with the Golden Pen

Don Black, 85, has written lyrics for everyone from Shirley Bassey to Tom Jones. He reveals the secrets of writing hit songs

Don Black won an Oscar for Born Free

ANDREW BUURMAN; DERRY BRABBS/TV TIMES; DAVID REDFERN; REDFERNS GETTY

W

riting songs is the best job in the world.

I’m in heaven when I’m strolling through a park, trying to come up with an idea that hasn’t been sung about before.

This involves a great amount of mind-wandering lunacy but when it happens, it is the best of all feelings. I don’t have to be in a park. I feel the same way in my kitchen with a cup of mint tea.

If anyone says to me they were moved by a song of mine, I know I’ve done my job right.

That said, it isn’t easy. I once compared writing lyrics to doing your own root-canal work. Stephen Sondheim called it agonising fun. It is easy to write a bad lyric, and unfortunately too many people do.

I was brought up listening to Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Frank Loesser, Irving Berlin etc. They all had one thing in common: every song was a crafted three-minute miracle. Their songs always managed to simplify complicated emotions without any impure rhymes.

Anyone can write ‘I hate to leave you’ but it takes a Cole Porter to write ‘Every time we say goodbye, I die a little.’

When I write lyrics, I have always tried to make sure that the words hug the contours of the melody: lyrics are written to be sung.

14 The Oldie March 2024

Songwriting is all about compression and eliminating the unnecessary. This habit has rubbed off in my personal life as well. My family have been brought up to get straight to the point if they have anything to say. I get agitated around long-winded people.

Rhyming plays a huge part in writing a wonderful song. The journalist and broadcaster Mark Steyn put it brilliantly: ‘Rhyme is crucial in theatre lyrics. It emphasises key words, it clarifies, it focuses, it reinforces, it spurs compression – the essence of the lyricist’s craft.’

The most frequent question I am asked is ‘What comes first – the words or the music?’

This depends on whom I am working with. When I’m writing with Van Morrison, it’s the words; with Andrew Lloyd Webber, it’s the music.

But both of them like a good title and a line or two.

My preference is to get the melody first because you have a rigid framework to keep the lyric concise.

When you write the lyric first, you are inclined to ramble. When Andrew gave me his beautiful melody for one of the major songs in Sunset Boulevard, it was obvious it would have to be a three-word title. The three words I chose were With One Look. If I’d written the words first, I could easily have written something like ‘Every Time You See Me’, which wouldn’t have been any good at all.

When I started out, the songwriter Michael Carr, the man who wrote South of the Border (Down Mexico Way), told me always to have a notebook and a pencil with me,

because you never know when you’ll see and hear things that could be a good idea for a song.

I followed his advice and it’s been a blessing. I have dozens of books filled with possible song titles and lines that could be turned into a song. These ideas can hit me when I’m watching a play or a movie or just picking up on something someone says. My mind is always on red alert when I read an agony column – a gold mine of emotional collisions.

Whenever I am sent a tune, the first thing I do is to refer to these books, hoping that one of the lines might help me get started.

When I worked with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the musical Aspects of Love, he came up with a wonderful tune. In one of the books, which was around 40 years old, I’d written the words ‘Love changes everything’. They fitted perfectly with his melody and the song went on to become a big hit for Michael Ball.

I have a theory that if you say something in a song that is true, it will be a great asset and will touch a lot of people.

Love does change everything.

If something in a song is true, it will touch a lot of people Here is an extract: Love, love changes everything, Hands and faces, Earth and sky.

Love, love changes everything, How you live And how you die My niece Laura was once madly in love with someone and she just happened to say that she knew it wouldn’t last but she was having a great time with him. Just a few words like that prompted me to write, again with Andrew, Tell Me on a Sunday: Don’t write a letter When you want to leave.

Don’t call me at 3am From a friend’s apartment.

Take me to a park That’s covered with trees.

Tell me on a Sunday, please Luck has played a big part in my career – two of my biggest songs nearly ended up in my bottom drawer.

I was asked to write a title song for the film Born Free (1966) with composer John Barry. It was sung in the film by my muchmissed friend Matt Monro.

The film’s executive producer, Don’s clients: Matt Monro (Born Free), Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones (Thunderball), Lulu (The Man with the Golden Gun)

Carl Foreman, thought John’s music was too syrupy and my lyrics were too much of a social comment. He took the song out of the film.

Suddenly it was recorded by Roger Williams in America and was becoming a big hit. The publishers insisted it go back in the film because then it would be eligible for an Academy Award.

A year later, Dean Martin handed me my Oscar. At the after-party Carl Foreman smiled and said, ‘Well, it does grow on you!’

Born free As free as the wind blows As free as the grass grows Don’s five Bond Born free to themes include follow your heart Diamonds Are Luck also played Forever and a big part in Thunderball Diamonds Are Forever. John Barry and I were very pleased with the song, but when we played it to the James Bond producer Harry Saltzman, he hated it.

I remember him saying to us, ‘It’s filthy. How can anyone sing “Touch it, stroke it and undress it?”’

John said to him in his charming Yorkshire accent, ‘What the f**k do you know about songs?’

Harry’s face went a sort of fire-engine red as he slammed the door. Luckily, Harry’s co-producer Cubby Broccoli loved it and so did Shirley Bassey. It became one of the most popular of all the Bond songs.

Diamonds are forever.

Hold one up and then caress it.

Touch it, stroke it and undress it.

I can see every part.

Nothing hides in the heart To hurt me Many years ago, the songwriter Frederic Weatherly wrote two enduring songs – Danny Boy and Roses of Picardy. He also said eloquently what every songwriter feels: ‘A song can say more in three minutes than a lofty speech, a lecture, a sermon, a book or a play. From the heart they come and to the heart they go.’

Don Black wrote the lyrics of Diamonds Are Forever, Thunderball, The Man with the Golden Gun and Born Free The Oldie March 2024 15

The Wright stuff In 1955, schoolboy John Price was charmed by Billy Wright. The England captain, who married a Beverley Sister, would have been 100 this year

ZUMA PRESS, INC. / ALAMY; DOUGLAS MILLER/KEYSTONE / GETTY

I

t wasn’t unusual for England footballers to be mentioned in morning assembly at the grammar school I attended in Stoke-on-Trent in the fifties.

Dennis Wilshaw, the Wolverhampton Wanderers and England inside forward, taught us PE and maths, and so we frequently heard of his achievements.

One spring morning in 1955, the headmaster announced casually, ‘At Wembley Stadium on Saturday afternoon, Mr Wilshaw scored four goals in the Association Football international against Scotland.’

This made Dennis the first England player to score four in an international and the first to score a hat trick against ‘the old enemy’. We applauded politely – whooping and whistling not being on the curriculum back then.

But with all due respect to the man who introduced me to quadratic equations, a few weeks later an unprecedented buzz filled the hall when we heard that Billy Wright (1924-94), captain of Wolverhampton Wanderers and England, was to visit the school. Billy would have been 100 on 6th February this year. In 1958, he married Joy Beverley (1924-2015), one of the Beverley Sisters.

At the time, Wolves, the reigning First Division champions, were the top team in England in the 1950s. At 31, Billy had made over 300 appearances for his club, plus 100 or so first-class games during the war years, gaining 65 international caps, with a record 50 as captain.

Yet few of us had actually seen him play. Our two local teams were anchored in the Second Division. For those with television sets, not much football was shown, apart from the FA Cup Final and the occasional second half of an international match.

On the day of our annual 1st XI versus Old Boys fixture, Billy duly arrived to referee the game. He was accompanied by Bert Williams, the Wolves and England goalkeeper, who, together with Dennis Wilshaw, was to be a linesman. Bill Shorthouse, the Wolves full-back, was the reserve official.

16 The Oldie March 2024

On seeing Billy Wright, I was surprised to note that the great man wasn’t as tall as I expected. Not that this disappointed me. For a 12-year-old, yet to reach my full 5ft 6½in, it was reassuring that heroes didn’t have to be six-footers.

On the newsreels, I’d seen Billy leap high in the air, appearing to hang above fearsome centre-forwards. He may have been only 5ft 8in, but on the pitch he was a giant.

There was no need for an armband to show he was captain; it was obvious from the moment he led out his team.

His tackles were powerful and perfectly timed, and he invariably

With wife, Joy, one of the Beverley Sisters. Right: his 100th England cap, 1959

appeared to know what his opponents were going to do.

Yet the legendary Wolves manager Major Frank Buckley had almost ended Billy’s career before it began, reducing the young apprentice to tears by announcing he wasn’t big enough to make the grade as a professional.

Fortunately for Billy and for English football, 20 minutes later the major

changed his mind, having considered Billy’s dedication to the job.

After the game, I looked for Billy and Bert Williams to ask if they’d sign the England-Scotland match programme I’d been given by one of my dad’s friends.

Four-goal Dennis Wilshaw had already signed it. I’d also brought along my autograph book, so that Bill Shorthouse wouldn’t feel left out.

‘Please may I have your autograph, Mr Wright?’ I said when I caught up with the three of them outside the gym. Billy asked my name and signed the programme, calling to the others, ‘Bert, come and sign this for John.’

He asked what I’d thought of the England-Scotland game and seemed quite disappointed to hear I only had the programme. ‘It was a good game – you’d have enjoyed it,’ he said. He added, with a smile, ‘The next time we play at Wembley, ask Mr Wilshaw for a day off school. I’m sure he’ll fix it.’

He quizzed me about the football I played, telling me before we parted, ‘Keep practising, John – and maybe you’ll get to Wembley one day.’

Leaving Billy and his teammates waiting for their lift back to the station, I took a tennis ball out of my bag and dribbled down the school drive, leaving in my wake every fearsome centre-forward I met on the way.

William Ambrose Wright went on to become the first player in the world to earn 100 international caps. He ultimately reached 105 caps, with a record 70 consecutive caps. He captained his country on 90 occasions, a world record, equalled only

by England’s World Cup-winning captain, Bobby Moore.

I never got to play at Wembley.

Jarché’s hidden camera Jimmy Jarché took some of the greatest pictures of the 20th century but remains strangely unknown. By his grandson Peter Suchet

18 The Oldie March 2024

DAILY HERALD ARCHIVE / SSPL; FOX PHOTOS / GETTY; SCIENCE MUSEUM GROUP COLLECTION

J

ames ‘Jimmy’ Jarché (1890-1965), my grandfather, was one of the most sought-after photojournalists of his generation.

He was born to immigrant Lithuanian parents in Rotherhithe, near the docks by Tower Bridge, in 1890. Jimmy’s parents arrived in London after living in Paris for a while, where his father, Arnold, worked as an assistant in a photographic studio.

In London, having set up Tower Bridge Photographic Studios, Arnold would take classic portraiture pictures during the day, but after hours his work would take a macabre turn. With no photographic unit of their own at that time, the Metropolitan Police would call on Arnold to photograph the dead bodies lifted from the Thames, assisted by Jimmy, who was then only 13. He would often be left alone with the bloated, groaning corpses while other matters were dealt with.

It was a hard life and it toughened him up. Also he was left blessed with great charisma, not to say chutzpah. He would happily wrestle with the dockworkers during the day and perform at the Magic Circle in the evening.

He was also an extremely loving

Clockwise from top left: Jarché with his Leica in 1938; Duke of York, later George VI, at 1933 Cup Final; Winston Churchill at the Sidney Street Siege, 1911; construction workers on the Shell building, London, 1932; Blériot after crossing the Channel, 1910; boy in Trafalgar Square, 1932

grandfather, and in later life my brothers (actor David Suchet and broadcaster John Suchet) and I adored him.

When Jimmy’s father died suddenly, he and his mother ran Tower Bridge Studios until Jimmy eventually left to train as a staff photographer. He worked on assignments for the Daily Mirror, the Daily Sketch, Weekly Illustrated, the Daily Herald and Life magazine, among others.

Jimmy undertook a huge number of photographic assignments for publications like these, but never as a freelance. In those days, freelance photographers simply didn’t exist.

He was competitive, certainly, when it came to getting the ‘scoop’. He was described as having the ‘sharpest elbows in the business’, but he would have detested the methods of the modern paparazzi.

Without the opportunities to make a very good living as a freelance photographer, he was simply on a publication’s payroll, and was paid relatively little.

He was immensely prolific during his 50 years on Fleet Street. His earliest picture was published by the Daily Mirror in 1909: of Louis Blériot, the first person to fly across the English Channel.

He also photographed the spot where Blériot slept overnight on the cliffs at Dover, to make sure he got the scoop.

Jarché’s most memorable shots include one of a young Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, during the siege of Sidney Street in 1911. In his memoirs, People I Have Shot, Jimmy writes, ‘Perhaps for sheer excitement, I never did anything equal to the Sidney Street Siege.’

The Oldie March 2024 19

Above: first published shot of Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson, 1936 Right: Albert Einstein, 1944

20 The Oldie March 2024

accepted sense, in 2019 he published David Suchet Behind the Lens: My Life.

One story we all remember with great affection is how Jimmy met his wife, Elsie. She was an actress and one of the two ‘Sisters Robinson’, a music-hall song-and-dance act (the origin of the name is not known).

As a regular visitor to the Hackney Empire, Jimmy was soon enchanted by Elsie and would wait to meet her at the stage door every night, only to be rebuffed each time. Today, he might be called a stage-door Johnny.

One night, he hired a white tie, tails

Limbs and the Law: policeman at the Serpentine, Hyde Park, 1924

The best lens to view a subject through is ‘the one God has given you: your eye’ and a top hat and waited again by the stage door. Jimmy pushed a red rose in front of Elsie and said, ‘This is the last time I’m ever going to ask you out, and this is the last chance you’ll have to say yes.’ They were married a few weeks later.

I remember as a young boy seeing Elsie taking a big bag of granulated sugar and emptying the whole thing onto her lino kitchen floor. She would stand in the sugar and demonstrate her immaculate music-hall soft-shoe shuffle, or ‘sand dance’. She was a talented and muchin-demand music-hall performer, with a wonderful singing voice.

It makes the family immensely proud to see Jimmy’s many images reproduced today, because we usually spot them only by chance. They are very rarely credited to James Jarché, a Fleet Street legend and the pre-eminent photojournalist of his time.

DAILY HERALD ARCHIVE, SCIENCE MUSEUM GROUP

Jarché also snapped the first photo published in a British newspaper of the future Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson in a nightclub in 1936. Until this point, the British press had resolved to be discreet regarding Edward’s affair. A week after the publication of this image, the King abdicated the throne.

In his early career, Jarché used what all press photographers used at that time, a collapsible 9x12 plate camera. By the 1930s, he’d found a Leica camera, which used 35 mm, was lighter and was therefore more portable. He swore by his Leica. He told his grandson Sir David Suchet that the best lens through which anyone can view any subject is ‘the one that God has given you: your eye’.

In People I Have Shot, Jarché muses that some of the ‘best shots have been the cheapest’. He then recalls the events that led him to snap Limbs and the Law, which cost him threepence in bus fares – and brought the newspaper nearly £400 in reproduction rights.

It was to Jimmy’s eternal regret that he missed the financial opportunities afforded the freelance photographers of today. If he had owned the copyright of his own catalogue, it would have been worth a lot of money, and provided him with the security in later life that he lacked.

Jimmy died in August 1965, just a month after my 12th birthday. My brother John (the journalist, author and broadcaster, awarded an OBE in 2023) is nearly ten years older than me; Sir David is nearly eight years older.

So they obviously remember Jimmy more clearly than I do, particularly since a large part of my life up to then had been spent away at boarding school.

David idolised Jimmy, inheriting his talent (and listening to his advice on photography) to become a highly regarded – and published – amateur photographer in his own right, as well as an ambassador for Leica cameras.

Avoiding an autobiography in the

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The Oldie March 2024 21

My aunt, the first St Trinian’s girl William Freeman’s aunt was a naughty schoolgirl – who inspired Ronald Searle

CHRIS BEETLES GALLERY/RONALD SEARLE ESTATE

M

y aunt was one of the original two dishevelled schoolgirls who were drawn by Ronald Searle; the other was Ronald’s sister, Olive.

His drawings would eventually become ‘St Trinian’s’, but that wouldn’t happen till a few years later.

Ronald Searle, the famous cartoonist, was born in Cambridge in March 1920.

My aunt, Joan Hale, was born in Melbourn, a village ten miles south of Cambridge, eight months later. Ronald Searle’s sister, Olive, was born early in the following year – so they were all much of an age.

Joan and Olive were best friends at the Cambridgeshire High School for Girls. They used to arrive at school all neat and tidy, and leave each day in great dishevelment, having caused mayhem in between.

Ronald was studying nearby at the Cambridge College of Art, and used to draw them while they were in that state.

He showed them some of the drawings – but if he ever gave any of them to Joan, she never kept them. A pity.

He published the first St Trinian’s cartoon in 1941, in Lilliput magazine, while he was in the Army. He had taken the name from a school in Scotland (St Trinnean’s).

Some websites say that he based his cartoons on two girls from St Trinnean’s, but that, I am utterly certain, was not the case. My aunt told me about all this, several years ago, and her memory was very sharp. That story was a later false assumption.

In 1945, Ronald returned from being a POW in the Far East and then, from 1946 until 1952, he produced a regular St Trinian’s’ strip cartoon, in which the school buildings were based on Joan’s school, and also on the Perse School for Girls, and on St Mary’s School – all of which were in Cambridge.

Joan’s and Olive’s school is now the Long Road Sixth Form College. The Cambridge College of Art is now part of Anglia Ruskin University.

‘Same old stuff...’

Blue Murder at St Trinian’s (1957)

What later happened to Ronald (who died in 2011, aged 91) the world knows.

What happened to Olive I do not know.

My aunt obtained Higher School Certificate in mathematics, and then became a WREN meteorological officer, reaching a rank equivalent to Lieutenant RN. She married a fellow naval officer and, after the war, they ran several hotels.

As a widow, she retired to Harpenden, near to her daughter, and she died in 2022 at the age of 101.

The Oldie March 2024 23

In his new book, Christopher Sandford is dazzled and horrified by the good, the bad and the ugly events of 1964

I

f you want to get a real sense of an era, a good place to start is the display ads in the popular press.

In the case of 1964, there was a good deal of talk about floor coverings, with several retailers noting that carpet prices were set to increase by a rather precise 7½ per cent over the year.

Shoppers were urged to buy one of Cyril Lord’s ‘fabulous, quality products’, with a free bottle of Swift Rug Shampoo thrown in. Elsewhere, Pontin’s were offering DIY holidays in one of their luxury chalets, each with ‘kitchen, lounge, TV and fully-carpeted bedroom!’, starting at just £3 per person (around £45 today) a week.

British parents were concerned about the accelerating plague of rock and roll, typified by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Top of the Pops, hosted

by Jimmy Savile, began on 1st January 1964.

Among the Number Ones that year was Sandie Shaw, 17, with (There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me. Parents were confronted by worrying signs that the spirit of national wartime unity might finally be starting to crack.

Films as diverse as Dr Strangelove, Girl with Green Eyes, King and Country, The Pumpkin Eater and Zulu appeared on UK screens in 1964. They offered at least a hint of social commentary or satire about class distinctions.

Joe Orton’s first stage play, Entertaining Mr Sloane, was an immediate succès de scandale at London’s Arts Theatre. As the reviews noted, it, too, was something other than traditional family entertainment.

24 The Oldie March 2024

Meanwhile, Top of the Pops, Match of the Day and Crossroads all made their debuts on British television in 1964.

The BBC introduced its second channel – although the launch itself was something of a fiasco when a massive power cut left the first night’s presenter staring fixedly into the camera before the screen went dark altogether.

In April, the ‘pirate’-ship station known as Radio Caroline, the brainchild of young Irish nightclub-owner Ronan O’Rahilly, began broadcasting from international waters off the coast of Suffolk.

There was also a lively display of adolescent hormonal abandon, whipped up into one of those periodic Fleet Street moral panics, at various coastal resorts that spring.

This was the mods and rockers phenomenon – essentially two conflicting youth cults distinguished by their contrasting fashion and musical tastes.

Although centred on Brighton, the clashes soon spread to other seaside communities. In time, even the cobbled lanes of Margate, Kent, rang to the sound of teenagers pursuing each other with bike chains and broken milk bottles.

Commenting on the ensuing That was the year that was: Dr Strangelove (above) and the Mods (right)

fracas that came up for his attention, Dr George Simpson, Chairman of Margate Magistrates, remarked, ‘It is not likely that the air of this town has ever been fouled by such hordes of mentally unstable, long-haired hooligans.’

The year also saw changes to Britain’s traditional high-street landscape. In May, a 32-year-old former restaurateur and furniture-maker named Terence Conran opened his first, era-defining shop in London’s Fulham Road. It might be going too far, but going not in entirely the wrong direction, to compare Conran’s cultural influence to Andy Warhol’s. After the drab war years, he made design fun and accessible.

Other enterprising retailers, such as John Stephen and Mary Quant, were showing you didn’t need to go to Savile Row or Bond Street for fashionable tailoring.

TRINITY MIRROR / MIRRORPIX; PICTURELUX / THE HOLLYWOOD ARCHIVE / ALAMY; FOX PHOTOS / GETTY

It was 60 years ago today...

MIRRORPIX; PICTORIAL PRESS LTD; KEYSTONE PRESS / ALAMY; BETTMANN; CENTRAL PRESS / STRINGER / GETTY

The Beatles (left) and Mary Quant (above)

Out went old fogeys in sensible dresses and suits; in came with-it young professionals in flares and miniskirts.

Seeming to reflect the upheaval going on all around, the Sun also made its debut that year. Initially, it was in broadsheet form, with a first-day editorial declaring the paper to be a ‘beacon of truth … geared to the bracing mental attitudes and new interests of the mid-1960s’. The topless models came later.

There was also a darker side to life in Britain, where it seemed certain individuals habitually murdered, stole, lied and cheated as they slithered around in a sea of immorality.

In a case that came to be known as the ‘Hammersmith nude murders’ (or, at the more populist end of the media, as that of Jack the Stripper), the savagely mutilated bodies of six young women, all prostitutes, were found in or near the Thames in West London. To this day, no one has ever been charged with the crimes.

The Kray brothers, Ronnie

Above: Radio Caroline Right: Sandie Shaw

and Reg, continued to operate their impressively violent, if only fitfully successful, protection racket elsewhere in the capital.

Around Manchester, the psychotic lovers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley murdered two of their five young victims in 1964, before being arrested and brought to justice the following year.

Fortunately for them, by the time they went on trial the death penalty had just been abolished.

In the early hours of 13th August 1964, 24-year-old Gwynne Evans and his 21-year-old accomplice Peter Allen became the last people to be executed in Britain when they were hanged for the murder of a work colleague.

1964 might also be said to Sinning sixties: have marked the Myra Hindley beginning of the end for the old-fashioned, patrician Conservative party, as represented by the sitting Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Home turned 61 that summer, but seemed about 20 years older.

After 13 years in office, the Tories narrowly lost the general election in October, and Labour’s pipe-smoking leader Harold Wilson became, at 48, the youngest PM of the 20th century to date. Perhaps optimistically, Wilson promised to usher in a ‘new nation’, forged in the ‘white heat [of] scientific revolution’.

The geography of Britain’s politics was essentially the same as today, with Labour dominating in London, the industrial Midlands and South Wales, and the electoral map otherwise showing a spine of Tory

Above: the Kray Twins Below: good morning, Vietnam

blue. In Wilson’s first Cabinet there were 26 men and just one woman (the minister for overseas development, Barbara Castle).

But perhaps the one really imperishable political event of 1964 came early in the morning of 5th August, when an aide woke US president Lyndon Johnson with the news that two American destroyers had returned fire after apparently coming under attack while sailing in the Gulf of Tonkin, about 12 miles off the coast of North Vietnam.

It later transpired that the ships might have been firing at nothing more sinister than a shoal of flying fish passing them in the night.

‘Freak effects on radar and over-eager sonarmen’ were to blame, a subsequent official report concluded.

Such nuances did not trouble Johnson, as he listened to the initial account of his ships’ being attacked.

Going on television to denounce this ‘open aggression on the high seas against the United States’, the President quickly secured congressional approval for the so-called Tonkin Resolution, giving him ‘approval and support for all measures deemed necessary to repel and counter future attacks’.

US air strikes began on selected targets around Hanoi – the opening salvo of America’s decade-long nightmare of the Vietnam War. Christopher Sandford’s book 1964 (The History Press) is out on 29th February The Oldie March 2024 25

Michael ffolkes was disliked by other cartoonists but he was a real artist – and very funny. By Dean Patterson

That’s all ffolkes!

PLAYBOY; PRIVATE EYE; PUNCH CARTOON LIBRARY / TOPFOTO

A

lthough not entirely forgotten, Michael ffolkes (he purposely chose the initial lower-case f) will always, it seems, have the epitaph that reads, ‘Martin Honeysett threw a cake over his head.’

This story stems from a Private Eye 21st-birthday bash, where before it got a chance to be dished out on paper plates with accompanying napkins, fellow cartoonist Honeysett threw the large and elaborately baked cake over ffolkes’s head.

For ffolkes (1925-88), one of Britain’s greatest cartoonists and illustrators, that seems to be the legacy. Described as notoriously pompous and disliked by other cartoonists, he was by all accounts something of a toff and a showboater. He could be quite arrogant and patronising to other cartoonists, and was renowned for driving around London in an opentopped Rolls-Royce, smoking thick cigars.

Whether he was rude or was snobbish to fellow cartoonists I don’t know. It does certainly seem so but, to judge by his back catalogue, it is time we started concentrating on his cartooning genius.

And it really is a genius back catalogue.

You can see ffolkes’s shadow in early Ralph Steadman work; even in early Quentin Blake as he developed the sketchy style we all know and love so well. You might even compare him to the great Charles Addams, the New Yorker cartoonist whose magazine cartoons evolved into The Addams Family (dud-du-dud-dum, click-click).

He wasn’t born Michael ffolkes, nor was he even born Ffolkes with a capital F. He was christened the slightly more mundane Brian Davis. Born on 6th June 1925, in London, he went on to study at St Martin’s School of Art. By his own account, his mother was a singer and his father worked in advertising. An only child, he sold his first cartoon to his local paper aged ten and his first Punch cartoon at 17.

In the fifties, he started to make a name for himself in the Daily Telegraph, first illustrating the Way of the World column and later the Peter Simple columns, both written by Michael Wharton.

After finding success with the Telegraph,

‘I can’t think of anything to play’

he drew prolifically for magazines such as Punch, Private Eye, the Strand, Reader’s Digest and the Spectator. He also achieved that rare thing: he was a British cartoonist who broke the American market, with regular cartoons for the New Yorker, Playboy and Esquire.

In modern cartooning, he is largely skipped over. In my experience, when a whinge (the collective noun coined by the late, great Tony Husband) of cartoonists get together, he is never brought up.

While we cartoonists love to talk about our heroes and the greats, I haven’t heard the name of ffolkes mentioned once. But he was one of the greats – in fact, one of the best.

‘I promised one of them something last night, but I can’t remember which one’ The Oldie March 2024 29

His use of ink and watercolour was outstanding. He could do a simple black-and-white drawing and he could use watercolour better than nearly any other. He would sometimes do a background completely in watercolour without black line at all. He could put the most fascinating detail in his drawings, on a par with the brilliant French legend Jean-Jacques Sempé. Just like Sempé’s, his drawings are breath-taking in their simplicity. In short, he was an artist.

As Nick Newman, one of today’s best British cartoonists and editor of Private Eye: A Cartoon History puts it better, ‘ffolkes’s baroque style was unique and instantly recognisable. He considered himself a true artist – and, unlike the rest of us, probably

was – but that didn’t stop him being very naughty, eclectic, literary and funny.’

One of my favourite cartoons (pictured, right) is in Punch. He masterfully draws Leonardo da Vinci in his studio, turning to the lady behind him and saying, ‘I think I’m beginning to lose my grip.

Yesterday I invented fish fingers.’

That’s it – that’s the gag. It’s absurd, it’s ridiculous and 99 per cent of cartoonists would say to themselves, ‘Well, that’s not going to work.’

But it does – and it makes me laugh out loud just thinking of it.

I am not a great cartoonist, or even a semi-decent one. I couldn’t say my own poor drawings are inspired by ffolkes. I wouldn’t dream of trying to emulate him.

‘I must say, Mr Baskerville, we had expected something larger’

‘Hold on – you say my apartment is bugged by two large receivers?’

‘Look here, Hugget. The Committee would like to know why you’re not wearing a club moustache’

But I love his work, jokes, drawings, technique and craftmanship. Most importantly, I love just going back and looking at them. He’s one of the best illustrators Britain has ever produced.

He died aged 63 in London on 18th October 1988, from undisclosed causes. I don’t really care if he had a pompous side to him, or even if he could be an ass at times. As the saying goes, you don’t judge Hamlet by Shakespeare’s bequeathing his wife only his second-best bed.

His work stands the test of time even if the man does not, and I think he deserves a better epitaph than a cake over his head.

‘I think I’m beginning to lose my grip. Yesterday I invented fish fingers’ 30 The Oldie March 2024

Dean Patterson is a cartoonist

Prue’s News

Offal isn’t awful.

It’s delicious!

What’s the matter with us? Why will we happily eat the shoulder of a sheep or the backside of a steer but not their livers?

We nod wisely when adjured to eat ‘nose to tail’ because it’s delicious, nutritious, economical and the right thing to do.

But there is almost no demand for kidneys or liver, for sweetbreads, trotters or tripe, for tongue, pig’s head, chitterlings, or even for ox heart or tail. So butchers just don’t stock them. Most offal ends up in pet food or being turned into fertiliser or fuel.

It’s not the flavour we object to. It’s the thought, or maybe the sight. I will eat pretty much anything, but even I would balk at a sheep’s eye. In Malta recently, I had to close my eyes when our host enthusiastically forked the eye out of my grilled fish, including the stringy optic nerve, insisting it was the best part and that I open my mouth. I did and he was right. It was delicious.

It seems we will eat offal only if we don’t know we’re doing it. No one realises their sausages are encased in intestines, and that a good restaurant Bolognese is

likely to have been enriched with minced offal. Or that gelatine can come from horses’ hoofs.

When we first moved to the country, in the seventies, our farmer neighbour, who had a healthy dislike of townies, thought he’d wind us up by bringing me two buckets – one of fresh sheep’s tails, the other of their testicles. He’d spent the morning castrating his flock.

To his disappointment, I was thrilled. I boiled the tails to remove the skin and fleece.

They smelt, unsurprisingly, like woollen socks in the washtub, but the skins came off. Then I griddled them for the children’s supper. Barbecued lamb bites, crunchy and delicious.

I served the marble-sized, pale pink testicles like sweetbreads, in a cream sauce on toast. My mother had two helpings. She was spitting feathers when I told her what she’d eaten.

Forty years ago, my children wolfed down fried liver sausage for breakfast.

Today, they’ll happily eat pâté or terrine, made from liver, but I doubt that they have ever bought and cooked any liver.

Ready-made dishes such as haggis (made from cow’s pluck) and black pudding (with fresh pig’s blood and fat) are still findable, but unforgettable dishes such as jellied brawn (from pig’s head and trotters) and soft roes (the male sperm or ‘eggs’ of fish) on toast are fast disappearing.

I fear I am disgusting you, dear reader? Am I alone in mourning their passing?

P.S. There is hope for Londoners at the Notting Hill Fish + Meat Shop, which has a fine range of offal.

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The Oldie March 2024 33

Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips

Over-use it – and lose it Too much exercise has left my friends in agony A few years ago, I went to stay with well-appointed friends who invited me to join them on a ride around their park.

I replied that I hadn’t ridden for years and had lost my nerve on horses who, being instinctive, would be able to tell I was anxious and wouldn’t respect my authority.

‘Don’t worry,’ my friends replied. ‘You can go on Dumpy. Look at him – he’s the sweetest old boy imaginable. He never goes beyond ambling. It’s just like being on a sofa.’

We looked out of the window at the tethered Dumpy, small and squat, who was genially chewing cud and emanating calm.

And so I found myself ambling along behind the others, thinking, ‘This is marvellous. I’m going to start riding again.’

But then Dumpy began whinnying and broke into a gallop. Further into the park, he could see other horses, gathered for a lawn meet, and naturally wanted to join in. For him it was the horse equivalent of Glastonbury and just too tempting to resist.

Pulling the reins had no effect. I felt like one of those toy cowboys of my childhood who came with their legs already spread out to accommodate a horse. I used to try to straighten the toy legs so the cowboys could stand up in my doll’s house, but they were unwieldy, stiff plastic.

I now found my own legs were unwieldy too – I could not shut them.

It had been so many years since I had needed to grip with my thighs that the gripping muscles had fallen into desuetude.

By some miracle, I didn’t come off – but my message is, after a certain age, don’t just resume any physical activity you were always able to do in the past. If you haven’t been using them, the relevant muscles may well no longer be operative.

A woman I know named Janet, on ‘going off’ in her mid-sixties, decided to turn what the French call a coup de vieux (a sudden blow of age) into a coup de mieux (I coined this term myself) – a sudden improvement in appearance.

She joined a running club and began running for five miles a day with other women who had been running for years.

Guess what? She developed plantar fasciitis, an inflammation of the fibrous tissue along the bottom of the foot that connects the heel bone to the toes.

Plantar fasciitis can cause intense heel pain. For three months, when Janet got out of bed in the morning she could barely put her feet on the ground.

There are the very public, often excessively dishevelled, moderate joggers, such as Boris and Michael Gove.

They give the wrong message to novice runners. Another highly successful man I know, in his early fifties, thought he would add to his string of achievements by training for the London Marathon.

His running on concrete in preparation means that he has now had to have a previously perfectly good knee replaced.

On her 68th birthday, a relation of mine decided to signal her continued fitness by walking 20 miles on the South West Coast Path and then lifting weights in the gym. She slipped a disc.

The son of The Oldie’s late medical correspondent, Dr Thomas Stuttaford, has shared with me a term he has coined himself – peterpanopathy.

‘Peterpanopathy has always been around in one form or another,’ observes Don’t Tom Stuttaford Jr. try this ‘Mid-fifties men wearing at home

falling-down jeans – mutton dressed as lamb. Harley Davidson syndrome – where men who had motorbikes in their twenties buy another one in their fifties and find it “over-responsive”.’

The Duke of Edinburgh carried on with carriage riding till his mid-nineties, and the late Queen rode almost to the end. But oldie riders do have terrible falls, whether or not they have kept their parts in well-oiled working order.

I will never forget attending the Countryside Rally in 1997 as a journalist.

Tony Blair, who had received a £1m donation for the party from an animal-rights charity, had announced he would ban hunting (although, curiously, not fishing).

The rally’s VIP enclosure, which doubled as a press enclosure, was notable for the number of former riders, now confined to wheelchairs following accidents out hunting. They had made superhuman efforts to come up from the country to show their support for this dangerous country sport, even after what it had done to them.

Forget about showing off and signalling youth through running, motorbikes and collecting back injuries through overdoing it in the gym. There is a reason doctors recommend walking, swimming and particularly gardening.

These are the least dangerous activities for keeping all your body parts in full working order.

If you still want to signal youth and fitness, you can then surprise contemporaries by being flexible enough to climb stepladders or crawl under cars.

The Oldie March 2024 35

Oldie Man of Letters

Kind hearts don’t need coronets

The Post Office scandal shows how worthless the honours system is a n wilson My favourite moment, out of many been established in the 1920s, was to superb moments, in Byron Rogers’s decide that Ireland would not have an classic biography of the poet R S Thomas, honours system.

While the English eagerly open their is when the old curmudgeon received a newspapers twice a year, at New Year or letter from the Prime Minister offering on their sovereign’s birthday, to see him some kind of gong. whether they have been made an MBE, The clergyman poet did not answer the Irish sensibly the letter, of course. It went judge one another on straight into the waste-paper their actual merits, basket where it belonged. rather than on letters Yet many other intelligent that appear after people in Britain seem positively their names. agog for a gong. My neighbour It was a pity when Jonathan Miller was a republican rumours went round who had a huge range of talents that Paul Dacre, the – neurologist, opera producer, greatest of living superb television performer. He journalists, was to be could surely see it made him seem honoured by Boris foolish to accept a knighthood, but Johnson. As Mr he did so. He was too cool to call Dacre, he can remain himself Sir Jonathan – which No gongs: de Valera the independentmade the acceptance all the odder. minded journalist’s journalist. He was Some intelligent people disguise their hunger for such baubles by claiming their my boss when I worked on the Standard and it was a daily object lesson in how to wives wanted to be called Lady So-andbe a good journalist.

So. When I was young and tactless, His successor, Stuart Steven, was so I asked Isaiah Berlin why a brilliant man slavish in his longing for a knighthood such as him wanted to be a Sir. that he made the paper ridiculous, with He replied, preposterously, that he knew it was absurd, but if his mother had headlines such as ANOTHER TRIUMPH known he had turned down such an offer, FOR JOHN MAJOR, when all the PM had done was fly back from some he could imagine a tear rolling down her international summit. In the end, Major cheek. By then she was dead – so it was did not even give him the knighthood! really the feeblest of reasons.

When I was on the Council of the He went on to say I could not imagine Royal Society of Literature, our what it was like to be a poor immigrant Chairman, Sir Michael Holroyd, would who’d arrived in England from Riga with ask us for names to be submitted each a little cardboard suitcase.

Yes, but had the boat taken them from year to the Honours Committee.

Someone suggested that a good writer, Latvia to Ireland, rather than to England, Nina Bawden, deserved to be made a and had he been brought up in the dame. Holroyd and friends spent Republic, he could not have become Sir about 20 minutes deciding that while she Isaiah. Instead, he would have been might be worth an OBE or perhaps a recognized as the witty, brilliant Isaiah CBE, she wasn’t quite in the DBE league.

Berlin, with no need to aggrandise The profound absurdity of trying to himself with a title. assess a writer’s merits in such a manner One of the best things Éamon de seemed to have occurred to no one. I Valera did, when the Irish Free State had

would sit there wondering what honour, if any, my fellow-council members might give to Keats (CBE?) or Blake (BEM?).

Yet, every year, actors, athletes, businesspeople, bureaucrats and hosts of absolute nobodies are self-important – and childish – enough to think they mustn’t go home from school without a prize. They want to be Members of the British Empire, which does not even exist, or Companions of it.

Clearly the existence of gongs has the power to corrupt public life. The disgraced boss of the Post Office, the Rev Paula Vennells, was awarded the CBE: Mrs May’s government felt that Vennells was somehow helping to save government money, and deserved a reward. Mrs May later became Lady May, since her husband, an investment manager, was knighted for ‘political service’ by Boris Johnson.

The Mays must be among the two least distinguished public figures in British history – but he is a knight and she is a lady.

Isn’t it time to stop the whole nonsense?

The system was devised to compensate those in the military or the civil service who had served in public life when they could have been following more lucrative professions. You can see why major-generals and senior mandarins in the Foreign Officed might want to retire with a title. Now the big gongs, the knighthoods and damehoods, are given to donors to political parties, or to people whose ethnicity or trendiness will reflect well on the Prime Minister doling out the honours.

Hence the award to Floella Benjamin, a forgotten children’s TV presenter of very limited talent, of not only a peerage but also the Order of Merit. Former holders of the order actually had merit – Thomas Hardy, Florence Nightingale, Edward Elgar. Need one say more?

The Oldie March 2024 37

Small World

Jack the Ripper’s last victim I loved stalking the East End in search of the Victorian murderer. But he had a lethal surprise in store for me jem clarke

STEVE WAY

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he shares with his parents…

Mother is convinced I’m not just on the highway to hell but substantially past the last service station.

I foolishly told her my itinerary for my trip to London was Whitechapel-based, comprising a Jack the Ripper walking tour.

My surprisingly modern mother immediately homed in on the problematic nature of Jack the Ripper as a tourist attraction: ‘Haven’t the Met got enough trouble without you glorifying that sort of thing?’

I replied, ‘It’s only like that Art Appreciation A level I did. Learning to appreciate art didn’t make me an artist.’

‘Oh, oh, so you “appreciate” murder, then?’ Mother looked like a seal in a wheelchair that had just caught a fish flying past, directly into her gob. ‘Besides, if memory serves, you did Art Appreciation only at AO level – and that was because you’d become too terrified of Bunsen burners to enter a science room.’

‘Kevin Stapleford is to blame for that,’ I said.

‘Oh, poor Jem, a boy from the year below him shows him a Bunsen burner and suddenly he can’t continue getting Ds in combined science.’

‘Mother! He tied me to the Bunsen burner! The third-years called me the Wicker Man for nine months.’

‘Well, one practical joke doesn’t turn a normal boy into a weepy serial killer.’

‘I’m not a serial killer. I’m a serialkiller fan.’

‘Oh!’ she barked, grabbing a passing father like a makeshift holy relic to hide behind. ‘Listen how he wears it like a scout badge – a serial-killer fan and proud of it.’

It’s all Ian Bottley’s fault. My friend since school and travelling companion is the Ripperologist. He has the right demeanour – he looks like a professional Victorian mourner.

Ian chose, of course, the cheapest and

quickest walking tour: ‘That way, if it’s rubbish, we’ll have wasted only half as much money and time.’

Thus, as the night-like afternoon turned into the night-like night, we found ourselves waiting in the company of many different nationalities. As a man from a small, non-diverse town, I was made to feel like part of a ‘We’d-like-toteach-the-world-to-sing’ revivalist flash mob.

Ian had read our email instructions twice and was tutting at a young Chinese couple for defying the advice to ‘come dressed for the day’s weather’.

We marched to keep warm on the historical cobbles, as Ian whispered to me, ‘Sockless in Crocs – tell me anyone this side of a baker or a surgeon who thinks Crocs are a year-round shoe.’

A young man with a placard and Che Guevara face furniture greeted us.

‘Welcome to your Unofficial Ripper Tour,’ he said in laid-back Australianese.

It should have been advertised as the ‘Ripper, mate’ tour.

Mother would have been proud that the slightly icky moral architecture of stomping round murder sites was addressed. On arriving at each murder

location, Oz the tour guide led us in a moment’s silence for the Victorian murder victim. Seconds later, he unveiled a mini projector and flashed a giant photo of each victim’s body onto a nearby wall.

At the end of the actually very interesting two hours, he invited questions. I asked, ‘If the Ripper, by some form of time travel, were here tonight, where would be the nearest toilet for him to use?’

Oz pointed me towards a pub. Another punter asked, ‘I notice the full moon is out. I wonder whether any thought has been given to the lunar calendar and whether the Ripper murders were done on a particular cycle?’

Oz drew air through his teeth thoughtfully. ‘Bicycles were around then,’ he said, ‘but I think the cobbles alone would suggest he probably did them on foot, to be honest with you, mate.’

With that zinger, Oz disappeared in the direction of Earl’s Court, and we caught the last train north. That night, so long after his initial spree, and to my mother’s moral delight, Jack the Ripper did claim at least two more victims.

Ian and I both caught Covid.

The Oldie March 2024 39

Town Mouse

The Elizabeth Line – transport of delight tom hodgkinson

At the beginning of News from Nowhere, William Morris’s novel about a utopian society of the future, the narrator takes a miserable journey from Farringdon to Hammersmith on the London Underground.

He calls the tube ‘that stinking vapourbath of discontented humanity’.

That would have been in 1890. Fast forward 134 years, put him on the Elizabeth Line and the Arts and Crafts pioneer would take a very different view.

I ended up on this marvel of modern engineering by mistake: in general, I reject the tube, preferring to cycle around London. But a tennis injury put me out of bicycling action, and for a few weeks I took the underground into Soho from my office for my evenings of merrymaking.

I took the Hammersmith and City Line – the very same line Morris complained about, and the oldest on the whole network. So far, so ordinary tube.

But then at Paddington I descended deep down to the magisterial new Elizabeth Line, the space-age train that speeds from Reading in the west to beyond Woolwich in the east, via central London. There are 73 miles of it. It’s 40 metres deep, stops at 41 stations and has transformed London.

There’s an amazing sense of space 40 The Oldie March 2024

down there. The tunnel-builders have fashioned gigantic, sweeping curved walkways, like something out of Star Wars. The material used is officially called ‘curving white glass fibrereinforced cladding linings’.

The passenger and train tunnels were created by eight enormous tunnel-boring machines. Each machine, charmingly, was named, because no machine can begin work until it is christened. There were: Victoria and Elizabeth, named after the monarchs; Mary and Sophia, named after the wives of the Brunel engineers; Ada and Phyllis, named after Ada Lovelace, Bryon’s computer scientist daughter, and Phyllis Pearsall, inventor of the London A-Z; and Jessica and Ellie, named after Olympic gold medallists.

Each pair of machines was responsible for separate jobs. When tunnelling, the machines inched forward; a huge wheel at the front carved up the London clay and transported it backwards. The machine then placed a concrete ring round the tunnel before moving forward again.

The 3,500 tunnellers needed to do the job were trained at the Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy in Ilford. What a noble vocation – tunneller!

The 3.5 million tonnes of soil excavated by these kindly monsters was then transported to Wallasea in Essex where it was used to create a bird sanctuary. How lovely is that? The Guardian’s reporter visited and was very impressed: ‘I spotted yellow wagtails, oystercatchers, lapwings, black-headed gulls and reed bunting on my visit last week. Brown hares scampered through the long grass while skylarks shrilled above the flat, uninterrupted Essex landscape.’

The trains themselves are large, spacious and air-conditioned. And they seem to move incredibly quickly. It took me about four minutes to get from Paddington to Tottenham Court Road tube station. The station efficiently deposits you, with a great sense of drama, at the top end of Dean Street.

As you emerge from the futuristic travel experience, the whole of the old road opens up before you: there’s the Private Eye office on the right, Quo Vadis on the left and the French House at the end.

My whole body felt elated and I bowled down the middle of Dean Street with the casual insouciance and bonhomie of a Parisian flâneur who has just heard his novel about the 19th-century peasantry has won the Prix Goncourt. Such is the power of good architecture and design.

I liked the Elizabethan Line so much that even when my injury had healed, I made excuses to travel on it again. Such was my enthusiasm that I even briefly contemplated moving to an area served by an Elizabeth Line station, maybe West Ealing or Acton, as the line tragically misses out Shepherd’s Bush, where I live.

It’s been 100 years in the making.

According to TfL, ‘An east-west tube railway linking mainline termini was first proposed in 1919, by the Underground’s Commercial Manager, Frank Pick, and again in the 1943 County of London Plan.’

Work finally began in 2011 with the tunnelling, which took four years. Then came the station-building operation, which ran from 2016 to 2021. Trains started running in May 2022.

The glorious Elizabeth Line is all part of TfL’s laudable efforts to reduce the city’s dependence on cars. How different from Silicon Valley’s ludicrous self-driving-car dream – a fantasy that will never happen and which has wasted billions of dollars.

OK, the Elizabeth Line cost a reported £19 billion, but what a great investment, which improves everywhere it touches.

Far from being a stinking vapourbath of discontented humanity, the Elizabeth Line is an air-conditioned chaise longue of cheerful humans, filled with positive thoughts.

Country Mouse

Music is not the food of love, says Mary giles wood

My wife enquired why I have such an appetite for listening to what she calls ‘maddening’ music.

It all started at Shrewsbury School in the 1970s. Our time outside lessons was our own, and one afternoon I was so utterly bored that I wandered up to my dorm and turned on the wireless. It was Radio 3 and they were playing Putnam’s Camp, a piece by the American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954). I was instantly hooked – and it started a lifelong interest in the composer whom Leonard Bernstein described as ‘a primitive’.

This term is a misnomer. Ives was in fact an outsider, a businessman by day who composed – by night, or while on the train to work – music of the utmost sophistication. He anticipated the modern techniques of layering and collage, the use of half-tones and microtones.

In his attempt to recreate the sounds of his childhood, he was not content just to transcribe the sounds of one marching band; he would superimpose the sound of another marching band simultaneously playing a different tune.

This was a revolutionary act in music.

Today his music is well established in the repertoire and has lost its once cult status.

Boredom, along with this burgeoning interest in Ives, were the prompts that drew me to join the Listeners Society at the school.

Half a dozen boys would be invited on an evening to a master’s private quarters to listen to the master’s (never the boys’) favourite classical music.

Yes, it was a queasy experience to be led to an easy chair in the underlit and stuffy private quarters of a schoolmaster; although some were married, the majority then were misfits or bachelors. Even though the staff flats were spartan, it was a chance to escape the rough justice and barrack-like conditions prevalent in the school houses and feel the novelty of

treading carpets underfoot. A carpet, even if moth-eaten, was a reminder of home.

A horror awaited me one particularly wintry evening when we assembled in the quarters of the kapellmeister and head of the music department. A strict disciplinarian, he would have been more suited to a career directing athletic youngsters at America’s West Point Academy for the training of potential army officers. Even the headmaster was allegedly intimidated by him.

That night, the work he chose to inflict on our cohort of willing listeners was Stimmung by Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 -2007) – a groundbreaking work based on vocal harmonies and featuring Stockhausen’s own, excruciatingly bad, erotic poems.

Never had we boys been so grateful to return to our bleak houses after the 75-minute ordeal.

There is a postscript for Stockhausen.

When, to an audience in Hamburg, he declared that the events of 9/11 were ‘the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos’, the ensuing scandal overshadowed his extraordinary musical career.

But full marks to the school for introducing me and others to difficult modern music – including a school subscription concert with Peter Maxwell Davies. His Eight Songs for a Mad King was memorable, not for the dissonance and shrieking clarinets we have come to expect from ‘attention-seeking’ modern music, but for the bizarre reaction of the deputy headmaster’s wife.

An amateur clarinettist herself, Mrs Charlesworth very brazenly left the concert hall mid-performance with her fingers in her ears.

On the same evening, another group of boys was being introduced to the Gothic Symphony by little-known English composer Havergal Brian

(1876-1972), who appears in the Guinness Book of Records as composer of the largest symphony ever written – the ‘Gothic’, requiring a double orchestra of 200 players, four vast choirs and a fistful of soloists.

The Brian introduction was courtesy of a maths teacher, short of stature, sallow of complexion and of slightly fey appearance. He registers in my memory bank only because of his penchant for almost mowing boys down while driving his purple Jaguar on the single track to the refectory, nudging them out of the way with his bumper as though they were sheep. It was the sort of thing that could have happened only in the 1970s. Today’s equivalent schoolboys would be seeing therapists for PTSD. In any case, the boys reported back to me that the Havergal Brian symphony had lasted a whopping 105 minutes. Only this winter have I begun to listen to Brian myself. A self-taught working-class composer, born in the romantically named Dresden, in the Potteries, near to my own birthplace, he is like an English version of Charles Ives, and also an outsider.

I am completely smitten by his work even though I find some of it unintelligible. His music is incredibly interesting. Its notable characteristics are its restlessness and discontinuity – the perfect reflection of modern life.

What my wife does not realise is that these exposures to difficult music have imbued me with an infinite capacity for endurance. They have served me well on gridlocked motorways and in passport queues. They have given me the patience to be able to break through a psychological pain barrier and continue listening, to hear out what seems to Mary like a vexatious cacophony – because much of difficult music reveals its secrets only after multiple hearings.

They gave me something to do in the evenings. In a state day school, turfed out at 3pm, I would probably have chosen to head for the nearest park and sniff glue.

‘Just taking the dog out…’

The Oldie March 2024 41

Postcards from the Edge

Parlez-vous Phrase-Book French?

TOBY MORISON

Old foreign-language guides made for wonderful, accidental comedy says Mary Kenny Foreign-language phrase books are a reflection of the manners and mores of past times.

Until the 1980s, ‘Would you like a cigarette?’ and ‘Can I smoke in this carriage?’ were examples of how to make conversation in French, German, Italia, and so on. Then, no more. ​Older language guides are sometimes marked by class – evidently people who visited continental Europe used to be posher. I’ve inherited from a deceased cousin E E Patou’s French à la Mode, published in 1932, which illuminates the social position of contemporary travellers.

Instructions are issued on how to conduct oneself ‘chez le grand couturier’, book tickets for the opera and interview a servant.

It includes the rules for ‘the hand kiss’.

‘A Frenchman kisses the hand of a married woman of his own social rank, but not that of a girl.’

It is bad form to turn on the radio or play music after 11pm, and the postman delivers five times daily. The fashionable places to visit include Longchamp, Le Touquet and Biarritz. One plays golf as a guest at Chantilly. ​E E Patou also wrote a German equivalent, An Englishman in Germany, which reveals social values of the early 1930s. Young ladies are addressed as ‘Gnadiges fraülein’, and ‘many men wear monocles’.

Useful phrases to understand include: ‘I have seen the great Russian 42 The Oldie March 2024

tenor in Dresden’; ‘Where is the baroness this evening?’ ‘Mrs Rossetti receives every Wednesday’; and ‘Since the war, the police all over Europe are very strict.’

There is a prescient note with the instructive conversational sentence: ‘My father has a strong prejudice against foreign husbands for German girls.’

At the start of this year, I was launched into a new obsession. It was a pedometer/step-counter app, which measures every step you take. Within a short time, I’d become a slave to it. ​A fit adult needs to walk 10,000 paces a day to stay healthy.

For older people, 5,000 daily steps is acceptable.

Even 3,000 steps is quite good for a not very agile oldie. And so my days became shaped around not only the number of steps taken, but the reaction of the app.

My count varied: 4,243 one day, 3,825 another; a virtuous 7,385 one day; a commendable 5,879 another. And when I hit the 8,000, the gadget gave me a little round of applause. ​Such is our childish craving for approval that I began to worry that, should I fall behind with my steps, I would earn a black mark. Some days, when the weather has been inclement, I’ve taken to walking up and down stairs repeatedly, just to enhance my step rating. ​On encouraging days, I fantasise that I might develop into an outstanding walker, like Nietzsche, or Hilaire Belloc.

How the app would cheer me when I tackle the Camino de Santiago! ​Until this innovation, walking bored me. I’d walk in the course of a day, but not with much enthusiasm. But now I’m in competition with my paces achieved daily, like a schoolchild striving for a gold star from a teacher. ​It sure prompts exercise. It also tells you a lot about human psychology.

It’s a common complaint that young people don’t now write thank-you letters, or even send messages. This disturbs me less – I allow youth a certain heedlessness – than another practice: oldies seem less inclined to respond to letters of condolence. ​In the course of natural events, I send about half a dozen condolence letters (or sympathy cards) yearly; but over the last twelve months, only two out of six bereaved recipients responded.

It feels as though your condolences, framed as comfortingly as you can, are ignored. ​The Irish used to issue ‘memorial cards’ – some still do – with a few holy quotations alongside a picture of the departed. This memorial was sent as an acknowledgement of a condolence message. It struck a rather nice note of remembrance. ​I believe etiquette considers a letter of condolence more ‘correct’ than a commercial sympathy card. But some people like to display sympathy cards in their homes, as a tribute to the loved one who has, as some now say, ‘passed’.

An old man is praying at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, loudly intoning his incantations. A reporter approaches him and asks, ‘May I ask you what you are praying for, sir?’ ‘World peace,’ says the old fellow. ‘But I might as well be talking to the wall.’ The veteran Jewish joke is sadly continuously contemporary.

Sophia Waugh: School Days

My classroom isn’t a dentist’s surgery, Keir Esther McVey MP is a Minister without Portfolio – but she’s been nicknamed the Minister for Common Sense.

It isn’t an official title, but it’s a very loud advertisement for the lack of common sense ruling this land for the past few years.

The good old term ‘common sense’ is being thrown around by every Tom, Dick or Harry hoping for a vote.

Now that people can’t really talk about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ without raising someone’s hackles, there has to be some other way of taking the moral high ground. ‘Common sense’ appears to be it. ​The latest hero to join in is our future Prime Minister, Sir Keir. But no sooner does someone start talking about common sense than you begin to wonder whether their argument fits into that newly fashionable box. ​Hence Sir Keir’s ‘big new idea’ – to get schools to teach children how to brush their own teeth. And to anyone who thinks this a little bit (ahem) nanny state, he has an answer: ‘If anyone wants to fight me on this question of the nanny state or common sense – bring it on.’

‘Bring it on’ is a favourite phrase of his.

44 The Oldie March 2024

​We teachers of older ‘kids’ won’t have to be in charge of brushing their teeth. I’d be frightened that some of them might bite me if I tried. But Starmer is transferring another job, that should be the parents’, onto hard-pressed teachers.

Next, he will ask us to sort out the obesity of ‘kids’. ​I’ve done many things in my career as a teacher that have nothing to do with how to analyse A Christmas Carol. I’ve handed a pregnancy test over a lavatory stall to a sobbing child. I’ve quietly suggested to a stinking boy that he ask his mother (father/guardian etc) to wash his shirt.

I’ve given advice, mopped tears and listened to tales of woe, ambition and fear. But they all happened in the moment, and came from what I suppose is my heart. I have never been instructed to do any of those things by the Government. ​I’ve seen children with black teeth and wobbling bellies and wondered about their parents and how they let their children get to such a state. But I haven’t considered it my business to interfere.

I also know the parents and the children would be furious if I did.

​There are no dentists. The SouthWest, where I teach, is one of the worst-affected areas of Britain in this respect. Everyone is poor, and fast food is cheap. Aren’t those the areas politicians should tackle first?

Rather than have teachers brushing little Johnny’s stumps, shouldn’t dentists be sent into schools to give check-ups in the way nit nurses used to turn up and check us?

Expensive, yes, but, luckily, cancelling non-dom status is going to pay for almost everything we are promised. Set up short courses at cookery schools to teach parents how to cook cheaply and well.

Teach the children the same. ​The lockdown did make many parents realise how much more we do than teach.

We are babysitters and advisers. We encourage the good and discourage the bad. Sometimes we even make our pupils laugh.

What we are not is doctors, nurses or dental hygienists. If this carries on, we’ll be asked to shave their downy cheeks and wax their stubbly legs. ​Please can I go back to Dickens and Shakespeare? That is, after all, my forte.

sister teresa

Who wants to be a Catholic?

I spent five long years at a strict Paris convent boarding school studying l’histoire de l’église.

This failed to engage my attention all that time. The Middle Ages seemed interminable and monotonous, and 12 was far too young to be reading Montaigne.

I had hardly given the subject any thought until Piers Paul Read’s A History of the Catholic Church recently came my way. At first, my heart sank: more of the same, 65 years on.

On opening the book at random, I found a lucidity of style very far removed from its French counterpart.

Also, it is packed with information and intriguing details which summon one to further investigation.

With the help of the passing years, I was no longer trying to assimilate a mass of names and tiny details written in a foreign language. Read runs through the centuries in a way that is fully comprehensible. Thanks perhaps to my schoolgirl studies, many of the names

and situations turned out to confess that I don’t always be familiar, and there was agree with Read. He is an no longer the huge effort ‘old-school’ Catholic, involved in memorising whereas I have found, to minutiae in order to attain my great relief, that the a pass mark. I was able to Church has moved a huge enjoy myself. distance since the end of I looked up Montaigne: the Second Vatican Council the first modern man. Read in 1965. I have no nostalgia tells us that he was no for the so-called good old scholar and seldom read days, especially when it books right through, comes to the religious life. although he dipped into a Many traditions were tired vast number of works by Montaigne: 1st modern man and outmoded, and did a the thinkers of antiquity. great deal of harm.

Furthermore, and sympathetically, Rather disarmingly, the author admits when asked about the nature of God, at the end of his prologue that two of his Montaigne said he knew very little friends ‘agreed that no one after reading about it. This strikes me as a very it could possibly want to be a Catholic’. frank and realistic appreciation of the But the question as to whether or not transcendence of God, and one that someone wants to be a Catholic is a far so many Christians of our time fail less important one than ‘Do you believe to recognise. in God?’ If this is the question that this I marvel at the research and reading book is really asking – and I believe it that a book like this entails, and am could be – then, even if it is controversial, deeply grateful for them – but I must it is also evangelisation.

Memorial Service

Anthony Holden (1947-2023) Melvyn Bragg led the tributes to Anthony Holden, the writer and journalist, at St Martin-in-theFields. Lord Bragg’s daughter, the Rev Marie-Elsa Roche Bragg, gave the blessing and led the prayers.

A glittering young star of the Sunday Times in Harold Evans’s day, Holden nearly became editor of the Times. He wrote 37 books, including biographies of Prince Charles, Princess Diana, the Queen Mother and Laurence Olivier and two books on Shakespeare.

‘At one stage, his rating as a poker player was higher than any Englishman’s rating as a tennis player,’ said Lord Bragg. ‘From there, sidestep to [his biography of] Tchaikovsky – I think his best book. He took risks in it, which proved to be valid.

46 The Oldie March 2024

‘He was immensely proud of his three boys, Ben, Joe and Sam. He kept his friends in constant repair, as Dr Johnson advised, even when he was cruelly cut down by his stroke.’

Tony’s son Joe told a story from his father’s book A Writer’s Life: ‘Waiting at Miami airport’s Gate 2B, we passengers were told over the public address system that the flight had been shifted to Gate 2A. Once we had all dutifully filed over there, I could not resist approaching the desk and demanding of the harassed airline attendant: “2B or not 2B?” ’ ‘We first met in 1968 in Oxford,’ said Gyles Brandreth. ‘I fell for him at once.

He was such a delight. I wrote in my diary at the time, “Tony is one of my

favourite people – except he smokes and drinks all the time.” Forty years later, he said to me, “Still do, Gyles, still do.” ’ Tina Brown, a Sunday Times colleague, who later married the editor Harold Evans and became editor of the New Yorker, gave a tribute.

Magnus Linklater, Holden’s news editor at the Sunday Times, said, ‘We agreed we had worked together in Fleet Street’s golden period, that the expenses had been absurd, the lunches too long, the time spent in El Vino’s and the Blue Lion reprehensible, but of one thing we were certain: our reminiscences, carefully edited for effect, were far superior to anyone else’s.’

Simon Russell Beale read from The Tempest. The hymns were Abide with Me and Jerusalem.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

See your GP? An impossible dream

Visiting the same doctor regularly is good for you – if you can dr theodore dalrymple General practice in the NHS is to the patient what the river was to Heraclitus: a patient cannot get to see the same doctor twice.

This is both inhuman and wasteful of time and effort. A doctor who knows his or her patient retains a lot of implicit knowledge about them that cannot be fully conveyed in medical notes.

The consultation begins the moment the patient comes through the door of the consulting room, and the doctor can glean much by the way the patient enters – especially if he or she knows them well already.

Continuity of care, as it is called, used to be standard, but is so no longer. An article in the British Medical Journal salutes its virtues in medical practice and laments its decline.

The reasons for this decline are several, among them an insufficient number of general practitioners, of whom fewer than a quarter now practise full time.

Demand rises and supply falls, with the result that obtaining an appointment to see a GP is now like tackling an obstacle course.

An appointment is a proof of determination and perseverance. It is experienced either as a win on the lottery or as a triumph over the Cerberus-like receptionists or telephonists, whose main task seems to be the prevention of medical consultation.

No doubt the final award of an appointment after much supplication (for everyone is a pauper at the court of the NHS, even if a well-treated one) exerts a brief placebo effect. But it soon dissipates, while difficulties in obtaining an appointment exert the opposite: a nocebo effect.

One might have thought that continuity of care in general practice is so obviously desirable that it requires no proof. But we live in intellectually scrupulous times in which every assertion must have a full panoply of evidence in its favour.

The article provides it. Continuity of care results in, or is associated with: fewer hospital admissions; fewer visits to the doctor; better adherence to treatment (what used to be called compliance, a term now rejected as demeaning to the patient); and even reduced mortality.

Most medical benefits come with some disadvantages, however. The principal disadvantage of continuity of care in general practice is the relative slowness of a doctor who knows a patient well to recognise that new symptoms may signify new diseases.

If you are a hypochondriac wellknown to, and forever bothering, your doctor, he or she might be inclined to dismiss your new symptoms as just further baseless complaint; but even hypochondriacs are mortal. There is actual evidence that continuity of care delays diagnosis of cancer by (on average) a few days.

On the other hand, if you are a hypochondriac and see a different doctor every time you attend, you are more likely to be subjected to unnecessary

investigations, not all of them innocuous.

Continuity of care has declined in hospital as well as in general practice. My mother was in hospital for five weeks before she died. She saw the surgeon nominally in charge of her care only twice in that time, once at my insistence.

And it was quite clear on both occasions that he had not the faintest idea who she was or what was wrong with her.

This is the very antithesis of humane medicine. But then common humanity has insufficient evidence in its favour to render it desirable in any managerial drive for efficiency.

Some of the decline in continuity of care is the result of organisational choice.

Where it is not valued, because seeing one doctor is supposed to be as good as seeing another, whether or not he or she knows you, speed of access becomes the Holy Grail.

Most patients, however, are willing to wait, except in an emergency, to see the same doctor twice. But, as Heraclitus would have pointed out, that is impossible.

‘So this is Hell? It looks just like my old cubicle’ The Oldie March 2024 47

The Oldie, 23–31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk To sign up for our e-newsletter, go to www.theoldie.co.uk

My mad neighbour SIR: ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser (Old Un’s Notes, February issue) was my neighbour in a newly-built block of council flats in Duncan Street, Angel, Islington, in 1985-6.

Like Adolf Hitler and like me, he had served as a Catholic altar boy, before training as a dental auxiliary.

Apart from the hair, treated with monumental quantities of Grecian 2000, two vivid memories: Black cabbies regularly dropping him off with a cheery greeting and gratis, as if he was some kind of hero.

A nasty fire in my outside dustbin shed housing the gas supply, requiring our temporary evacuation – presumably intended for Frankie, two staircases away.

Happy days!

Yours sincerely, Anthony Weaver, London WC2

Magic of fat fairies SIR: I am dropping you a line after seeing the cartoon by Kathryn Lamb (among the Readers’ Letters in the January issue) depicting a heavyweight, amply proportioned Christmas-tree fairy.

My wife, Gilli, who was an artist, illustrator and author, created the family Christmas card each year from 1965, when she had just turned 17, until 2022.

48 The Oldie March 2024

‘One of my five million a day’

My darling Gilli died in October last year and, if she were still with us, would have been amused by Kathryn Lamb’s seasonal drollery, because Gilli had come up with the same image 51 years earlier in her design for her 1972 card.

Gilli and Kathryn clearly share the same sense of humour.

Geoffrey Williams, Ruscombe, Stroud, Gloucestershire

Ticket to the past SIR: As a regular reader, I was especially pleased to see the article about collecting matchbox labels (January issue). This is because I, and a few hundred others, collect another item of forgotten ephemera, namely the humble bus / train ticket. Not so long ago, there were millions of these issued yearly in the UK and they were fine examples of the typesetter’s art. Now, if we get a ticket at all, it is just a scrap of computer print-out which will not last 12 months.

We do of course have a society, the Transport Ticket Society, with a monthly journal. I am enclosing a copy of one of my recent publications [right].

Keep up the good work!

Martin Easteal, Remembrance of Harlow, Essex tickets past

Titter titter SIR: Gyles Brandreth’s mention of the sometime Warden of All Souls, John Sparrow, brought back an anecdote told me by a friend, an Oxford student in the ’60s, during Sparrow’s tenure.

The Warden had indulged in one of his public outbursts of misogyny, outraging – as he had intended – a considerable proportion of the city’s undergraduates.

One or more of these responded in large white letters on a very public wall, asking, ‘Can you tell a sparrow from a tit?’

Griff Everett, Milford Belper, Derbyshire

‘If it’s really a “man’s world”, why do we always end up vacuuming it?’

Pipe down SIR: I look forward to my Oldie every month and generally wholeheartedly agree with the reflections on things lost to the past. However, having spent last summer at the deathbed of a dear friend and former pipe-smoker, dying from oesophageal cancer, enduring three lots of surgery to insert ever bigger stents and

unable to eat, I cannot agree with Nicholas Lezard’s eulogy of pipe-smoking.

Don’t do it, chaps. It’s not big and it’s not clever.

Jane Jones, Chester, Cheshire

followed, a man in the audience near me shouted, ‘Get ’em off!’

There were gasps and groans of disapproval. All eyes turned to La Dors to see how she would react. After years of experience working in clubs and cabaret she was totally unfazed. She slowly leaned forwards to the microphone and said in a low voice, ‘You couldn’t afford it, love.’

The audience laughed and applauded.

The ice was broken. And she continued her act uninterrupted.

Ian Graham, Holt, Norfolk

I served tea at Number 10

Swinging Dors SIR: John Temple’s article about Anne Shelton (January issue) reminded me of seeing her performing live on stage in Belfast in the 1960s. I believe she was headlining a show in aid of the Royal Artillery Association.

This annual charity show attracted big-name stars from Britain. I remember seeing Dick Emery, Jon Pertwee (the third Doctor Who), the Beverley Sisters, comedians Jewel and Warriss, and a popular duo called Rawicz and Landauer who played spirited arrangements of classical pieces on two back-to-back grand pianos.

The most memorable entertainer to grace the show was Diana Dors. She topped the bill in 1968 when I was an impressionable 15-year-old and she was 37. She was the most glamorous woman I have ever seen. I vividly remember her walking onto the stage in a figure-hugging silver satin dress matching her platinum-blonde hair. She waited patiently at the microphone for the loud, long applause to stop.

In the moment of silence that

SIR: I have read both Quentin Letts’s review (January issue) of Linda McDougall’s Marcia Williams and the book itself. In case any of your readers were tempted to do the same, I would like to mention at least two points, one of remarkable insensitivity, and one of pure fantasy.

McDougall reports Marcia’s complaint that the civil servants at No 10 did not give Harold Wilson the customary ovation – never an ‘ovation’ in those less emotional days. A subdued sense of loss and sadness for the departure of a loved and respected leader is surely only human, as adjustments are made to greet a successor who has made a series of derogatory remarks about the ways and inmates of No 10 before arriving.

The fantasy element is in describing the senior civil servants as gathering in the Private Office in the afternoon to chat and sip tea out of Crown Derby cups! I was a Duty Clerk in the Private Office at the time, and one of my routine chores was twice a day to receive a tray and distribute round the desks an assortment of slightly dripping mugs, perilously heaved up by rope in the Victorian paper lift from the offices below, where clerical staff made tea and coffee in addition to their normal work.

These drinks were then consumed while normal desk work continued.

'I had that dream again, where I turn to stone and sit in front of a library'

There were no in-house catering arrangements at all in those days, not even an office tea trolley. Night-duty staff brought in and cooked their suppers and breakfasts – in my earliest days, in the vast subterranean kitchen, as seen in National Trust Georgian houses.

These corrections merely scratch the surface of the years of tension and noisy altercation that followed.

Oh, there is also a misleading element in The Oldie’s illustration. Harold never smoked a pipe. It lived in his Gannex pocket for public appearances.

He preferred the high-quality cigars provided on the drinks tray in the Cabinet Room – kept stocked by the taxpayer through the Government Hospitality Fund.

Yours ever, Anne Kiggell, Headington, Oxford

‘There are many reasons for your dismissal, but let’s blame it on climate change’

Benny Hill’s Top Ten SIR: I enjoyed the article about Benny Hill (February issue) but feel that mention should be made of his considerable number of very amusing songs, which he composed and recorded with Pye and Tony Hatch.

I still have two 45rpm records, which I bought in 1961: one The Piccolo Song and Lonely Boy; the other Transistor Radio and Gypsy Rock.

In addition, I have an LP called Benny Hill Sings? (the question mark was in the title), containing 14 songs, which I bought a little later; it includes My Garden of Love and The Egg Marketing Board Tango. He certainly gave us a lot of laughs in the early 1960s, leading on ultimately to the famous song about the milkman.

Richard Wheeler, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire The Oldie March 2024 49

I Once Met

Ryan O’Neal father, in apricot silk, wig and heels, A Georgian grandee, in plum velvet, with storms up Longleat’s great staircase to singularly blue eyes, stares out from the find me sprawled, centre set, on a blurry Polaroid. Standing by him is a boy four-poster bed, playing with a deranged grin. draughts with Stanley The child is me; the Kubrick.

18th-century aristocrat is the There I glimpse Ryan. I am actor Ryan O’Neal (1941only vaguely interested. For 2023). It is July 1974 and me, he is a mere adjunct to we’ve been snapped on the set his daughter Tatum, on of Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry whom I have a crush, after Lyndon, in which O’Neal plays seeing Paper Moon, in the title role. which they co-star, for my I’m there because my father, birthday treat.

André Morell, is also in the film Jason and Ryan Days later, in a break (my mother was the actress after one of Stanley’s innumerable takes, Joan Greenwood). His determination to Ryan engages me in conversation. keep me away from showbusiness has God knows what ‘stardom’ is. The been thwarted by the long summer holidays. There is nowhere else for me to go. term has been abused and misapplied beyond measure. But whatever starry We are filming at Longleat House, attributes consist of, Ryan O’Neal has whose grounds are littered with moththem. The pheromones pour off him eaten lions, dazed by drizzle. My father effortlessly. He smells of hairspray, crisp bribes me with handfuls of loose change to spend on the ‘attractions’, with the stern new silk and himself, and speaks in a injunction that I must ‘NEVER go on set.’ clear, quiet voice.

I am entirely disarmed by his I share my loot with Vivian Kubrick, flattering azure gaze and generous Stanley’s twelve-year-old daughter. interest in my jejune opinions. He sees When my cash is exhausted and Vivian has slapped me for attempting to kiss her through my hideous precocity and accepts me as I am, and I am instantly on the dodgems, she suggests we ‘go see besotted.

Dad on set’. Resistance is useless.

He suggests a photograph. A Hearing of this transgression, my

photographer appears. I pull an absurd face. The fatal flash flashes, and the Polaroid emerges. I am preserved, eternally, as a gurning idiot, with my new best friend. My dismay is palpable. Ryan covers graciously: ‘I look pretty funny too.’ Of course he doesn’t.

July turns into August. I am retained in Ryan’s intoxicating favour. During another lengthy break, my father, waistcoat unbuttoned, on the eve of his 65th birthday, is dozing. To curry favour with Ryan, as a boyish harum-scarum, I suggest tugging my father’s wig to wake him.

The unwinking blue eyes meet mine. ‘If Tatum tried that on me, I’d break her arm.’

My stomach flips. A real lion – no shabby Longleat imitation – has come to the aid of the oldest member of the pride.

The foolish cub is cuffed aside.

Summer is ending. We are now at Blenheim Palace. School looms and home beckons. Stanley and Ryan break off filming to say goodbye. I am gritting my teeth to stem my tears. With great sweetness and sincerity, Ryan assures me that our paths will cross again. I nod fervently, unable to speak.

Our paths did not cross again. Now, alas, they never will. But I’m very glad he said they would. RIP Ryan O’Neal.

Jason Morell

Mrs Thatcher’s duel with Helmut Kohl

On 17th September 1986, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Chancellor Helmut Kohl were to visit British Forces Germany. I was the responsible Chief of Staff.

My Corps Commander briefed me: ‘We’ll send the Prime Minister and Chancellor down the range in main battle tanks ... make sure she hits the target!’

I headed for BergenHohne ranges on historic Lüneburg Heath to set things up. The Royal Hussars would man the British 50 The Oldie March 2024

Challenger; 24th Panzers, the German Leopard.

‘Make sure she hits the target,’ said I crisply, as practice began.

On the day, RAF helicopters flew in the VIPs. Eighty reporters were clustered near the PM’s spin master, Bernard Ingham: ‘Are you in charge, Brigadier?’

‘I am if this goes wrong!’ I responded.

‘Make sure she hits the target,’ he barked.

Tank Commanders Hauptmann Spier and Sergeant Steve Penkethman, with Leopard and Challenger crews, stood ready. The PM stole the fashion show: with dashing, biscuit-beige coat, white silk scarf tossed over head and shoulders, plus

that essential accessory matching goggles, Thatcher was dressed to kill.

‘A cross between Lawrence of Arabia and Isadora Duncan,’ reported the Telegraph.

On the firing point, the national leaders locked tank guns onto their targets, the main armaments exploded with a flash of smoke and laser beams sent 120mm shells unerringly to their objective, 1,500 metres away. Then they were off, surging down the battle run with a rumble of iron-clad horsepower and billowing dust, returning to nervous applause from anxious generals.

‘I loved it!’ exclaimed Mrs Thatcher. ‘I was so relieved we hit the target.’

‘First-time hit!’ Sergeant Penkethman told a breathless press corps. ‘I’ll give her a job when she finishes!’

Chancellor Kohl smiled.

Bernard Ingham chuckled.

‘Bullseye, Maggie,’ headlined the Express.

‘Maggie shells Russia,’ shouted the Mirror.

Four years after the Falklands war, iconic tank photographs on the front pages, restored Thatcher’s fading ‘Iron Lady’ image. She continued in office; I still have my signed programme.

By Peter Duffell, Salisbury, Wiltshire, who receIves £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

Books King of the Road HUGO VICKERS Charles III: New King. New Court.

The Inside Story

By Robert Hardman

GARY WING

Macmillan £22 Having just plodded through the final episodes of The Crown with undisguised displeasure, I found it a tonic to turn to Robert Hardman’s considerably more welcome book.

It is authoritative from the start, since Hardman was able to talk to the Princess Royal (always worth listening to), to the King’s advisers at a high level, and sources such as Dr Jill Biden, Rishi Sunak and the Queen’s sister, Annabel Elliot. He also spent a year observing the King at close quarters for the documentary shown on Boxing Day 2023. ​In a review of a book by a colleague/ friend, it is acceptable to tease him a bit – and tempting to adopt an Ali Forbes approach (older Oldie-readers will recall Ali’s meticulous dissection, in his reviews, of the authors). I need to explore his modus operandi.

In his years at first the Daily Telegraph and now the Daily Mail, Hardman has always been the voice of reason.

Unlike other journalists, he is a man in a suit, and not a light suit either. I watched him on the late Queen’s state visit to Pakistan in 1997. Smartly dressed, often with a clipboard in his hand, he could easily have been mistaken for one of the Royal Household. He would walk alongside them, chatting ‘man to man’, and a hesitant local policeman or guard would, on balance, let him through rather than risk turning the wrong man away. It would be safe to let him in. ​Because he interviewed the sources 52 The Oldie March 2024

Charles III discovered he was King on a roadside near Balmoral

quoted here for the documentary, no one would expect him to pass harsh judgements – and nor does he. His job, well-achieved, was to get them to talk.

So he is an umpire rather than a judge.

‘We can give him that,’ is an expression he sometimes employs in lectures, to concede an error made by one of his cast of characters.

He forgave the makers of The Crown for muddling Prince Philip’s medals in Kenya in 1952 (I didn’t), but he castigated them for resurrecting the late Duke of Gloucester for the Silver Jubilee three years after his death in 1974. ​So to the new book. It is not a biography of the King. It is a look at a

year in his life tying in with the Boxing Day documentary. It contains two set pieces of considerable historical value – 65 pages on the transition from the Queen to the new King, and then 121 pages on the King’s Coronation.

In Ali Forbes mode, I did of course know that the King was not at Balmoral when the Queen died, but Hardman has the scoop, revealing that Prince Charles visited her in the morning and then retired briefly to Birkhall, seven and a half miles away.

Alerted that the end was near, he was driving along an unmarked road when Sir Edward Young, the Queen’s Private Secretary, attempted to call him. As he

was at the wheel, he did not answer, but a protection officer did. The Prince pulled over to be told that he was now King.

So, as Hardman puts it, Elizabeth II was in a tree in Kenya, and he was in his car at the side of a road when the moment of accession came. When he arrived at the castle, he was asked by which name he wished to be known. The answer: Charles III. Hardman gives us a long and fascinating account of the days that followed, the drive through Scotland, Operation Unicorn in Edinburgh, the procession through London, funeral service and committal.

He clearly got his hands (as I did) on the Guards Magazine in which there are precise and touching details of the organisation behind the scenes – such as the return of the state trumpeters from Canada, the summoning of a Gentleman at Arms from a family wedding in Corfu and the intricate night-time rehearsals. ​The way Princess Anne accompanied her mother’s coffin all the way from Balmoral to Windsor was immensely moving, not least when she curtsied to her mother’s coffin at Holyroodhouse. To this he adds a touching detail – that a senior official at Balmoral was minded to give Princess Anne a brief, comforting hug soon after her mother had died.

She accepted it and added, ‘That’s the last time that’s going to happen.’ ​Hardman was a studio expert at the BBC for the Coronation, and here we get the most in-depth account of that event that we are ever likely to find. Again he does not pass judgement.

I am more critical of the Archbishop, having seen the notes he circulated to the media before the ceremony. These indicated a dislike of any form of tradition. Grudgingly, the prelate accepted that certain participants had established a historic right to be present.

It was clear that tradition had gone out of the window. Some new features worked well – in particular the greeting of the chorister from the Chapel Royal.

If there were differences between the Archbishop and the King, Hardman does not tell us. I think there were – over his sermon which we did not need, and the public making a pledge of allegiance.

I preferred the majestic way Arcbishop Fisher crowned Elizabeth II, following the crowning with a sweep of his hands heavenward, to Welby’s screwing the crown on the King’s head and then stepping back to wonder whether his handiwork required a further tweak.

Hardman is right that the King was well-trained for the job. He had a game plan for the monarchy (but had kept this

close to his chest). In no way does he consider himself a stop-gap monarch.

His hour has come and he intends to make full use of it. He is a workaholic, and has a fine appreciation of Shakespeare and the arts. He is a great convener, and ‘the most significant environmental figure in history’.

Hardman discusses the King’s love of Windsor Castle. The castle looked a bit forlorn after the Queen’s death.

Windsorians had become used to the Royal Standard flying over the Round Tower almost daily between March 2020 and July 2022. When Hardman says the King can take pleasure in the treasures of Windsor ‘without being ridiculed for feeling it’, what he is saying (politely) is ‘without his father breathing down his neck’. To lose both parents within a short period of time (at any age) entails huge realignments and readjustments, but brings with it a sense of liberation and the opportunity for change. ​Sadly, I suppose inevitably, some print is devoted to the Sussexes. On page 65, Hardman is generous in stating that ‘Fortuitously … the Sussexes happened to be in Britain’ when the Queen died.

I would have said ‘Regrettably’ – as then, as so often, they hogged the narrative.

The revelation that the Queen was horrified at them calling their daughter Lilibet, her childhood nickname, chimes with what the British public suspected.

The King has been wise in not responding to barbs from Montecito, but in keeping the door open for the return, at least, of Prince Harry. Hardman tells us that the King’s line is ‘I don’t want to know what the problem is. I’m just getting on with my life.’

In conclusion, this book is a most engaging introduction to the new reign.

Hugo Vickers has written biographies of the Queen Mother, the Duchess of Windsor and Queen Mary

Roaming Romans

PAUL CARTLEDGE Legion: Life in the Roman Army

By Richard Abdy British Museum Press £45 The British Museum has been having a bit of a torrid time of late.

To its rescue and even perhaps rehabilitation (something BP’s £50m subvention deal will not achieve) comes its first major exhibition of 2024, open now: Legion: Life in the Roman Army.

The title and subtitle are suitably

What the Romans did for us: mummy portraits from Fayum, Egypt, c 190 AD

punchy, but they’re also more than slightly misleading. By no means all soldiers and auxiliary support personnel in Rome’s prodigiously far-flung imperial armies were either legionaries or serving a legion. (The exhibition’s handsome catalogue under review here has an excellent map of the Empire at its greatest extent, in about 117 AD.) Strictly, too, ‘and death’ should have been added to the subtitle after ‘life’.

No matter. As the exhibition’s expert curator, Peter Abdy (the BM’s Curator of Roman and Iron Age coins), modestly puts it in his stimulating introduction, ‘The ancient Romans have long excited the modern imagination.’

Yes indeed, and what – else – have they done for us? The great Roman historian Tacitus cynically observed that, in conquering our Britannic ancestors (Britannia became a Roman province in 43 AD), they also seduced and enslaved them with the arts and comforts of civilisation. Put differently, for centuries Rome brought, imposed and maintained peace, or at least pacification, across a vast tract of the ancient world.

Tacitus, though, again sounds cautionary notes. As one of his speaking characters – a local Caledonian chieftain, as it happens, one Calgacus – memorably protests, ‘Where they create a wasteland, they call it “peace”.’

The first Roman emperor, Augustus, did indeed – as he many times boasted – bring peace, but, as Tacitus imagines some anonymous critics of his expostulating at his deificatory funeral in 14 AD, it came at the cost of an enormous amount of bloodshed.

This is a salutary thought to be borne in mind, perhaps, as one views among the hundreds of objects on display the magnificent, mainly bronze head of Augustus, the self-styled Princeps (‘Boss’ – Gibbon labelled him a ‘subtle tyrant’), excavated a century ago in Sudan and since then housed in the BM. The Oldie March 2024 53

CHRIS BOSWORTH / ALAMY

Like that head, a very great many of the BM’s permanent collection of eight million or so artefacts are not British – at least not in origin. Its large Roman holding is a more than solid basis for an exhibition that most impressively also includes loans both from a wide swathe of other museums – continental European and even American, besides the BM – and from a private donor.

The caretaker Director of the BM, Sir Mark Jones, in a succinct two-page foreword rightly emphasises the huge range in the size and scale of the ‘spectacular’ loaned objects. The artefacts themselves have an even wider geographical spread, deriving from Asia, as well as Europe and Africa.

Dr Abdy and his cohorts sensibly divide their presentation of the exhibition into eight themes/chapters: Enlisting; A Soldier’s Remains; Ranks and Roles; Advance to Aristocracy; Dressing for Battle; Tent Life; Fort Life; and Soldiers in Society. Wives and Women do receive index entries, but this was very much a man’s world.

My own top picks would include at least the following (one from each theme/chapter). There’s the inscribed wooden tablet from Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall, slagging off the miserable Brittunculi, ‘Little Brits’. Then there’s the Herculaneum military carpenter-cummarine of 79 AD (he is the chapter’s sole subject, so rare and so interesting is the find). And the 1st-century-AD lead cremation-container of M Favonius Facilis from Camulodunum/Colchester.

What a top-quality cavalryman’s sports or parade helmet in bronze comes from Crosby Garrett. The iron cuirass is from Kalkriese, the German site of the clades Variana, the Varus disaster of 9 AD – reminding us that Roman armies were not invincible. A marble dedicatory stele from Egyptian Alexandria documents the honourable discharge in 194 AD of 41 veterans from the Legio II Traiana Fortis (Oldie-readers, notate bene). Look out for the bath house and public toilet block at Bearsden on the Antonine Wall, Scotland.

Very much not least, a marble relief of the 3rd century AD from Smyrna depicts four men condemned ‘to the beasts’ being led, tethered, to their slaughter (Soldiers in Society).

Not all Roman military life was nasty and short, and little or none was solitary, but much of it was all too brutish. The Romans did not acquire or maintain for centuries an empire of unprecedented size and complexity by being perfect gentlemen.

Their martial power was soft only on the velvety surface. Vae victis!

Paul Cartledge is Professor of Greek Culture Emeritus at Cambridge University. Legion is at the British Museum until 23rd June

Yorkshire gold CLIVE ASLET John Carr of York: Collected Essays

By Ivan Hall

Paul Holberton Publishing £50 This is a treasure trove of a book.

Now 90, Dr Ivan Hall is a man of the north, having studied at Manchester Grammar School and Manchester University and having taught at the University of Hull.

He knows more than any living person about John Carr of York, and now this enormous erudition is being shared with the public, through a collection of his essays.

It displays the sort of learning that does not entirely belong to this generation. A 21st-century historian might obsess about the links that some of Carr’s patrons – notably the Lascelles family of Harewood House – had with the slave trade.

John Carr of York, however, is a woke-free zone. Like his contemporary the late John Harris, Hall combines careful, scholarly research with the eye of a connoisseur of his subject. He really looks at buildings. His familiarity with the Georgian period means

that illuminating asides sparkle on every page.

The title of the book uses the appellation by which Carr is mostly known. ‘Of York’ shows that he was a proud Yorkshireman but tends, in our London-centric world, to relegate him to regional rather than national importance.

Reluctant to lose income by employing many assistants, Carr travelled endlessly around projects on horseback, but, unlike Robert Adam or William Chambers, lacked the glamour a grand tour would have bestowed. He never went to Portugal despite designing the hospital of Santo António de Misericórdia – his largest work – for Oporto.

Yet, at home, he could rule the kingdom of Yorkshire with unrivalled authority, building and altering country houses, designing the lodges, farmhouses, model villages and enormous stables that went with them, erecting town houses and suburban villas, often – with the preeminent example of Fairfax House in York – now demolished, and working on over 60 bridges. The bridges were needed to support the county’s developing economy.

While Lancashire had only two major centres of population, Yorkshire contained numerous smaller towns, each of which was a hive of activity.

Wentworth Woodhouse was built on coal.

The Duke of Devonshire developed the spa town of Buxton after windfall profits from a copper mine. Improved farming brought more general prosperity to landowners. The Royd family of Halifax built a town palace flanked by

Harewood House (built 1759-1771), designed by John Carr and Robert Adam The Oldie March 2024 55

GIE KNAEPS / GETTY

warehouses, showing the profits to be reaped from Yorkshire’s centuries-old textile industry.

Today’s Yorkshire Dales National Park was, ‘in Carr’s day, a rural landscape scattered with mines, ore-crushers, smelters and other buildings needed to service the flourishing if scattered industrial communities’.

Carr’s own practice reflected the dynamism of the age. Not only an architect, he also served as a surveyor – hence the bridges – and took on the family quarry, previously run by his father Robert, who was also an architect.

Rather than billing clients for individual projects, he would undertake to do all the architectural work of an estate for an annual retainer. The architectural historian Sir John Summerson disparaged him as being a mere businessman but he was a canny one, who adopted a coat of arms (to which he was not strictly entitled) and built a parish church for his birthplace, Horbury outside Wakefield, at his own expense.

Designed as an octagon with transepts and attached tower and spire, St Peter and St Leonard, Horbury, is not entirely successful but contains a vaunting inscription: ‘If you want to know, O reader, the extent of his liberality and piety, and how he excelled in originality and skill, lok [sic] at this sacred building, the most praiseworthy product of his own munificence.’

Clearly Carr was no shrinking violet. He had his own opinions too. He was such ‘an ardent Rockinghamite Whig’ that the Archbishop of York turned to the Roman Catholic architect Thomas Atkinson to extend his palace, Bishopsthorpe.

Readers who want a narrative history of Carr’s work should read this book alongside Brian Wragg and Giles Worsley’s The Life and Works of John Carr of York, published in 2000. Hall’s work is more episodic yet liberally strewn with insights.

He is fascinating on the economics of building, for example, explaining the economies that could be made by using the plain Doric order rather than the flamboyant Corinthian, or by eschewing the fluting on columns.

At Constable Burton, an intended cartouche remains a block of unworked stone, in readiness for a carver who never came, perhaps on grounds of cost. ‘Mr Pease’ often appears in the accounts as a supplier of paint – Joseph Pease of Hull having stolen the latest technology of crushing oilseeds from the Netherlands

after touring that country in the guise of a blind fiddler.

Only Hall, with his intimate familiarity with Carr’s work, could describe how light plays on the estate village at Harewood, causing Carr to adapt the mouldings to suit different aspects. What riches there are here. Congratulations to Kenneth Powell for editing the diverse material comprising this work and to Hall’s family for cheering it on.

Clive Aslet is author of The Story of the Country House

Lou Reed’s wild side WILL HODGKINSON Lou Reed

By Will Hermes Viking £25

Lou Reed at the Jazz Bilzen festival in Belgium, August 1978

Being abused by Lou Reed was a rite of passage for rock journalists.

‘That’s a rather pubescent question, don’t you think?’ Reed asked me in 2011, in response to what I thought was an innocuous enquiry about the influences on his old band the Velvet Underground.

Two years later, just a few weeks before his death, aged 71, on 27th October 2013, I hosted an audience Q&A with Reed and the photographer Mick Rock, who captured the singer’s vampiric essence in his cover shot for the 1972 masterpiece album Transformer. This time round, he was all sweetness and light – until the fan questions came.

‘Why don’t you get the fuck out of here?’ he said to some poor soul who had found the courage to tell New York’s most literary rock’n’roll deviant that he had changed that person’s life for ever.

What drove Reed to be so famously horrific, from firing Andy Warhol as the Velvet Underground’s manager out of spite – probably the worst mistake he ever made – to screaming at New York waiters who failed to meet his exacting standards? Then there was the gentle soul his widow, the experimental musician Laurie Anderson, described as ‘the person I loved most in the world’.

Reed had the ability to write such empathetic portraits as Candy Says, a homage to the transgender Warhol superstar Candy Darling, featuring the line ‘I’ve come to hate my body, and all that it requires in this world.’

Will Hermes’s epic biography seeks to stand out from the countless ones already out there by presenting Reed as a pioneering trans hero, seeing beyond sexuality and gender at a time when to

do so was not only unfashionable, but dangerous.

Reed emerged from a middle-class Jewish household on Long Island as an odd duck; a frail child whom his sister remembered locking himself into his bedroom for hours on end, as he went through one panic attack after another.

His wide-ranging sexuality unquestionably fuelled his creativity – and his spikiness. ‘If the forbidden thing is love,’ Reed told one journalist, ‘then you spend most of your time playing with hate.’

Reed’s masterstroke was to take his otherness and use it as a mark of superiority. Suffering a nervous breakdown in 1960 after a year at NYU, he was subjected to electroshock therapy – later claiming his parents recommended him for it to eradicate homosexual tendencies. They didn’t – it was that or being committed to an institution – but the treatment became, as Hermes puts it, ‘a battle scar to display, part of Reed’s mythology’.

The chapters on the Velvet Underground are the most fascinating, simply because the band were such a unique artistic force, operating in opposition to the flower power spreading through mid-sixties America like a benign rash. Reed left a short-lived gig as a songwriter-for-hire to hook up with the classically trained Welsh viola-player John Cale; tolerated Warhol foisting the icy German beauty Nico onto the band; and wrote songs about everything from sado-masochistic novels to scoring heroin in Harlem.

His brilliance shines out – I’ll Be Your Mirror, intended to make the The Oldie March 2024 57

insecure Nico feel better about herself, is one of the most tender pop songs of all time – and also his truculence. One way or another, he seems to have alienated pretty much everyone he ever worked with or met.

Even David Bowie, who pulled Reed’s career out of the post-VU doldrums and helped make Transformer, in Hermes’s words, ‘a landmark of both glam rock and queer art’, wasn’t immune to Reed’s attacks. The album contained the songs that would define him: Walk on the Wild Side offered a roll-call of everyone at Warhol’s Factory, while Perfect Day – a tribute to then wife Bettye Kronstad, complete with gratitude for making him feel like ‘someone else, someone good’ – was his romantic ballad for the ages.

Bowie produced the record, hired the musicians, put up with the temper tantrums and championed Reed tirelessly. Reed thanked him by dismissing Bowie as a bandwagonjumper, ‘trying to be a part of whatever was going on’.

Hermes frames all this within an incisive character portrait: deeply researched, clearly written, ultimately sympathetic. The one snag is his determination to use the gender studiesapproved language of today – deadnaming, othering, queerness – to describe the sexual fluidity of yesterday.

Reed is not someone who would fit well with contemporary obsessions with identity, and to have a writer retroactively apply it to him feels forced and self-conscious.

Still, if you want to get to grips with the ultimate New Yorker in all his caustic, castigating glory, this is the book.

Will Hodgkinson is rock critic for the Times

‘We’re after something he can be buried in...’

Luxury beliefs IVO DAWNAY Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class

By Rob Henderson Forum £16.99 Not many misery memoirs follow a trajectory from catastrophically unstable childhood to a PhD from Cambridge University. But then not many Cambridge PhDs would describe education as ‘a red herring’ when it comes to contentment with one’s lot in life.

Unlike our own, often Celtic, tradition of tortured upbringings – Angela’s Ashes and Shuggie Bain, to name but two – Henderson’s Californian version follows a classic Hollywood narrative arc of triumph over adversity.

Yet that is not the point at all.

Instead, this Korean-Mexican American’s journey from loveless foster homes through a tearaway teenage spell to the US Air Force, and finally to Yale and Cambridge, is more interesting for the socio-political conclusions he draws when he reaches his elite academic destination.

Above all, it is about the importance of stable families. ‘While 85 per cent of children born to upper-class families [in the US] are raised by both their birth parents, only 30 per cent of those born to working-class families are,’ he observes in his preface.

And while education is widely seen as the be-all and end-all of what is best for children, Henderson’s view is that this is merely the fortunate by-product of a warm and loving upbringing.

‘Given the choice, I would swap my position in the top one per cent of educational attainment to have never been in the top one per cent of childhood instability,’ he writes.

Far from being a celebration of the good life in the ivory towers of academia, Henderson’s narrative segues from a rather-too-long chronological journey from deprivation in Red Bluff, a rural Californian poverty trap, to a coruscating take-down of the assumptions of the liberal elites with whom he ends up.

As such, his book fleshes out earlier essays on his concept of ‘luxury beliefs’ – ideas whose subliminal purpose is to differentiate the holder from the common herd.

‘The affluent,’ he says, ‘have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.’

Hence the advent of ‘political correctness’. After all, it is the rich kids at Yale and Cambridge who obsess about

‘gendering’, cultural appropriation and white privilege – ideas that cut no ice in Red Bluff.

It is also – as the statistics clearly show – the affluent who disproportionately favour sexual promiscuity, drug experimentation and ‘defunding’ the police. Such notions are eschewed further down the social scale.

This is a relatively novel development.

In Ike’s America in 1960, 95 per cent of children from all US social classes lived with their biological parents. No more.

Moreover, while the educated rich publicly claim that ‘marriage is unimportant’, they actually favour fidelity.

As the celebrated Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam recently claimed, two Americas are now emerging. At a 2017 Senate hearing, he observed that two-parent families are now the exception in working-class America, while among the upper middle class they are normal ‘and becoming more common’.

Henderson’s theory of ‘luxury beliefs’ stretches even as far as culture. The musical Hamilton was all the rage in 2015 when tickets could be had only for $400, but after being aired on Disney+ television is now frowned on.

‘Once something becomes too popular, the elites update their tastes to distinguish themselves from ordinary people,’ he observes.

The victim as hero is another ‘upperclass’ trope that comes under Henderson’s withering eye. Hence the desperate efforts of our privileged classes to escape the curse of being ‘cisgender’ and ‘heteronormative’ – for if they are, their own victim status is undermined.

‘We now live in a culture where affluent, educated and well-connected people validate and affirm the behaviours, decisions and attitudes of marginalised kids that they would never accept … for their own children,’ he asserts. ‘And they claim to do this in the name of compassion.’

No doubt Henderson’s thesis will be deployed as a powerful weapon in the culture wars – a new volume to join Jordan Peterson’s in the growing library of social conservatism. Moreover, this plea for ‘traditional values’ comes with supercharged credentials, emerging as it does from a former full-blooded member of the underclass.

Yet it’s a plodding read. Nor was I entirely convinced that this very American analysis – deadpan and entirely humourless – works fully in the more nuanced, ancient and meticulously crafted environment of British snobbery.

My own father, a classic snob of The Oldie March 2024 59

the old English school, was a masterly practitioner of the art.

‘If you must be a success, very well,’ he used to advise, ‘but it must be effortless – in no circumstances be seen to be trying.’

Like so many of my feckless generation, I heeded his advice, didn’t try and didn’t succeed.

Ivo Dawnay was Washington bureau chief for the Sunday Telegraph

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

S & M – & Jane Austen JASPER REES What Will Survive of Us

By Howard Jacobson Jonathan Cape £20 ‘1 feather boa. 1 pair of thigh-high leather boots. 2 sets of wrist shackles fitted with aluminous karabiners.’ Halfway through his 17th novel, Howard Jacobson opens a suitcase and itemises the contents. ‘1 rhinestone flogger. Sundry clamps. 1 length of rope. 1 blindfold.’

What Will Survive of Us portrays a long affair, which finally transfigures into a happy marriage. Somewhere along the way, it deviates into sex dungeons and pain crypts. Hence the suitcase, which also contains one copy of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, for these sadomasochists do like their books.

They are Lili, a documentary-maker with no given surname, and Quaid, a playwright sometimes called Sam. We are told vanishingly little else about their careers, other than that each enjoys award-winning success. They meet when she proposes he present a film on D H Lawrence. Both know at once – the novel’s first word is ‘Kerpow!’

It begins in Taos. The shoot lasts three weeks (which should indicate quite how long ago this is), whereafter, remaining for years with other partners, they enter ‘that routine of subterfuge and depression well-known to adulterers’.

Jacobson explores these shadows with obsessive thoroughness. Or rather Lili and Quaid do. His lovers adore talking about themselves. They are like a pair of intense narcissists from Milan Kundera who pore over the contours of their history in ping-pong dialogue.

‘The conversation WAS the lovemaking,’ we hear. ‘He eased himself into her in words.’ (Some may here need to make use of an ick bag.)

We don’t know whether Quaid, like previous Jacobson protagonists Walzer, Finkler and Shylock, is circumcised –

Quaid is far too circumlocutory to talk about the nether areas. He does exude a type of Jewish style: a fretfulness, a swift wit.

His approach to life as to literature is rooted in an exchange with a bluestocking English teacher who once berated him for itemising women by body part, like Marvell (‘two hundred to adore each breast’).

But he can’t help himself. ‘Strange creatures, men,’ he thinks when Lili’s kimono is first removed and he makes oral contact. ‘Once a man has suckled a woman’s breast, can he ever again be a man in her eyes? Or in his own?’

Luckily for Quaid, if not for all readers, Lili manifests as a fantasy figure, a porny pin-up. On their first night, Quaid’s ‘eyes steam up of their own accord’, the kimono being ‘of such fine material he could whistle it off her’.

He soon luxuriates in ‘the unexpected fullness of her, the plenitude, the easeful fleshliness which is somehow – miraculously – compatible with her being slender and even slight’. In short, she’s skinny but busty. Plus – bonus – brainy. The thinking red-blood’s bull’s-eye.

Lili doesn’t even seem to mind much that for years Quaid is too lily-livered to tell his wife he’s off.

Curious to explore their inner limits, they enter a new-found land of whips.

‘The more she hurts him, the more she loves him, and the more she loves him, the more she wants to hurt him.’ Theirs is a very trusting disinhibition.

Next up, they are touring sex clubs – in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Woking – where Lili seeks other men to humiliate

while Quaid watches behind a Pierrot mask. This ceases only after a close shave. Otherwise the novel is light on actual events or even people.

Quaid’s wife, a minor painter screaming in the wings, is the nearest their story comes to a supporting player.

Jacobson sweeps other characters ruthlessly to the margins so that his protagonists – childless, sundered from terrible parents, all but friendless – are free mainly to gaze on themselves.

‘You eat like you’re in bed together,’ someone tells them jealously.

‘We are,’ says Quaid.

Yes, they do sound intensely smug – and it so happens they agree. ‘We aren’t getting smug about ourselves?’ Lili asks after they at last are married. ‘We’re self-consumed,’ she adds, ‘like those fabulous creatures that eat themselves.’

Growing older, they think of themselves as a story without end.

‘Who’d want to read us?’ Lili ponders.

The reader might feel shut out of this grand passion altogether, were it not also funny, self-knowing and floridly romantic.

‘All lovers are preposterous if you don’t look away when they’re talking about themselves,’ asserts Jacobson.

So ecstatic is the novel’s selfabsorption that perhaps it is trying not so much to describe love as to give expression to it. It reads as Jacobson’s own Arundel Tomb. Or, as Larkin almost put it, what will survive of us is 1 studded leather choker, 2 corsets, 1 ball-gag face mask and Savlon.

Jasper Rees is author of Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood

The Oldie March 2024 61

Commonplace Corner Why can’t grown-ups just give me stuff, let me do what I like and then go away A LOT? William Brown in William Again (1942)

by Richmal Crompton

Νίψον ἀaνομήματα μὴ μόναν ὄψιν (Wash the sins – not only the face) Ancient Greek palindrome on a font outside Hagia Sophia Cathedral in medieval Constantinople

Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it.

Germaine Greer

Ask a man which way he is going to vote, and he will probably tell you. Ask him, however, why, and vagueness is all.

Bernard Levin

Oh, she’s very embittered, you know. Very embittered. You’ve seen the ring she had on? Well, allegedly, that was given to her by her fiancé when she was 18, and he jilted her, and she hasn’t had it off since!

Poor dear!

Lurcio (played by Frankie Howerd) on Cassandra, the grumpy prophetess, in Up Pompeii!

Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

H L Mencken I’d like to make you laugh for about ten minutes, though I’m going to be on for an hour.

Richard Pryor

TOM PLANT

Discontent arises from a knowledge of the possible, as contrasted with the actual.

Aneurin Bevan

Computer diaries My search for an attractive appointments diary begins around November.

My needs are simple: sturdy cardboard pages to absorb any ink, a striking image on the front, a spiral binder for easy turning, and weekly photographs that please or surprise me.

Frankie Howerd as Lurcio, Up Pompeii!

I read Pride and Prejudice. I was gobsmacked by it – it’s so funny and so modern. Unbelievable. You don’t expect funny to come through after 200 years – humour doesn’t transcend decades, let alone centuries.

Julie Walters The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.

Malcolm Muggeridge I once shook hands with Pat Boone and my whole right side sobered up.

Dean Martin

Instead, these days the bland front cover will, increasingly, be of cats. Or dogs. That is, if they even have them in my local stationer’s.

I fear we are entering the last days of handwritten diaries since, for some reason, people prefer to keep their appointments on their phone. What a mistake!

A paper diary is a joy to behold, not least because you can hold the damn thing, rather than staring at your screen. Every year is a unique image for me, from 2005’s Taschen All-American Ads diary to the Eagle Diary (2011) – with a page from the famous cartoon each week – ­ and the Hollywood HardBoiled Engagement Calendar from 1999.

The manufacturers claim digital diaries are

Leming told me that his passion is to write books that everybody will read.

He said he knows he can write books that nobody will read.

Julius Horwitz, Can I Get There by Candlelight (1963) In 1969, I gave up women and alcohol – it was the worst 20 minutes of my life.

George Best What the actor is in private life he is to a large extent on the stage, because he cannot conceal himself and his true personality from his audience.

Leslie Howard Forbid us something and that thing we desire.

Geoffrey Chaucer ‘Ee, it’s just like Blackpool!’

George Formby, entertaining the troops in the North Africa desert, 1943

‘intuitive and customisable’.

But, compared with these, they’re just a series of Excel rectangles. ​Digitisers don’t give up.

‘Look at my e-diary,’ a friend says, seeking to convert me. I stare, and wait. ​‘It’s a bit slow this morning,’ he says, tapping the screen. ‘Strange: it’s not usually like this.’

SMALL DELIGHTS Cutting your toenails and knowing you won’t have to do it again for a while.

SUSIE RIDDOCH, TASMANIA

Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

​E-diaries are prone to the same frailties that bedevil all computers. The batteries run down, you might insert an appointment on the wrong page and mislay it for ever, and they’re as allergic to water as a rabid dog. (Or cat.) ​By contrast, my manual diaries stand proud, each volume different from its neighbour. If someone mocks me for using one, I do a quick draw, as in a Western: I can always find the date more quickly than the e-version can.

Of course, both my mid-20s children think I am a dribbling Luddite for holding out against modernity. But their diaries exist only on some cloud. Mine are on sturdy card. I recommend them, even this late in the year.

Save the paper diary!

ALEX GAMES The Oldie March 2024 63

History

First Impressionists last They’re now revered – 150 years after they were mocked on their debut

david horspool

In April, it will be 150 years since a group of French painters put on a show at the former studio of the photographer Nadar in Paris.

They called themselves the Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs. They had squabbled over the name. One of their number argued for ‘La Capucine’, a reference to the address of Nadar’s studio at Boulevard des Capucines.

Capucine means nasturtium, and the idea was that this ‘victory flower’ could be a defiant symbol of the new brotherhood (which included one sister).

We know them by a third name, given by a mocking journalist: the Impressionists.

The offending hack was Louis LeRoy. He superciliously imagined the reaction of a connoisseur to the show, taking one of the paintings, Impression, Sunrise, as the representative work, and its ‘last straw’.

‘Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape,’ LeRoy wrote, demonstrating simultaneously his aesthetic blindness and a total ignorance of DIY. Embryonic wallpaper? Come again?

LeRoy was looking at, if failing to see, Claude Monet’s unforgettable evocation of a morning at Le Havre harbour.

Ever since, more sympathetic art historians have argued that Impression, Sunrise is not the most emblematic of Impressionist paintings. Maybe so but, as well as its clinching title, it has many of the elements that the ordinary viewer associates with what became arguably the most popular artistic movement of all time.

Monet gives us a concentration on light and colour, the immediacy of a scene painted outdoors, en plein air, and the evocation of beauty from everyday life, with the working boat crew and already billowing chimneys.

Monet may be the Impressionist painter par excellence, but the movement to which his painting gave a name was a matter of shared passions and inclinations rather than strict rules. Some of the Impressionists, such as Monet, Pissarro and Renoir, painted outside. Some, such as Manet (who

did not show at the 1874 exhibition but is yoked to the Impressionists nonetheless) and Degas, preferred the studio.

The artists came from different backgrounds, too. Pissarro had been born a Danish citizen to an ironmonger on St Thomas, one of the Virgin Islands.

Monet was the perennially broke son of a disapproving businessman.

Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet (1872)

Manet was from much grander stock, his father a judge and his mother the daughter of a Napoleonic diplomat.

Degas’s father was a banker, his mother from a prominent Lousiana Creole family. The only woman among the group, Berthe Morisot, was the daughter of a prefect and a descendant of Fragonard.

The movement that got its name in 1874 had been germinating for more than a decade. Although some of the exhibitors found a measure of commercial success afterwards, the first show was financially anything but a hit.

Monet’s letters complaining to friends about not having a sou kept flowing. One of the first serious collectors of his and his peers’ art, Ernest Hoschedé, went bust. The knockdown prices at the subsequent auction lowered their painters’ market value for years to come.

Pissarro suffered particularly badly, though Monet – whose life sometimes reads like a caricature of a French artist’s, with equal portions of genius, pretension, chutzpah and selfishness – moved in with Hoschedé’s estranged wife.

The Impressionists were undoubtedly giants of art history, but do they matter to history more generally? In this country, art history is often looked down on, a subject for posh types (including the Prince and Princess of Wales) rather than scholarly ones. The subject is far more venerated in Germany or France.

The danger in concentrating on piquant facts such as Monet’s marital history or Degas’s descent into antisemitism is to reduce Impressionism to a matter of personalities. Of course, individual genius was ultimately the driving force behind the movement. And anyone who looks at a selection of paintings by its big names is struck by how dissimilar many of them are. No one could truthfully mistake a Monet for a Manet.

Impressionism was, in part, a statement of individualism, and often a reaction to stifling convention. But it did not take place in a historical vacuum.

1874 was only three years after the cataclysmic events of the FrancoPrussian War (1870-1) and the brief uprising and revolutionary experiment known as the Paris Commune (1871).

Some of those who exhibited at Nadar’s studio had fled France during that war.

Monet and Pissarro had washed up in London, where Monet painted Westminster and Pissarro found Impressionist inspiration in Upper Norwood. Manet stayed in France, and bore witness to the violent suppression of the Commune.

To that political upheaval can be added a technological one, heralded by the very location of the first Impressionist exhibition, in a photographer’s studio. Photography was both challenge and inspiration to painters. They at first seemed to react by striving for ever-greater realism, as in the work of Courbet. They then leaned towards the concentration on colour and light rather than exactitude, which dominated later.

Impressionism changed art, without question, and it also changed the way most of us see the world.

The Oldie March 2024 65

Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT THE HOLDOVERS (15) Oldie-readers will know the original grumpy classics master – Andrew Crocker-Harris in The Browning Version, Terence Rattigan’s wonderful 1948 play, later made into films starring Michael Redgrave (1951) and Albert Finney (1994).

The hard shell of ‘the Crock’ – aka ‘the Himmler of the Lower Remove’ – is cracked when a pupil gives him Robert Browning’s translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon.

The masterstroke of David Hemingson, writer of The Holdovers, is to set the Crock’s story at Christmas and give it the feel of A Christmas Carol. Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is the Crock character at Barton, a preppy New England school, in 1971.

My god, Paul Giamatti does a brilliant

job – the height of tragicomedy – as the washed-up teacher, sipping Jim Beam, smoking a pipe, depressed at his dim pupils, with a lazy eye and a fishy strain of BO. The eternal bachelor, he takes solace in tweed, corduroy, a selection of bow ties and a deep love for Greek and Latin.

Just like the Crock, he is the brightest master at the school. Just like the Crock, he is passed over for preferment. And so it’s Hunham who has the grim task of looking after the ‘holdovers’ – the boys who stay over at Barton through the Christmas holidays.

When the thicker and odder holdovers are whisked off by a rich father to a skiing resort, Hunham is left with just one boy – Angus Tully (Dominic Sassa), a poor little rich kid with a dead father and a mother more interested in spending Christmas with her rich new husband.

The party is completed by the black school cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy

It’s all Greek to him: Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) 66 The Oldie March 2024

Randolph). Her son, who was at Barton on a scholarship, has just been killed in Vietnam.

And so the scene is set for a catastrophically miserable Christmas for the three misfits. Angus Tully is a fine study in the tricky schoolboy, his sarcastic barbs to Hunham a thin veil for his unhappiness with the world.

Mary Lamb is a subtle mouthpiece for class and race problems in 1970s America – the broke, bereaved mother who has to wait on the spoilt jeunesse dorée of the Eastern Seaboard.

The three of them grow closer as they take a trip to Boston and find out the real story of Tully’s father (no plot-spoilers here). That warming-up of the Crock and his two companions could all be very clichéd – but the resolution of the film doesn’t turn out to be happily Dickensian for all three Bob Cratchits.

Hemingson and director Alexander Payne (who worked with Giamatti on Sideways (2004)) are too original for that. Instead, they create an exceptional story: funny, tear-jerking, drenched with melancholy and the sympathy we feel for the tricky adolescent years and the disappointments we hit in middle age.

No film has ever depicted so well the touching, non-sexual friendships that can develop between teachers and pupils.

Giamatti makes this one of the best films of the last ten years. With the tiniest screwing-up of his odd eyes – or his nerdy running style, with the knees raised too high – he makes you laugh without saying a word. And, when he does say something, he can inject humour or sadness with the tiniest inflection.

His schoolmaster persona is so layered and self-aware that his transformation – from grumpy old man to empathetic charmer – is entirely convincing. The brilliant, kind man was always there under the desperate, vinegary carapace.

Mr & Mrs: Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick in three different guises, in Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite

Sessa looks a little gauche by comparison – but who wouldn’t, next to Giamatti? And, in any case, is there any creature more gauche than the awkward teenager trying to be a cool grown-up?

The film is so well done that even the Greek on Hunham’s blackboard has the accents in the right place. Pedants will be disappointed – everything is spot-on.

The 1971 setting is perfectly caught, from the bright, tawdry clothes to the coloursaturated quality of the film stock.

The only blunder is that in Britain this great Christmas film is coming out only now (in America it was released in time for Christmas). But even that doesn’t matter – this wonderful movie transcends the seasons.

GARY SMITH

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK PLAZA SUITE Savoy Theatre, London, until 31st March If only modern playwrights were more like Neil Simon. The late great American dramatist, who died in 2018, at the grand old age of 91, was a master craftsman – a peerless writer of well-made plays about flawed yet sympathetic characters.

Simon’s plots are entirely plausible, his dialogue is utterly believable – and yet his dramas are far funnier than real life. He finds humour in every human situation. Like his greatest hit, The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite has all these qualities, in spades.

‘No other playwright has had a greater influence on American popular culture,’ claims the director of this traditional, conventional production, John Benjamin Hickey. ‘Without him, there would be no Frasier, no Seinfeld.’ I’m inclined to agree.

This play is really three one-act plays, each one a two-hander about a middleaged man and a middle-aged woman.

There are two neat twists. First, all three plays are set in the same location, Suite 719 in the Plaza Hotel in New York City. And secondly, all three couples are played by the same man and woman. For the right actor and actress, it’s a marriage made in heaven. So how do these latest stars to tackle it, Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, measure up?

Broderick and Parker are man and wife – they’ve been married since 1997 – and they’re both big fans of Neil Simon.

Broderick made his award-winning Broadway debut in Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs; Parker worked with

Simon on a TV version of The Sunshine Boys. So when they decided to embark on a joint project, Plaza Suite was a natural choice.

They were about to open on Broadway in 2020 when they were shut down by Covid. The show reopened two years later and became a Broadway hit (despite a further interruption when they both caught Covid). Now it’s transferred to London, for a limited West End run.

Simon created three contrasting playlets for his eponymous hotel suite: a domestic tragedy, a romantic comedy and a bedroom farce.

We start with tragedy: brittle housewife Karen Nash books Suite 719 for a night of passion with her husband Sam, a stressed-out, self-obsessed businessman. It’s their wedding anniversary and this suite was where they spent their wedding night, but Sam doesn’t seem to care.

Then comes the comedy: Jesse Kiplinger is a famous film producer who’s left his New Jersey home town far behind and now lives the high life in LA. Back in New York on business, he calls up his teenage sweetheart, Muriel Tate, and invites her over to Suite 719 for an afternoon of adulterous romance.

Finally comes the bedroom farce.

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Roy and Norma Hubley have hired Suite 719 as a dressing room for their daughter’s wedding, which is due to take place downstairs. The only problem is their daughter has got cold feet. She’s locked herself in the bathroom, and they can’t coax her out.

The show gets off to a slow start.

Broderick plays Sam Nash as a buttonedup, constricted character, which is fair enough, but these personality traits stifle his performance, which in the first act seems stiff and stilted.

It’s only in the second act, when he plays the libidinous film producer Jesse Kiplinger (looking a lot like Austin Powers) that he loosens up, and the audience warms up.

In the third act, he really hits his stride as Roy Hubley, the father of the reluctant bride, and this performance brings the house down – but it’s quite a long time coming. A two-one win after going one-nil down.

Parker, conversely, needs no time whatsoever to get going. Her Karen Nash is a tender, poignant portrait of a dutiful, neglected wife. Her starstruck adulteress, Muriel Tate, is delightfully daft and ditsy.

And Norma Hubley, her mother of the bride, is the perfect foil for Broderick’s distraught, indignant dad.

Parker is a natural comic actress, as she showed in Sex and the City. But it’s one thing doing it on TV; quite another doing it on-stage. She’s sassy and seductive, but it’s her vulnerability that makes her so attractive. Her comic timing is superb. Her husband runs her pretty close, but this is her show.

I wonder where they’re staying during this run, and what they get up to between performances? What a pity Neil Simon isn’t still around. Their London stay would make a good plot for one of his perfectly crafted comic plays.

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RADIO VALERIE GROVE Times Radio sent me a billet-doux recently. It said, ‘It’s that time of year when we spend even more time at home and if you have a radio in every room gathering dust, I promise you that you are going to love Times Radio.’ At Drivetime, there’ll be more politics while I ‘make the dinner or load the dishwasher’.

AAAARRGH! ‘If you feel you’ve outgrown your usual radio station, try Times Radio. It’s free and at your fingertips.’

What year is this – 1954? The implications behind the letter (signed by the intelligent Aasmah Mir) were surprising. I subscribe to Times Radio anyway. I don’t require advice about an audio soundtrack to my chores.

On the other hand, like most freelancers, I will undertake any task, however menial (as Anna Haycraft once put it, ‘black-lead the fireplace, take the cat for a walk’), rather than start writing.

Might even dust the radios.

Instead, I turned to Radio 4. The first programme was Doctor Doctor: an irresistible edition of Dr Phil Hammond’s series. He invited fellow comic/medic Peter Greenhouse (founder of a women’s clinic) to talk on matters of sexual health. Boy, did it follow Reithian guidelines! So much information, straightly spoken.

Both doctors had themselves had STDs – ‘Of course I have!’ said Dr Greenhouse. ‘All the best people did, at Cambridge.’ Dr Hammond had gonorrhoea.

Dr Greenhouse told us that dating apps are causing an even bigger explosion in STDs than the pill did in the ’60s. And men rarely need testosterone therapy – because (Dr G says) there is no such thing as the male menopause, though the programme’s producer is having treatment for it. All very educative.

Next up: Word of Mouth, where Michael Rosen brought us Grant Barrett, an American lexicographer. He began by asking him, ‘What is a lexicographer?’

Half an hour on dictionaries: my ideal listening, to get through the shirts.

Rosen, b 1946 (an excellent vintage), had, surprisingly, not heard the terms ‘tween’ or ‘FOMO’.

To complete this Anglo-American cultural afternoon, on Great Lives Niamh Cusack praised the American poet Mary Oliver, of whom neither Matthew Parris nor I had previously heard. Luckily, Baroness (Helena) Kennedy had

befriended Ms Oliver on holiday at Cape Cod, and enlightened us. Lovely programme, lovely afternoon.

I vividly recall a history teacher telling us about the play on words ‘Non Angli, sed angeli’ (not Angles, but angels). Pope Gregory said this, according to the Venerable Bede, when he first set eyes on fair English youths at a slave market.

This featured in the engaging new series Ian Hislop’s Oldest Jokes, in Radio 4’s 1.45pm slot. It followed, in that same slot, the welcome repeats of Nick Wallis’s The Great Post Office Trial, from 2020.

Both Wallis and Hislop deserve the highest plaudits for their persistence with the cause of the postpeople, over decades. Private Eye pounced on the story in 2011. Look up Robert Peston’s recent show on the topic – you can see Hislop’s vituperative rage, marinaded for 14 years, directed at all the villains including Fujitsu.

No joking matter. Thoroughly admirable.

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON Television has suddenly become the country’s principal instrument of social justice.

I refer to Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the ITV drama that, in four hours, stirred the Government into repairing a wrong they had known about for 20 years.

No one was more surprised by the audience reaction than Gwyneth Hughes, the scriptwriter. Having spent three years interviewing victims of the Post Office witch hunt, she assumed the series would generate as little attention as the scandal itself.

What made it so powerful? The plot lines didn’t always tie up. We were denied the final court case. It wasn’t explained why the employees in the basement at Fujitsu would want to interfere in the sub-postmasters’ end-of-the-week book-balancing.

One reason it took off as it did is that Mr Bates, like I’m a Celebrity, was interactive entertainment. Before episode four had even aired, a million people had signed an online petition voting Paula Vennells, former CEO of the Post Office, into relinquishing her CBE. What with this being an election year, we could vote out a good number of the other people who turned a blind eye to the miscarriage of justice.

Interactive theatre has always broken box-office records. Ninety years ago, a courtroom drama called Night of January 16th, written by Ayn Rand, invited the audience to take the part of

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE RHAPSODY IN BLUE

ITV

TV history: Toby Jones as Alan Bates in Mr Bates vs The Post Office

the jury and decide whether the defendant was guilty or not guilty. More recently, a musical adaptation of Dickens’s unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, asked the audience to decide on one of seven endings.

Tell Them You Love Me might be described as an interactive documentary.

Commissioned by Mindhouse, Louis Theroux’s production company, it has already received the Best Documentary Feature award at the Hamptons International Film Festival and will continue to generate debate.

It’s based on interviews with Anna Stubblefield, an able-bodied, white disability-rights activist and former philosophy professor at Rutgers University, and the family of Derrick Johnson, a 30-year-old AfricanAmerican with severe cerebral palsy. Two sides of a complex case of sexual abuse are presented.

Anna Stubblefield was married with two children when she met Derrick, who has the communication skills of a six-month-old baby. Derrick’s mother, Daisy, felt there ‘was something more going on’ in his mind. So Anna introduced the idea of ‘facilitated communication’, a keyboard on which non-verbal people and those with minimal control over their limbs can be taught to express their locked-in thoughts.

According to Anna, who held Derrick’s hand as he typed his sentences, he was an intellectually sophisticated man imprisoned by his body. He wanted to love and be loved, drink fine wine, listen to classical music, enjoy a vegetarian diet, do a university degree, feel Anna’s breasts and have her take his virginity, which she did. Not only was Derrick capable of consent, Anna argued, but it was he who seduced her.

According to Daisy – who called the police when Anna announced that she and Derrick were in love – her son has no emotional needs that are not met by her, drinks beer, listens to Gospel singing and eats fried chicken.

‘He’s my baby. He is my baby,’ Daisy says of the adult in diapers by her side. What most appals Daisy is that, since being introduced to sex, Derrick has started to masturbate.

According to Derrick’s brother, himself a university professor, Anna was imposing her own white-saviour, ableist agenda on a vulnerable man in order to satisfy her monstrous ego and perverted desires.

Experts on facilitated communication argue that far from untapping the thoughts of non-verbal people, the system records the thoughts of the facilitator. We might compare it to the movement of letters on a Ouija board. In that case, Anna, albeit unconsciously, guided Derrick’s fingers and wrote herself into a romance.

The trial was one of the most divisive of the century. Derrick was displayed to the court like a circus freak and the judge, refusing to hear evidence in defence of facilitated communication, gave Anna a 12-year sentence for sexual assault. This was 11 years, nine months longer than the punishment meted out to former Stanford student Brock Turner who raped an unconscious woman.

Anna’s sentence was overturned on appeal after 22 months; she will spend the rest of her life on the sexual offenders register.

The viewer is left to decide whether she was guilty of a crime or simply, as one reporter put it, ‘entrapped by the grandiosity of her good intentions’. In my own judgement, the jury is still out.

George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue turns 100 on 12th February.

It wasn’t Gershwin’s best work but it was an epoch-defining one. The distillation in music of ‘the youthful zeitgeist of the Jazz Age’, said Scott Fitzgerald. And he would have known. That same year, he began work on his own epoch-defining masterpiece, The Great Gatsby.

12th February, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, wasn’t the best date for bandleader Paul Whiteman to stage his gargantuan showcase event. With 36 items to sit through on a snowy February afternoon in New York’s overheated Aeolian Hall, some of the celebrity-packed audience had gone home by the time Gershwin got to play Rhapsody – number 35 on a programme scheduled to end with (of all things) Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No 1.

The first Gershwin heard about his new ‘jazz concerto’ was when brother Ira saw a publicity puff in the New York Tribune. Ruthless old toad that Whiteman was, he managed to sweettalk George into completing the unauthorised commission.

Described by Gershwin as ‘a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, our metropolitan madness’, it was drafted to the accompaniment of the ‘steely rhythms and rattle-ty bang’ of a railroad journey to Boston.

The BBC’s first disc jockey, urbane Old Etonian Christopher Stone, took a rather different line in a broadcast tribute after the composer’s untimely death in 1937, aged 38. ‘Only Gershwin,’ he lamented, ‘knew how to capture the bitter-sweet gaiety of those post-war years.’

Stone’s programme (reproduced on a Naxos Nostalgia CD, George Gershwin and Friends) included harmonica legend Larry Adler playing ’S Wonderful from Gershwin’s 1927 musical Funny Face.

Larry was a good friend of Gershwin – and, indeed, of The Oldie, to which Richard Ingrams signed him as the magazine’s imperturbably irreverent video correspondent. (‘Mary Poppins is cute. I use the word in the toe-curling sense. I didn’t watch it all. I couldn’t.)

As a new kid on the block in 1930s New York, Larry blagged an audition with Whiteman.

‘Play Rhapsody in Blue,’ barked the bandleader.

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other boomers. I was feeling pathetically lucky to be there with my £15 pint as the sun dipped and that sweet, pure voice basted us in classic folk honey from the Paul Simon (and Garfunkel) songbook.

He was so good I’ve booked to see him when he’s in York in December, supported by the remnants of Fleetwood Mac. Don’t tell my husband! It’s his Christmas-and-birthday present 2024.

A song by Paul Simon was the first disc chosen by Delia Smith for her recent second pass at Desert Island Discs. I am devoted to this programme. I don’t mind that Lauren Laverne has the unerring ability to ask the next question down on some assistant producer’s list rather than the obvious one.

A castaway will say, ‘In my teens, I was abducted by aliens and came back from Mars speaking only Mandarin,’ and she will pick up with ‘And, after that escapade, Geoff, you read Sports Science at Loughborough. What first got you into the beautiful game?’

In her 2023 episode, Delia explained that after work in a restaurant she’d go to a folk club in Wardour Street where Paul Simon once played. She went on to say she wasn’t there when he played. But Paul Simon was always part of her life and so she chose The Sound of Silence.

‘And why this particular track?’ LL asked. You will be stunned to hear it was because silence had always been an important part of Delia’s life.

Ever since, I’ve been listening to Paul Simon, following Delia Smith recipes, and becoming slightly addicted to Simon’s new album, Seven Psalms.

It’s in seven sections, and only 33 minutes long. It starts with bells, as if you are in a Tibetan spa ritual, but it’s a grower and gets better with every delicate chord.

Simon sings, ‘The Lord is my engineer/ The Lord is my record producer,’ and it turns out the Lord is jolly good at these trades.

Despite its sublime qualities, Seven Psalms doesn’t quite have the singalongability of the old Simon & Garfunkel numbers.

So I am secretly hoping Simon, 82, reverts to the traditional songbook for our trip to York. For my husband’s sake, of course.

EDD WESTMACOTT / ALAMY

the sleek young It’s why gentleman Gershwin’s genius standing beside was recognised Whiteman, across the board, Larry lied. not only by fellow ‘I don’t like Broadway the piece.’ composers and all ‘What do you the great jazz think of that, musicians of the Gershwin?’ said day, but by many Whiteman. ‘This on the other side kid doesn’t of the tracks LIKE Rhapsody whom he sought in Blue!’ to emulate.

George and One thinks of Larry soon Rachmaninov became fast (kicking himself Classical jazz: Rhapsody in Blue (1924) friends, their he didn’t write the arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue a big tune that transforms Rhapsody much-performed double act. midway), Ravel (‘Why do you want As the piece’s finest latter-day to be a second-rate Ravel when you interpreter, Leonard Bernstein, has said, can be a first-rate Gershwin?’) or it’s a chameleon-like creation. You can Gershwin’s tennis-playing neighbour make cuts, add new cadenzas, and and friend in Brentwood Park, deploy all manner of instrumental Hollywood, the avant-garde Austrian combinations, and it’s still Rhapsody exile Arnold Schoenberg. in Blue.

‘Authentic’ was the word most often Musicians have always loved used to describe Gershwin – a real performing it, not least because you composer with a popular touch, never quite get to the bottom of a Schoenberg insisted, not simply a maker composition that marries Tin Pan Alley of musical artefacts.

Jazz with all those bluesy chords familiar And who can forget short-story writer from Eastern European Jewish folk and columnist John O’Hara’s famous music – not to mention the kind of quip? ‘George Gershwin is dead, but I pianistic high jinks Hollywood would don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.’ later exploit in things like Scott Bradley’s Cat Concerto.

The original orchestrations were GOLDEN OLDIES by the legendary Ferdie Grofé. You RACHEL JOHNSON hear them on Gershwin’s superb, albeit STILL CRAZY FOR PAUL heavily cut, 1924 Victor recording (now on YouTube). Or you can hear them as part of Sony’s 2-CD The Just as I was planning a pro-forma Essential George Gershwin in a offering for this month – best famous 1976 reconstruction of the albums of 2023, gigs to book complete work conducted by Michael in 2024 – I realised I’ve Tilson Thomas. It has Gershwin himself never yet devoted this space as soloist, courtesy of his 1925 Duo-Art to Paul Simon. piano roll.

Rudimentary error.

The advantage of the 1924 original is He is one of the that it has Ross Gorman’s famously many wrinklies improvised opening clarinet solo – who can get the Gorman’s fancy, not Gershwin’s – whole of Hyde which has made this (Beethoven’s Fifth Park rocking out. aside) the most famous opening in I was there in the classical music. crowd, belting We still talk of musical crossover, but out You Can there’s nothing today remotely like Call Me Al a few America in the 1920s and ’30s, when British Summer Whiteman rival Frank Black could Times ago, double as music director of NBC Radio along with and head of Classical A&R at RCA Victor, where the likes Paul Simon: 50 of Rachmaninov, Heifetz and Toscanini Ways to Leave Your reigned supreme.

Fans Enchanted

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU

ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD; PHOEBUS FOUNDATION; RUBENSHUIS, ANTWERP

BRUEGEL TO RUBENS Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 23rd March to 23rd June The period between the career of the elder Jan Bruegel (c 1525-69) and the death of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) almost exactly matches the Eighty Years’ War. The war established the independence of Protestant northern Netherlands from Catholic Habsburg rule. It was a struggle by which the artistic development of much of Europe was profoundly affected.

As the tides of war ebbed and flowed, artists moved north and south according to religious conviction. Many in the south continued to find markets for traditional religious subjects. Others in the north found new bourgeois buyers for secular subjects – landscapes, marines and domestic scenes.

In fact, a secular market emerged in the south too, as various Habsburg regents encouraged a florescence of the arts.

Drawings became an important component of artistic practice, not just as studies for paintings, but as works in their own right.

This show, subtitled ‘Great Flemish Drawings’, includes a brown-ink roundel

by Maerten de Vos – a design for his bronze panels, celebrating the Protestant liberation of Antwerp in 1577. It encapsulates the troubled times, since Antwerp was constantly being ‘liberated’ by one side or the other, and suffered the Spanish Fury. Similarly, de Vos twice changed religion to promote his career.

Top: Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c 1526-69): The Temptation of St Anthony, c 1556.

Left: Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640): Belvedere Torso, c 1601-2. Above: Study of a Young Girl Wearing a Cap, c 162035, by Cornelis de Vos (1584-1651)

Artistic links between the Netherlands and Italy had been strong since the early-15th century. By the 1620s, it was common for artists from both sides of the religious divide to flock southwards, as proto-Grand Tourists. They termed themselves the Bentvueghels (birds of a feather). They also influenced contemporaries and successors across the continent.

Flemish – to use the convenient art historical shorthand – drawings and paintings of this period have provided the material for major exhibitions for some decades, including ‘Bruegel to Rubens: Masters of Flemish Painting’ at the Royal Collection in 2009. Much of

the Ashmolean show comes directly from the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, where the similarly themed ‘From Scribble to Cartoon’ closes on 18th February. The Flemish government has recently declared 100 drawings in that collection to be nationally important.

This important exhibition also includes examples and artefacts from the Ashmolean’s own collections. It explains and illustrates the purposes for which drawings were intended and the technical processes used by their creators. The catalogue, with essays by the curator, An Van Camp, will become a vital reference work for all admirers of drawing.

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Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER IN SEARCH OF SNAKE'S HEADS

Co-written by Michael Jefferson-Brown and nurseryman Kevin Pratt of Village Plants in Stockport, it contains a wealth of information on this bulb’s mystery and Fritillaries are among the spring garden’s sorts out some of its great confusions.

Superb photography reveals valuable aristocracy – distinctive, diverse and detail and supports a text that is both highly desirable. informative and inspirational.

I’ve grown many kinds over the years, An earlier book, Fritillaries by from the diminutive (3-5 inches Christabel Beck (1953), is tall) Fritillaria pudica (beware illustrated with black-and– some tricky names lie white photographs and ahead) to the stately and botanical drawings by several appropriately named crown artists of diverse vintage, imperial, F imperialis. It’s including a striking meleagris the lord and master of all it etching from a 1611 manuscript. surveys, with a showy crown I have grown F persica in of yellow, orange or red bells open ground and in pots under atop a guardsman-erect stem, four feet above the ground.

Fritillaria meleagris glass and it remains one of my indispensables, not least because The frits, as aficionados like to it is easy to cultivate. Pratt tells us its bulb call them, number some 100 species, is second in size only to imperialis, noting found in the wild over vast tracts of too that its foliage is ‘a pleasing grey rather Northern Hemisphere land, especially than green’. The flowerhead, he says, can around the Balkans and in Asia Minor. extend to about ten inches ‘with up to One alone is native to Britain: 30 small conical pendant bells [that] are F meleagris, the snake’s-head fritillary, deep plum-purple with a very fine greywith such other sinister-sounding names plum bloom’. The variety ‘Adiyaman’, as death bell, leper’s bell and, quite named for the town in southern Turkey unfairly, Madam Ugly. Given optimum close to its homeland, is preferred, the conditions – damp pasture – it thrives, flowers being ‘darker and more closely set’. with spectacular colonies at Magdalen Let’s exercise our brain cells with a College, Oxford, and near the source of few of the aforementioned tricky names. the River Thames at Cricklade. But don’t F michailovskyi is another Turkish pick the flowers; it’s a protected species. species, on which ‘two-thirds of the Said to die out in dry conditions, the flower nearest the stem is a rich purple snake’s-heads nevertheless made a great maroon and the lower third is a vivid swathe for us in our previous garden in Herefordshire on bone-dry ground under contrast of gold’ – now commonly found beech trees. Among their mainly uniform in garden centres, thanks to garb of light and dark purple chequerboard micropropagation methods.

F pyrenaica – yes, from the Pyrenees or tessellated patterning, you’ll find the occasional white one; a handful of named – bears ‘beautiful flowers … mostly varieties (eg ‘Artemis’, ‘Jupiter’, Aphrodite’) chequered red and brown with a yellowhave been selected for superior appearance. green stripe’.

Buy or borrow Kevin’s book and explore The Gardener’s Guide to Growing the delights of such species as F kotschyana, Fritillaries (1997) seldom wanders far F latakiensis, F rhodocanakis from from my bedside table during the spring.

limestone outcrops of southern Greece and late-flowering F camschatcensis, widespread in the wild from eastern Asia, Japan and the west coast of Alaska.

At certain times of my life, illness has prevented any energetic outdoor gardening.

By cultivating bonsai trees and growing bulbs in pots, which can be in bloom throughout the year, I have survived anxious weeks of life-threatening wretchedness and revelled in the glory of Nature’s bounty. And the world of fritillaries supplies it in spades.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD SWEET CICELY The perennial herb sweet cicely, having died down in November, is said to be the first to show itself each year, around the middle of February. It is a close-run thing with lovage, which should be about to appear above ground, and both are welcome harbingers of spring.

With its fern-like leaves and white flowers, sweet cicely can be confused with cow parsley. Now is the time to sow the seed or, better still, buy a young plant which, when established, will self-seed and spread, growing up to five feet tall. It prefers a damp, well-drained soil and the leaves should be available in every month of the year except December and January.

Sweet cicely is a very hardy plant, untroubled by disease and pests, and needs little attention. It is often grown among tulips in spring, when its flowers will be at their best. In autumn, the seed pods will turn almost black.

The plant gives off a strong aniseed scent, and the flavour of the leaves has also been compared to that of fennel and star anise. John Parkinson, botanist The Oldie March 2024 73

and apothecary to James I, was a great fan of sweet cicely, saying that it gives a better taste to any other herb put with it.

Another herbalist of the time, John Gerard, recommended it for oldies, as ‘it rejoiceth and comforteth the heart and increaseth their lust and strength’.

Sweet cicely can be a useful and healthy substitute for sugar. The leaves have the effect of reducing the acidity in tart fruit, such as unripe gooseberries, currants and rhubarb.

This herb is also known as garden myrrh – its Latin name is Myrrhis odorata – though I am uncertain of its connection to the dried resin brought by the wise men for the infant Jesus.

In the Middle Ages, sweet cicely was strewn on the floors of churches to release its scent, and the seeds were used as an aid to digestion.

An infusion of the leaves was popular as a herbal tea, and they are among the ingredients of the Scandinavian aquavit.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD ABSTAIN WITHOUT PAIN This is just the thing for the Lenten Fast.

The traditional beans-and-greens dishes of Puglia, Italy’s poorest region, provide a lesson in frugality and ingenuity.

A period of abstention from meat and other good things (including wine) in the run-up to Easter was imposed on congregations by savvy Church Fathers at a time when the fields of the northern hemisphere were barren and winter store cupboards were almost empty. It is as practical and sensible now as ever.

replace the beans. Serves 4 as a dip, 6 as a soup.

250g dried, ready-skinned broad beans (fava), soaked overnight 1 large floury potato, peeled and diced Sea salt About 100ml olive oil About 1kg winter greens, rinsed and shredded 2-3 garlic cloves, skinned and slivered ½ tsp chilli flakes (more if you like) Drain the beans. Bring them to the boil in enough water to cover generously, skimming off the grey foam as it rises.

Add the diced potato, salt lightly, bubble up, turn down the heat, cover loosely and simmer until the beans soften completely – 45 minutes to 2 hours – stirring regularly and adding boiling water as necessary.

The result should be a smooth, soft purée.

Stir in half the olive oil and reheat gently.

Meanwhile, heat the rest of the olive oil in a small pan and toss in the shredded greens with the garlic, chilli flakes and salt, lid loosely, turn down the heat and cook for 4-5 minutes, till the greens are just tender but not mushy.

Serve the beans and greens separately, with bread for scooping and mopping.

Possible accompaniments: slivered red onion marinated in wine vinegar; a plain tomato sauce with a stirring of pitted black olives.

Ciceri e tria This surprisingly delicious combination makes the best of limited ingredients. A soupy dish of chickpeas flavoured with celery (a venerable pot-herb which grows wild in the region) is finished with tria, Puglia’s fresh no-egg ribbon pasta – some of it fried crisp as a topping. Serves 4 as a vegetarian main dish.

ELISABETH LUARD

350g chickpeas, soaked overnight in cold water 1 medium onion, diced 1-2 celery stalks and leaves, chopped 1-2 bay leaves 1-2 dried chillis About 100ml olive oil Sea salt 250g fresh tagliatelle or other ribbon pasta

Fave e cicoria Bitter greens such as chicory, endive and sprouting broccoli – field-grown or from the wild – are eaten with a soft-scooping purée of dried broad beans in much the same way as the Middle Eastern hummus. Split peas, green or yellow, can 74 The Oldie March 2024

Drain the chickpeas and transfer to a roomy pot with twice their volume of cold water. Add the onion, celery, bay leaves and chilli. Bring to the boil, turn down the heat, lid loosely and simmer for 1-3 hours, adding boiling water as needed to keep the dish soupy, till the chickpeas are perfectly tender. Stir in half the olive oil

and bubble up to emulsify the broth.

Taste and add salt.

To finish, stir two thirds of the pasta into the soupy chickpeas and bubble up again for 4-5 minutes, adding more boiling water if necessary to ensure plenty of broth, till the pasta is perfectly soft. Meanwhile heat the remaining oil in a small frying pan, drop in the rest of the pasta ribbons a handful at a time, and remove with a draining spoon as soon as they puff and brown (a minute or two). Ladle into bowls, and top each serving with a hank of crisp pasta ribbons. People won’t believe it’s not bacon – a useful trick if you don’t want to include meat in any pasta dish.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE MR SPONGE’S SCOFFING TOUR It all started with an invitation to stay at the Suffolk Hotel, in Aldeburgh.

That was definitely the trigger. After decades of toeing the line and waiting to be invited – in vain – I was back on the wagon of IMS (Inviting Myself to Stay).

Any first-night nerves that I might have lost the confident bravado of my youth were quickly dispelled. Turns out it’s like riding a bicycle. And even easier by email, given that one can copy and paste one’s self-invitation multiple times.

It’s a game of attrition, really – not one for those with a fear of rejection. It was the weekend before Christmas – so I was banking on a poor response. But shock and awe are surprisingly devastating weapons.

We emailed five ‘old friends’: ‘I am circling East Anglia in mid-December and heading to Norwich for lunch on Saturday. Would you like to join? Heading back to London on Sunday 17th. And would love to see you. I’m very rarely in East Anglia.’

In spite of their grotesque transparency, my five emails bagged us two acceptances, one ‘I’ve got the kids that weekend’, one ‘We’re away’ (suspicious for hermits) and one no-reply. Given the umpteen bedrooms our would-be hosts enjoy, this last disengagement felt like downright ungraciousness – on their part. Their house is the Everest of all spongers.

So, what with the freebie from the Suffolk in Aldeburgh, our accommodation (including breakfast) for three nights was delightfully free, leaving plenty of credit card space for eating out. And what riches.

In terms of geography, criss-crossing tends to be the flight path of the sponger, given our need for a nest at all costs. So, after turning off the central heating, on Thursday 14th we drove from West London to Aldeburgh. There we feasted on Colchester oysters and perfect halibut

en croûte. George Pell, formerly of L’Escargot, has transformed a tired inn of 12 bedrooms into a swell restaurant/ hotel of six large ones, with a glorious roof terrace overlooking the beach.

The staff really couldn’t be nicer and we even toyed with the dread idea of paying for a night at some point in the future – before remembering our new freeloading creed.

We then parked outside the Adam and Eve, the tiny 13th-century pub next to Norwich Cathedral. We used their loo, credit card intact. The Norman cathedral really is magnificent: all stone vaults and a façade of Caen limestone. We had an excellent three-course lunch at Benedict’s for £32.

Throughout our tour, the East Anglians were only too keen to show off their breadmaking skills, honed through centuries of long nights waiting for guests. This left little room for the Gressingham duck and lemon tart. So, on to dear Charlotte and Alfie, who gave us top venison lasagne at their lovely house near King’s Lynn.

The next morning, we found another glorious cathedral at Bury St Edmunds, as well as the Greene King brewery.

Maison Bleue was rammed on that market Saturday for another threecourser of gilt-head bream and perfect pigeon for £42.50. Hardly surprising given the cheap wine list.

Our final night was with Emma and Rick, who took us to the Sun Inn, at beauteous Dedham – the liveliest pub east of Wales. We had home-made squid-ink tagliatelle with cuttlefish ragu for £15.

What a warm-up for our weekends in 2024. None of you is safe. We might even repeat our self-invite to Robbie and Iona, our no-reply from near Norwich. What is there to lose?

DRINK BILL KNOTT A TASTE OF HEAVEN This year marks the 30th anniversary of my first wine-tasting. Three decades of swirling, sniffing and spitting (and sometimes swallowing).

Much has changed. In 1994, the typical taster was a tweedy, paunchy, ruddyfaced ex-public-schoolboy who looked askance at a long-haired, leatherjacketed young whippersnapper. I merely reinforced his long-held belief that the country had gone to the dogs.

There were a few women, but nowhere near as many as, gratifyingly, attend tastings today. There was the sainted Jancis Robinson, of course, who has

done much to encourage other women into the world of wine.

And, in the early years, there was a formidable grande dame – Pamela Vandyke Price (she died ten years ago, aged 90) – who loathed any extraneous smells emanating from her fellow tasters.

Perfume and aftershave were her bêtes noires, and her wrath could be withering.

Professional wine-tastings, it may surprise you to learn, tend to be rather sober affairs. None of my friends believes this, preferring to imagine my life as one long Bacchanalian orgy, but everyone at a tasting – writers, sommeliers, merchants – is there to work, and there is often no sustenance on offer bar a plate of water biscuits. Also, it might be 10.30am.

But the annual wine-tasting at the St John restaurant in Smithfield – the Vignerons’ Lunch – is cut from a different cloth. A dozen or so independent French winemakers set up tables in the bar, three dozen wines are opened, and the spittoons are rarely troubled. At the hugely convivial lunch that follows – gargantuan mounds of cassoulet this year – there is not a dry glass in the house.

Most of the wines I tasted are available only at the restaurant (although it is a worthwhile pilgrimage for anyone who likes the finer things in life), but there are a few that can be found online.

I especially enjoyed the wines made by Benjamin Darnault at the Boulevard Napoléon winery in the Minervois, a collaboration with Trevor Gulliver and Fergus Henderson, St John’s bibulous and Francophile owners.

Their pale and interesting, sublimely fruity Grenache Noir 2022 (£28) can be ordered from stjohnrestaurant.com, or there’s a mixed case of six Boulevard Napoléon wines for £180. The talented Darnault also makes a whole host of well-priced Languedoc wines for Naked Wines (nakedwines.co.uk).

There were some lovely wines from the venerable Maison Sichel, too, including the deliciously savoury, sulphite-free ‘1883’ claret from 2021 (thamesvalleywine.co.uk, £11) and the honeyed, zesty Sauternes 2020 (shop. oxfordwine.co.uk, £15.50 for a halfbottle). And the classy St John own-label Pauillac 2018 (stjohnrestaurant.com, £44), made by Sichel with declassified grapes from a first-growth château.

There are three such châteaux in Pauillac – Mouton-Rothschild, LafiteRothschild and Latour – but Max Sichel was reluctant to tell me which.

Eventually, he cracked. ‘Not the tower,’ he told me. ‘Or the sheep.’

Wine This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a classic white from the Loire, a great-value claret from an excellent vintage, and a well-structured Rioja which would grace any Sunday lunch table. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Sauvignon de Touraine ‘Les Secrets de Sophie’, Famille Bougrier, Loire Valley 2022, offer price £12.00, case price £144.00 Dry, crisp, gooseberryscented white from the Loire, great as an apéritif or with seafood.

Château La Petite Borie, Bordeaux 2020, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88 Versatile, easydrinking claret with plenty of plummy Merlot fruit and good length.

Rioja Crianza ‘Gustales’, Bodegas Navajas, Spain 2018, offer price £11.75, case price £141.00 Juicy, silk-smooth, lightly oaked Rioja from an excellent bodega.

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The Oldie March 2024 75

SPORT JIM WHITE RACE THE BLUES AWAY During the dark, dank days of February, a friend of mine cheers himself up by looking at the cork board on his kitchen wall.

The moment the Christmas rush is over and the Hogmanay champagne is drunk, he pins his tickets to the Cheltenham Festival on the board. Just a look at them alleviates his mood. No matter how bleak and glum things are, the thought that the finest race meeting in the world is round the corner is enough to lift his spirits.

And he has a point. If you have never been to the week-long extravaganza of jumps and hurdles, you may be sceptical about its therapeutic possibilities. But nothing eradicates the winter blues like heading to the edge of the Cotswolds and watching beautiful thoroughbreds tearing round the most dramatic racecourse in the world.

To be in the main stand as the roar of 73,000 over-excited patrons bounces off the surrounding hills, watch the horses barrel up the hill to the finish line and lose yourself in the tumult as the favourite romps home: there is no better place.

What’s more, to see Rachael Blackmore, Nico de Boinville and the rest of the smartest field of jockeys gathered anywhere steer their horses over daunting obstacles is to witness genius in action.

And that is without mention of the glorious, steaming crush of the Arkle Bar, where those who have triumphed in the most recent race quickly spend their winnings. Or the shopping village, where you can buy the most exquisitely crafted – and eye-wateringly pricey – rocking horse if you have backed an improbable outsider to victory.

Then there’s the Bentley showroom, where you can wonder whether anyone has ever won enough to buy themselves a £250,000 limo to drive home in. Never mind that the weather can be capricious (I have been soaked to the skin, frozen solid and ended up with a sunburned nose – and that was on three different days in the same year); there is always somewhere to shelter.

Wherever you go around the course, there is invariably something – or rather someone – to look at. This is the best people-watching spot in the world – an eccentric collision of class and style.

There are the red-faced colonels in garish tweed. There are the women with so many pheasant feathers in their hats they look as though they might take flight at any moment. And there are always the visitors from Ireland quickly regretting 76 The Oldie March 2024

that they decided to come dressed as a leprechaun.

Not, I admit, that it works for everyone.

Many moons ago, I took along a hedonistic old chum whom I hadn’t seen in a while.

He’d never been to Cheltenham and told me on the way he really didn’t know what to expect. He also revealed that, after years of struggle, he had just accepted he was an alcoholic and was now in therapy.

Within five minutes of clacking through the course turnstiles and spotting that there was opportunity to buy a drink every 15 paces, he had to turn round and head home. The temptation, he said, was simply too much.

The good news for him is that these days, while consumption is for some still prodigious, there is less emphasis on drink than there used to be. In the Guinness Village, they promote alcohol-free stout with real vigour. Maybe I should ask him along again this year, and we can enjoy a pint of draught 0.0 Guinness together as the horses thunder by.

I suspect it would cheer him up. Nothing kicks seasonal affective disorder into touch as vigorously as a trip to Cheltenham.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD LOYALTY DOESN'T ALWAYS PAY ​ ast month was AA renewal time – hence L another negotiation. The three members of this household have comprehensive cover – home start, breakdown, recovery etc.

Last year’s renewal quote was £400, reduced to £300 after a telephone call.

This year it was £444, again reduced to £300 after another telephone call.

Just ask for a discount. If you encounter resistance, say you’re thinking of moving elsewhere – and mean it. I suspect it’s the same with other breakdown services. ​Welcome though the discount is, it’s sad that we have to go through this annual ritual. Why isn’t loyalty – 57 years, in my case – rewarded with an automatic discount? Presumably because the private equity companies owning major breakdown services rely on unquestioned renewals to earn more money.

On the one hand, I don’t blame them.

On the other – come on, you’re supposed to be there for us, not we for you. So show some appreciation. ​During a recent four-hour motorway bash through hard rain and enveloping spray, I counted three breakdowns. When I joined the AA, there would have been more – modern cars are more weatherresistant than their predecessors.

But there was a lonely early Mini

bravely swimming doggy-paddle in the slow lane. Tiny and vulnerable, it was about half the height of the lorry wheels thundering inches away and momentarily submerging it in spray.

My own experience of early Mini ownership was not one of unalloyed pleasure. Minis were a revolutionary concept with many good points but sometimes balked at puddles, refusing them like recalcitrant showjumping Shetland ponies.

The problem was that water splashed up through the front of the engine bay onto exposed plugs and points. The fault was later solved, I believe, by the simple addition of a protective metal plate.

Modern BMW Minis, though bloated to the mid-saloon size of 50 years ago, are so, so much better. ​Most vehicles on that amphibious expedition were sensibly doing less than the 70mph limit, even if few were sufficiently adjusting stopping distance to the car in front. There was also the inevitable sprinkling of nutters tailgating, flashing and switching lanes in their dash to the next hold-up.

Such people will appear whatever the penalties for speeding are (unless perhaps their cars are confiscated), but it set me wondering what would happen if the 70mph limit were scrapped. It might seem counter-intuitive – but would it actually lead to more accidents? After all, the limit was introduced without clear evidence that it reduced them. ​That was in 1965, when the Government imposed it for a four-month trial following a major pile-up in fog on the M6. The trial ended inconclusively.

So the non-driving Transport Minister, Barbara Castle, extended it for another two months, and then – conceding that ‘the case was not proven’ – for another 15.

The Road Research Laboratory finally announced its findings in 1967, admitting that, on the M1, ‘The numbers killed or seriously injured as a proportion of the total casualties varied between 38% and 57% between 1960 and 1965, and the value during the trial period (53%) fell within this range.’ Thus there was no significant statistical difference. But the 70mph limit was nevertheless made permanent. ​Of course, few cars managed more than 100mph in those days, whereas some now double that. Also, modern roads are busier – once you’re over about 150mph, distant objects come up very fast indeed.

It’s hard to imagine any government scrapping the limit for even a short trial.

Yet my hunch is that it wouldn’t make much difference to most motorists, who cruise at less than 70mph anyway. But then there are the nutters.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Confessions of a broke music man I’ve decided to become an online retailer and sell my vinyl record collection on eBay. Sales of vinyl are unexpectedly booming. So, rather than risk my heirs’ simply giving them away, I got selling, as I wrote here previously. Several readers have asked how I’m getting on.

Progress is, frankly, slow, but I am modestly encouraged by a little success.

In two months, I have sold 95 records and made £1,350 after all expenses (apart from my time). Not exactly riches, but not to be sneezed at.

I stopped buying them in about 1984, when CDs arrived. So they’re rather dated. However, like book collectors, record collectors want the rarest and earliest possible edition. Some of my

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

tinyurl.com/webster436 Report showing that vinyl sales increase every year. trends.google.com/trends/ yis/2023/GB The most popular Google searches in 2023. Depressingly predictable.

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

ancient stuff gleaned mostly from charity shops in my teens and twenties is just what they are after.

My best sale has been the first album from the band Hawkwind, for which I received £87, but most go for under a tenner.

I owned many more LPs than I had thought; over 500, rather than the 300 I had guessed. I ploughed through them all (gosh, there’s some odd stuff in my collection), speculating which ones might sell for the highest prices, or for any price at all. EBay can help; you can check what the same record has sold for recently.

I have also spent a while peeling off ancient price labels; selling a record for £10 with a £1.99 Oxfam label on it seems tactless.

If someone buys one, eBay collects the money for me, but I must post the record.

I bought some thick cardboard ‘mailers’ designed for the purpose, and they cost about 75 pence each, which of course eats into the profit. And eBay itself, naturally, levies fees.

In my experience, eBay’s fees, together with my postage costs, can total up to 55 per cent of the sale price. However, the average seems to be about 30 per cent; pretty much what you’d pay in a traditional auction.

Then there is the question of returns.

Most buyers have been delightful, even sending thank-you notes, but a disappointed customer can initiate the ‘returns’ procedure. It’s happened to me only three times. In one case, the record arrived snapped in two (the courier

reimbursed me) and in the other cases the customer thought the records were too dilapidated. Fair enough. I paid for their return and refunded their money; everyone is happy, I hope.

There is the occasional chancer who asks for a partial refund (‘I’ll keep the record, but it’s not worth what I paid’). I am firm and tell them either to keep it and stop complaining or to send it back (at my expense) for a full refund. They never send it back; they are just pushing their luck.

As I said, progress is slow, but I’m in it for the long haul. I currently have 90 records listed on eBay, and eventually I will upload the remaining 250.

If, after a year or so, I’ve still got some unsold (I bet I will have lots), I’ll pull them off eBay and stick them in the local auction house, where boxes of vinyl seem to go for about five pence per record.

The fun will come once it’s all over; I’ll have the pleasure of deciding what to spend the money on. I’m looking forward to that.

'I'm sorry, sir, but we don't carry scythes'

Neil Collins: Money Matters

Electric dreams – and nightmares That new electric car. Marvellous.

Sepulchrally quiet around town, goes like a bat out of hell, runs on cheap juice … it could turn me into a golf-club bore overnight. Except that, like so many others, I haven’t bought one.

It seems from the latest figures that the inexorable march of these vehicles is not quite so inexorable after all.

Their share of new-car sales is falling, along with the second-hand values which are so important for the cost of 78 The Oldie March 2024

financing a purchase. Insurance costs have shot up. Manufacturers are cutting production targets.

All this is despite a full house of subsidies. While the tax on company cars has been progressively cranked up, the incentives for corporate EVs are almost irresistible. Your top-of-the-range executive Merc can cost as much as £40,000 a year as a benefit-in-kind.

Choose an EV and the bill is just £320.

It is hardly surprising, then, that

three-quarters of EVs sold are company cars. Another slice of sales are as urban runabouts. Leave the Range Rover in the garage when you pop into town, and gather further subsidies. Did you know that electric cars do not cause congestion? Sometimes, they don’t even take up a parking space. It’s a modern miracle.

Despite these inducements, we don’t really like them. EVs are more expensive to buy, and the question of whether they

are worth it in the long run is as hard to answer as that of their lifetime CO2 cost.

The Guardian recently had a good go (and found the green answer you might expect), but the answer essentially depends on the assumptions you make regarding the price of exotic raw materials and electricity, technological advances and replacing the £38bn a year in tax that conventional vehicles generate. Heavier EVs will also

increase the cost of road maintenance.

This does not even begin to address the question of who is in charge of your new car. Its sat-nav knows where you are, and soon you may have to answer tricky questions before the engine will start, as the car checks that you’re not drunk or drugged. Breaking the new 20mph speed limit in Wales? Your car will know…

We have so convinced ourselves that

they are virtuous vehicles (even if they come from China, built with coal-fired electricity) that the latest easing of the rules to allow a few more years of making conventional cars caused no end of a fuss. As the subsidies disappear, to be replaced by the tax currently paid by owners of petrol vehicles, today’s buyers may wonder whether they are being taken for a ride.

invites you to

a tour of Istanbul, Gallipoli and Troy with Harry Mount

LIMITE Webwatch D TO 20 Doodle.com GUEST An online tool for organising meetings S with groups – if you can persuade them to use it. webcamtaxi.com

12th to 19th September 2024

This is an amazing opportunity to visit one of the great cities of the world and two of the most iconic battlefields. In addition to having the editor’s expertise at Troy, we have employed Çiçek, an experienced guide, to give us an insider’s tour of Istanbul and its bazaars for three full days (including her choice of top restaurants). The renowned Kenan Çelik will show us around the key sites of the calamitous Dardanelles campaign.

For the first four nights in Istanbul, we’ll be staying at the smart Pera Palace Hotel (www.perapalace.com), which opened in 1895 to host Orient Express passengers.

Agatha Christie wrote that murder mystery there. We then transfer to Çannakale, our base for Gallipoli and Troy, where we’ll stay at the Set Ozer hotel (www. setozerhotel.com) for our last three days.

This would be a difficult trip for an independent traveller to organise. So this is a great opportunity to have a stressfree holiday. Did we mention the sunset cruise on the Bosphorus? Or the shopping?

Thursday 12th September – arrival Depart Heathrow at 10.10am on flight BA676; arrive Istanbul Airport at 4.10pm (two hours ahead). Transfer to Pera Palace Hotel; introductory talk on Constantinople

by Harry Mount and James Pembroke.

Friday 13th September – Tokapi Palace and Hagia Sophia Morning tour of Topkapi Palace with its jewel-filled treasury and harem, followed by lunch at Matbah. Then continue to

of Tekirdag where we’ll have lunch. Check in at Live webcams Set Ozer Hotel. from around the7pm talk on the Dardanelles world. campaign by Kenan Çelik.

Above: Istanbul. Right: the wooden horse used in the 2004 film Troy

Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque.

Sunset cruise on the Bosphorus.

Saturday 14th September – Süleymaniye Mosque Depart for Süleymaniye Mosque and see the traditional art of carpet-weaving at Caravanserail. Lunch at Galeyan, home to Yunus Emre Akkor. Visit the 500-year-old Grand Bazaar in the old city, with 4,000 shops.

Sunday 15th September – Dolmabahçe Palace and Spice Bazaar Visit Dolmabahçe Palace; then the Spice Bazaar. Lunch in Hamdi restaurant.

Afternoon visit to Fener and Balat districts with their beautiful coloured houses and the Greek Orthodox Church of St George.

Monday 16th September – Çannakale Drive to Çannakale via the seaside town

Tuesday 17th September – Dardanelles Full-day tour with Kenan including Cape Helles, Lone Pine, Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay. Screening of Gallipoli followed by dinner at Cafe du Port. Dinner at Muhitt.

Wednesday 18th September – Troy First, we will visit the rightly acclaimed Museum of Troy, which opened in 2018. Lunch at the site followed by a visit to the lofty towers of Priam’s city, with Harry Mount providing the commentary. Dinner at Yalova.

Thursday 19th September – departure Leisurely morning to explore Çannakale, including the Dardanelles Straits Naval Command Museum, or a stroll to the wooden horse used in the 2004 film Troy.

After 12pm lunch, depart from nearby Edremit airport at 15.20 on Turkish Airlines flight TK2265; arrive Istanbul Airport at 16.35. Transfer for Turkish Airlines flight TK1983 departing 18.45; arrive Heathrow at 20.50.

HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 or please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Price per person: £2,595

which includes all meals, wine with meals, transport and entrances. You need to book and pay for your own flights.

Single supplement: £400. A non-refundable deposit of £750 will be required, with the full balance due on 1st March 2024.

The Oldie March 2024 79

Waxwing

CARRY AKROYD

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd Migration is an annual routine. The ‘irruption’ comes out of the need to survive. This is spectacularly true of the waxwing (Bombycilla garrulus), renowned for its beauty.

‘Waxwing winters’ occur – often at intervals of years – when starvation in the bird’s far northern breeding grounds forces it to wander.

In 1955, when James Fisher’s Bird Recognition 3 was published, he wrote, ‘Most authorities hold that the waxwing is not migratory; but mass movements in search of food take place in every winter, though in some winters the flocks do not roam a very great distance from their breeding ground.’

Hence the excitement of British ‘waxwing winters’, which dates back to 1686. The 19th century saw five.

Since 1990, waxwings have been seen every winter; an irruption, such as in 2004/5, brings up to 12,000 in wandering flocks. ​David Bannerman (1886-1979), in The Birds of the British Isles, wrote, ‘The waxwing cannot possibly be confused with any other bird to be met with in the British Isles – or, for that matter, in the whole Palaearctic Region.’

He considered it ‘of such exceptional beauty’ that he departed from his usual practice and described one specimen.

He admired the ‘delicacy and softness’ of its feathers (bombyx/ ‘silk’),‘the vinous tints of its plumage offset by the dark background of some berry-laden bush’.

He described such details as the sealing ‘wax-red appendages’ in the secondary wing feathers, which account for its name in English.

The plumage is the same in both genders. ​An arboreal bird, it breeds in the world’s northern forests up to the tree line. Its main food is fruit. In summer, this can include wild strawberries, raspberries and cherries. In winter, it can eat mistletoe. It also consumes the fruit readily available in public spaces and

private gardens – rowan berries, crab apples, rose hips and cotoneaster.

This leads to convenient, starlinglike accessibility. ‘Often it seems almost to court closer scrutiny, its confiding behaviour being sometimes as surprising as its plumage is distinctive’ (Bannerman). ​Doubtless, the lack of human contact in its formative upbringing in northern forests is partly responsible. I have a distant memory of a TV programme showing a boy on the Faroe Islands literally festooned with waxwings, several perched on his arms, shoulders and head.

All this contributes to the excited expectation when waxwings are about.

They are guzzlers. One bird was seen to eat 600-1,000 berries in six hours,

decorating the ground with a bright red dropping every fourth minute. Sightings circulate, and birdwatchers know they have to be quick to experience possibly the only chance in a lifetime.

A winter flock was once reported in my home borough of Camden, north London. Having never seen a waxwing, I took it as a red alert. During lunch, a flock of what I momentarily thought were starlings settled in the bare branches of the undistinguished sycamore tree at the end of the garden. The prominent crests revealed the identity of the silhouetted birds. Binoculars desperately retrieved, they were gone.

This winter, a flock of 500 arrived in early November. Keep those binoculars handy.

The Oldie March 2024 81

Travel My Delft Blue heaven William Cook walks in Vermeer’s footsteps – and admires the elegant blue porcelain produced in the Dutch city for 400 years

O

n the sedate outskirts of Delft, one of the prettiest cities in the Netherlands, a jolly Dutchman called Co van Nieuwenhuijzen is guiding me round the last surviving Delftware factory in the world.

All around us, skilled craftsmen and craftswomen are hard at work, painting intricate patterns onto delicate cups and plates – a process that’s hardly changed since the firm was founded in 1653.

Like the Potteries in Staffordshire, or Meissen in Germany, Delft has become synonymous with the eponymous porcelain that’s been made here for the last 400 years.

Delft Blue (or Delfts Blauw, as the Dutch call it) is familiar the world over, but how much do you know about the place it comes from? If you’re at all interested in ceramics, Delft is a mustsee destination – and there’s far more to this lively little city than florid blue-andwhite crockery.

Whatever time of year you come, there’s always something going on. This spring, the main attraction is Pioneering Ceramics at the Prinsenhof, Delft’s magnificent art and history museum.

This ambitious new show juxtaposes classic Delftware from the museum’s permanent collection with works by some of the world’s leading contemporary ceramicists. A big part of Delft’s heritage, pottery is also a dynamic and evolving art form, and, 82 The Oldie March 2024

Johannes Vermeer’s View of Delft (1661)

right now, in the global art world, it’s never been more fashionable.

The best place to start your tour of Delft is at De Koninklijke Porceleyne Fles, aka Royal Delft. During the 17th and 18th centuries, this famous factory was merely one among dozens in the city.

By the end of the 19th century, it was the only one still trading. How did it survive, while its competitors collapsed?

And what made Delft such a mecca for pottery in the first place?

During the 17th century (the so-called

Golden Age, when the Netherlands led the world in commerce and culture), Delft was one of Europe’s leading ports, enjoying especially strong links with China and Japan.

Dutch merchants brought Chinese and Japanese porcelain to Delft, and demand became so high that Delft’s potters created their own ersatz versions.

They weren’t quite as good as the real thing, but they were better than anything else in Europe, and so Delft became a byword for this exquisite tableware.

IMAGEBROKER.COM GMBH & CO. KG; TERENCE KERR; MANFRED GOTTSCHALK / ALAMY; ALBERTINE DIJKEMA, MUSEUM PRINSENHOF DELFT

By the 19th century, Delftware was already in decline, eclipsed by cheaper tableware from Stoke-on-Trent and intricate figurines from Dresden. Yet, while other potteries in Delft folded, Royal Delft diversified, manufacturing smart new tiles for the building trade.

Awarded a royal warrant in 1919, today it’s still going strong, with customers all around the globe.

You can buy all sorts of crockery in the factory shop, with prices ranging from two to three (or even four) figures. An adjoining museum tells the story of the firm’s evolution. The gallery houses special exhibitions – the current display is a riveting survey of Picasso’s joyful, fantastical ceramics.

Wandering around Delft, a picturesque network of canals and William the Silent, cobbled alleys, Nieuwe Kerk you realise Delftware is integral to the city’s identity.

Everyone who lives here seems to have a few precious pieces on display.

Royal Delft has several outlets around town, and there are lots of quirky curiosity shops, where you can hunt for older, more unusual items (try Léon Paul Antiques on Voldersgracht). A new hand-painted piece can set you back several hundred euros, but you can pick up an antique tile for as little as €20.

The Prinsenhof has an excellent collection of Delftware, while the museum’s best exhibit is the building itself. Originally a convent, it was appropriated by the Dutch rebel William the Silent, who made it the HQ for his revolt against the Netherlands’ Spanish rulers. The Spanish put a price on his head – and in 1584 an assassin, Balthasar Gérard, duly shot him dead in the stairwell of this robust palace. The wall still bears the bullet holes.

Gérard was tortured to death before an enthusiastic crowd in the market square outside, and William became a national martyr, the father of the Dutch state.

William was buried in the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) on the market square, and the crypt beneath his ornate shrine became a tomb for all the Dutch rulers who succeeded him. The building is austere yet intensely atmospheric.

Built in the 14th century, it’s called the New Church because the nearby Oude Kerk (Old Church) is even older.

The Oude Kerk is the last resting place of Johannes Vermeer, who spent his whole life in Delft. Today, this sublime and subtle painter is revered worldwide. When he died, in 1675, he was too poor to afford a headstone, and until the end of the 19th century he was almost forgotten. The gravestone that attracts the tourists dates back only to the tricentenary of his death, in 1975.

There are only a few specific sights associated with Vermeer in Delft, but the city he inhabited has been immaculately preserved.

The street plan of the historic old town has hardly changed since his lifetime, and most landmarks from that era have survived. The bland modern suburbs are uninspiring, but there are no new eyesores in the city centre. If one stands on the spot where Vermeer painted his View of Delft, the skyline remains the same.

Getting here is easy. From London, it takes three and a half hours on a direct Eurostar to Rotterdam, then 15 minutes on a local train to Delft. There are several connections every hour. A ticket costs only a few euros.

I stayed at the Hotel Arsenaal on the edge of the old town, a few minutes’ walk from the train station. As the name suggests, it’s housed in a former armoury.

‘AD 1692’ reads the coat of arms above

Above: Oude Delft, the oldest canal street in the city. Left: tulip vase (c 1690) in the Prinsenhof

the door. The canal-side location is quiet, and it’s only a short stroll from the city centre (almost all the attractions and amenities in Delft are easily accessible on foot).

A military museum until a few years ago, the building now has a contemporary interior that’s chic and comfy, yet it still retains a sense of history and a close connection with the past.

There are lots and lots of good places to eat. Delfts Brouwhuis is a microbrewery which serves hearty, wholesome grub, and fresh beer on tap, brewed out the back. For a more international menu, head for ’t Postkantoor, in the old post office.

Hanno is a popular modern rendezvous, serving healthy fusion food.

Although there are lots of tourists around town, the city never feels swamped by sightseers, partly because a lot of visitors are Dutch, but mainly because a lot of locals live and socialise in the city centre.

On my first day, I visited the Museum Paul Tetar van Elven (a handsome townhouse that belonged to a 19th-century painter – everything is exactly as he left it, including his wonderful Delftware collection) and got talking to the friendly lady on the door.

On my last day, walking to the station to catch the train to Rotterdam, I bumped into her again, doing her shopping in the market square. I told her I hoped to be back here soon. She said she’d look out for me.

What a happy place this seems to be.

I think you’d like it, too.

Eurostar London to Rotterdam from £78 return (www.eurostar.com).

Doubles at the Hotel Arsenaal (www. hotelarsenaal.com) from €140, including breakfast

The 1496 Nieuwe Kerk (tower 1892)

Pioneering Ceramics is at the Prinsenhof Museum (www.prinsenhof-delft.nl), 16th February to 8th September The Oldie March 2024 83

Overlooked Britain

Hellfire at Apollo’s Temple

© NATIONAL TRUST IMAGES

lucinda lambton Sir Francis Dashwood hid a cockpit in a triumphal arch – and founded the racy Hellfire Club

The thunderingly great Temple of Apollo, at West Wycombe Park, Buckinghamshire, was built as a triumphal arch.

Incredible to say, it was also a cockpit.

The action took place below the arch, while the cages for the wretched fighting birds were in a room on high.

It was built in 1761, supposedly by architect John Donowell, for Sir Francis Dashwood. No doubt, it was erected to encourage the ever more lustful pleasures and depravities enjoyed by his Brotherhood of the Friars of St Francis of Wycombe. They are also known as the Knights of St Francis or the Friars – and, most popularly, as the Hellfire Club.

The arch inscription is an abbreviation of the club motto ‘LIBERTATI 84 The Oldie March 2024

Top: Temple of Apollo and cockpit. Above: West Wycombe Park (1818), temple on left

HISTORIC IMAGES; CHRONICLE; SILVESTER; NATHANIEL NOIR / ALAMY

Left: Sir Francis Dashwood (1708-81), founder of the Hellfire Club. Right: the Dashwood Mausoleum (1765) and St Lawrence’s Church (1763)

AMICITIAE QUE SACRA’ – (‘sacred to freedom and friendship’).

The members of the Hellfire Club, also known as Dashwood’s Apostles, were an illustrious yet rum bunch. Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, was one. John Wilkes, radical journalist and politician, was another. And there were umpteen poets and pamphleteers, all of them revelling in shamefully licentious and satanic rites.

They took place in the semi-ruined Medmenham Abbey some miles away – today still standing and exquisitely restored – as well as in the caves Sir Francis had dug deep into the hills at West Wycombe.

Each ‘Friar’, wearing a monk’s habit, had a cell to retire to for ‘private devotions’. And there were regular black masses, held beneath a wealth of obscene frescoes.

Horace Walpole described their practices as ‘rigorously pagan’ and condemned Dashwood as having ‘the staying power of a stallion and the impetuosity of a bull’. More worryingly distasteful were the masked women dressed as nuns.

In fact, all this building demonstrated the more serious side of Sir Francis’s character. He became Chancellor of the Exchequer, although he was considered incapable of understanding a bar bill of five figures and had to resign when his tax on cider caused riots!

He was the Postmaster General, a founder member of the Dilettanti Society – formed to promote the arts – and a knowledgeable connoisseur. He was also a pioneer neoclassicist, who practised

what he preached by commissioning the architect Nicholas Revett exquisitely to remodel his house.

John Donowell also classicised the medieval church high on the hill above West Wycombe. It was all somewhat mocked in The Ghost by the poet Charles Churchill, fellow member of the Hellfire Club: Here She [Fancy] made lordly temples rise Before the pious Dashwood’s eyes, Temples which, built aloft in air, May serve for show, if not for pray’r.

And there was more: a huge and hexagonal open-to-the-skies mausoleum was paid for by his friend the pleasingly named politician and fellow ‘Friar’ George Bubb Dodington.

I have relished this airy spot with its splendours on high and have delighted in its flintwork, surrounded by the grandeur of the view which quite stirs the soul.

The Temple of Apollo hails you from far below, alongside a quantity of great buildings that can be described only as sublimely beautiful. For starters, there is the fine, colonnaded, neoclassical West Wycombe Park with the Tuscan order on the ground floor and the Corinthian order above. Both flank a central projecting pediment –

Hellfire Caves, West Wycombe

Dashwood had ‘the staying power of a stallion and the impetuosity of a bull’ features that are rare indeed for architecture in England.

Dashwood triumphed throughout; he was responsible for picturesquely arranging some 20 buildings within the folds of West Wycombe Park, on land that has been continuously and romantically landscaped since 1739. ‘If not superfluous at least profuse’ was a local newspaper’s grudging description of them all.

There were seven temples, including the Temple of Apollo. Six years after that was finished, Nicholas Revett designed the stables, giving them the flint wall – to be seen beyond the arch – to act as a screen. This has a niche to show off a statue modelled on the Apollo Belvedere, suitably framed by an arch.

Benjamin Franklin often stayed at West Wycombe in the 1770s. There he and Sir Francis Dashwood compiled a simplified version of the Book of Common Prayer, published in 1773. The Pevsner guide to Buckinghamshire records that its purpose was ‘to attract the young and lively and retrieve the well disposed from the infliction of interminable prayers’.

Dashwood had embarked on numerous Grand Tours, from which he returned with great acquisitions of art, both in learning and in culture. His house was described as one of the most theatrical and Italianate mid-18thcentury buildings in England.

Hurray for such particularly rare beauty to be found nestling in England’s Home Counties.

The Oldie March 2024 85

On the Road

Fry’s delight – and despair Stephen Fry tells Louise Flind about his friendship with Hugh Laurie, the joy of Lord’s and the agony of Gaza Is there anything you can’t leave home without?

A charger for my Apple Watch, notebooks and pencils.

Is there something you really miss when you’re away?

Test Match Special and The Archers, but you can hear them now if you’re cunning with a VPN. And Radio 4 generally.

Do you travel light?

I throw everything in and get annoyed with myself that there are all these things I didn’t need…

What’s your favourite destination?

A place I’ve never been before. I’ve travelled a great deal for the BBC and ITV, because of documentaries I’ve done. Also, I do like to travel for holidays with my husband.

Earliest childhood holiday memories?

Cornwall – and one remembers playing Scrabble while the rain beat against the window, and the offer of a speedboat ride and hiding behind my mother, saying, ‘I don’t want to,’ dropping an ice cream and crying because it was lost. From Paddington to Cornwall, it was a steam train.

SAMIR HUSSEIN / WIREIMAGE / GETTY

Do you come from an artistic household?

There were lots and lots of books. My father was a physicist and an inventor. In the wilds of Norfolk, we had a large house, and my father converted the stable block into laboratories where he had his oscilloscopes. The complications in my life were slightly to do with my difficult relationship with my father, whom I did find rather frightening. And I discovered, once our relationship was repaired, that he felt I had immense potential and was wasting it – and I dare say he was right.

Did you always want to be on the stage?

When I was at prep school, my first review was ‘Stephen Fry as Mrs Higgins would grace any drawing room.’ At the pantomime, when Buttons said, ‘Do any of you boys and girls want to join me on stage?’, I thrust my hand up so hard that it almost tore the membrane of my armpits.

86 The Oldie March 2024

What was Hugh Laurie like when you first met him?

Wonderful. It was Emma Thompson who took me round, and Hugh was sitting on the bed with a guitar writing a song and he was stuck on the lyric. He sang the verse and the chorus and I said, ‘You could always swap that around,’ and we finished the song and picked up another piece of paper and wrote a sketch… We’re still best friends.

Was there something unusual about your generation at Cambridge to produce such a crop of talent?

One didn’t think it at the time.

What was your first big break?

Going up to Edinburgh and, virtually three nights in a row, the most extraordinary things happened.

First, an Australian promoter said he’d like to take us on tour to Australia. The next day, we were taking our bows and suddenly there was an extra roar – and behind us was Rowan Atkinson, who awarded us the Perrier Award, which involved a show for a week in a London theatre. The next day, the comedy legend Dennis Main Wilson said he wanted to put the show on the BBC. Then Sandy Ross, a producer at Granada, and his young assistant John Plowman said they wanted to put me, Hugh and Emma together with Robbie Coltrane and Ben Elton, and we did three series.

Where was Blackadder filmed?

In Wood Lane, the BBC Television Centre.

Did you write stories as a child?

At prep school, I wrote a pastiche of a Sherlock Holmes story and one of a P G Wodehouse story.

Do you prefer writing or performing?

Performing, but the satisfaction of having written is unbelievable.

When did you discover you were bipolar?

My parents sent me to a psychiatrist when I was 15. I discovered later that he had written a letter to both my parents and my housemaster at school suggesting bipolar.

What’s your favourite piece of music and favourite book?

Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, Glenn Gould’s Bach Partitas, Handel and Mozart. Ulysses and The Great Gatsby.

Does success affect your depression?

My having disclosed I have a mood disorder means people readily understand.

Is it difficult being married to a much younger man?

If you love each other, I don’t think it matters. Wilde said, ‘I love the young – they’re so much more experienced.’ I look to Elliot for advice far more than he looks to me. So in that sense he’s older than I am.

What was best about being MCC President?

Hosting the presidential box during the Ashes Test at Lord’s.

What is your favourite cricket ground?

In terms of beauty, Canterbury and Worcester. Abroad, South Africa and the Wankhede in India.

Does your Judaism have an effect on your approach to what’s going on in Israel?

Alarm and fear at the rise of antisemitism. The contempt, fear and horror I feel for Netanyahu and his government is matched only by the contempt, horror and fear I feel for Hamas.

How did you get on with Oldie favourites Barry Cryer and Barry Humphries?

I adored them both. The world is vastly the poorer for their absence. The wickedest wit with the least malice.

Stephen Fry’s The Odyssey is out in October

Genius crossword 436 EL SERENO Across 1 Puzzles as public transport holds me back (7) 5 Beginning to operate, doctor slices tiny bone (7) 9 Caramel once used to keep fruit (5) 10 Stakes securing run for animals (9) 11 Wind instrument a submariner came across – I’m not sure (10) 12 Story encapsulating French existence (4) 14 When spiv loses case, sound hopeful (12) 18 One dad and son in the money getting crosser (8,4) 21 Forlorn countenance going back across line (4) 22 One in trade union tracking Greek city growth (10) 25 Conclude English taste initially missing and make an effort (9) 26 17’s lucky success (5) 27 Defensive work of primate in role (7) 28 Round up about a pound for such a weapon (7)

Down 1 University doctor in reserve is a carrier (6) 2 Add spice to eat outside – such a shock (6) 3 Risks – now I’m worried and in at the deep end (4,2,4) 4 Son gets recent debt recorded on this (5) 5 Working dog collecting bird without delay (2,3,4) 6 Only painful if changing sides (4) 7 Prisoners drinking a pint with international legends (8) 8 Time for lots of eggs?

Extremely likely to give you wind (8) 13 Curiously fluid – and is showing contempt (10) 15 Removed problems as press journalist dismissed (6,3) 16 Refuse to fall behind in building phase (8) 17 Struggle helplessly seeing line adopted by father (8) 19 Little note taken of meeting (6) 20 Threaten Independent politician with intention (6) 23 Sit and fish (5) 24 Angler’s target may be better across river (4)

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How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. Deadline: 6th March 2024.

We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25.

Two runners-up will receive £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 436 1

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Across 1 Highest rank of nobility after king (4) 3 Let it down to enjoy yourself (4) 9 Inaccuracy (5) 10 Man-made (9) 11 Thoughts (5) 12 Flat; dwelling (9) 15 Secret; wardrobe (6) 17 Slapdash, careless (6) 19 Return journey (5,4) 21 Fisherman’s basket (5) 23 Wild west criminal (9) 24 Basil, pine nuts and garlic sauce (5) 25 Encounter (4) 26 Curds and ___ (4)

Genius 434 solution Down 1 Length, coolness (8) 2 Marsupial;makeshift court (8) 4 Part of flower containing pollen (6) 5 Reading; musical performance (7) 6 Scottish bank (4) 7 Supplies weapons to (4) 8 Closed (4) 13 Draw near (8) 14 Orchestral composition (8) 16 Old mare (anag) (7) 18 Awkward struggle (6) 20 Subscription fees (4) 21 Mafia boss (4) 22 Gaelic language (4)

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Winner: Maureen Lane, Stevenage, Hertfordshire Runners-up: Judy Murray, Exmouth, Devon; J Bielawski, Southport, Merseyside

Moron 434 answers: Across: 7 Simper, 8 Thighs (sympathise), 10 Sustain, 11 Cover, 12 Aged, 13 Sleep, 17 Dingy, 18 Slim, 22 Trunk, 23 Nirvana, 24 Idling, 25 Stress. Down: 1 As usual, 2 Smashed, 3 Medal, 4 Shocked, 5 Ogive, 6 Usury, 9 Inelegant, 14 Ticking, 15 Bloated, 16 Impasse, 19 Attic, 20 Quill, 21 Broth.

The Oldie March 2024 89

Competition TESSA CASTRO I recall some 25 years ago, in the last round of the world’s top invitational event, my partner, Zia Mahmood, false-carded on defence by playing the knave from knave-nine doubleton of trumps; declarer later misread the position and took a deep finesse into his nine. This catapulted Zia and me to victory, the Polish player Piotr Tuszynski and partner finishing second.

The opposing declarer who had fallen for Zia’s ruse was Tuszynski.

The boot was on the other foot in this month’s deal from last year’s European Winter Games in Tignes. West led the queen of clubs versus the optimistic six hearts, declarer winning the ace. Needing a very favourable heart holding, he crossed to the ace of spades and led the two of hearts…

Dealer South North-South North ♠ AKJ42 ♥ Q92 ♦ A Q 10 ♣ 10 8

West ♠ Q653 ♥ 873 ♦ 87543 ♣Q

South ♠ 9 ♥ AJ654 ♦ 62 ♣ AJ974

East ♠ 10 8 7 ♥ K 10 ♦ KJ9 ♣ K6532

The bidding South 1 ♥ (1) 2♣ 3 ♣ (3) 4 ♥ (5) 5 ♥ (6)

West Pass Pass Pass Pass Pass

North 1♠ 2 ♦ (2) 3 ♥ (4) 4 NT (6) 6 ♥

East Pass Pass Pass Pass End

1. Skimpy but satisfies the rule of 20.

2. Too strong simply to jump to four hearts, North bids Fourth Suit Forcing to set up a game force. 3. Showing his five-five shape.

4. Stronger than four hearts. 5. Weakest bid. 6. Should probably pass but instead asks for aces, receiving the answer: two.

At the other table, East played the ten.

Declarer finessed the knave, cashed the ace, felling East’s king, and could now cross to the Queen of Hearts and merely concede to the king of clubs. Slam made.

However, when our hero Tuszynski was East, he played the king of hearts on dummy’s two of hearts (key play). Naturally believing this was a singleton, declarer understandably (after winning the ace) led a second heart to dummy’s nine. East rubbed salt into the wound by returning a low club (not the king) for West to ruff, and still had to score the king. Two down.

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 302 you were invited to write a poem called The Doormat. Most of your doormats were metaphorical, but instead of a Welcome doormat, Jenny Jones’s narrator concluded, ‘What I need’s a mat to shout: / “Go Away”, “Be Off”, “Keep Out”!’ D A Prince too ended with a memorable couplet: ‘The doormat’s silent modesty survives / The calendars of louder human lives.’ Gail White ended her tale of a doormat’s waiting game: ‘It lay supine and somnolent (to nobody’s surprise), / As dormant as a dormouse with its paws before its eyes.’

I liked the economy of a line from Dorothy Pope’s lonely narrator: ‘The fish man comes but has no time to chat.’

Commiserations to them and to Martin Brown, Katie Mallett, Noel King, Paul Holland, Stefan Badham and Fiona Clark, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Clara Frith.

The doormat to your house is squarely cut, The coir bristles standing coarse and high, A welcome message painted on it, but You know in truth the welcome is a lie, For like the dirt the mat brushed off your shoes We are the debris of your former life, An episode that you would rather choose To keep out of the house of your new wife.

My friends’ parents now share their homes with me.

‘She’s from a broken one,’ I hear them say.

I’m too deep in denial to agree, And clinging to the shards of yesterday, For I can’t face the truth behind your door: That you’ve abandoned what we had before.

Clara Frith My coir bristles occupy A frame set carefully to lie Quite flush with the surrounding floor.

So, as they come they can’t ignore The silent service I provide, Nor cross me in a single stride; They scrape and shuffle, give a skip, They bend, untie and then unship Their boots or shoes (rarely galoshes), Hang their dripping mackintoshes;

Greet and kiss, give manly hugs, And cleansed they then can greet the rugs.

No sullying of polished floors, Once all these heels have come indoors, For I have purified their soles And by their feet I know them.

Anthony Young I can’t remember what it was I said But you harrumphed and I apologised And you harrumphed again. After a pause During which you continued wiping dishes You walked away from me to hang the cloth, Saying, ‘That’s all right, then.’ And I said, ‘Sorry.’

How else should one acknowledge a rebuke?

You had honed your consonants into sharp points And pushed them home with slick enunciation: I had transgressed, I stung and I was sorry.

That’s all there was to it. I was contrite But you said briskly, ‘Don’t apologise,’ As though you minded my having said ‘Sorry,’ And made me feel like saying it again.

But that’s me; I’d say ‘Sorry’ to a hedgehog If I were to step on it barefoot. Sorry.

Ann Drysdale I used to be a coconut, And quite a hard case too.

I reckoned I could wipe the floor With anyone I knew.

But now the floor gets wiped on me!

It’s really disconcerting.

My fibres seethe and bristle But it doesn’t stop them hurting.

I dream of bougainvillaea That skirts a sand-filled coast, And smell the ocean, not the floor, That’s what I miss the most.

Con Connell COMPETITION No 304 I saw lip balm advertised on the side of a bus, but have never bought it yet. Please write a poem called Balm, in any connection.

Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 304’,

by Thursday 7th March.

The Oldie March 2024 91

Taking a Walk

Psychedelic nights in Derbyshire

GARY WING

patrick barkham

To hijack L P Hartley, the night is a foreign country; they do things differently there. And if that’s true, a night walk with a UV torch is an expedition to another planet.

This was a simple stroll round a small common in the ordinary English countryside on a dark, dank night.

I set out with my friend Jeremy Buxton, a farmer, and David Atthowe, a young man who is a kind of natural explorer. David has started night strolls with UV torches, which are a tool to take us into another wavelength.

He handed us a torch each. These were ordinary-looking black torches, albeit unusually heavy. We strode down the track and onto Booton Common to a soundtrack of distant tawny owls. The night was still and dripping wet, with dense cloud sheathing any sight of the moon, the stars and passing satellites.

We flicked on the torches – and were soon stopped in our tracks.

Lichen that was yellow by day was revealed under torchlight as brilliant orange. Algae on a fence post that were unnoticed in daylight now shone vivid red. Woodlice scurrying along a branch showed up as luminous blue.

Our torches unveiled the natural biofluorescence of animals, plants and fungi. Biofluorescence is the absorption of light by living organisms who then emit it as bright blues, greens, reds and yellows.

This ultraviolet light has wavelengths shorter than those detectable by the human eye, but many other animals can see it, and communicate with it.

We may be naturally blind to it, but increasingly affordable and portable UV torches are bringing it into our vision.

We walked slowly on down the footpath which skirted the common, field-edge oaks looming above us. I stopped to examine a brown slug. It emitted brilliant fluorescent yellow slime as I touched it. Jeremy was sidetracked by an earthworm, which revealed twin dotted lines of turquoise on its belly.

We began giggling. I’m such a square that I’ve never taken a trip, but this must 92 The Oldie March 2024

be what trippy looks like. The English countryside at night was flaunting its flamboyant psychedelic tendencies.

A humble grey-brown moth turned purple and pink under UV light, and nettles wowed us. Those growing in sunny spots remained green, but plants in shadier areas sported leaves of vivid maroon. Spiders seemed to vary depending on species and also their age, shining bright blue or yellow.

We continued round the common, hoping to stumble across a blue-glowing hedgehog or mole, which are David’s favourite discoveries this year. While the scientific community has documented biofluorescent communication among marine organisms such as sharks for years, an Australian study recently found that 86 per cent of 125 mammals had fur that glowed under UV light. North American flying squirrels shine brilliant pink.

No mammals revealed themselves, but we did discover the beauty of UV litter, even on this quiet nature reserve. Little threads from clothes snagged on branches showed up bright blue-white. I

paused to inspect what seemed to be a stupendous lemon-coloured caterpillar; sadly, it turned into a lost scrunchie.

The most charismatic stars of our UV walk were, however, undoubtedly the fungi. By day, Russula fungi were a striking maroon, but beneath our torches they shone a bright lemon yellow. Artist’s conk, a bracket fungus, had a dark brown top and a creamy underside by day. Now it sported a blood-red cap with duck-egg blue beneath.

After two hours of walking at less than woodlouse pace, our torches began to dim (they require hefty battery power) and we reluctantly headed for home. The effect of all these new observations was to slow us down, and make us focus on the small things. This night walk was not only trippy but also deeply tranquil.

We walked around Booton Common, a Norfolk Wildlife Trust nature reserve with public access. Entrance: grid ref TG110228; what3words: books.yards. ghost. David Atthowe offers UV nature walks in East Anglia at revealnature.co.uk

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Ask Virginia

virginia ironside Dad’s sex life? Eurrrghh!

Q

After my mother died, my father married my stepmother – he was in his late seventies, and she was only 40 – but now he’s died, she can’t step telling me in detail about their sex life. I feel so embarrassed hearing such intimate details about my father.

I don’t want to cut off contact with my 12-year-old stepbrother, but how can I get her to stop?

Sophia, by email

A

You could lie and tell her that he had an even more amazing sex life with your mother. (‘The things I could tell you!’) Or you could bang on about how theirs was the perfect marriage. They were more in love than Romeo and Juliet or Anthony and Cleopatra. It was so transcendent that you could almost feel it. Or you could just keep absolutely quiet, smiling to yourself in the knowledge that you have such devastating weapons available but are choosing not to use them. First of all, though, I’d simply be honest: ‘You know I feel really uncomfortable when you talk about your sex life with my father. I feel I’m being disloyal to him, even hearing about it. So perhaps we could keep off the topic in future.’ She’s almost certainly doing this because she’s still jealous of the relationship you had with him, one that she knows, deep down, she would never have been able to live up to.

I’m a demented carer

Q

I’ve cared for my elderly father, who has Alzheimer’s, for five years. I get all the help there is available, but the other day I got so frustrated I lashed out at him physically.

I’m terrified I might not be able to

control myself another time. He was such a good father to me and I feel terribly guilty. Of course I daren’t tell anyone. What can I do?

Name and address supplied

A

The truth is that there is barely a carer in the world who doesn’t feel like lashing out sometimes, and many who have actually lashed out and feel just like you. Hugh Marriott has written a wonderful, completely honest, book about the turmoil he felt when caring for his demented parents – no holds barred. If you read it you’ll feel much less alone, less guilty, and relieved to discover that what you’ve given in to is, sadly, while not to be condoned, horribly normal. The book is The Selfish Pig’s Guide to Caring: How to Cope with the Emotional and Practical Aspects of Caring for Someone (Piatkus). Some bits are actually funny.

Infuriating eco-grandson

Q

Our 20-year-old grandson has gone green mad. He’s very disapproving of our flying to Tunisia for a holiday, and is horrified when I produce a roll of clingfilm from the drawer. There seems to be nothing he doesn’t disapprove of, from flushing the loo more than once a day to not having a compost heap for potato peelings etc.

Much as I love him, I am starting to dread his coming round. What can we do?

V R, Scotland

A

He will, one hopes, grow out of this. Until then, I’d focus on one thing – say, the compost heap.

Ask for his advice, encourage him to build you a little enclosure to keep it in, and if he goes on about anything else, say, ‘One thing at a time, darling. Let’s get the

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compost sorted first and then we can move on to the other things.’

I suspect that once he feels he’s made an impact – which will make him feel proud of himself – he’ll be able to put the other matters on the back burner.

Take the better invitation

Q

I recently agreed with friends to go on a tour of a local country house to look at the portraits.

But, a few days before we were due to go, I received an email from an arts centre, of which I am a member, to say they were showing – for one day only – a rare film, one that I particularly wanted to see. I immediately emailed my friends, explaining my dilemma and asking to be excused, hoping that they’d understand. I received no reply.

My partner maintains that this was very rude of me, and that I should have honoured my agreement (which I would normally do). But I felt that on this occasion I would indulge myself, especially as no costs had been incurred and my friends could still go without me.

Name and address supplied

A

Your partner is clearly terrified of upsetting other people. This is a crazy overreaction. Ask a couple in your group what they thought on getting your email and then report back to your partner. If you can’t bow out of a friends’ gathering now and again, you’ve got a group not of friends but of bullies and tyrants. It isn’t as if this were a wedding at which you were giving a speech. It was just a jaunt.

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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