What explains the enduring appeal of the original film of Mary Poppins, 60 years after the film version was released?
The tale of the magical nanny, who wafts down over the rooftops of Edwardian London to take charge of two winsome but neglected children, first blazed across British screens at Christmas 1964.
There are two answers. First, it’s an obviously well-made piece of family entertainment, punctuated by a whole series of catchy, vaudeville-like songs and enough visually striking images to have long since made it part of our collective consciousness.
Secondly, it’s also done something that’s harder to achieve in our fallen age: it presents a picture of essential human goodness, fairness and justice that’s as timely now as it was 60 years ago. How heart-warming, too, that two of its stars, Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, are still with us, at 89 and 98 respectively.
That message may seem ironic to anyone familiar with the 2013 biopic Saving Mr Banks, which deals with the film’s troubled story. Children’s authors as a race aren’t known for their happy childhoods, and Helen Goff – the Australian girl who at 21 changed her name to Pamela Travers and went on to create Mary Poppins – was no exception.
She was born in rural Queensland in 1899 to an alcoholic father who died when Helen was seven, and a mother who calmly informed her children one night that she intended to go out and drown herself in a nearby lake.
Although she survived her suicide attempt, ‘she was no longer a woman whom I cared to love or to entrust myself to’, Travers later wrote. Much of the family’s day-to-day supervision instead fell to a formidable maiden greataunt, who bossed everyone around but displayed a talent for story-telling and
Mary Poppins at 60: Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke
make-believe that informed the fictional Mary Poppins.
After a brief flirtation with
Among this month’s contributors
Algy Cluff (p14) was one of the first entrepreneurs to strike North Sea oil. He is author of Get On With It: A Memoir and The Importance of Being Algy. He owned the Spectator magazine.
Simon Williams (p51) starred in Upstairs, Downstairs. He is Justin Elliott in The Archers. He and his wife, Lucy Fleming, play her parents, Peter Fleming and Celia Johnson, in Posting Letters to the Moon.
Lady Antonia Fraser (p53) is one of our leading historians. At 92, she is The Oldie’s newest columnist. Patchwork Pieces, her latest book, is a collection of historical vignettes. It is out on 10th October.
Harriet Rix (p74) worked in landmine clearance in Iraq and Syria. Her first book, Earth, Wind and Fire: How Trees Shaped the Elements and Mastered the World, will be published by Penguin in 2025.
the Australian stage, in 1924 Travers decided to try her luck as a writer in England, where she remained for the rest of her long life. She never married, although at the age of 40 she adopted a son, who sadly shared his grandfather’s taste for the bottle. It’s been said that so far as Travers ever formed any personal attachments, they were to other women.
Inspired both by her great-aunt and by J M Barrie’s Peter Pan, she wrote a first short story called ‘Mary Poppins and the Match-Man’ in 1926. A full-length novel featuring the umbrellaparachuting nanny appeared in 1934 (perhaps fittingly, published by the firm run by Peter Llewelyn Davies, the inspiration for Peter Pan), and seven sequels followed over the next 55 years. By the end of that time, Travers was approaching 90.
Walt Disney, whose two young daughters loved the Mary Poppins books,
Important stories you may have missed
Overgrown grass to be cut back
Walden Local
Seafood festival success despite ‘biblical’ rain
Dorset Echo
Tower crane is dismantled
Peeblesshire News
£15 for published contributions
SIGN UP! SIGN UP! for the FREE Oldie newsletter
Every Friday, we will send you the very latest stories and features – the more timely stuff which doesn’t make it into the magazine. And a joke from the late great Barry Cryer. Plus you get advance notice of our literary lunches, reader trips and courses. Don’t miss out. Go to www.theoldie.co.uk and enter your email address in this box:
had first come knocking in the 1940s. Travers eventually agreed to sell him the series’ film rights in 1961, largely because she was then flat broke.
The next three years of script development stand as a parable about the clash between art and commerce.
Travers had reservations about the more cartoon-like version of her story right from the start, as evidenced by a tape-recording of an early script conference.
‘But how is that arranged?’ she can be heard demanding of a scene in which the human performers are called on to interact with a chorus line of dancing penguins.
‘Walt Disney magic!’ one of the studio executives replies with touching excitement.
Among the Oldie party on our readers’ trip to Gallipoli was Clement Attlee’s granddaughter Sally Camps.
Attlee was heroic at Gallipoli in 1915. Having landed once, he was invalided off with dysentery – only to return to the front.
At the disembarkation from Gallipoli after the doomed campaign, Attlee got all his men off the shore at Suvla Bay, without a single man lost.
Sally said, ‘To get the men and guns off the beach – and nobody died – makes me really proud.’
At 32, Attlee, a barrister, was a keen socialist. Sally
Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter Email SIGN UP
says, ‘He was teased for it in the mess. He was rather quiet and shy but the men had confidence in him.
‘He was often underestimated, but this original man changed Britain.’
Oliver Cromwell’s alma mater is putting right an ancient mix-up. It has discovered that Oliver Cromwell’s warts-and-all portrait has been attributed to the wrong artist.
‘Isn’t that the Duke of the Isle of Man?’
The Oldie is very sad to hear of the death of the great cartoonist Ed McLachlan, at 84. He worked to the end. This rough was found on his desk after his death. A tribute is on page 46.
The painting was donated to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in the 1760s. It was described as ‘drawn by Samuel Cooper’. But doubts were raised about the artist’s identity because Cooper specialised in miniatures, not full-size portraits.
Now experts have established that the pastel portrait came from the studio of Peter Lely, another 17th-century artist, whom Cromwell famously instructed, ‘Paint my picture truly like me … warts and everything as you see me.’ The confusion arose because both painters produced a number of Cromwell portraits.
The 1650s picture will now bear Lely’s name instead of Cooper’s. For many years, it took pride of place in the Sidney Sussex dining hall and was sometimes covered by a curtain. Students suspected this was done when the loyal toast was made at college ‘formals’.
But college archivist Nicholas Rogers says the portrait’s donor had simply stipulated that it should be protected from sunlight:
‘The curtain was taken down when it was rehung in our combination room, which is heavily curtained and where there’s not much natural light. I’ve seen a photo of the late Queen at a quatercentenary dinner for the college with the uncovered portrait in the
Dolce vita: Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) on Hydra, Greece. Taken by his wife, Joan, from Olivia Stewart’s book, The Outward Gaze: The Photographs of Joan Leigh Fermor
Sally Camps, Suvla, Gallipoli
background – so I don’t think anyone regarded it as disloyal.’
The future Lord Protector matriculated at Sidney Sussex in 1616 but left after a year without taking a degree.
After the Restoration, his body was dug up and hanged and his head put on a spike at Westminster Hall. It blew
down in a storm and became a bizarre collector’s item before being reburied at Sidney Sussex in 1960.
Some families keep on popping up, and it’s nothing to do with money. An army officer’s daughter called Mary Spender, who did a tour of England in October with her first guitar folk album, has made more than £100,000 from her music and has some 750,000 online ‘followers’ (online subscribers are somehow made to sound like disciples).
The Old Un wondered: is she related to Stephen Spender, poet and colleague of Auden and Isherwood?
Answer: second cousin twice removed. More than that, she counts Emily Spender among her forebears.
Emily, now largely forgotten, was a novelist and suffragettiste, as the precursors of the Suffragette movement were called. She pushed off to Italy, where she bumped into E M Forster and his mother doing a Grand Tour.
She may have rubbed up E M the wrong way because he later, in his novel A Room with a View, came up with a foolish character called Miss Lavish. Spender/ Lavish, see?
As far as we know, no descendant of E M Forster has 750,000 followers – so the Spender-Lavishes have had the last laugh.
On the matter of surnames, our new Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, seems to think they alone will suffice.
In the Commons, he refers to the retiring president of the United States not as President Biden or Joe Biden or Mr Biden but as just Biden. He does so, furthermore, at first mention.
At the Labour Party Conference, he likewise mentioned the President of
JEREMY LEWIS PRIZE FOR NEW WRITING 2024 How to enter
Our muchloved deputy editor and patron saint of The Oldie, Jeremy Lewis, died in 2017, aged 75. In his memory, we run the Jeremy Lewis Prize, worth £500. It rewards the sort of writing that emulates Jeremy’s wit and lightness of touch in his books and journalism.
What to write about In 400 words, recount a memory (similar to our Memory Lane column, on page 28 of this issue). Please begin by saying when the events you describe took place. How to send your entry Simply email your entry to editorial@theoldie.co.uk by 17th November 2024. Please mark it JEREMY LEWIS PRIZE.
Ukraine and called him simply Zelensky.
There is almost something old-world about it. We can imagine Edwardian statesmen referring to one another by solely their last names. Mr Lammy himself was educated as a Peterborough chorister – so maybe that is it.
But, to the modern ear, the habit of omitting any first name or title is surely in danger of sounding casual and a little disrespectful, is it not?
Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster Rivals hits the small screen on 18th October.
But Dame Jilly has a more demure side – she adores the gentle novels of the late Barbara Pym (1913-80).
In the Barbara Pym Society magazine, celebrating the society’s 30th birthday, Jilly writes, ‘Barbara never married, and thus seemed to
understand the desolation I felt, particularly as an overweight and spotty teenager, that no boy I loved would ever love me back.’
The teenage Jilly so loved Pym that she pretended she’d lost a library copy of one of her novels and paid the 3s 6d fine. She still has the book on her shelves.
Then, joy of joys, Jilly met Barbara at a 1979 Hatchards Author of the Year party. Jilly writes, ‘Charging over, I only had time to stutter out a few words of gratitude.’
Today, Jilly still adores Pym Number One, as she calls her.
Cromwell – warts and all
What a dame!
My friend Maggie Smith was the complete actress
When the great Sir John Gielgud died back in 2000, Dame Maggie Smith said, ‘We shall not see his like again. It is the end of an era.’
We shan’t see her like again, either. Maggie Smith was a one-off, unique and irreplaceable. It has been one of the privileges of my life to be able to call her a proper friend.
I think she let me get close to her only because she knew I had been a friend of Kenneth Williams – her friendship with Kenneth was one of the unalloyed joys of her life. They didn’t simply sound alike. They were on the same wavelength.
In the late 1950s, when they appeared together in the West End in Bamber Gascoigne’s revue Share My Lettuce, at one performance Kenneth killed one of Maggie’s biggest laughs with a bit of overthe-top improvisation. During the interval, an irate Maggie went into Kenneth’s dressing room to demand an explanation.
‘I had this urge to do something new,’ said Kenneth sheepishly.
Maggie perched by his dressing table, flicking cigarette ash into his washbasin. ‘You need to rehearse something new,’ she told him sharply.
‘I know,’ said Kenneth, ‘but I just couldn’t wait.’
Maggie suddenly leant over the sink and enquired, ‘Have you been peeing in here?’
Kenneth started a stammering denial.
‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘I suppose you couldn’t wait for that, either.’
Maggie loved the laughter Kenneth brought into her life. She was a funny lady; quite private, so not easy to know well – witty, wise, kind, caustic, forbidding, formidable.
Her passionate marriage to Robert Stephens was doomed because of his drinking. There was an underlying sadness within her from the day her second husband (the playwright Beverley Cross) died in 1998 until her own dying day. There was happiness, too, of course
– she loved her actor sons (Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin) and adored her grandchildren.
She became a global star on stage and screen because she had all the necessary qualities – and I can tell you exactly what those are, because John Gielgud once defined them quite precisely for me: ‘Energy, an athletic voice, a well-graced manner, certainty of execution, some unusually fascinating originality of temperament. Vitality, certainly, and an ability to convey an impression of beauty or ugliness as the part demands, as well as authority and a sense of style.’
Every element in that list (especially the unusually fascinating originality of temperament) Maggie had in spades. The only one that deserted her towards the end was energy. ‘I feel so tired,’ she said repeatedly during her last two years.
I first saw her on stage at the Globe Theatre (now the Gielgud) in Shaftesbury Avenue, when I was 13, during the summer holidays in 1961. The play was Jean Anouilh’s The Rehearsal (Anouilh was huge in the ’50s and ’60s) and Maggie Smith was incredibly funny.
I didn’t fall for her properly until a year or two later, when I saw everything she did at the new National Theatre under the direction of Laurence Olivier. Famously, when playing Desdemona to Olivier’s Othello, she responded to the great man’s criticism of her diction by putting her head around his dressingroom door while he was blacking up for his part, intoning, ‘How now, brown cow?’
During the run, at one performance Olivier, possibly frustrated with her
because she wouldn’t be persuaded to appear in a revival of The Skin of Our Teeth, slapped her as rehearsed, but with unexpected force. She was knocked out by the blow and had to be carried off the stage by Iago and Lodovico.
As she came to in the wings, she murmured, ‘First time I’ve seen stars at the National Theatre.’
She did not talk much about her recent work (least of all Downton Abbey), but she would happily tell stories about the greats of her younger days – such as Olivier or Rex Harrison or Noël Coward, whom she simply adored.
She was glorious playing Amanda in Private Lives on stage, soon after replacing Katharine Hepburn on screen in the film of Travels with My Aunt.
Gielgud was directing the Coward play and said to her in rehearsal, ‘Oh, Maggie, don’t screw up your face like that. You look like that terrible old woman you played in that dreadful film… Oh no! I don’t mean Travels with My Aunt.’
She could be mordant (she really did call her young co-star in The Importance of Being Earnest Richard E Can’t), and some found her forbidding. She often came to supper in our kitchen; I once asked a younger fellow actress (another Oscar-winner) to join us. The actress declined: ‘I don’t think Dame Maggie likes me and I find her rather frightening.’
She was not frightening, but she was awe-inspiring – no question. I think I must have seen everything she did over 60 years. Most of all, I loved her Beatrice in Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Much Ado About Nothing in 1965
It was a dazzling enchantment and, as Beatrice, she spoke a line that explains it all: ‘Then there was a star danced, and under that was I born.’
Gyles Brandreth’s podcast, Rosebud, is available now
Maggie Smith (1934-2024)
A trip to rural Dorset – and the 1970s
Who knew that power cuts are still going strong in the Tarrant Valley?
matthew norman
‘I’m not going to beg you,’ said my wife one recent evening when I was visiting her at her picturesque thatched cottage in a rural Dorset village, ‘because I value my dignity. I am going to gently request that you rein the hysteria in.’
I commented on neither the split infinitive nor the sentence-ending preposition. Becca’s tone plainly implied that this would be very much the kind of archaic pedantry up with which she had extremely little intention of putting.
What I did was point out that 33 years of holy wedlock (the last dozen insulated by a buffer zone of 104 miles and five or six counties) had surely taught her how eerily calm I become in a genuine crisis.
‘All I will say,’ I went on, ignoring the derisive snort before paraphrasing Sir Edward Grey at the dawn of the First World War, ‘is that the lamps are going out all over the Tarrant Valley, and we may not see them lit again in our lifetime.’
The power cut, she pointed out, had begun 90 seconds earlier at almost exactly 8pm. It was unlikely to endure until one or both of us had departed this life for the next. The woman has not one corpuscle of Jewish blood.
‘Has this ever happened before?’ I enquired in mystification. I couldn’t recall even a momentary loss of power in London for 50 years, since the glory days of the Three-Day Week. War in the Middle East, high inflation and economic misery at home, the collapse of a Tory government and its replacement by a chaotic Labour administration … how could you begin to convey the flavour of that to young folk today?
She threw me a glance that translates in modern American to ‘Duh!’ I didn’t see it, of course, since we were in near total darkness, and I didn’t need to. In times of grave danger, primal instincts take over. I felt it pricking me on the back of the neck, just below the hairline.
‘We sometimes have power cuts,’ she said, ‘in weather like this. It’s the countryside.’
‘Then wouldn’t it be wise to…’
‘I am not,’ she interrupted, with a certain finality, ‘buying a f****** generator.’
‘OK, OK, but how long do these cuts last?’
‘Varies. Could be seconds…’
The lights came on – then immediately went out again.
Mindful of that gentle request, I said nothing other than ‘Is it too soon to call 999?’
‘An excellent idea,’ said Becca. ‘The police, ambulance service and fire brigade would want to respond. The coastguard would probably want a slice of the action too.’
As we were some 40 miles inland, this seemed fanciful, but I didn’t say anything.
‘But you can’t use a mobile,’ she continued, ‘because it’s Wi-Fi calling, and the internet’s out. And the landline doesn’t work in a power cut. Why don’t we just sit patiently and wait? If it would help, we can listen to an audiobook.’
She reached for her iPhone, from which emerged the dulcets of Stephen Fry. Courageously shrugging off his phobia of overexposure, he was narrating the complete Sherlock Holmes stories –in this case, ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’.
‘Oh, sir, do you not think that you could help me, too?’ intoned Fry in the genteel voice of a petrified Helen Stoner, ‘and at least throw a little light
The iPhone ran out of juice – so that, for once, Stephen Fry was without words
through the dense darkness which surrounds me?’
Time passed, the heavy silence leavened only by the sound of rain slanting into the windows and the snufflings of a dreaming Labrador splayed over my companion’s legs.
How much time there was no way of telling, because the iPhone ran out of juice so that, for once, Stephen Fry was without words. But, judging by the alarming drop in room temperature, it must have been several hours.
‘How much tinfoil do you have in the kitchen?’ I asked her.
‘Not enough for a hypothermia blanket.’
‘Then thank Christ I’ve made my will.’
‘How are you getting on,’ she enquired, irrelevantly, ‘with finding a therapist?’
The silence resumed its grip for God knows how long before I spoke again. ‘I don’t want to seem alarmist…’
‘Then be quiet,’ she said. ‘Please, and now I am begging you, just be quiet.’
As this dismal night dragged on, a shard of consolation pierced the gloom. It couldn’t be much longer now before daybreak. Light and comparative warmth awaited if we could only hang on.
And then it happened. As suddenly and unexpectedly as they’d gone out, the lights came on, and this time stayed on. Through tears of relief, I watched the Lab and her three fellow canines troop off to the kitchen for their breakfast. ‘We’ve survived the ordeal,’ I whispered. ‘It was the longest night of our lives, but we held our nerve. We never panicked and we came through it.’
Becca took her phone and plugged it into the charger.
‘How long exactly was it?’ I asked as it revived.
She glanced at the screen. ‘Nine minutes,’ she said, ‘and 23 seconds.’
what was segregated sea-swimming?
Every week in the summer term at Berwick Grammar School, we had swimming lessons in the freezing North Sea.
This ritual began for me in the late 1950s, when I was 11. There were two beach pools that filled on the incoming tide, and our lesson timetable was arranged accordingly. One pool was for women, the other for men. They were about 50 yards apart, each with a changing area carved into the cliff.
Our Victorian ancestors believed men and women swimming together would lead to indecent behaviour. So separate bathing areas were established. This segregation was taken very seriously, and any transgressor would be fined.
In the 19th century, female bathing costumes weren’t the fashionable items they are today. A lady would wear a smock-like garment that concealed any possible glimpse of flesh or feminine curve. She would enter her bathing-hut
carriage on dry land and the machine was pushed – or drawn by horse – into the sea, allowing her a discreet and private entry to the water.
Victorian men didn’t have such inhibitions. Some bathed in undergarments, but most men took advantage of the enforced privacy and would swim naked.
The segregation rules made it very awkward for family groups to enjoy time together at the seaside. In 1901, at Brighton, mixed bathing was allowed during specified daytime hours.
Ladies’ swimming costumes became
what is a crossword?
A century ago, on 2nd November 1924, the Sunday Express published the first crossword in a British national newspaper.
In the 1st July issue of Punch the next year it was declared unhesitatingly that the ‘dominant feature’ of British social life over the previous six months had been ‘the Cross-word puzzle’.
Devised in America in 1913 by the Liverpool-born Arthur Wynne for the New York World, the cross-word (a printer’s error for word-cross) properly arrived in Britain with the publication in April 1924 of The Cross Word Puzzle Book.
The British edition added a warning: THIS IS NOT A TOY. The following note asks ‘fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts’ to solve half a dozen of the puzzles themselves before passing the book on. ‘You’ll be able to go back to your work in about a week’, it concludes sardonically. This mischief recognised the scare that the craze had already caused in America (the book sold 350,000 copies
in its first year), where publishers of novels, distributors of films and producers of plays were already crying foul, blaming declining sales and audiences on the evils of cross-words. Eminent ophthalmologists warned of the puzzles’ deleterious effect on eyesight.
The first crossword to appear in Britain, in 1922, was probably in Pearson’s Magazine, a fairly highbrow publication carrying pieces by the likes of Maxim Gorky and H G Wells.
Although the Express’s heyday in the late ’20s and ’30s was yet to come, it had already broken the mould. Beaverbrook was an unashamed populist, and he had seen how American papers used the crossword as a way of increasing circulation.
The Sunday Express’s crossword was an adaptation by C W Shepherd of one of Arthur Wynne’s. Shepherd had had to reconstruct the original to exclude an American spelling. It was a small and simple version, seven squares by seven (the number should always be odd in order to give a central square), with 11 clues in each direction. Eighteen of the 22 words were of three letters: BOB,
more pyjama-like, and gentlemen wore vest-and-pants outfits we see in old photographs and postcards.
In 2017, Theresa May, the then Prime Minister, confessed in a TV interview that her major act of childhood mischief was to run through fields of wheat.
Sixty years earlier, in 1957, my wild act was to swim in the ladies’ pool with other boys. Contrary to folklore, none of us grew breasts, nor did we lose our paltry manhood symbols. We were, however, rebuked, after a diligent passer-by reported us to the headmaster. A half-hearted message about ‘respecting accepted conventions, even if you disagree with them’ was deemed enough punishment.
A decade later, in the late 1960s, we lived in a more relaxed era. Seaswimming grew in popularity while costumes shrank in body coverage.
The crashing sea waves gave the perfect background for our skinnydipping, taking mankind a giant leap beyond the small step our Victorian male ancestors had started.
William Freeman
ERA, YEN, EEL and so on, and there were four seven-letter words.
The answer to ‘Eminent political figure’ (clue 3, vertical) was BALDWIN. Stanley Baldwin was confirmed as PM on the Tuesday following the appearance of the crossword. He and Beaverbrook were to become bitter adversaries.
The Express didn’t stay ahead of the game for long. In January 1925, the Sunday Times also began printing a crossword. In July that year, there was a game-changer. Previously, clues had been definitional, with the occasional anagram. Now the Daily Telegraph introduced the first cryptic crossword, composed by Leonard Dawe. Dawe later became notorious for having included JUNO, GOLD, SWORD, UTAH and OMAHA in his crosswords shortly before D-Day.
The Times did not ‘succumb’ until February 1930: the puzzle could now be said to have become a staple, no longer a craze.
True cruciverbalists will know that 2024 also marks the centenary of Russian-language krossvordy, the first of which was composed by none other than Vladimir Nabokov. Wynn Wheldon
Beach body ready, Victorian-style
Fifty years after Sandra Rivett’s murder, Algy Cluff remembers meeting the earl – and how detectives came knocking on his door
Lord Lucan: the grisly truth
Michael Stoop (1922-2010) won the Sword of Honour at Sandhurst and the Military Cross while serving in the Grenadier Guards in France in 1944.
A member of the celebrated AngloDutch Rugger family, prominent shareholders in Royal Dutch Shell, he was possessed of immense charm and intelligence.
After the war, he elected to live the gambler’s life: trading commodities or playing backgammon in the 1950s.
The centre of activity was the St James’s Club at 106 Piccadilly, where there was a room containing six backgammon tables. It was in constant use from 5pm onwards, every weekday, until John Aspinall’s Clermont Club superseded the St James’s in the mid-1960s.
Prominent among the St James’s backgammon coterie, along with Stoop, was Rupert Belville, a professional backgammon player. He made his living travelling the Atlantic on the two Queens, Mary and Elizabeth, profiting from the captive plutocratic passengers.
Another was the Marquess of Milford Haven, wartime naval hero and chainsmoker, who died running for a train.
Then there was Lord (Joss) Pender, the urbane chairman of Cable & Wireless, always sporting a pink carnation. And Jerry Gurney, the naval officer who pressed the button that fired the torpedo that sank the Bismarck.
Then, completing the set, was Lord Lucan, ironically known as Lucky –which he indubitably was not.
It was in Michael Stoop’s car that Lucan drove to Newhaven after killing the family’s nanny by mistake 50 years ago, on November 7, 1974. He intended to murder his wife, driven almost to insanity by a family judge’s decision to award custody of his two children to his wife rather than to him.
That fatal evening, he first drove, alone, to the house of fellow professional gambler Ian Maxwell-Scott. There was his wife, Jane, daughter of the disapproving KC Sir Andrew Clark.
Lucan was not seen alive again. Michael Stoop’s car was found at the car park for the Newhaven ferry. There has been no credible explanation as to what happened to Lucky, other than that he embarked on the ferry that night –and then the tortured man launched himself into the freezing embrace of the English Channel.
By the time of the murder, Lucan had lost his money gambling at the Clermont Club, having become a fully paid-up member of what the press describes as the Clermont Set.
The set was a platoon of people dominated by the amazing John Aspinall – known to his friends as Aspers – and his close friend and ally Sir James Goldsmith.
I knew both of them and regarded them highly, while supping with a long spoon with them, at least with regard to gambling. Jimmy Goldsmith, in particular, apart from being an entrepreneurial genius, had a very good heart, complemented by personal charm.
Lesser members of this set were mostly financial wrecks who laid down their wallets at Aspers’s chemin de fer tables. They depended on him and so gave him unswerving loyalty. They included Daniel Meinertzhagen, Michael Hicks Beach, Dominic Elwes, Ian Maxwell-Scott and Lucan – and they were of little consequence.
When Lucan committed his dreadful error, I was sitting by Lake Rudolf in Northern Kenya with Andrew Cole. He was a descendant of Arthur and Berkeley Cole, founding Kenyan settlers.
We were on a so-called camel safari, led by Jasper O Evans, an original figure who directed a camel empire from his rambling farmhouse.
Doomed romance: Lord Lucan and Veronica Duncan announce their engagement, Belgravia, 1963
We had our wireless set on and were listening to the BBC news from strikeridden Britain when the startling information was announced. My Belgravian neighbour and fellow St James’s Club member Lucan had allegedly murdered his nanny.
I dismissed this egregious piece of information from my mind and we resumed our camel trek. It was so hot that we were obliged to move by night.
On my return, the press was gorging on the Lucan drama and an ‘elite’ Lucan squad had been set up at
Gerald Road Police Station in the centre of Belgravia.
Imagine my surprise a few weeks later when, as I was reading on a stormy afternoon in my home on top of the White Cliffs of Dover, the same squad materialised at my front door – two men and a woman. The men were clad in regulation trilby and belted mackintosh. There ensued an hour of farce during which I protested that I had always found Lucan to be unsympathetic from the early days of powerboating in the Solent. I had exchanged my elegant ketch, Linette, for a powerboat, Rouge et Noir. I hurtled around the Solent, making something of a nuisance of myself until I was instructed by the Royal Yacht
Squadron grandees to get rid of it and revert to sail.
Lucan regularly crewed for other powerboat enthusiasts Charles de Selincourt and Tim Powell, absorbing some much-needed sea air before resuming his profession in the windowless chemin de fer rooms in Mayfair.
When I knew him in his powerboating days, he was very good-looking and immaculately well-dressed. But he wasn’t bright and was not a brilliant gambler. I did not like him.
During the decline and collapse of the Lucan marriage, I had a flat at 18 Eaton Square. It was at right angles to Lower Belgrave Street, where Lucan lived and where he murdered Sandra Rivett, the family nanny.
I once saw him ‘train’ his poor dog in the square by administering electric shocks, via a console, to the animal’s neck. The poor dog leapt a foot into the air as Lucan bullied it to obey his orders.
So, dismissing my protestations that the last murderer I would have given refuge to would be Lucan, the police proceeded to search my house. No Lucan.
It so happened that the house, which remains in our family today, had been commandeered by the military during the last war. It was occupied by naval personnel listening into enemy wireless traffic in the channel.
The grounds housed Royal Artillery long-range field guns, and the ammunition was stored in concrete blockhouses with walls two feet thick. There they remain.
By this time, the combination of the storm and isolation of the house, together with the existence of these mysterious blockhouses, had created a conviction in the minds of the constabulary that Lucan had to be there.
So we set off through the storm to investigate the empty blockhouses. Farce then prevailed. Arriving at the door of the first building (which I had used as a wine cellar), I was astonished to be confronted by a brand-new, white-painted door, sporting a glistening new Chubb lock.
The rattling of the police’s empty
handcuffs reached a crescendo as I frantically sought a solution to this unforeseen contingency.
The gardener, John Blanche, a Gypsy and husband of Doreen, my housekeeper, was summoned. He revealed that, before I had gone on safari, I had been concerned that Arthur Scargill, the NUM leader, was about to call a total strike.
Prudently, in anticipation of the strike, I had instructed John to buy a generator, which saw good service for 40 years.
This revelation engendered some dismay amongst my visitors. They insisted that we resume our melancholy way to the other bunkers. Still no Lucan.
The next instalment of this quaint episode was a headline in the next day’s Daily Express: ‘Tycoon’s clifftop mansion searched for missing Earl.’ How very discreet of Gerald Road Police Station!
Other than a tendency for certain locals to dial 999 when any of my
The last murderer I would have given refuge to would be Lord Lucan
moustachioed friends came to stay the weekend, that, happily, was the end of the search for Lucan at my house.
Of the other, more fatuous theories that still persist regarding his disappearance, one suggested that the Clermont Set fed Lucan to the tigers in Aspinall’s zoo in Kent – Howletts. This method had supposedly been planned to destroy Veronica Lucan’s body, had Lucan succeeded in this grim task.
The Clermont Set was larger than life. But, other than a hapless capacity for losing their own money, its members had no criminal instincts and would never have acted as accomplices to murder.
The idea that Lucan, on the fatal night, would have abandoned Michael’s car, taken the train from Newhaven to Faversham station (no mean feat) and a taxi from Faversham to Howletts –where he presented himself to John Aspinall to be served up as his tigers’ evening meal does not have what Private Eye used to call the ring of truth.
Somewhere between the Sussex coast and the French coast, there lies on the sea bed Lucky’s signet ring – all that remains of him.
Algy Cluff was Chairman of Cluff Natural Resources and owned the Spectator magazine
For 50 years, Pam Ayres has been Britain’s most loved poet. William Cook meets her and admires her new anthology
The people’s poet
Who is Britain’s greatest living poet?
It may be an unfashionable choice, but I’d have to say Pam Ayres, now 77. Her books have sold millions of copies, her live shows are as popular as ever, and she’s still a familiar face on telly, half a century since her TV debut.
Her frank and funny poems are about everyday subjects we can all relate to, written in an easy, accessible style that appeals to people who’d normally never dream of reading ‘proper’ poetry:
‘I don’t like metrication, friends,
The milligramme and the litre, I work in feet and inches, I do not trust the metre.’
‘I know people mock me for my accent,’ she says, at her home near Cirencester, but that broad country burr has become her calling card. It shows she has what posher poets sorely lack – the common touch.
‘I like it by the furlong,
And I like it by the acre, I liked the baker’s dozen,
And I also liked the baker.’
‘I don’t know much about poetry,’ she tells me. ‘I never really saw myself as a poet. I just wanted to write something
‘Oh, they hated me; they hated me! I was detested by the poetry establishment’
I could say onstage to make people laugh.’
Yet she’s the nation’s favourite poetess (no living poet has sold more books) and she’s just published a new anthology which doubles as a sort of autobiography. Its chatty, heartfelt verses range from her twenties to her seventies, from motherhood to grandmotherhood, from young unknown to national treasure.
‘I can’t believe I wrote so much!’ she says. ‘I look at this great big thick book and think, “Good God! Is that all mine?”’
Reading this warm and tender book,
you realise how much lies beneath the laughter. Onstage or on TV, her poems are packed with punchlines. On the page, they seem more poignant. Although a lot of them are purely humorous, their chirpy tone can be deceptive.
They don’t tackle just the trivial travails of daily life. A good many of them are devoted to life’s big issues: how it feels when your kids grow up and move away; how it feels to grow old:
‘I’m looking at a life which seems so drained of all its colour,
The heart is gone from us, we are older, we are duller.’
Sure, there are gags galore (‘My skin’s quite good and me teeth – fantastic/ Crafted from the finest plastic’), but buried beneath the jokes are starker lines of which Larkin would be proud (‘His eyes were cold as chisels’).
A bleak hotel room is ‘another sad box for another sad night’. And how about this description of old age? ‘I am the old chapter/My pages are read now.’
So why was the literary world so reluctant to accept her? Why was she dismissed as a novelty act for so long?
I reckon the main reason is simple snobbery. She looks and sounds like a friendly, unaffected farmer’s wife –which is what she might have become if poetry hadn’t come calling.
‘Oh, they hated me; they hated me! I got used to being mocked, but I just stuck to what I was doing, what I liked doing and what I could see the audience enjoyed. But, certainly, I was detested by the poetry establishment.’
Did that upset her?
‘It upset me that I was accused of trying to be a poet, because I never was – and that’s the truth. I set out to be a performer and I couldn’t find anything anybody else had written, so I wrote for myself. It’s a kind of poetry, and I’m delighted
that people like it, but I never set out to be a poet, and I didn’t like being lampooned as if I was trying to be a Sylvia Plath.’
She was born in 1947 in Stanford in the Vale in Berkshire, the youngest of six children. ‘You had everything you needed there, and people did not travel. Only two people in the village had a car – it was very insular and very nice.’
She still lives in the countryside, not so far from where she grew up.
Her rural upbringing gave her a close connection with the natural world. ‘It was a happy place to grow up – there was so much wildlife all around us’ (many of
‘I’ve tried to make it welcoming to as many species as possible.’)
Her father was a linesman with the Southern Electricity Board. It was a steady job, but money was tight – eight people in a modest council house with the most rudimentary amenities.
‘We had no sanitation. The lavatory was a bucket that you had to empty. There was no hot water. We hardly ever had a bath, because it was such a palaver.’ Her dad grew vegetables, snared rabbits and made sure she never went hungry. ‘It was primitive, but it was no different from what anybody else had.’
Spike Milligan was an early inspiration – in particular his comic verse. But it was performing rather than poetry that was her passion. ‘From a very early age, I wanted to be a performer. I wanted to be onstage, and I felt that’s where I belonged, but I didn’t know how to get there.’
She wrote stories from an early age, but she didn’t shine at school. She failed her Eleven Plus, went to the local secondary modern, and left school at 15, like everyone else she knew. ‘You just looked for any old job – there was no guidance.’
Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth by Pam Ayres
Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth, And spotted the perils beneath. All the toffees I chewed, And the sweet sticky food, Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth. I wish I’d been that much more willin’
When I had more tooth there than fillin’
To pass up gobstoppers. From respect to me choppers, And to buy something else with me shillin’.
When I think of the lollies I licked, And the liquorice all sorts I picked, Sherbet dabs, big and little, All that hard peanut brittle, My conscience gets horribly pricked.
She only ever shone when she was performing her own work.
The TV series flopped. ‘Everybody hated it, including me. People wrote me off. They thought that was all I could do, that I was a flash in the pan.’ That was when she met Dudley, who became her husband. ‘He was brilliant. He helped me extricate myself from the mess I’d got into, and we started again, doing my own work in small venues, and built it up from there.’
Since then, she’s built a loyal fanbase, not just in Britain but also down under. ‘People know what I am and what I do. I haven’t got any pretentiousness about me. I’m not everybody’s cup of tea, but you never are if you’re in the entertainment business.’
She became a civil-service clerk but ‘it bored me out of my skull – I couldn’t bear it’. So she joined the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) and was sent to Singapore. There was a theatre there where troops did am-dram. She’d written a few witty ditties – so she got up onstage and recited them. To her surprise, they
‘This is it!’ she thought. ‘This is what I
She returned home, left the WRAF and got a job as a typist. In the evenings she started gigging on the local folk circuit – convivial events in pubs and clubs, where anyone could get up and have a go. ‘You didn’t feel judged – you were just joining in the fun.’
Soon she was getting £12 a gig –half her weekly wage. ‘I realised two performances, which I adored, equated to a whole week of
So she packed in the day job. Her big break was getting a weekly slot on local radio. ‘At a time when I had no confidence whatsoever, BBC Radio Oxford really supported me.’ She printed a booklet of her poems, which sold a staggering 7,000 copies.
Oh I showed them the toothpaste all right, I flashed it about late at night, But up-and-down brushin’ And pokin’ and fussin’ Didn’t seem worth the time… I could bite!
If I’d known, I was paving the way To cavities, caps and decay, The murder of fillin’s Injections and drillin’s, I’d have thrown all me sherbet away.
So I lay in the old dentist’s chair, And I gaze up his nose in despair, And his drill it do whine, In these molars of mine.
‘Two amalgam,’ he’ll say, ‘for in there.’
How I laughed at my mother’s false teeth,
As they foamed in the waters beneath.
But now comes the reckonin’ It’s me they are beckonin’ Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth.
Opportunity Knocks made her famous overnight in 1975. ‘It was lovely at first, because I’d always been a nobody and suddenly I was a somebody.’
But it didn’t make her happy. ‘I felt as though I’d completely lost control – it was awful,’ she recalls. ‘I was thrust into a world I didn’t like.’
She was booked on to variety bills alongside mainstream comedians such as Jim Davidson. She was given an entire TV series, which she couldn’t possibly write all by herself – so much of the writing was farmed out to scriptwriters.
Yet, finally, after all these years, it seems the poetry world is beginning to recognise her true worth.
‘I feel as though I’ve sort of been grudgingly accepted,’ she chuckles, ‘but I’ve always ploughed my own furrow. I’ve just done my own thing. I’ve written things that I loved writing, that made me feel happy, made me laugh and made other people laugh. So it doesn’t really matter whether I’m accepted as a poet or not.’
Yet the public have always accepted her. We love her because she makes us laugh, but above all because we know she’s genuine. She’s done what all true artists do – she’s found her own authentic voice. We can sense the warmth in her; a generosity of spirit that’s encapsulated in the dedication in her new book: ‘To everyone who loves writing but fears they might not have what it takes.’
It could almost be a dedication to her younger self.
And the way she signs off, so simply, is sublime:
‘Oh, let me stay for one more year, Safe amid the faces dear, Where love and loving intertwine, Little hands embraced in mine.
To leave will be the hardest part, This richest life, it breaks my heart, Here my soul with gladness sang, My family. My little gang.’
Pam Ayres’s Doggedly Onward: A Life in Poems (Ebury) is out now
At home today
Pam Ayres performing in April 1977
Voice over
When actor Jack Hawkins had his larynx removed, he did not give up on his career – or his smoking. By Nathan Morley
In late 1959, Jack Hawkins was a worried man.
Britain’s most famous stiffupper-lipped hero – and star of The Cruel Sea (1953), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Ben-Hur (1959) and Zulu (1964)– was suffering from a persistent, vicious cough.
Across three decades, he’d appeared in nearly 50 films and countless stage shows – yet never clocked a single day sick.
However, as his cough worsened during the filming of The League of Gentlemen (1960), the cast witnessed some heart-wrenching moments, as Jack grappled with his loss of voice.
Under a veil of silence – so as not to alarm potential employers – Hawkins was wheeled into a London clinic for cobalt treatment.
His voice was restored, but in a noticeably huskier monotone. Should the cancer return, doctors warned, the removal of his vocal cords was the only option.
For a while, everything seemed to be improving. Jack’s family life continued happily. He returned to work and even resumed smoking, puffing up to 60 Craven A cigarettes a day.
Several well-received performances followed, including his enduring portrait of the crusty General Edmund Allenby in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). He struck up a friendship with Peter O’Toole, an actor he thought had ‘a sprinkling of genius’.
Alec Guinness was surprised at Jack’s fragility during the shoot. ‘He’s so very shaky,’ he wrote to his wife, Merula. ‘His hands tremble all the time.’
Hawkins’s distress led him to a faith healer. Even prayer couldn’t stop his voice finally fading, like a radio with a draining battery, during filming a scene of the American medical soap Dr Kildare.
Jack Hawkins’s last lines in Hollywood in his own voice were delivered on the set of the television series.
In a tear-filled close-up, he said, ‘It was God’s will … never doubt that. Remember me as I am at this moment … please. Never have I felt so whole or so happy.’
‘We both knew the ultimate was facing us and that unless some miracle occurred, he would have to have his larynx removed,’ his late wife Doreen later recalled.
There was no miracle.
When it was all over, the surgery left a hole the size of a 50p coin in his throat and cut off communication between his throat and lungs. ‘I breathe through the hole in my throat. It is entirely different, and the sounds are different from normal talking,’ Jack explained.
Remarkably, after some recuperation, he was able to take small roles in a flock of forgettable offerings, including the comedy The Adventures of Gerard (1970).
On the first day, the film’s star, Peter McEnery, was left agog as Jack waltzed on to the set with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.
‘I watched him smoking. He couldn’t draw on the cigarette because he was breathing through the hole in his throat, and yet he still smoked,’ McEnery told me. ‘It was about the whole motion of putting the cigarette to his lips.’
Though burpy gulps were sufficient for delivering brief lines, Jack felt more comfortable miming longer parts. That was the case when he landed a role in Nicholas and Alexandra (1971).
Jack despised his lack of inflection and having to swallow air – or gulp –which ruined his timing. Unsurprisingly, when he heard about a new artificial voice box being developed in the United States, he wasted no time in finding out more.
The little instrument, weighing just three ounces, was invented by Dr Stanley Taub and promised the immediate restoration of ‘effortless speech’ for a person whose larynx, or voice box, had been removed in surgery.
On impulse, Jack flew to New York to meet Taub.
To install the instrument – known as a VoiceBak – Taub would cut a second opening through the side of Jack’s neck into the oesophagus, leading to the stomach. The instrument would then be fitted into the opening. The only downside was that just ten operations had been conducted – it was still considered experimental.
Taub said, ‘I hooked him up to the VoiceBak and he spoke! My God, it was so clear – but a little on the gruff side. And he heard himself talk – he was saying something from Shakespeare. It was really quite thrilling to hear him talk. Here was Jack Hawkins … talking! It was emotional for all of us.’
However, another haemorrhage meant Jack returned to England, dreams of regaining his voice shattered.
Not long after, he was rushed to St Stephen’s Hospital in London, after blood began spurting from his throat. The ‘long tale of horror’, as his wife Doreen described it, ended just after noon on Wednesday 18th July 1973. He was 62 years old.
Peter O’Toole also was inconsolable. He said, ‘He put everything on one throw and lost. But the compromise he’d had to live with for the last decade of his life was simply not enough for him. He wanted a full life again for himself and for his family. That was enough for him to take the ultimate gamble.’
Jack Hawkins: A Biography by Nathan Morley is published on 24th October
Jack Hawkins (1910-73)
Ysenda Maxtone Graham on the endless irritations of modern life. Illustrations by Nick Newman
Things can only get worse
Wedding invitations
The wedding invitation arrives … and it’s worryingly thick – as thick as the kind of envelope you get when you’ve been accepted rather than rejected by a school, a university or a firm.
It turns out to be a kind of welcome pack, with the first names of the bride and groom in italics on the front, containing eight separate information cards, stipulating everything from ‘gifts’ to ‘local hotels and hairdressers’ to ‘dress code’.
One of the information cards, the most ominous of all, spells out the full timetable for the wedding. Absent are the reassuringly simple words ‘and afterwards at The Old Rectory’: those wonderfully open-ended words, with no time stipulations. You could just slip away from that ‘and afterwards at’ kind of wedding.
Not from this one. Your presence is required by the bride and the groom from 4pm on Friday for an ‘Edwardian tea’, till 3am on Sunday, when the whole thing will eventually wind up, under the named activity of ‘carriages’.
The wedding day itself, Saturday, requires you to turn up at the venue at 11.15am, 45 minutes before the ‘ceremony’; and then, after the ‘photographs’, to make your way to the reception venue, a hotel, where you’ll be served ‘champagne and canapés’ for a full three hours before the sit-down ‘wedding breakfast’ which starts at the non-mealtime of 5pm and goes on for another two and a half hours.
The cutting of the cake will then take place at 7.30pm, and the speeches from 8 till 9, followed by ‘dancing’, and ‘bar will be open’.
You’ll hardly be able to stand up by the time the longed-for ‘carriages’ moment arrives. This is the bride and groom’s vision for a 35-hour adulation marathon from their friends, who must jump to their every requirement to prove their love. It’ll be exhausting.
Acronyms
Lying awake at night, you try to remember what the latest collection of letters is. Is it ‘LGBTQIA’? Has it still got a plus-sign at the end? It has. The plus sign implies ‘infinite possibilities, so don’t take offence if we’ve left one category out’.
‘Oh no – you’re acronym blind’
Then you try to make a word out of it, as it’s currently seven letters, like a Scrabble hand. Tricky, as there’s no U to go with the Q. So you start thinking of a category that would begin with a U.
Customer-helpline music
This is the music the customer helpline plays while you are waiting to get through to a human being.
You can’t avoid listening to the music they play to you. It’s like waiting for a bus: you can’t read, as you need to be on constant lookout for the arriving bus. While kept on hold, you can’t concentrate on anything else, as you need to be in a state of hyper-alertness, just in case the repeated ‘We are experiencing an unusually high volume of calls. Please continue to hold and your call will be answered as soon as possible’ ever gets converted to a ‘Hello, I’m an actual human being – how may I help you?’
What they really mean is ‘It’s not cost-effective for us employ enough people to answer the telephone.’ And it’s not ‘an unusually high volume’ – it must be usual, as they’ve recorded a voice to say it automatically.
This department’s music is particularly wistful, a repeated guitar piece with a deeply melancholic strain. They keep you on hold for an hour and a quarter. Fifteen minutes in, you start to cry, because the music, which you’ve now heard repeated multiple times, is so sad, with its lurch into a minor key halfway through each rendition; and because your country, if it makes you listen to this for an hour and a quarter when you need to talk to a human being, must be broken.
A human being used to be called ‘a person’. But now you have to call them ‘a human being’, actually naming the species, because talking to one is so rare and needs to be distinguished from answering questions to a pre-recorded voice which says, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite hear that.’
See it, say it, sorted ‘If you see something that doesn’t look right…’
You just have. It’s a pug: a dog designed not to be able to breathe properly.
But they don’t mean that.
‘…speak to one of our operators, or text the British Transport Police on 61016. We’ll sort it…’
Come on. Spit it out. Here it comes.
‘See it, say it, sorted.’
You’ve heard it spoken in so many different recorded voices: men, women, northern, southern, Cockney, posh, lisping, and they all do it a bit differently. It’s as if they’re being auditioned for RADA or LAMDA. Today’s nicely-spoken voice, a woman’s one, puts special emphasis on ‘say it’ with an upward but non-questioning inflection at the end, as if to suggest that it might suddenly occur to you to ‘say it’, and that this would be an inspired and supremely intelligent idea.
Has anyone ever seen it and said it, and was it sorted?
Screams: Shrieks of Horror and Yelps of Pleasure from Modern Life (Abacus) by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, illustrations by Nick Newman, is out on 31st October
Jeremy Catto (1939-2018) was a Fellow in Medieval History at Oriel College, Oxford, from 1969 to 2006. In 1966, he befriended a young Bryan Ferry. By David Vaiani
The don and the pop star
While he was teaching at Durham University in 1966, Jeremy Catto had chance encounter in a Newcastle pub that would spark a lifelong friendship.
At the time, Bryan Ferry was a student at Newcastle University, studying fine art. He shared a flat with Stephen Buckley (pictured), who would go on to become a distinguished artist.
Catto recalled, ‘I was having a drink in a low bar in the Bigg Market, the Royal Court, and they came in.
‘So we got drinking, and then we decided we’d go off to a nightclub in South Shields – which, typical of the North East in those days, turned out to be shut. And so we came back.’
Ferry remembers their first proper encounter at a gay pub in the city’s Bigg Market area, because ‘it was the place that had the best music’.
That part of town was somewhat run down, and Ferry recalls that most of the pubs in the area were pretty rough:
‘You had to watch yourself and you wouldn’t find many students there.’
They formed a connection straight away. They were both from the northeast and bonded over their shared roots. Both men also had a desire to move on to explore new opportunities.
Catto was determined to return one day to Oxford, where he’d studied at Balliol, and Ferry hoped that his future would be in London – and perhaps even further afield.
Ferry says that he still has ‘such fond memories of him’ and that, in particular, he ‘loved that Jeremy was always there’.
He adds, ‘With old friends like him, you know how to bounce the ball off the wall, as it always comes back at you with a true bounce.’
Ferry emphasises Catto’s sense of humour. ‘That was very important. He was clearly very knowledgeable about things, but he was also always very amusing about everything. That provided us with a great link.’
That sense of humour also came with a certain ‘lightness of touch’, which meant Ferry always felt relaxed in Catto’s company.
Michael Bracewell, author of Roxy: The Band That Invented an , says Catto had ‘a formative influence on Ferry’s aesthetic and social education’.
According to Bracewell, Catto was ‘a connoisseur and scholar, with an interest in aesthetic style that included on the one hand the boutiques of the King’s Road (buying clothes from Granny Takes a Trip, as well as from Carnaby Street), and on the other the imagism of
Ezra Pound’s Cantos’. He adds, ‘Catto represented an elevated, academically assured sophistication and sense of taste – the attributes, in one sense, of an “upper”, socially confident class, at ease in both their leisure and their intellectual outlook’.
‘As the brilliant agent of a particular glamour, Catto helped make real the finer world of art and culture that had been signified to the young Bryan Ferry by the classicism of the Penshaw Monument, back in Washington, Tyne and Wear.’
Catto was more circumspect about his influence on Ferry specifically – let alone on 1960s popular culture more broadly.
He wrote to a friend, ‘My career of fraud seems to go on and on. Bryan’s historian says I had a deep influence on ’60s pop culture… Only you know THE SORDID TRUTH.’
Catto described their shared sense of style: ‘I think that Bryan and I were both in search of style, of various kinds – a
Cool Catto: Jeremy, artist Stephen Buckley and Bryan Ferry, Newcastle, 1966. Left: Ferry performs with Roxy Music, 1975
desire to be at the edge of things. That was something we wanted to find in those days.
‘The sixties were a period when there was a feeling of hope around; it looked as if there were some new ideas emerging, and we looked for them.’
In the summer of 1966, Catto, Ferry and Buckley embarked on a road trip across Europe and down to Calabria.
Bracewell writes that photographs of the three men in Italy ‘show a supremely cool trio of travellers: Ferry in pink button-down shirt and slick aviator-style glasses; Buckley in pristine white T-shirt and brown fedora; Catto, his hair Hockney blond, wearing jet-black Ray-Ban sunglasses’.
To begin the journey, they met at Charing Cross, stuffed their sleeping bags into the back of the car and, given that Catto insisted on seeing the cathedral, their first stop was Canterbury.
They crossed to France by boat and stayed the night in Reims, from where they made their way towards Lake Geneva in Switzerland.
Buckley recalls that it was unclear where Switzerland started – so they
ended up going in and out of the country three times in an hour.
They proceeded to Florence. By now, the car was making some unpromising noises. So they stayed in Florence for three nights in an old and dilapidated palazzo, where, as Buckley remembers, ‘you could see the leg of a cherub on the ceiling as you sat on the loo’.
The next day, they drove to Naples and enjoyed a day trip to Capri, as Catto was very keen to see the graves of the Wittgenstein princes. They eventually got to Calabria, where they spent a few days before making their way back to Britain.
On the way back, the car broke down on the outskirts of Monte Carlo. They went swimming – it was there that Catto taught Ferry how to swim. Ferry also recalls that they took turns to drive – and because he himself could not drive, Catto taught him as they went along.
The trip clearly left a mark on Ferry, who still has very fond memories of their time in Italy: ‘We laughed all the way, as we made our way down to the south of Italy.’
Catto recalled to Bracewell that Italy ‘had quite an effect on Bryan … I think it was the first time he had been there, and he was affected both by the obvious historic beauties of Florence, where we stayed for a day or two, and by Assisi.
‘And, of course, Italy in the 1960s was very much a land of style. Italian youth dressed well in those days; now they wear reach-me-down American grunge of the worst kind. In those days, I think both Stephen and Bryan were affected by the people they saw. Crossing into Italy is a different world.’
Ferry agrees that he and Catto, who resembled David Hockney when they met, shared an interest in art, and especially in British art. When Ferry was a young art student at Newcastle, Catto even helped to arrange Ferry’s first ever exhibition of his own work.
In later years, Ferry would go on to become a great collector of modern British art and the two men would enjoy visiting art galleries together. They had similar tastes. Ferry says Catto had ‘very good and wide-ranging taste’.
Both men, Ferry points out, ‘liked both old and new things … Jeremy was of course a great medievalist, but he was also interested in the modern. He liked the harder edges of Wyndham Lewis more than the softer edges of Bloomsbury.’
Ferry says Catto ‘never went for the obvious answer, and never had an obvious opinion. He was one of my great mentors. Very intelligent – medieval history; not my field – and great fun.’
Jeremy Catto: A Portrait of the Quintessential Oxford Don (Unicorn) by David Vaiani is out now. For a review of the book, turn to page 55
Catto teaches William Hague, 1982
Jeremy and Bryan, 2007
The strange death of Tory England
A century ago, the Liberals were wiped out. Are the Tories doomed, too?
a n wilson
The metropolitan elite – who ushered both Tony Blair and David Cameron into Number 10 – are once again in the ascendant.
I could see it long before the election, because I have turned into one of those old people who totter to book launches in London at 6.30 in the evening.
Most of those who attend such gatherings belong to what is called the metropolitan elite, though I do not think I do so myself – not exactly. Or have I gone native without realising it?
A few weeks before the election, I found myself standing on a landing, holding a glass of plonk, with Tristram Hunt, Director of the V&A and former Labour MP; Jane Bonham-Carter, Liberal peer; and Robert Harris, the popular novelist and former political journalist.
All nice people. It was not what they said; it was their faces.
All the strain had gone from the facial muscles. Tennyson’s line ‘The noise of life begins again’ came into my head.
This was even before the monumental loss of Conservative seats in the Commons.
Some weeks later, hearing the hell of a din coming over the back wall of our garden in north London, my wife suggested we went to have a sniff at the North London natives at a street party in Dartmouth Park.
There was a lot of ‘Dad dancing’, as paunchy middle-aged chaps, holding plastic cups of Rioja or New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, bopped and pirouetted, while Ed Balls, Robert Peston and others thumped out cheesy old rock music.
The metropolitan elite literally danced in the streets, gazed upon adoringly by Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper, who wore that expression wives have when their husbands make Charlies of themselves. The idiocy pleases them, making clear their own superiority over the chumps they have married.
Ah, say the optimistic right-wing journalists. This Starmer government won’t last. The squabbles among the staff
at Number 10, the ‘scandal’ of a Labour peer paying for the Prime Minister’s spectacles and the inevitable blunders the Government commits will ensure Labour’s downfall. Then the country will come to its senses.
Well, maybe, but will ‘coming to their senses’ be the same as ‘voting Conservative’?
One anniversary should give the right-wing pundits pause.
This was the election, a century ago, that saw the irreversible wipe-out of the Liberal Party. Many political wiseacres would have said that, since 1689, the Whigs had really been the ‘natural’ party of Government. They had morphed into the Liberals, and after the Corn Laws fiasco, many of the Peelite Tories – such as Gladstone – became Liberals. Gladstone’s Liberal Party, and Rosebery’s, was surely an unbeatable force: the natural party of progressives, but also of the puritan Northern grocers who supported the Great Exhibition and free trade.
In 1924, post-First World War Britain was going through many crises of political identity. What was going to happen in Ireland, now that the Free State had been declared? Would women be fully emancipated? What was Britain’s economic relationship with the Empire?
The frail Labour minority government of Ramsay MacDonald was toppled. The Conservatives, led by Stanley Baldwin, won a whopping Commons majority. In the previous Parliament, under the leadership of H H Asquith, the Liberals had 158 seats. After Baldwin’s victory, the Liberal seats were reduced by 118 to just 40.
One of those Liberal MPs, Winston Churchill, having supported a Lib-Con coalition, realised which way the wind was blowing and switched sides, to become a Tory.
Churchill was not alone. Many of the conservative-minded Liberal voters, who believed in the Empire and cherished the union with Ireland, became Tories. The
Liberals who were lefty joined the Independent Labour Party.
What is to prevent a comparable calamity for the Conservatives whenever the next General Election is held? (Remember, the 16-year-olds might have the vote!)
Many of the metropolitan elite used to vote Conservative – because the likes of Cameron were indistinguishable from New Labour, as far as social policy was concerned (gay marriage, for example) and, unlike the Labour left, they were all keen Europeans.
The metropolitan elite are a powerful lot, and there is only one person in recent British political history who has ever roundly defeated them.
That is the Honourable Member for Clacton, who brought about the Brexit vote.
The Liberals were wiped out in 1924 not because they were incompetent, but because they no longer represented ‘the people of England’, who ‘have not spoken yet’. There simply were not enough natural Liberal voters left, now that the Labour Party represented the interests of both the lefty intellectuals and organised labour.
Isn’t that true of small-c conservatives now, as the natural conservatives, such as me, who still go to church, and who suspect that almost all change is for the worse, gradually die out?
Today’s Conservative Party would have to hold together both the Cameroon-type elite voter, who is going to be perfectly happy with boring old Sir Keir (so long as he doesn’t put the taxes up too high), and their polar opposites, who once voted Tory because they were social conservatives – antiEuropean, pro-hunting, worried about immigration, suspicious of wokery.
If Farage has not lost his touch, huge swathes of these social, small-c conservatives will vote Reform at the next election, and reduce the Tories’ 121 seats to double figures.
Sophia Waugh: School Days
Yawning generation gap
Sometimes I realise my pupils and I are from completely different worlds. Communication is blocked by this – sometimes disastrously.
I am not talking about class, education or culture. I am talking about the totally different assumptions that operate in the minds of the young.
I was first truly aware of this when my own children were young. My husband used to go to Pakistan for three months at a time, to work. We would explain to the children that ‘He has to go away to get the money to buy food.’
I thought that was all fine until I heard my eldest, aged five, describing Pakistan to a friend, and realised that she was describing the bank in Dulverton – just much bigger and very far away.
Often the assumptions are based in the changes in language. I had a class of girls, mostly lippy and confrontational, among whom was one very quiet girl, who kept separate from the rest and kept her head down. Setting them a task one day, I told them they could work in pairs, and then turned to the quiet girl: ‘You don’t need to, Jane. You can work alone, because I know you’re a loner.’
The room went absolutely still; every last gobby girl stared at me in horror. They had paid no notice to this girl for the best part of a year, but were now united against me on her side. And Jane was in tears.
It turns out that a loner is no longer taken to be someone who is independent, self-contained and self-reliant. A loner is an outsider; someone no one likes; someone isolated and untouchable. Well, I got that one wrong.
These misunderstandings continue, especially in the study of literature. And sometimes we have to adjust not just how we teach, but what we teach.
I am teaching Of Mice and Men to Year 8. However often I teach it (and it must be over 20 times by now), I never tire of it, nor of Steinbeck.
Given that these children could blithely say Rishi Sunak could not be
Prime Minister because you only have to look at him to know he isn’t English, the genuine outrage at the use of the word n*gg*r in the book (see, even for you oldies, I felt I could not spell it out in full) was interesting.
These children understood the word is wrong, but it takes a good half-hour to try to explain the contextual use of the word. Steinbeck is disapprovingly pointing out the discrimination in the treatment of Crooks, the black character, but the word was part of a vernacular in the way it absolutely is not now. So they hate the
We are from different worlds, speaking the same language, but with different accents
word, and either cannot read it out loud at all or do so with fearful, hysterical giggles. But they can happily say that black or brown people should not hold high office, without understanding the very deep racism of their views.
We have called time on teaching A View from the Bridge to Year 9. I don’t think that at that age (14) I knew what a paedophile was, but these children perhaps know too much.
They cannot view Eddie Carbone as a tragic hero fighting against his emotions, just as a weird paedo who should be locked up. Their views of the world are in some ways more sophisticated than ours were at that age, but in other ways much less nuanced.
That’s why we are from different worlds, speaking the same language, but with accents so different we sometimes just can’t understand one another.
I first laid eyes on Jimi Hendrix on 15th February 1967 at the Dorothy Ballroom in Cambridge. Around 30 people turned up and we were all blown away by the maelstrom generated by Jimi, Mitch and Noel in that small venue without even a proper stage.
The trio rocked the place and we were rendered numb by the onslaught. Jimi wrapped his long fingers around the Fender neck and made it talk in many tongues.
I was with my old school pal Ricky Hopper, who had gained a scholarship to Jesus College in classics – and later discovered Kate Bush. I was ligging in Cambridge and was on my gap year – which, strange to say, has continued till this day. The Dorothy is now a Waterstones.
Jimi had released his first seminal single Hey Joe, but an album was yet to emerge. So we didn’t know much about him. Neither did we figure he would be the worldwide star he is today; but we had an inkling.
I spent time with him later. My partner, Jay, and I were making bespoke clothes in London. We visited him in his Kensington flat, taking round a stack of jackets, shirts and whatnot tat for sale. We got his number from a dark-haired
I Once Met Jimi Hendrix
beauty called Carmen, who opened her little black book to us.
Jimi was most courteous, asking us in and taking time to be polite.
We showed him the clothes, drank tea and smoked joints – the way you did in those days. He then disappeared off into his bedroom to make calls, leaving us alone.
So I found a Robert Johnson record –THE Robert Johnson record – and put it on the turntable.
‘So, you dig this stuff, then?’ Jimi commented on his re-emergence, proving that Robert Johnson was one of his big influences, as he was with every other blues guitarist around at the time.
He found it amusing that young white guys dug the rural blues from the Deep South.
Jimi liked the English humour, and the female attention he attracted; he joked about the rain and dug the plethora
of guitarists in the capital: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck etc.
Nobody was in much of a hurry back then, but Jay and I thought we might have outstayed our welcome. So we began making to leave.
Jimi interjected, ‘How much do you want for them?’
‘What – all of them?’ we answered, surprised.
‘Yeah, sure. I can use them.’
In our stoned state we totted up what seemed a fair price. Jimi, like a real gent, produced the pound notes and we fell out into the street.
The culmination of our sartorial connection with Jimi came later, with the creation of a painted silk jacket for him that he wore on the cover for Electric Ladyland
The jacket was made by a lady called Julia on our suggestion, decorated with swirling inks in a psychedelic pattern, featuring eyes that each held two pupils. Someone described it as the best piece of psychedelic fashion from the 1960s.
Jimi squeezed his skinny frame into it backstage at the Savoy Theatre in the West End before a show and loved it. A one-off original for a one-off original. Chris Jagger
Long arm of the law meets a very short skirt
was on leave and there was a shortage of staff. So the duty sergeant took a risk and sent me out to ‘wave the flag’.
In my 36 years as a policeman, one incident is seared into my brain in forensic detail above all the others.
It was during the gorgeous summer of 1969 when, having completed basic training, I was posted to Dunstable in Bedfordshire.
On this particular Saturday morning, they’d let me loose in full uniform to patrol the town centre. I should have had a senior constable with me, but he
Armed with a Pye Pocketfone two-way radio, which I’d never used before, off I went on my first foot patrol down a high street I’d never been down before. What could possibly go wrong?
I remember feeling immensely proud as I strolled from the police station into the town centre.
It was a really busy day. At least if anything happens, I mused, there’ll be plenty of witnesses.
As I patrolled at the instructed pace of 2½mph past a long bus queue, I noticed a young lady walking
on the other side of the road wearing a very short skirt.
My attention was diverted for no more than a second or two – but that was sufficient. To hit a lamp post at 2½mph doesn’t sound like much and, in terms of physical injury, it wasn’t. In terms of shock and abject embarrassment, it was off the scale.
The impact knocked my helmet clean off and sent it spiralling into the middle of the high street.
Before I could retrieve my prized headgear, a Mother’s Pride lorry ran over it – all played out in front of dozens of witnesses, not to mention a bus queue of applauding spectators. It was made a hundred times worse
because I knew they knew the source of my distraction. I limped into the road to retrieve my flattened helmet, now lazily spinning to a stop and looking like a battered vinyl record.
Comments from some very rude bystanders didn’t help.
‘You naughty copper, we saw what you was lookin’ at!’
‘Put it back on your ’ead, mate!’
The walk back to the police station was the longest journey I’ve ever made.
By John Dee, Dunstable, Bedfordshire,
who receives £50
Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past
Jimi in Chris’s jacket
Christmas solved by The Oldie
GIVE ONE 12-issue subscription for £46, saving £20 on the shop price, and get one FREE copy of The Oldie Annual 2025 worth £6.95
TWO subscriptions for only £82, saving £50, and get one FREE copy of The Oldie Annual 2025 AND one FREE copy of The Very Best of The Oldie Cartoons worth a total of £15.90
THREE subscriptions for just £99 – BEST DEAL, saving £99, AND get the two books plus The Oldie Travel Omnibus, worth a total of £21.85 OR complete the form below and
Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips
Leggings legacy
Giles is right – they’re a crime against humanity
Modern leggings made their first appearance in the 1960s.
They were trousers similar to capri pants, but tighter. Capri pants were charming – think Audrey Hepburn – and are still charming today.
It was when they morphed into leggings in increasingly tight, stretchy, machine-made polyamide fabric that the aesthetic problem began.
Leggings disfigure even those with a justifiable reason for wearing them: personal trainers, professional athletes, ballet dancers.
Yes, the wearer may have a technically perfect physique, but she wears them at the cost of offering Too Much Information.
Leggings were a valuable addition to the human wardrobe in the days when they were largely unseen but served the key function, in the days before central heating, of providing warmth.
For medieval men, they took the form of hose – close-fitting, woollen clothing worn on the legs and lower body and suspended from the waist by straps.
Crucially they were ‘cut on the bias’, meaning the fabric was cut at a 45-degree angle to the grain, or weave, allowing more stretch and fluidity so it can mould to the body. Viewers were spared the graphic delineation of the body, as hose was worn with a surcoat, which screened off much of the problematic areas.
been: can leggings be worn on their own, or are they an accessory to be worn with other items covering them, such as skirts, dresses or shorts?
In a 2016 Glamour magazine poll, 61 per cent of readers believed leggings should be worn as an accessory only. Every ripple, crease and bulge of the body is revealed. The unfortunate expression ‘camel toe’ was coined as a consequence of women wearing leggings as outer wear. The female equivalent of a cricket box – a sanitary towel worn over the pants but inside the leggings – to obscure camel toe is not the answer. Just don’t wear leggings.
But, ironically, at a time when the average junk-food-filled Brit is unhealthier than ever, the streets are pullulating with unfit people in gym kit. Trainers, paired with leggings or stretchy high-vis tracksuit bottoms and tops, give the impression of an army of ambulant beach balls.
Is it because they want to signal their intention to go to the gym – or take some exercise – at some stage? Or because their ordinary dresses and skirts don’t fit any more?
to answer for. Sienna Miller was photographed wearing skin-tight Lycra, scrolling on her phone while walking in New York, perpetuating legging-wearing. It is human nature to fix our gaze on bodies clad in skin-tight clothes. Should we instead be pointing the finger at ourselves and our inability to look away?
A lot of young people confuse an aesthetic revulsion to leggings with ‘body-shaming’ or even ‘slut-shaming’. That’s not the point. It’s usually the ugliness of the garment, not the body they expose, that people object to.
I did once own a pair of leggings. It was at a time when my figure was not that bad. They were irresistibly comfortable. Once you have worn them, you never want to wear anything else –as with Crocs. My husband, Giles, took the executive decision to put them out with the rubbish –and it was the right decision.
Historically, women too wore lower body-warming garments – linen pantalettes under crinolines, for example – but they were always under something; never as clothing in its own right, like leggings today. Imagine the erotic atmosphere of those times when what we concealed was so much more stimulating that what we revealed.
In the last 60 years, the debate has
Since when did comfort and convenience come before cutting a dash? In the past, being well dressed was a form of politeness, a way to imprint yourself on the social fabric – now billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin go out of their way to wear hoodies. Do they feel they need to wear them as camouflage?
Hollywood stars have a lot
countryside surrounded by escarpments, I would never want to don leggings, or loose-
bottoms – even if they are the ideal kit slippery slope on
I have a long, rough, Barbourstyle wax coat. If I take it off when a precipitous download slope needs to be tackled, it doubles nicely as a sledge and I can
Audrey Hepburn
Sienna Miller in Lycra
Town Mouse
Hell is other tourists
tom hodgkinson
Florentines are angry.
Thanks to Airbnb, easyJet and the hyper-tourism they bring, fewer than 40,000 natives now live in the historic centre, compared with 100,000 in the Renaissance.
And the 1.5 million tourists each year bring with them vulgarity, and offend the genteel people of this polite and beautiful city.
In July this year, the BBC reported that a picture of a young woman kissing and embracing a statue of Bacchus in lewd fashion had been circulating, leading one Florentine to comment, ‘This is the result of years of attempts at turning Florence into Disneyland.’
This may be unfair: perhaps she been inspired by the Cynic philosopher Diogenes and his habit of embracing statues.
I do hope the statue-embracer wasn’t a Brit. That would be embarrassing. We English seem irresistibly drawn to Florence. Above my desk, I have a lovely 18th-century print of the Uffizi Palace, featuring bewigged Grand Tourists gaping at the marvels around them.
Well before the age of the Grand Tour, in 1638, Milton visited the city and stayed for more than a year. He was 29 and relished his time in the informal, free-thinking academies of the city. These were societies that met for the purposes of indulging in highfalutin discussion and music, among them the Academy of the Apatisti, or ‘apathetic’, and the Academy of the Svogliati, or ‘will-less’.
On 6th September 1638, he read one of his poems (in Latin hexameters, of course) to the Svogliati in Florence and was fêted for it.
During the summer of 1639, Milton went up to the small town of Fiesole which overlooks Florence. There he met Galileo Galilei, to whom he refers in Paradise Lost, when he mentions ‘the Moon, whose orb / Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views / At evening from the top of Fiesole’.
The wonders of Florence, the great self-governing city state, with its wealthy bankers and wool traders, home of Boccaccio and Dante, continued to attract literary types.
The Romantic poets, better known for
their love of the countryside, could go into raptures about Florence. Wordsworth wrote about being ‘pensive and alone’ outside the Duomo while gazing on Dante’s ‘favourite seat’. In 1818, Percy and Mary Shelley lived in Florence for a while, on the run from creditors in Blighty. Mary gave birth to a boy there, whom they named Percy Florence.
Mary later wrote, ‘Here we view all that man can achieve of beautiful in sculpture, when his conceptions rise to the height of grace, majesty and simplicity. Look at these, and a certain feeling of exalted delight will enter at your eyes and penetrate your heart.’
Byron spent a lot of time there, though he considered himself superior to the other tourists, whom he sneered at and called the ‘gossip-loving English’.
Mrs Mouse and I have trodden in the footsteps of these literary greats over the last few summers. This year, we visited Casa Guidi, the home of Elizabeth and Robert Barrett Browning from 1847 to 1861, when Elizabeth died. The lovely flat, with its elegant sofas, day beds and leather-bound volumes of 19th-century poetry, is available for holiday rentals through the Landmark Trust.
We went up to Fiesole, where we visited a Medici summer palace and a Franciscan monastery. We visited Vallombrosa, just outside the city, another haunt of Milton and, later, Wordsworth. Brother Marco of the Benedictine monastery there proudly showed us the signature, in the visitors’ book, of a Brit who’d recently visited. It was none other than King Charles.
Central Florence in August can be fairly hellish, though. One wonders what Byron would have thought of the crazy scenes on the Ponte Vecchio, which is absolutely crammed with tourists.
An unholy combination of Instagram and Airbnb have turned the city, at times, into a seething hellhole of selfie-takers and wheeled-suitcase-draggers. The crowds are unbearable. You wish they would all go away – and then you realise you’re one of them.
The Florentines clearly recognise that they can’t ban tourists. But they can do some clever crowd control. The director of the Galleria dell’Accademia said this summer that visitors could be managed better through ‘slower tours, smaller groups, better signage and orientation, de-seasonalisation; distribution of visitors, longer openings’.
Oldie-readers can help. When you go to Florence, do not use Airbnb. Do go off-peak. Then you’ll have more chance of exalted delight entering your eyes and penetrating your heart.
Country Mouse
Mary’s right – I should have got out more
giles wood
Starmer has spoken. Britons must ‘turn up our collars and face the storm’.
Perhaps he imagines it will be only higher-rate taxpayers, such as plumbing king Charlie Mullins, who will jump ship.
I predict that even his favoured ‘hardworking families’ will also be looking for ways of escaping the nasal knight’s self-avowed ‘unpopular decisions’.
I am already dreaming of decamping to my newly-beloved Liguria. During late summer, my elder daughter, tiring of my grumbling, frogmarched me out of my comfort zone in Wiltshire and onto taxis, trains, planes and hired automobiles.
I went along with it, obeying her orders – I had to. I am digitally excluded and she had the boarding cards on her phone.
After a 13-hour journey, I found myself deep in the heart of the Italian Riviera. Having achieved it, I recognise it is a journey that no longer holds any fear for me. Mary was right. I should have got out more.
The region was favoured by Byron, Shelley, D H Lawrence and Max Beerbohm. According to Liguria, my award-winning Bradt guidebook, it can offer Brits abroad an average of nine hours of sunshine per day in summer and four hours of sunshine per day in winter. That’s four more than in Wilts.
Liguria is protected from cold northerly winds by the mountains. The mild winters first attracted those distinguished stranieri.
It was the only holiday of my life when I have felt free from the desire to explore or sightsee and indeed the only time I have ‘relaxed’ on a beach. We found the shores to be Brit-free zones, where only bronzed natives, with limbs the colour of autumn conkers, occupied every square inch of the mostly pebbly beaches. Good – I cannot abide sand.
Having squeezed in 15 days ‘in the realm of the senses’, giddy from dormant taste buds awakened and from almost a surfeit of architectural beauty round every corner, I feel the one-bar-electricfire experience of a typical UK staycation will never again suffice.
I was reluctantly persuaded by an alpha-female friend of my daughter to forsake the beach and spend one day exploring inland.
This was in search of an alleged series of gin-clear river-water rock pools where we could plunge in and cool off after hiking on mule tracks.
Despite much disinformation from stocky Bavarian fellow hikers (and low-blood-sugar episodes), we eventually found them.
Bracing is the best word to describe the plunge pools – but, afterwards, warmed by the sun and our picnic focaccia, I consulted my Bradt guide and learnt that no traveller should miss the attractions of nearby Sassello.
But there was trouble in paradise. Heading for the town square, we were accosted by a nondescript middle-aged Englishman, who proclaimed himself a resident and ventured pleasantly, ‘Someone has just told me Giles from Gogglebox is in town!’
As we engaged in small talk, I realised this fellow could enlighten us as to what it was really like to live in Sassello in the winter. I had decided this pretty town was ‘the one’.
Our civilised chatter was shattered by the materialisation of another Brit, Freddy, cut from quite a different cloth. An ageing, skinny geezer with jet-black hair, a cravat and an alarming resemblance to Dean Martin, he barged his way into our circle without introduction and began, ‘I’ve just been trolling Mick Jagger on Twitter.
Someone tweeted that Mick’s just enjoyed his 4,000th sexual experience, and I commented, “Cor, fella! That’s an awful lot of meat to take up the jacksie!” ’
This self-important pest made no allowance for the gracious ladies in my entourage and continued to broadcast in inappropriate vein.
Of course I should have paused him. ‘Steady on, mate. Mind your language. Mixed company.’ But I’m not good at being ambushed.
The demon had a sculpture show on and was keen to show us a work that – in his own words – expressed all the misery and suffering human life was capable of. Its title? The F****** Hell of Existence.
He began to enumerate these horrors: ‘Mutilation … castration.... disembowelment … syphilitic pustulation.’ He was still reeling them off as we walked briskly away.
Later, having viewed some of his derivative sculptures on an old documentary, we were able to reassure ourselves the demon was no more than a Poundland Antichrist.
Clearly, having settled in a remote town with scarcely any passing trade to view his works, he has become increasingly desperate for anyone to take notice of his puerile artworks. I couldn’t say any of that when he was insulting me to my face.
Luckily, the Bradt guide is interactive. I am going to write to them, and suggest they warn travellers to be wary, to be sure they avoid this toxic version of the Ancient Mariner.
I might also review my own decision to move to Sassello.
Right now, that town ain’t big enough for the both of us.
‘Assume, for the sake of reality, that I’m right’
End of my purple reign
It’s time to ditch the hair dye, says Mary Kenny, and fade to grey
Now comes the big life change: goodbye to being a punk grandma.
For some years, I have dyed my hair purple, following some urge to capture an old-hippy look. But I suddenly grew tired of doing so, and decided to let the colour grow out.
The change was met with dismay by my Deal coffee group, assembled at Bloody Mary’s each Saturday (where le tout Deal meets).
‘The purple takes years off your face,’ said one of my fellow oldies. ‘Don’t fade into grey!’
But hair colour is an affirmation of attitude, and I’m no longer in the mood for such a vivid choice –though I do know it cheers up onlookers. I remember a weary-looking older woman in Lebanon, when I visited Beirut a few years ago, giving me the thumbs-up for my eccentrically dyed barnet.
In our time, it’s no disgrace to dye quite outrageously. But, still, you have to want to invest time, money, motivation and energy to keep doing it. The colour has to express the personality – or, as people would say now, the identity – you want to be.
And my purple identity is over.
I’m not a huge fan of these ‘nanny state’ campaigners. And policymakers – such as Sir Keir Starmer –plan to slap more restrictions on unhealthy food and snacks next year.
Honestly! Does the Government have to monitor every bite we put into our mouths?
The neo-Cromwellites are even coming after the delicious croissant.
Paris, Ninetta Jucker wrote that the pastry was so prized that ‘De Gaulle might have chosen the crescent as his emblem. Ever since restrictions began, the croissant had become the symbol of good living.’ Even the word became ‘sacred’.
But I suppose what really made it so delicious was that it was a treat at a time of rationing. Treats are permissible. It’s the surfeit that seems excessive.
The House of Lords behaved shamefully over Irish home rule. Had they not stymied it twice, much conflict might have been averted.
Lord Lansdowne – his Irish title was the Earl of Kerry – was the leading opponent. (Even so, I’m quite sorry to see the last of the hereditary peers abolished. It’s nice to maintain a link with history.)
A small Irish publisher, Somerville Press, has now published the memoirs of Lansdowne’s daughter, Beatrix, dowager Marchioness of Waterford, in the years from 1895 to 1908.
Hair dye is woven into the social history of women’s liberation. Within living memory, to dye was racy. There was an advert for hair colour in the 1960s that asked the provocative question of a lady with suspiciously dark hair ‘Does she, or doesn’t she?’
In John Betjeman’s unforgettable poem Slough, he refers not very approvingly to the wives who ‘frizz out peroxide hair’. Poor Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged, was usually described as a ‘bottle blonde’, as though this were a moral failing.
In the 1930s, salons had separate, discreet entrances for dyeing clients. But artificial hair colour was gradually made acceptable by Miss Clairol marketing; and by David Hockney, who decided to embrace the slogan ‘If I have only one life, let me live it as a blond.’
‘A croissant a day can take a toll on your heart in under a month,’ proclaimed an Oxford University research team recently.
Yet even I, a food libertarian, am taken aback by the sheer amount of crisps, snacks and chocolates that now adorn every small outlet. At Dover Priory – a hub railway station where tourists arriving from the cruise ships entrain for London – there’s a pleasantly renovated coffee shop. Where newspapers and magazines used to be displayed, I counted ten shelves of chocolates, sweets and crisps, and six shelves of drinks, mostly sugary. This seems fairly typical, and is surely immoderate.
The croissant is in a different category from all this junk food. It is genuinely organic. It has its place in history.
In her memoir of the 1940s, Curfew in
It’s a sunny picture of the old AngloIrish gentry in the days when hunts and hunt balls made the ‘Dublin season’ great fun. Beatrix Waterford is not political. She is a fond mother and a wife very much in love with her husband, Henry, the 6th Marquess, who died young.
They live at their estate, Curraghmore, County Waterford, and Beatrix carries out good works, setting up a war hospital and launching a knitting factory. The gentry move around between Ireland, England, the Continent and further afield, usually for ‘a change of air’.
Her granddaughter-in-law, Maria Ines Dawnay, edited the memoir, called Beatrix. Despite all the tumultuous events we have seen, Curraghmore still stands – at 2,500 acres, the largest private demesne in Ireland. It now produces its own whiskey.
Small World
Weirdo on the landing
Now I’m Mother’s doctor in the house, I’ve got her under 24/7 surveillance
jem clarke
Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he shares with his parents…
Mother now calls me the Cough Inspector.
My doctor-in-the-house role has increased to East German levels of surveillance ever since she refused to take antibiotics. She is now a frequent guest of Hôtel d’NHS. I’m now on endless bus journeys, smuggling flat, Egyptian cotton bed sheets into whatever day ward she’s been moved to.
Once she’s home, I monitor Mother’s health. I eavesdrop on her eldritch breathing. I run back to my room and write down, ‘Raised-breast-to-flat-chest rhythm: 3 seconds; catarrh croak: level 6.’
It gives me great comfort to know that, should anything happen, I can proudly say to the pathologists, ‘I think I may be able to solve this one, Doc.’
My sole worry, in my position as creator and only adopter of the raisedbreast-to-flat-chest/catarrh-croak measuring methodology, is that it may be too sophisticated for the pathologist.
Father has queried my tendency to run back and forth from their bedroom. I must befriend a local electrician and get him to install a nest-box-style camera in the corner of their room. I won’t be the weirdo on the landing any more. I will be the weirdo watching videos of my parents sleeping.
This is perfect timing. The main light won’t turn on in my room – the electrician can kill two birds with one stone.
Still, any big electrician’s van mustn’t come too soon. Thanks to the number of ambulances and police cars so often outside our residence recently, we are becoming ‘that family’ in the cul-de-sac.
The police car arrived yesterday after I reported a local inebriated woman for calling me a rude name. I led a young, eager officer into the kitchen
I can proudly say to the pathologists, ‘I may be able to solve this one, Doc’
for an awkward conversation – made more awkward by my hearing Mother’s raspy throat – and her creaky walking frame stopping dead outside the kitchen door.
I had to admonish her in earshot of the kind copper: ‘Mother, stop listening in from behind the door!’
‘Hypocrite! You do it to me every night outside my bloody bedroom!’ she shouted.
‘Yes, but I’ve stopped.’
‘So what exactly did the inebriated lady call you?’ the copper enquired.
‘Twat.’
He underlined the word ‘twat’ in his notebook and said that his boss would be in touch very shortly.
About two hours later, there was a very decisive, forceful rat-a-tat-tat-tat on the door. I opened it to see a very tall, plain-clothed authoritative figure, as promised.
‘You’re here about the twat?’ I asked.
‘I’m here about the light switch, mate,’ said the electrician.
Mother approached, like a tipsy Dalek. She roared down the hallway, ‘Go near my bedroom and this frame’ll take your shins off!
I think I suffer from follower envy.
Prue’s News
My latent latex fetish
My TV colleagues have trillions of followers on social media, while I plod along in their wake with a few thousand. I feel like an also-ran, and constantly tell myself I should do something about it.
But, oh, the tedium of it! To be constantly taking snaps of your dinner, doing a selfie in Diana pose in front of the Taj Mahal, cuddling the dog or stepping onto the Oxford Tube!
I admit to quite like videoing the odd kitchen hack – how to chop an onion or how to avoid ending up in A&E with ‘avocado hand’ after trying to remove the stone. But even that’s a fag, because it seems I need to be ‘on message’ to do it, ie earrings, necklace, glasses, lippy, when often I cook in my pyjamas.
But last week my insta count jumped by 1,000, which I attributed to Emma’s (she’s my brilliant new PA) being on top of this stuff.
But she suggests, having read the comments, that it’s down to my second appearance on the Vin + Omi catwalk.
She says all sorts of ageing
weirdos and heavy breathers were excited by my skin-tight black latex dress with lacing up the side, long black gloves and Goth make-up.
I’m relieved to hear that this denomination were joined by lots of perfectly normal woman who were impressed that I had the courage, at my advanced age, to wear the outfit.
To be honest (tbh, in social-media speak), I’d no idea what Vin + Omi were planning. I’d had one fitting, of a demure – if slinky latex – pink thing, but Omi, who does the creative stuff for the duo, decided to give me some ‘sexing up’. And you know what? I liked it. Being cheered by 500 people gives one hell of a buzz.
Back to black: Prue
On the next day, I was at the South Festival held on the Stansted Park estate, masterminded by Viscount Duncannon. He works like a navvy on the farm or in his farm shop and has gathered an impressive
bunch of exhibitors selling their local products. There were also a few non-food artisan stalls, such as CHOP, making chopping boards with intricate patterns from tiny woodblocks.
My job was to open the fair and join a conversation on stage about the legacy of Elizabeth David.
The panel consisted of the great Artemis Cooper, who wrote the definitive biography of Elizabeth David; food historian Diane Purkiss; Elizabeth’s nephew and literary executor, Johnny Grey; and academic Tom Marks, who is working on a documentary about her.
It was heartening to see a packed tent of people genuinely interested in a no-longer-with-us food writer who wasn’t a chef. She was as interested in art as in food, eschewed television, hated being photographed and didn’t like publicity.
Yet she is, without question, the most influential foodie (she’d have hated the term) of my time, mainly because she was a truly great writer. I was presented with a wooden spatula of hers, heavy, stained, well-used and workmanlike.
I shall treasure it for ever.
Prue Leith’s Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom is out now
Sponsored by
sister teresa
A call to Christianity’s lost sheep
At 4.45 on a midsummer morning, I was woken by something sounding like a strangulated crow.
On looking out of the window, I saw 20 sheep, mixed in size and colour, happily grazing on the front lawn under two Indian smoke bushes in all their pink candyfloss glory.
The view was very pretty and very funny. The (good) shepherd’s not being available at that early hour meant that two nuns, veils fluttering gently in the breeze, added to the surreal quality of the scene by shooing the trespassers back to their field, a mile away.
Norfolk is full of sheep. It also has the highest concentration of churches in the world: there are 650 of them in the county. Many were built on the back of the wool trade. Four of these are within walking distance of the monastery.
St Andrew’s, Quidenham, has a memorial window dedicated to the 189 members of the US Airforce who lost their lives flying out from a local airfield in the Second World War. St Peter and St Paul’s in East Harling has miniature flying buttresses, rivalling those on a larger scale at Notre-Dame. It also has most of its original glass: a far-sighted local family removed it during the Reformation and kept it safe in a barn for
Memorial to US Airforce, St Andrew’s, Quidenham
150 years, putting it back once things had calmed down. The biggest and grandest – like a city church in the countryside – is St Mary’s, Kenninghall. And there is tiny St Mary’s, Eccles, with its beautiful, diminutive round tower and wonderful acoustics.
A young clergyman friend has seven of these churches to look after: all of them beautiful, listed and with congregations in decline. And all have very possessive parishioners who are reluctant to move from their own to church to one nearby to make less work for their overburdened vicar.
Thankfully, these churches are open, so that people can go in, pray and admire. But surely they need to be fuller than that, and used on a more regular basis than as the venues for flower
Memorial Service
festivals and carol concerts?
There is undoubtedly faith on earth, but the statisticians tell us that it is rapidly waning. O come on, all ye faithful: please ensure that something as valuable as well-practised Christianity is not allowed to fade away.
My hope now is that a remnant will spring up, presenting the Christian message in a new way to a younger generation who are longing and looking for it, even though they may not realise their need.
I myself feel like a ragged and not very lively specimen of a remnant – never more so than the other day, when I was sitting in my habit enjoying the sunshine.
An elegant young lady I hardly knew plonked herself down beside me and said, with no introduction, that she badly felt the need for a spiritual life.
I told her that I would be delighted if she paid me a visit so that we could talk things through. I suspect, like so many others, she doesn’t realise that faith invariably involves work: a little spiritual reading accompanied by willpower.
In a perfect world, guidance and good example are a great help. The results are well worth the effort.
Alas, so far the young lady has not turned up.
Dame A S Byatt (1936-2023)
The Reverend Lucy Winkett, Rector of St James’s Church, Piccadilly, led the memorial service for A S Byatt, the novelist.
There were tributes from Edmund de Waal, the potter and author of The Hare with the Amber Eyes, and by Isabel Armstrong, read by Isabel Pinner. Jenny Uglow and Lawrence Norfolk gave eulogies. Edmund de Waal said, ‘So remember A S and joy, remember her response to her portrait by Patrick Heron: “When it was finished, I did not know what to think for a moment. We both stared. I had a curious experience of it settling
into shape, becoming itself, as I looked at it.
The energy, the brashness, the uncompromising splashes of primary colour represented what I had wanted in an abstract portrait by a great colourist... They were a painting of the writer, of how I feel when I start work, a vanishing, watching body in a sea of light and brilliance!” ’
Actor Samuel West read an extract from A S Byatt’s Possession (1990).
A recording of A S Byatt on Radio 4’s Bookclub (1998) was heard, and another from BBC World Service 2024.
Hymns included ‘Praise, my soul, the King of heaven’ by Henry Francis Lyte, and ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways…’ by John Greenleaf Whittier.
The organist played Siegfried’s Funeral March by Richard Wagner. The choir sang Psalm 121 – ‘I will lift up mine eyes’ – by Henry Walford Davies.
JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW
The Doctor’s Surgery
Elixir of youth
Olive oil might stave off Alzheimer’s – particularly among women dr theodore dalrymple
I remember the days in England when olive oil was regarded as a medicinal product, used mainly for softening the wax in the external ear.
You went to the chemist to buy a small bottle of it and treated it as if it were an exotic substance or even dangerous. It belonged in the medicine chest rather than in the larder. As food, it was in that then capacious category, ‘foreign muck’. What was wrong with lard or beef dripping, anyway?
Who says that there has been no progress?
Olive oil might return, at least metaphorically, to the medicine chest, so good is it claimed to be for you. Nothing we consume can long escape epidemiological investigation of its consequences, good or bad, for our health. Those who want to lose weight count their calories; those who want to live long ponder the ingredients of their meals. As the personal was once political, so the meal is now medical.
An American study suggests that those who consume a lot of olive oil are considerably less likely to die of, or with, Alzheimer’s disease – the disease that many of us fear above all others.
The design of the study was a little suspect; it consisted of following up large numbers of people (nurses and other health professionals) for a long time, asking them about their habits at regular intervals, and correlating these habits, and other variables, with outcomes such as heart attack, stroke, cancer and, in this case, dementia.
The problem with this kind of research is that if you study enough variables, one or more of them will appear to be associated with a particular outcome more strongly than seems explicable by chance – though in fact the association is by chance. If you have enough data, you will always find associations that are statistically significant, but not significant in any
Liquid
gold: oils the cogs of your mind
other sense. That is why researchers should always have an initial hypothesis, rather than merely trawl through vast quantities of data, as is the case here.
Moreover, the reproducibility of the findings is an important element in establishing their validity. A study involving scores of thousands of subjects and extending over a long period is unlikely ever to be replicated. This makes its conclusions somewhat less secure.
Nevertheless, the results of this study – which involved using Food Frequency Questionnaires, a supposedly valid and reliable means of finding out what people consume – were, at first sight, more clear-cut than in many other studies of this nature. Overall, there was a 28-per-cent-reduced risk of dementia death in the group who consumed the most olive oil, by comparison with those who consumed the least. This was so even in the group most genetically liable to develop Alzheimer’s.
When as many other factors as
possible were controlled for, the reduction in dementia deaths among men dipped to just below statistical significance – though this does not mean that it was not real.
The authors invoked differences in the neurology of the genders to explain the reason olive oil had a greater protective effect in women than in men.
Of 92,385 people aged in their mid-fifties, 4,751 – one in 19.45 –had died by 28 years later of, or with, dementia. I worked it out from the statistics given by the authors.
On the assumption that the relation between olive-oil consumption and dementia death was causative, if the 32,360 women who never consumed olive oil had taken at least half a tablespoonful a day, then 348 – just over one per cent of them – would not have died of, or with, dementia.
As is so often the case with studies of a single disease, the all-cause death rate was not given, though I do not believe olive-oil consumption would have raised the death rate from other diseases.
An interesting thing I noticed was that people who consumed more olive oil also consumed more alcohol – probably wine. They were sophisticates, and sophisticates live longer.
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
Frinton time-traveller
SIR: Gyles Brandreth’s remark (October issue) that the joy of visiting Frinton in 2024 is that you feel as if you are in 1958 again reminded me of the saying that was common in Essex during the time I lived there: Harwich for the Continent, Frinton for the incontinent. The place was so staid it didn’t even have a pub. Could be it still doesn’t.
Sincerely,
Tony Purcell, Sheffield
Prue’s vibrant hues
SIR: Bravo to Prue Leith (Prue’s News, October issue) for embracing – very elegantly – colourful clothes.
Not so the motor industry, who have decided – maybe as a result of a wayward focus group or a batty influencer – to promote and sell cars that are grey or a dull beige. And the public seems to have swallowed it.
We need more colourful cars on the road – like Prue’s dresses. Brightly coloured cars are safer and more likely to cheer us up after the dreadful summer we have just endured.
Yours ever, David Holme, Accrington, Lancashire
‘And all because the lady was sugar- and lactose-intolerant’
Writers’ letters
SIR: Your habit of publishing on the Readers’ Letters page contributions from your own writers (Liz Hodgkinson in
October; Roger Lewis the month before) would be annoying were it not that (a) writers are readers too, (b) I’m just piqued because you never publish any of mine, and (c) it’s all part of the quirkiness that makes the magazine unique. Forget I ever mentioned it.
Yours sincerely,
James Dixon, Stanningfield, Suffolk
What Charles Azn’t
SIR: We loved your affectionate piece (Old Un’s Notes, October issue) on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Charles Aznavour.
But did the Goodies not dub him Charles Aznobum?
James Gibson, Quorn, Leicestershire
Genius of Posy Simmonds
SIR: I sympathise with Roger Lewis in his disillusionment about the literary world (Review of Books supplement, October issue): ‘I think I’d assumed anyone operating in the humanities
would be humane, enlightened, thoroughly sympathetic’. So did I, as a student of English Lit in the early ’80s. I soon learned to look to the ‘boring’ scientists, engineers and, in my case, archaeologists, for nice, uncomplicated, supportive friendships.
I urge him to look at Posy Simmonds’s superb Literary Life – a hilarious dissection of the jealousies, pettiness and arrogance of the world of writing. Even though Simmonds is celebrated to some extent, this woman is still an underrated genius, up there with Hogarth.
Rhona Taylor, Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire
‘My husband doesn’t know much about art, but he knows what he hates’
‘I just couldn’t bear another day in black’
‘I’d like the garden salad with the bluecheese dressing, and my mother would like me married by the age of 30’
A toast to soft drinks
SIR: I must take issue with Liz Hodgkinson’s Rant (October issue) about non-alcoholic drinks. In particular, she assumes that everybody drinking these is content with the usual soft drinks, eg lemonade. In fact, there are many of us out here who (for many reasons) do not drink alcohol and who cannot abide the sugary sweetness of such drinks. We are most definitely looking for the non-sugary adult traditional flavours of dry wines, beers and spirits etc, but without the alcohol. Why should we be denied them?
Indeed, all power to those in the industry who are coming up with ever more attractive alternatives.
Neal Whitehead, North Somerset
Raise a glass to booze
SIR: Amen to Liz Hodgkinson’s righteous Rant (October issue) about non-alcoholic
beers, wines and spirits. Anyone wishing to abstain from booze already has a plentiful choice of fruit juices, teas and tap water to slake their thirst. I’d go further than citing the wedding at Cana: exorcising alcohol from wine is undeniably the work of the anti-Christ. Yours, Anthony Bennett, Ormesby St Margaret, Norfolk
O tempora, o mores!
SIR: A N Wilson (Oldie Man of Letters, October issue) was romantically vague about the magic he would like a new Chancellor to bring to Oxford University.
In a world full of fake news and bad science, I hope all the candidates will explain how they will strive to maintain it as a bastion of truth and intellectual integrity, and prevent it from being suborned by corporate and other vested interests, especially by totalitarian states.
I have no confidence in one particular candidate to attempt any of these things, but in fairness will suspend judgement on this before I vote against him.
However, I have composed a Latin oration against the possibility that he will be elected and inducted: ‘Ave, Petre Mandelsone, medice propagandarum, inimice veritatis, amice Galfridi Epsteini, servitor Putini et Tyranni Sinarum, amator pecuniae et potentiae, fecunde auctor scandalorum.’
Of course it can be improved – like Peter Cook, I never had the Latin to pass the rigorous judging exam.
Yours sincerely, Richard Heller MA Oxon (by purchase), London SE1
Lady Antonia nods
SIR: In Antonia Fraser’s masterly Mary Queen of Scots, the birth of the naive and tragic monarch is recorded as taking place in Linlithgow Palace, not Stirling Castle, as Antonia Fraser claims in the October issue. Revisionism, or just a slip? Please reassure readers who have always clung to A F as our totally trustworthy guide through history.
Jennifer Parker, Newton Stewart, Galloway
‘I demand to speak to the robot in charge’
Laughable
SIR: I’m sat here chuckling to myself. The first thing I do when I receive my copy of The Oldie is to rattle through and read all the jokes first.
Very rarely am I disappointed.
It’s fair to say that it’s one of the biggest joys of getting old, and being able to relate most of them to someone I know. Priceless.
Yours in humour, Paul Dale, Kidderminster, Worcestershire
I once met Queen of Mean
SIR: I’d like to challenge Anne Robinson’s assertion (October issue) that contestants on The Weakest Link actually liked her being rude to them.
I thought she was vile, as did those teammates with whom I discussed her afterwards.
Regal: Anne Robinson
Yes, we put on a brave face while we were on camera and didn’t answer back, but only because we suspected that any successful attempt to get the better of Anne would be edited out anyway.
Best regards, Maggie Cobbett, Ripon, North Yorkshire
The favourite doesn’t always win
The Duke of Buckingham, adored by James I, was stabbed to death
david horspool
Edward II had Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser. Elizabeth I had the Earl of Leicester, Sir Christopher Hatton and the Earl of Essex, among others.
In France, you can take your pick from Louis XI’s barber Olivier Le Daim – the man for whom the term ‘judge, jury and executioner’ was first coined – to Louis XIII’s eminence rouge, Cardinal Richelieu.
The favourite, a monarch’s personal friend, was often raised from obscurity to a position of wealth and, crucially, power. It had a golden age in the 16th and 17th centuries.
But it is a widespread enough historical phenomenon, from classical times to our own, that it might be more accurate to call it a part of human nature.
Rulers need friends. And naturally many look for someone to advise them who stands outside official circles; who offers guidance out of love and loyalty (they hope), rather than calculation.
The attractions of becoming a favourite are equally clear. For a person of ambition and, often, limited means, worming your way into the chief’s affections offers the chance to leapfrog those who have occupied their positions through accidents of birth, or even through talent and hard work.
There have been intelligent, talented and high-born favourites but, without the ability to appeal personally to the monarch, those individuals would never have occupied their exalted stations.
In England, the greatest of all favourites was George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628). In The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas – who inveigles the Duke into all sorts of ahistorical intrigues that eventually result in his untimely death – says of Buckingham, he ‘lived one of those fabulous existences which survive, in the course of centuries, to astonish posterity’.
The novelist wasn’t too far off the mark in describing the Duke, ‘the handsomest gentleman and the most elegant cavalier
of France or England’, as ‘all-powerful in a kingdom which he disordered at his fancy, and calmed again at his caprice’.
A new book by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Scapegoat, conjures up the personality and the world of this famously gorgeous, famously arrogant man. Buckingham has the rare distinction of having been the favourite of two successive monarchs, James I and Charles I. Usually, as a contemporary noted, a favourite was a ‘tenant at will and rarely transmitted’.
How did he do it? At the beginning, as Hughes-Hallett shows, Villiers was an instrument of others’ ambition. Mary & George, the recent doublet-ripping TV drama loosely based on his life, casts his mother as a psychopathic early modern version of the Hollywood parent, insanely fixated on her son’s path to fortune.
Hughes-Hallett tempers the picture. As well as receiving maternal propulsion, Villiers benefited from the machinations of political and religious rivals to James’s incumbent favourite, the Earl of Somerset. None of these schemes would have worked if James hadn’t been interested, and in a very short space of time, he was.
James was married with children, yet everyone knew that he loved men. Hughes-Hallett doesn’t dwell too long on whether that love was necessarily sexual. We don’t know and, in any case, 17th-century sexual proclivities don’t map very well onto modern ideas.
Once he fell for him, and without very much interruption until his death, James viewed Villiers – whom he elevated to the earldom, marquisate and, eventually, dukedom of Buckingham – as a lover.
James I was married with children, yet everyone knew he loved men
The king called Buckingham Steenie – short for Stephen – because St Stephen had the face of an angel. He addressed him as his ‘sweet child and wife’.
Buckingham seems to have been under no illusions about his own status. He signed his replies to the king ‘Your humble slave and dog’. But if he was willing to abase himself before his master, he didn’t tolerate others’ disdain, stoutly defending himself against all accusations of corruption and double-dealing.
Buckingham endured insults as James’s favourite, with one opponent comparing him to Hugh Despenser, who had died a traitor’s death. But, on James’s death, Buckingham maintained his pre-eminence, chiefly because he had already cultivated a deep friendship with James’s successor, his second son, Charles I. They had spent more than six months together on a fanciful trip to conclude negotiations for a Spanish bride for Charles. Travelling under assumed names, the two men – much closer in age than Buckingham and James – formed a bond that survived the succession.
Military failure destroyed Buckingham’s reputation and confirmed his wider unpopularity. It was a lone assassin, John Felton, who stabbed Buckingham to death as he prepared yet another naval expedition. Charles mourned his favourite, but the country rejoiced.
Buckingham was a quintessential man of his age, a leader of fashion and a collector of fine art, who saw the favour of the king as an entitlement to wealth and privilege.
We don’t have favourites like that now but, as Lucy Hughes-Hallett points out, democratic leaders also rely on unelected people with whom they have a special bond. Chiefs of staff and very special advisers are favourites by another name, if not a tenth as glamorous.
The Scapegoat by Lucy Hughes-Hallett is out now
Oldie Towers is in mourning.
Ed McLachlan, Britain’s finest cartoonist, has died at 84.
Ed produced cartoons from the magazine’s earliest days. Richard Ingrams, an avid fan, called him “the Leicestershire Charles Addams”, thanks to his macabre, bloodthirsty toons.
One of the joys of editing The Oldie was the torrent of McLachlans that came in every month – again and again, that rare combination of inimitable line and caption hit the spot.
How we will miss him.
Original McLachlans are on sale at the Chris Beetles Gallery, London SW1
‘Do you have to hum!’
Ed McLachlan (1940-2024)
The Oldie salutes a cartooning great.
By Harry Mount
‘The Mods and the Rockers are not what they were’ ‘Race you’
Welcome to our Christmas Gift Guide. Discover great presents for all oldies and all ages, from books to food. But don’t forget that a subscription to The Oldie is the best present of all (see below).
Published by The Oldie magazine, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titch eld Street, London W1W 7PA
Editor: Charlotte Metcalf
Design: Lawrence Bogle
Advertising: Paul Pryde, Jasper Gibbons, Monty Martin-Zakheim
Publisher: James Pembroke
Cover illustration by Bob Wilson
Christmas Gift Guide 2024
4 Gifts galore Original ideas for presents by Amelia Milne
11 Food Elisabeth Luard
14 Give generously Charity ideas from Pam Ayres, Pattie Boyd, Michael Palin and other Oldie favourites
18 The worst time of the year by Roger Lewis
20 Pop Music Mark Ellen
21 Classical music Richard Osborne
23 Travel Catherine Milner on the best Christmas Markets
25 Sign Up Nigel Summerley’s pick of subscriptions and memberships
Give The Oldie for Christmas!
26 Books Lucy Lethbridge
28 Drink Henry Jeffreys finds the best English vineyard tours
31 Overstuffed Mary Killen on Christmas over-indulgence
32 Gardening David Wheeler on gifts for gardeners and horticultural getaways
38 Christmas Quiz with Marcus Berkmann – Win a Partridges Christmas Treats Hamper
Give ONE subscription for £46 saving £20 plus a FREE copy of The Oldie Annual 2025 worth £6.95.
Give TWO for £82 saving £50 plus a FREE copy of The Oldie Annual 2025 + The Very Best of The Oldie Cartoons worth £15.90.
HALF PRICE OFFER - give THREE for £99 saving £99 plus a FREE copy of The Oldie Annual 2025 + The Very Best of The Oldie Cartoons + The Oldie Travel Omnibus.
Give 12-issue subscriptions to The Oldie from £2.75 an issue. And earn yourself up to three FREE books. *FOR OVERSEAS SUBSCRIPTIONS, SIMPLY ADD £5
one Australian sub will cost you just £109.
Gifts for everyone
AMELIA MILNE sources imaginative Christmas present for all ages
Forher
Lucky dip slippers
These comfortable, handcrafted Onaie slippers, plush with soft shearling, are handmade and embroidered in the Polish Highlands by skilled craftswomen. Onaie was founded by two Polish sisters, to bring Polish folk heritage and artisan techniques to the UK. No two pairs are the same. £22 notonthehighstreet.com
Merino wool tank
No discerning woman will ever complain about receiving a gift from Aspiga, and its clothing and footwear sourced from around the world already have a firm following. These round-necked short tanks are made from sustainable merino wool in a variety of delectable colours. £95 www.aspiga.com
Pooky rechargeable table lamps
Not cheap, but if you calculate a lifetime of candles, the numbers make sense. These rechargeable lamps are popular in restaurants but these come with much nicer shades, and because they’re cordless, you can use them anywhere, even al fresco at the bottom of the garden. From £95 www.pooky.com
Chococo chocolates
The weavy tote
These beautifully made PU leather woven tote bags come in a variety of colours and have robust dual handles that go over the shoulder. They come with an additional cosmetic clutch. They are all the tougher for being synthetic but feel as supple as the softest leather and will hold their shape when packed with daily essentials – or inessentials. £65 giftpop.co.uk
Made in Dorset since 2002, Chococo chocolates have won 130 awards for being the most lusciously chocolatetasting hand-crafted chocolates and the best on the market The range includes gift bars for every occasion, hamper bags, Christmas and Advent collections and a milk chocolate wise owl. Whoever said a moment on your lips is a lifetime on your hips, was a killjoy. From £8. chococo.co.uk
Rubber Stamps
Family-run and Dorset-based, The English Stamp Company sells ribbon and paper goods online. We particularly like the beech-handled rubber stamps that enable you to make decorative, personalised labels to turn any old rinsed out glass jar into a keepsake. Come January, when you are knee deep in Seville Oranges, you will delight in the pretty labels you’ll be able to create. £29 englishstamp.com
Fanny soap
The popular soap brand, Marseille, has come up with Natural French Fanny Soap. Before we snigger, ‘Fanny’ is a traditional French name and cements the brand’s reputation for hand-making authentic, timehonoured products in Marseille. Fanny soap has a pleasant fragrance which is oriental, delicate, with a subtle blend of mimosa, hawthorn, rose and vanilla. £3 www.quinceandcook.co.uk
Forhim
Hedgehog camera
In recent years hedgehogs have come to represent the vulnerable, endangered British wildlife we love to protect, particularly since Sarah Sands’s book, The Hedgehog Diaries, was published last year. This good value pack with solar powered box camera allows you to see hedgehogs close-up as they emerge from hibernation in the spring and there is an option to add on a hedgehog care kit. Cable Connection Hedgehog TV Camera Pack £129 green-feathers.co.uk
Pub walks cube by Duncan Peterson
Combining two of Britain’s favourite hobbies, walking and drinking, this boxed collection contains 35 cards, each outlining a British walk with a good pub in it. The cards are pocketsized and the routes have been well researched, as have the pubs, giving useful information on their ales, wines, food, atmosphere and history. How much more walking you’ll be able to do after the pub is another matter. £15.99 shop.ordnancesurvey.co.uk
Hello Handsome mug
Everyone likes a compliment, even the grumpiest of bah humbug! grinches. If this ‘Hello Handsome’ mug in a shiny green glaze can put a smile on the old man’s face, its priceless. £12.50 www.oliverbonas.com
Stei Poirot
A limited edition of just 1,920 Steiff bears have been made to honour 1920, the year Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published, giving us Hercule Poirot, the world’s canniest and most selfconsciously stylish detective. The light-blonde mohair bear comes complete with three-piece suit, hat, cane and Poirot’s trademark meticulously waxed moustache. Chosen as this year’s star gift by The Oldie’s Publisher, order now to avoid disappointment. £355 (with free shipping!) danburymint.co.uk
Mini zipper LED light
No more rummaging for matches in murky corners or a light at the bottom of your Barbour pocket. This LED zipper light obligingly lights up in the dark so is perfect for that night-time smoke on a late dog walk. From £5 www.oliverbonas.com
A Gyles Brandreth
Jumper
have a garden but who tenderly tends and cares for his house plants, these Microfiber pads clean dust off any leaf and will make waxy leaves gleam. Made from natural bamboo and with a three-year warranty, the tongs are held together with magnets for one-handed use. £19.99 kikkerlandeu.com
It will come as no surprise that Gyles (as in Brandreth) & George make luxury knitwear with a sense of humour. It’s been a favourite with Royalty and rockstars (Elton John’s a fan) since the eighties. From £180
gylesandgeorge.com
Forthem
LED Room Changing Lights
Small Signatures Thank You Letters
Which teenagers write letters when they can WhatsApp you? Bring back this much appreciated polite gesture and re-enforce a dying tradition with these personalised cards and give your teenager no excuse not to do the right thing. Most teenagers nowadays have never posted a letter and don’t even know where stamps come from! £17.95 for 15 smallsignatures.com
Wooden Swiss Army Knife
Forget a Patek Philippe watch, this knife is a keepsake, which can be personalised and passed down from generation to generation. The successor to the classic Officer’s Knife, the wooden addition has added scissors and wood saw to give it serious power and comes with a free sharpening tool. It’s small but tough and functional and will be invaluable camping and at festivals to solve the age-old problem of who has a bottle opener. £52.69 www.swiss-store.co.uk
Give teenagers the means to transform their room at home, school or uni into their own, personalised zone, changing the mood at the touch of a remote control. Any mother will tell you these are always a sure-fire hit. From £14.99 amazon.co.uk
Retro Lego Radio
Albie & Walt Jewellery for Boys
Hannah from Gift Pop has two sons, Albie and Walt, who have set up a boys’ jewellery range. Jewellery has been worn by Roman emperors, Egyptian pharaohs, and medieval kings, but possibly more famous to teenage eyes was the necklace worn by Paul Mescal in the lockdown hit TV show, Normal People, which earned its own Instagram page. From £40 giftpop.co.uk/collections/ boys-collection
Suitable for any would-be engineer, this is a build-your-own replica of a 1970s transistor radio. For fans of lego and vintage décor alike, this is also a working radio, and as such, a quirky novelty for a generation used to Spotify. Reassuringly for Gen Z, it also has smartphone integration. £89.99 www.lego.com
Bijoux de Mimi jewellery
When the shop opened on Kings Road selling ‘original colourful jewellery’, there were queues around the block. Founded by the eponymous Mimi, the brand quickly became an internet sensation, selling colourful bejewelled cuffs, chains, droplets and studs. The cult gold ‘Huggie’ earrings can be ‘stacked’ in clusters along the ears, the more the merrier. From £24.50 bijouxdemimi.com
Tara Cookery Class
With the growth of the fast food industry and faster delivery companies like Just Eat or Deliveroo, cooking is increasingly a dying skill, but essential once teenagers start heading to university. Based in West London, Tara Cookery teaches a variety of classes, in person and online. She went to Vietnam recently and has started Asian cookery classes too. See website for prices) taracookery.com/about
Forlittleones
Underwater Disco Light
This fun light will have children racing to the bathroom faster than you can say Saturday Night Fever. This safe, 100% waterproof, battery-operated light creates an instant disco in the bath but will also work in a swimming pool, hot tub or even the kitchen sink. £10 www.oliverbonas.com
Monopoly Dogs
Animated Acrobatic Toys
These painted traditional wooden toys remain full of charm for any child over three and will bring a nostalgic smile to grandparents’ faces too. Just squeeze the handle and the acrobat will perform a mini trapeze act. Not suitable for children under three. £5.95
www.rexlondon.com
Peter Rabbit Book Box
You can never go wrong with the complete collection of Beatrix Potter books. If you’re reading to tiny tots, you will undoubtedly feel a warm nostalgic glow as you re-encounter Beatrix Potter’s loved characters from Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton Tail to Mr Tod, Jemima Puddleduck and the Tailor of Gloucester. Some collections come complete contained in a beautiful box. £32.99 www.axelbooks.com
Simply Colors Varsity Jackets
Forgetting your grandchildren’s names? These fashionable, fun American-style jackets make a great gift as they can be personalised in a big range of colours and fonts. For children from as young as three, these colourful washable jackets can have anything from an initial or nickname to the name of a city or even an American university across the back, making them easy to spot
If normal Monopoly is driving you barking this Christmas, Monopoly Dogs creates hours of wholesome family fun. It features 22 different dog breeds and the six metal pieces are drawn from a dog’s world and include a bone and dog bowl. And dachshund owners can even find Dachsund-Opoly, billed as ‘paw-fect fun’. If you are more of a cat person, then there is Monopoly Cats too. £35
www.argos.co.uk or www.wickeduncle.co.uk
Cartucciera
First spotted in Italy, these crayons are neatly packed in a pale blue
recycled ocean plastic. The 24 chubby crayons can be slotted back and folded away into the roll so it’s perfect to entertain little hands while travelling or in a restaurant. £41.00
Kids can now create their own movies as this little device has everything they need, complete with a green screen to create special effects or look as if they’re flying. Included is a tripod for filming selfies and there’s a flip-up lens to take on-the-move selfies too. It even includes child-friendly video editing with a choice of 20 backgrounds from beaches and outer space to a television studio so children can become the stars of their own created worlds. £49.99
www.johnlewis.com
ELISABETH LUARD selects the very best festive fare
Food for the Feast
Guineafowl: small is beautiful This year, skip the leftover-problem and go for guineafowl, a neat little bird with a flavour somewhere between wild and tame, from The Dorset Meat Company.
Proprietors Jane and Nick Somper work with small-scale, family-run farms in Dorset and Wiltshire that do all the right things – grass-fed, outdoor-reared, ethically-sound –that farmers did in the old days.
For the Christmas roast, cook as you would any other bird: slip a sliver or two of butter beneath the breastskin, tuck a chunk of onion, a quartered apple and a sprig of thyme inside the cavity, baste regularly with butter and maybe a splash of white wine or dry sherry and cook for 50-60 minutes at a gentle heat (325°F/170°C) till the juices run clear when prodding the thigh with a sharp knife. Two birds (£18.95 each) will comfortably feed six. Save the carved-out carcass to cook with lentils as a Boxing Day soup. thedorsetmeatcompany.co.uk 01747 811077
Irish smoked salmon
From the wild and beautiful shores of Country Antrim comes Glenarm smoked salmon.
Raised as close to free-range as possible on Ireland’s west coast, in the fast-moving currents and deep, cold waters of the North Atlantic, this is very different from the floppy pink stuff usually found on supermarket shelves. The fish are reared organically from sprat to full-grown fighting fish – take a look at the video on the website for the joy of watching them jump.
Having enough space to grow and thrive, and an absence of chemical interventions (no problem with sea-lice in a seven-knot current) produces muscular fish with firm flesh and a freshness of flavour that’s not lost in the smoking.
A little of something good goes a long way. So 300g (£27.50) is enough for 4 as a starter, or 8-10 as nibbles on buttered brown bread with drinks (whiskey highballs, I think, don’t you?).
glenarmorganicsalmon.com 028 288 41691
Ethical Cheese Board
Christmas being the season to be kind, order your cheese board from The Ethical Dairy. David and Wilma Finlay’s high-welfare, organic dairy-farm is set in the green pastures
of Galloway (where the cows come from). Their Big Idea is that cows allowed to suckle their calves in a milk-sharing situation – cowswith-calf – can be done productively, efficiently and affordably.
The cows are calm, the calves are happy and the milk makes good cheese. They’ve written a memoir about their experience, The Ethical Dairy. Their hope is that cow-with-calf regenerative dairy-farming will become as normal as the production of free-range eggs. Their Christmas Selection Pack to serve 8-10 will see you calmly through the holiday with four seasonal 150g cheeses plus a truckle of award-winning semi-soft Bluebell at £39.60 inc p&p UK delivery.
theethicaldairy.co.uk 01557 814343
Make your own bread
Knowledge is power. Treat yourself (or your best-beloved) to a totalimmersion bread-making day with a professional baker at the deservedlyfamous School of Artisan Food at The Welbeck Estate in Nottinghamshire.
You have to make your own way there (it’s close to the A1 and M1).
The course starts at 9.30 and runs, with an hour’s break for a delicious, homemade lunch till 5 (from £195).
Beginners welcome: ingredients, equipment and recipes provided; suitable for vegetarians and vegans; bring your own containers to take your triumphs home. By the end of the day, you’ll have mastered the tricky stuff – kneading, proofing, shaping – and have the knowledge and confidence to bake such English classics as a white country-style (hand-shaped) loaf, bread rolls, malthouse loaf and whole-meal loaf baked in a tin.
Take control of the bread bin and you’ll never need to eat another soggy supermarket sarnie ever again.
schoolofartisanfood.org 01909 532171
From top: Irish salmon, guineafowl, ethical cheese and baking classes
The Oldie Annual 2023 A4 papberback 192pp
£6.95
Et Tu, Brute
Harry Mount and John Davie Signed copy hardback 264pp
£14.99
Swoop Sing Perch Paddle
Carry Akroyd and John McEwen. From Bird of the Month with 132 colour prints
£14.99 hardback 144pp
TO ORDER www.theoldie.co.uk/
Or call
0207 4368801 between 10-4 Monday to Friday
Forget the bleak midwinter. Award yourself a little ray of season-happy sunshine from mail-order specialists Feast Italy. They do a wide range of regional specialties (including gifts and hampers).
My own stash of Christmas happiness is a jar of Calabrian ’nduja (fiercely chili’d pork-paste – glorious in anything involving tomato sauce or refried everything, particularly potatoes). The white truffle butter is much the best way of conserving the flavour – stir it in raw to pasta at the end of cooking or use to dress vegetables – fabulous on a baked potato. Plus emergency supplies of Puglian taralli, crisp little ring-breads like miniature bagels to serve with the Christmas drinks. feastitaly.com
*OLDIE DISCOUNT*
5% off our Feast Italy special bundle which includes:
1 jar ’nduja
1 jar white truffle butter
2 packs olive oil taralli
(At time of writing) for £26.40 plus £4.95 p&p but just £25.08 for Oldie readers if they use the link below:
Who needs fancy chocs in boxes (nobody eats the marzipan and who wants crystalised ginger?) when you can order the most delicious fudge in the whole wide world from
Penrith in Cumbria, where I’ve been stopping off on the way to the Western Isles for years. The Toffee Shop has been making their softish, crumbly-yet-firm, all-butter fudge since 1910. This year they’ve packaged up a festive version with a little cache of Christmassy dried fruits in the middle (not too much). Me? I’ll be heading for the two-pound original at £30.95 plus £5.49 p&p, uncut slabs neatly wrapped in wax-paper (appropriately retro), which means you have to chop it up yourself. Exciting! thetoffeeshop.co.uk 01768 862008
CHRISTMAS OFFER
The Partridges Oldie Christmas Hamper
It includes: Partridges Pinot Noir 75cl; Partridges Mr Shepherd’s Blend Tea 25 bags; Partridges Organic Fairtrade Mr Shepherd’s Coffee 250g; Chelsea Flower Almond and Rose Butter Biscuits 150g: Partridges Cherry and Amaretto Preserve 227g; Partridges Kensington Mixed Nuts 100g; Walkers Fine Oatcakes 280g; Partridges Chicken Liver Terrine with Cognac 180g; Partridges Coarse Grain Mustard 185g; Patum Peperium Gentlemen’s Relish 42.5g; Partridges Scottish Heather Honey 340g; Partridges Pink Marc de Champagne Truffles 110g; Chelsea Flower Vanilla and Geranium Fudge 90g; Partridges Tomato Soup 500ml; Partridges Green Olive Tapenade 80g; Partridges Chilli Oil 250ml; Villani 1886 Truffle Salami 200g; Walkers Shortbread Highlanders 200g.
HOW TO ORDER: The delicious contents below will be delivered in an 18-inch wicker basket at the special price of £130 for Oldie readers, including free delivery to mainland UK. To benefit from the offer please use the code OLDIE10
Give Generously
We asked our favourite oldies and other hallowed names to choose charities to give to this Christmas
Pam Ayres
Cheltenham Animal Centre
Cheltenham Animal Shelter has cared for vulnerable dogs, cats and small animals for nearly 100 years. With 70 animals on site each day, we rehome hundreds every year. Our teams support pets and their owners, and work with young people to encourage responsible ownership, creating a better future for animals. gawa.org.uk
The Duchess of Beaufort
The Avon Centre
The Avon Centre, which is based on the outskirts of Bristol, not far from where I live, provides riding lessons for children and adults of all ages with a range of learning difficulties, sensory difficulties and neurological conditions. They also have a small team of rescue Shetland ponies so that non-riders can enjoy spending time in the company of horses. theavoncentre.org.uk
Ingrid Seward
Parkinson’s UK
Parkinson’s is the fastest growing neurological condition in the world, affecting 150,000 in the UK alone. I was inspired to help with this charity after attending a fund-raising concert put on by former rocker and record producer Mike Hurst, once part of the sixties group, The Springfields. The concert raised over £30,500 from a tiny local theatre. Stars such as Sir Tim Rice, Mike D’Abo, Cat Stevens and Shakin’ Stevens gave their services free to provide a unique musical evening which motivated me to want to help. parkinsons.org.uk
Michael Palin
Save Britain’s Heritage
Save Britain’s Heritage does an excellent job of bringing to our notice the legacy of fine old buildings in this country, of all kinds and of all shapes and sizes. They fight hard, and effectively, to preserve the best of them from the ever-present demands of development.
savebritainsheritage.org
Zandra Rhodes WaterAid
One of my favourite charities is WaterAid for the work it does ensuring that clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene are accessible to everyone around the world. I encourage you to donate to WaterAid and help support its life-changing work. I collaborated withWaterAid to design a T-shirt depicting Mother Nature that captures the essence of clean water. As well as donating directly, you can purchase one of these T-shirts online to help bring clean water to all.
wateraid.org/uk
Jeremy Bowen Look-UK
My favourite charity is Look-UK. It supports young visually impaired people. Its mentors offer a network of help and advice to young people who are visually impaired so they can fulfil their full potential. Look was originally started by my parents after Charlotte, my sister, started losing her sight when she was eight. Quite quickly it became a national charity. Many years later Charlotte became the CEO of Look, and has done brilliant work in the 21st century for young visually impaired people across the country.
look-uk.org
John Suchet Dementia UK
My wife Nula and I are ambassadors for Dementia UK, a charity which provides specially trained mental health nurses, known as Admiral Nurses, to give free, life-changing support to anyone affected by dementia. This includes those caring for a loved one with dementia. The burden of caring can often have a devastating impact on the carer. If you are affected by dementia, whether as someone with a dementia diagnosis, or as a carer, Dementia UK is there to help you. dementiauk.org
Philip Mould Plantlife
One of the most fragile and expressive forms of our natural heritage is our endangered wildflowers. They have filled our poetry and art for centuries, their names entwined with human needs, magic, and beliefs. We are losing them rapidly, and Plantlife is fighting to stem the loss and preserve our countryside’s soul. plantlife.org.uk
Helen Lederer Eve Appeal
I love the this camcer charity for its stamina in tricky times and the fact that funds are raised for this invisible disease and to address five different types of gynaecological cancer. It saves lives by funding groundbreaking research and awareness. It really is dynamic in changing public policy as well as saving lives. eveappeal.org.uk
Lady Glenconner SafeLives
SafeLives is a charity working with survivors to transform the response to domestic abuse and abusive relationships. The Queen is a Patron and recommended their work to me. A portion of the royalties of my new book, Lady Glenconner’s Picnic Papers, will go to them. safelives.org.uk
Loyd Grossman North Cotswold Foodbank
Even though I live in the supposedly hyper affluent Cotswolds, the area has many familes struggling with the cost of living, so I support the excellent and vital work of the North Cotswold Foodbank. Wherever you live – no matter how glossy – there will be need, so please find and donate to your local food bank.
northcotswolds.foodbank.org.uk
Tom Hodgkinson WaterAid
In an age where our tech overlords think that every problem can be solved with expensive technology or pharmaceuticals of dubious value, it’s
Above, left to right: Philip Mould, Zandra Rhodes
Left: Lady Glenconner
Below, clockwise from left: Michael Palin, Pam Ayres, Tom Hodgkinson, Ingrid Seward, John Suchet, Helen Lederer
encouraging to see the work that WaterAid does, motivated by the fundamental belief that good health starts with clean water and good hygiene. A very sensible charity. wateraid.org.uk
John Humphrys
Kitchen Table Charities Trust
I set up the Kitchen Table Charities Trust after many years witnessing at first hand the terrible poverty in sub-Saharan Africa – especially its effect on children. With a basic education they have at least a chance of escaping that poverty. We’ve made that possible for hundreds of thousands of children and our proud boast is that we have no paid staff or offices. Just dedicated volunteers and my kitchen table.
kitchentablecharities.org
Beth Coventry
The Trussell Trust
It helps fund the shameful, shaming number of life-saving food banks in our country – the world’s sixth largest economy. I researched The Trussell Trust after watching a gut-wrenching scene in a food bank in Ken Loach’s film I, Daniel Blake. I defy anyone to watch it and not donate to this charity. trussell.org.uk/emergency-food
Don Black
Shooting Star Children’s Hospices
Shooting Star Children’s Hospices
need to raise £12m every year to care and support for families in the most unimaginable circumstances. They are there to enhance quality of life when every precious moment counts.
shootingstar.org.uk
Pattie Boyd RSPCA
As a lifelong animal lover, the wonderful work of the RSPCA has always been very close to my heart. For 200 years, its grassroots work in Britain has transformed the attitudes of generations towards animals, and its wider international mission is simply breathtaking in its scope. In this bicentenary year, I want to endorse its outstanding contribution and remind everyone how it has fostered the welfare and wellbeing of countless millions of animals worldwide.
rspca.org.uk
Madeline Smith
Princess Alice Hospice in Esher
When Cancer had finally finished eating away my husband’s life, it was time for me to contact The Princess Alice Hospice in Esher. David had just two weeks to live. In the hospice he thought he had gone to heaven. The kindness he received from the nurses and all the staff was overwhelming. On the day
Clockwise from top left: Don Black, Anne Robinson, John Humphrys, Madeline Smith
of his death, I held David’s hand and told him to let go. His little girl was by his side. A magical death for his little family.
pah.org.uk
Bendor Grosvenor ArtUK
Founded in 2003 the charity ArtUK has done something amazing and unique in the world: with no government money, it photographed, digitised and published online the UK’s entire collection of over 200,000 oil paintings, making great art accessible to everyone, everywhere. Now it is doing the same for drawings and sculpture, a monumental (and costly!) undertaking.
artuk.org
Sarah Standing Children with Cancer
Having had cancer not once, not twice but three times in the last four years
(the gift that keeps on giving) I am fortunate that I was given the opportunity initially to support, and subsequently be appointed a trustee for the charity Children With Cancer I’m a grown-up. I’ve lived a great life. From meeting children and their parents who are suffering from this disease, I am truly in awe of their bravery. This charity deserves every penny and support you can spare.
childrenwithcancer.org.uk
Jacqueline Wilson
Battersea Dogs & Cats Home
I’m so proud to be an ambassador for Battersea Dogs & Cats Home. The skilled vets perform lifechanging operations, the staff give gentle therapy and training and show endless patient love to the animals until they’re ready for rehoming. Our serene rescue cat Jacob and our lively Battersea Boy Jackson are now family.
battersea.org.uk
And finally...
Anne Robinson
My favourite charity is the Fund for Distressed Ageing Television Presenter Anne Robinson.
NEIL SPENCE
NEIL SPENCE
The worst time of the year
Christmas won’t go away, by ROGER LEWIS
Somebody once phoned Anthony Burgess to wish him a Happy Christmas.
‘Liana !’ he yelled to his wife, ‘It’s Christmas !’
He hadn’t noticed – which says a lot about the great novelist’s powers of observation. But for the rest of us, Christmas commences or re-commences five minutes after the boxes of tinsel and glass baubles have finally been stowed back in the loft. It’s a year-round festival. You can’t avoid it.
January is spent returning cardigans to Marks, complaining about malfunctioning stockingfillers in Toys-R-Us (or its equivalent), and whimpering about the credit card bill, which has to be settled early in the month. The council refuses to dispose of the tree, which languishes on the pavement, a brown skeleton, until the spring.
No doubt, despite warnings, many a family is trying to dispose of puppies and kittens whose cuteness quotient has worn off.
for these mail-order idylls, as perpetrated by Harrods, Fortnum’s, and the Museum Selection.
Soon enough, cheap Christmas cards (printed in Singapore) are on sale and plastic mistletoe is being sellotaped to the shelves in the Co-Op.
Chocolate logs and mince pies appear with a best-before date stipulated for mid-October. In exotic locations like Uxbridge or Chobham Common, Christmas Specials are being filmed, most of them starring Martin Clunes or Anton Du Beke.
In the photographs heralding the seasonal quiz shows, sitcoms and up-the-jungle documentaries in the Radio Times, the grinning celebrities, always pulling crackers and dressed in Santa outfits, all have deep brown suntans. This is because they are interrupting their summer golfing holidays in Ibiza to meet the schedule.
It was still high summer when Highgrove, the King’s place in Gloucestershire, sent me an invitation to join a wreath-making workshop.
Catalogues always start to pour through the letter-box at the end of July – all those perfectly laid tables with flickering candles; the Cotswold manor house with snow dusting the mullion-pane windows; the snoozing Golden Retriever dreaming of pheasants and rabbits. I’m a sucker
Months ago, I invested in fragrant yuletide candles, plum and cherry liqueur chocolates, Venetian glass tableware (‘fit for a Venetian doge’) and a Venetian damask mantel runner – I really couldn’t be without that one.
I also bought exclusive unlimited edition Art Deco plates from the Bradford Exchange, even though they bear the warning ‘Not for food use.’
I’ve already received and drunk seven Christmas cases from the Wine Club – ‘deep velvety festive bargains,’ and they are not wrong claiming that.
When my children were children, the school play started rehearsals in September. Oscar was the Mayor of Hamelin and we went over his line endlessly. (‘Good day, citizens. I expect you have come to see me about the rat crisis.’)
I once spent time in late autumn with Barbara Windsor, when she was
This will be my sixtieth or so Christmas and not even one has been white
rehearsing Dick Whittington in Bristol. Her wand was surprisingly heavy. ‘You must have strong wrists, Bar,’ I said, provoking a saucy giggle.
I am a connoisseur of terrible pantomimes, a graveyard for killed-off soap characters and the formerly famous, like Bob Carolgees or Freddy ‘Parrot Face’ Davies. In my time and in provincial backwaters, I have lapped up Anita Dobson as a Wicked Witch, Britt Ekland as a Wicked Queen, and Leslie Grantham as Captain Hook. I swear I also saw Dame Anna Neagle as a Christmas Fairy. Though I once, with a photocopier and a gluepot, enterprisingly made my own cards (e.g. a ribald picture of the Carry On team saying ‘Knickers off for Christmas !’), so many dilemmas were involved, I now don’t bother. Was I to continue sending a card to Bromyard neighbours from the 1990s, who came to my parties and knocked back the free drink and never reciprocated in any way ? What about those boring relatives in Minehead whose daughter was a forecourt attendant ? Or those nice people once encountered in Mykonos, who made shoes for the disabled?
Stop sending Christmas cards. No one notices. They’re relieved.
This will be my sixtieth or so Christmas, and not even one has been white. Wet and muggy, yes; crisp and deep and even, never. Going abroad hasn’t helped.
In Sweden one year, there was fog. In Slovenia, the frozen lake had thawed. In Salzburg, Bruges and New York, it rained the minute I arrived. I went to the Canadian Rockies and came back with sunburn.
So I’ll stay in Hastings, for the ritual screening of The Snowman, The Guns of Navarone and Gyles Brandreth eulogising the Royal Family. Owing to the collapsed transport system, the family will fail to get together – do the Thomas the Tank Engine Santa Specials run to schedule, I wonder?
I’ll have another shot at Nigella’s fennel and pinenut stuffing. I’ll amuse myself shredding the begging letters from charities – a task that will last me until New Year at least.
Barbara Windsor in panto, 2010
Folk and Pop
MARK ELLEN on the gift of a
When folk royalty Richard and Linda Thompson released I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight in 1974, you wouldn’t have got short odds they’d both be making records 50 years later, but this spring saw a pair of solo albums and each a pure delight.
Richard’s Ship To Shore – from the two-way radio he had as a child – is a suitably windswept and choppy electric folk adventure powered by his stinging guitar and 18th century vocal tones. His ex-wife Linda can’t sing anymore sadly, thanks to a longtime larynx condition. Proxy Music, its cover a cheeky pastiche of the first Roxy album, is a selection of her best, most wistful and chiming tunes sung – proxy! – by various disciples, among them Rufus Wainwright, her son Teddy, Eliza Carthy, the Proclaimers and the divinely honey-voiced John Grant.
clubs. This 15th album of shiny electronic pop is as witty and propulsive as ever.
good song
The headline-stealer this year was Beyoncé. Her double-album Cowboy Carter made an adventurous bid for the country market – fiddles and banjos! – with bluegrass, pop, soul, hip hop and rock opera in the mix and features cameos from Paul McCartney (guitar) and Stevie Wonder (harmonica) and a spirited version of the Beatles’ Blackbird.
For old-world Country & Western, go for TexiCali by Dave Alvin and Jimmy Dale Gilmore. Alvin is a self-styled ‘wild blue blaster’, whose blistering guitar scatters peanut shells on the barroom floor in this celebration of the deep south.
While we’re at the folk end of the spectrum, try songdreaming by Sam Lee, gorgeous, oaken-textured tunes about his strong connection with nature (in his concerts he duets with nightingales), with echoes of Kate Bush, pastoral Van Morrison and Bert Jansch – magical.
A big year on the pop front too from every angle. Raised on the symphonic harmonies of the Beach Boys and vigorous melodies of Broadway musicals, the Lemon Twigs, brothers from Long Island, package the warm and optimistic songs about East Coast life in the ringing guitar tone of the Byrds. Nonetheless by the eternally magnificent Pet Shop Boys looks back to old influences too.
New London Boy remembers Neil Tennant’s move from Newcastle in the early 1970s, dancing to Bowie and Bryan Ferry with ‘my glam rock brothers’ in Soho
For old America, seen through younger eyes, try The Past Is Still Alive, with gripping tales of their former life by the Bronx-born folk-pop singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra – known as Hurray for the Riff Raff – which includes Colossus Off Roads about time spent hitchhiking and hopping freight trains.
Richard Hawley still flies the flag for Sheffield. Its steel-forging past is romanticised in his fabulous soaring Roy Orbison tenor, In This City They Call You Love – another tribute to the thrill of 1950s and
1960s ballads, the melodrama of Elvis and the zing of a boxy Gretsch guitar. In the same vein, a gorgeous lost Johnny Cash album surfaced this year, Songwriter
It was recorded in his ‘wilderness years’ between record labels, rich and resonant, far-reaching. One track opens with ‘Hello out there, this is Planet Earth …’. It includes a touching salute to his wife June Carter.
And the great Nick Lowe, once rather wonderfully Cash’s son-inlaw, released Indoor Safari, his first album for over a decade. It continues to mine his rich and self-mocking theme of the rigours of middle age and ‘good love gone wrong’, backed by the fulsome, rockabilly twang of his band Los Straitjackets and with shades of Burt Bacharach, Ricky Nelson and the Kinks. The track Went To A Party hilariously paints a picture of ‘an indoor safari round a waterhole of Campari’ before he shuffles off, as ‘my feet were getting sore’.
The new record I’ve returned to most is MoonDial by 70 year-old jazz guitarist (and David Bowie collaborator) Pat Metheny. It’s a sinuous, smooth-cornered collection of songs – Chick Corea, Leonard Bernstein, the Beatles, 1950s jazz standards – played on his lowerregister baritone acoustic guitar.
This has a powerful nighttime pull about it. If the Xmas household revellers are still up downstairs, stick this through the headphones and sweet and blissful escape will beckon.
Above: Beyoncé‘makes a bid for the country market’
Right: Johnny Cash, whose lost album surfaced this year
hip
Wonder (harmonica) and
Classical Christmas
RICHARD OSBORNE on the CDs that make great gifts
A widely circulated fiction is that no one buys CDs anymore. In fact, thousands do, drawn to the format’s durability, high technical quality, and those richly informative notes that come with most releases.
Take one of recent time’s more memorable opera recordings, Simon Rattle’s live Barbican Centre concert performance of Janáček’s Katya Kabanova. Superbly conducted, expertly cast, and vividly recorded, it’s now available from LSO Live as a 2-CD set (LSO 0889). The box comes with a handy short synopsis, a full libretto and English translation, and a fine essay by Nigel Simeone. Prices vary, but buy from Presto Music or Amazon and it will be under £20.
Many of us grew up with opera on LP or CD. It’s the perfect medium for getting to know the repertory. DVD can be more problematic, such are the absurdities and irrelevances of many modern stagings. It’s difficult, for example, to see anyone deriving much pleasure from the DVD of Barrie Kosky’s (inevitably ‘award-winning’) 2022 Salzburg Festival production of Katya Kabanova
star pianist or Tokyo for that rarely heard violinist? Well, it can all be on your TV, computer, smartphone or tablet, courtesy of Stage+, Deutsche Grammophon’s new online platform. Apart from current performances, Stage+ has an archive dating back to the 1960s of hundreds of historically important filmed operas, concerts and recitals.
Subscription rates, are £7.90 a week, £12.90 a month, £129.00 for 12 months.
Yet that same Salzburg season produced a revealingly straightforward staging of Puccini’s late-composed triptych of one-act masterpieces, Il Trittico. Director Christof Loy altered the order and began with Gianni Schicchi, that matchless comedy of family greed set in Dante’s Florence, and ended with Suor Angelica (‘Sister Angelica’), the tale of a ‘disgraced’ nun and her ultimate salvation.
The reason for the reordering –not an issue for buyers of the 2-DVD set (Unitel 808908) – was the presence in all three operas of Asmik Grigorian, our age’s greatest singing actress. Her performance of the adulterous Giorgetta in Il Tabarro, the grimly realistic melodrama set on a barge in the River Seine, put me in mind of the vocal and stage allure of both Maria Callas and Marlene Dietrich, not something one says lightly. Unable to get to Salzburg or Bayreuth? Or Berlin for this
I haven’t yet sold the family Canaletto to make way for a vast television screen that so many households seem to possess. If you know an opera or ballet lover who’s suitably equipped, then Friends of Covent Garden’s Royal Ballet and Opera (annual subscription £120, Young Friend £74) offers online subscriptions (one month costs £9.99) for the entire Covent Garden’s current season and its own 80-strong filmed archive (rbo.org.uk).
This year’s must-see Christmas and New Year show at Covent Garden
is a revival of Frederick Ashton’s famous staging of Prokofiev’s ballet Cinderella. You’ll find tickets hard to come by at this stage in the year, but it’s part of Covent Garden’s current cinema-screening programme (in cinemas in the week of 10 December) and tickets for screenings make inexpensive gifts. The year 2025 will launch with Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann with Juan Diego Flórez in the title role (from 15 January); in May there’s Wagner’s Die Walküre, the second instalment of the company’s new Ring cycle. (See roh.org.uk/cinemas for a full list of programmes and locations.)
Tickets make great presents, and it’s worth bearing in mind that anyone between the ages of 16 and 29 who signs up, free, to Glyndebourne’s Under 30s scheme can buy seats for £30 for selected seasonal performances. There is even an Under 40s scheme which, for an annual fee of £70, provides access to cost-saving priority booking, and up to 50 per cent off the price of one pair of selected tickets (glyndebourne.com).
Gifts marking composer anniversaries always seem timely. This year’s anniversaries include those of Puccini, Smetana – well served by Semyon Bychkov’s Czech Philharmonic recording of Smetana’s orchestral evocation of his homeland, Má vlast (Pentatone PTC 5187203) – Gabriel Fauré, Henri Mancini of Pink Panther fame, and Anton Bruckner. Bruckner is not a man to set ten lords a-leaping, but he’s memorably served in the Stage+ archive by classic performances filmed in the Vienna Musikverein with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by the likes of Karajan and Christian Thielemann.
Finally, back to CD. Another of my discs of the year would be Nikolai Lugansky’s collection of piano transcriptions of famous scenes from Wagner operas (Harmonia Mundi, HMM 902393). Some of these will be included by the 52-year-old Russian master in his recital at London’s Wigmore Hall on 8 December. Meanwhile, the entire collection can be heard on this latest CD.
Asmik Grigorian: our greatest singing actress?
Tales of Hoffman
Below: Simon Rattle
Getaways by CATHERINE MILNER
Christmas Markets
For those in need of an escape from not-so-merry old England, a trip to a Christmas market is a heart-warming return to a world of bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens, sleigh bells and schnitzels and crisp apple strudels – made all the merrier by regular slugs of Glühwein.
First established in the late Middle Ages in Germany and Austria, the markets sold delicacies like salted herring or carp, roast hedgehogs and jellied eels as well as religious statues and biblical texts.
Although you’re no longer likely to spot an illuminated manuscript or a sugar plum fairy for sale (although some German markets still sell prune chimney sweeps), browsing the cosy wooden chalets magnificently trounces trawling Amazon as a shopping experience.
Glide down the Danube to markets in different countries, starting at Vienna, Europe’s oldest market, dating back to 1298, from where you can cruise to Budapest via the markets of Melk, Linz and Bratislava; or to Nuremburg via Regensburg and Passau.
Vienna sells fossil jewellery, insect delicacies wrapped in chocolate and handmade musical instruments. Melk excels in Christmas musical concerts, in its abbey with its fine, lofty, gilded baroque architecture.
The Germans and Austrians have been extremely successful in exporting Weihnachtszauber, the magical Yuletide spirit through their markets, dodging the pervasive Americanisation of Christmas elsewhere, particularly in Britain’s high streets, with its Grinches, animatronic Santas and muzak.
Instead, the markets of Salzburg or Dresden have ranks of dignified moustachioed Nutcracker Kings standing to attention and Salzburg is particularly famous for its traditional Bavarian clothing, lederhosen,Dirndl skirts and boiled woollen garments, from Tyrolean hats and loden capes to long brocaded, puff-sleeves dresses.
Dresden is famous as the birthplace of stollen; the fruit bread representing the swaddled Christ child, now available in all good UK supermarkets. But how differently it appears in Germany! On December 7th a horse-drawn carriage parades a 27-feet long stollen through Dresden, to the market, where it is cut with a
five-feet long knife and served to all who gather round. This is in memory of the 1.8 ton stollen commissioned by King August in 1730.
Colmar in France has five markets, one featuring arts and crafts, selling Alsatian pottery, linen and textiles, while others boast a recreation of a traditional Alsatian village and a gourmand’s paradise with live cooking demonstrations, enjoyed while sampling local Eaux de Vie.
Venice hosts some of Italy’s most celebrated markets, offering a rich variety of hand carved religious sculptures, antiques and antiquities alongside ceramics, lacquerware and textiles from as far away as Japan.
Madrid Market sells Manila shawls and leather goods from the mountains of Cadiz.
Brussels and Amsterdam have exceptional markets, especially for Tintin enthusiasts or those looking for Dutch clogs and Delftware.
Prague market is a stand-out festive highlight, where Czech herbal remedies and custom-made marionettes vie for attention with vintage toys, postcards, and maps.
Venice November 30 – December 24, 2024.
Bath November 28 – December 15, 2024.
Winchester November 15 – December 22, 2024.
York November 14 – December 23, 2024.
Edinburgh November 16, 2024 – January 6, 2025.
Melk November 24 – December 24, 2024.
Linz November 23 – December 24, 2024. Bratislava November 24 – December 22, 2024.
Nuremberg November 29 – December 24, 2024.
Or you can just get on the bus to Birmingham. Here is the largest, most popular German market outside Germany with Viking’s mead and towering two-foot-long bratwursts.
More genteel is Bath’s market where the Aldwick estate sells its Jubilate sparkling wine and you can buy goat’s milk soap or a portrait of your dog. And should you fancy a touch of festive wonder, you can ice-skate in the park or listen to a Bach oratorio in the abbey.
Edinburgh’s market has choirs, ceilidhs and a funfair. Set in Princes Street Gardens with the castle towering above, you can buy all your culinary fare for Christmas, and while you’re about it, for Burns night too, snapping up varieties of haggis and some of Scotland’s finest whiskies with which to light them.
Most of us now dread the annual dreary hustle of Britain’s waning high streets, so turn to Christmas markets as gateways to a world of festive enchantment. And if you can’t make it to Europe, Birmingham’s bratwursts are an experience worth travelling for in themselves.
Regensburg November 27 – December 23, 2024.
Passau November 28 – December 23, 2024. Madrid November 24 – December 31, 2024. Salzburg November 21, 2024 – January 1, 2025.
Dresden: November 27 – December 24, 2024.
Brussels: November 29, 2024 – January 5, 2025.
Amsterdam: December 1, 2024 – January 5, 2025.
Birmingham: November 2 – December 24, 2024.
The Striezelmarkt in Dresden, Germany, one of the first Christmas markets in the world
A present for the future
Art
Membership of an art gallery usually means you can avoid the tedious business of advance booking online and be spontaneous. A Tate membership doesn’t only give unlimited free entry to exhibitions at Tate Modern and Tate Britain (and their excellent members-only cafés) but also to associated galleries in Liverpool and St Ives. You also get a glossy quarterly magazine. From £78 tate.org.uk
It’s a similar deal at the Royal Academy where free entry includes the mammoth Summer Exhibition. From £138 royalacademy.org.uk
And for the aficionado, a subscription to The Art Newspaper makes an excellent gift. It’s a serious monthly (with daily updates online) covering all the visual arts plus how they are affected by laws, politics, economics and culture. £94 print and digital theartnewspaper.com
Gardening
What’s not to like about gardening? Apart from the backbreaking digging, mowing and weeding? The vicarious, pain-free pleasure of looking at other people’s fabulous gardens is catered for by the Garden Museum, and membership offers priority booking for visits around the country. You also get free entry to exhibitions at the
museum (next door to Lambeth Palace), shopping discounts and a copy of the hardy annual Garden Museum Journal. From £41. gardenmuseum.org.uk
Those not sure what to get (and when) from the garden centre will welcome the home-delivered Flourishy Gardener’s
Subscription Box. It arrives four times a year, with a seasonal selection of seeds and horticultural paraphernalia. The first box comes with a free copy of The Complete Gardener by Monty Don. £119.85 notonthehighstreet.com
Exploring
The Ramblers’ Association now brands itself succinctly as Ramblers. Whatever you call it, it’s a great organisation, particularly for those in search of walks, exploring and socialising. Members belong to a local group but can join any walk in the UK; they also get a quarterly magazine plus offers on walking gear. £41 for one. ramblers.org.uk
movies to watch at home or see in a cinema. Membership gives five free tickets a year (for cinema or home rental) and 20 per cent discount on additional cinema tickets and home rentals. The perfect – but expensive – gift for a housebound film fan could be Curzon’s Cult member-ship, which includes a free movie ticket for every day of the year.
£50 and £285 for Cult. curzon.com
Eating and drinking
National Trust membership gives access to hundreds of historic places (and tearooms), free parking, an NT handbook, and a magazine three times a year. £91.20 for one, £45.60 for young people (18-25) nationaltrust.org.uk
Entertainment
For someone you know who can’t get to the theatre or the cinema, a subscription is a way of giving them a night in which is almost a night out – in fact, lots of nights out. National Theatre at Home is exactly that: a way of seeing top-class drama, past and present, without having to leave your front room. There’s a host of great performances on offer, such as Ian McKellen in a classic King Lear – almost worth the subscription in itself. £99.99 ntathome.com
Curzon has a wide range of
If you know a cook keen to learn new skills, a gift card from the Jamie Oliver Cookery School could give them up to five two-hour online lessons next year. The sessions cover lots of styles (like south Indian curry, Mexican street food, and baking and breadmaking for kids). £30 to £120. jamieolivercookeryschool.com
For someone who enjoys pub grub rather than haute cuisine, the Great British Pub Card can be used to pay for food and drink in more than 1,700 pubs nationwide, including chains such as Farmhouse Inns, Chef & Brewer, Greene King, Hungry Horse and Belhaven. £5 to £250 greatbritishpubcard.co.uk
Thinking
Mental stimulation is good for us and it’s hard to beat Intelligence Squared with high-end podcasts, debates and live talks featuring great speakers, like Mary Beard, Rory Stewart and Jeremy Bowen. Membership allows advance booking, discounts and a free in-person event a year, plus podcasts without irritating ads. £119.99 intelligencesquared.com
And let’s not forget that for the thinking oldie, you can’t do better than give an annual subscription to The Oldie. £46 theoldie.com/subs.co.uk
Tate Britain in Pimlico, London
At the Garden Museum
Curzon Soho, London
Pages for all ages
LUCY LETHBRIDGE picks books to delight everyone
Swifties! Top of your Christmas book list this year is surely The 13 Days of Christmas by Taylor Garland (Hodder, £8.99). It’s a festive celebration for Taylor Swift Fans, or anyone aged nine to 13 who identifies as a girl. It’s crammed with Swifty morsels in a feast of selfies and other goodies.
A different reader of the same age may be thrilled by the much-anticipated seventh volume in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series: Wrath of the Triple Goddess (Puffin, £16.99) in which Percy, half-god, half-boy, saves the world yet again.
For littlies, there’s a new story by the magnificent Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler which will warm the cockles of reader and readee alike. Jonty Gentaloo is the tale of a ‘plucky little penguin’. Read on! (Alison Green Books, £12.99).
Terry Deary, the annoyingly successful creator of Horrible Histories and presiding genius of gruesome and macabre detail, continues his winning delve into historical nasties with A History of Britain in Ten Enemies (Penguin, £20), a book for adults but with cross-generational appeal potential.
Readers and podcast fans of all ages will enjoy The Rest is History Returns: an A-Z of Historical Curiosities by the indefatigable Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. Questions for everyone to ponder over the turkey – including what it would have been like to tweet through the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD (Bloomsbury, £20).
Fans of Elizabeth Strout will be delighted by a new visit to Crosby and Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton. Tell Me Everything is hot off the press (Viking, £16.99). And for admirers of Sally Rooney, the master chronicler of contemporary selfconsciousness, Intermezzo has also arrived bang on time for Christmas.
Richard Osman’s We Solve Murders takes temporary leave of
his much loved Thursday Murder Club oldie detectives. Its central characters are Steve, a retired detective and his private security officer daughter-inlaw. You might be already hooked (Viking £22).
£22).
a treat for Jack
And there’s also a treat for Jack Reacher fans with
In Too Deep, the latest Reacher novel, no longer penned by Lee Child but, in a surprisingly successful laying on of hands, by his brother Andrew (Bantam, £20).
Keen gardeners will thrill to Janelle MacCulloch’s Where the Old Roses Grow, an account of how during World War II a movement of rosarians, including Vita SackvilleWest and Constance Spry, saved the great English heritage roses then in danger of disappearing forever. It’s a riveting sidelight on both gardening and wartime history. Lovely pics (Pimpernel Press, £25).
Readers drawn to mid-twentieth century domestic dramas will enjoy a delectable new edition of Jan Struther’s Mrs Miniver, based on her morale-boosting wartime Times columns of everyday privation, which comes with an introduction by Struther’s grand-daughter Ysenda Maxtone-Graham (Persephone, £12). And Maxtone-Graham herself has produced a winning book, Screams!, a compilation of ‘shrieks of horror and yelps of pleasure from modern
life’ which will strike a chord with anyone continually baffled by the management of daily existence in the 21st century (Abacus, £14.99).
The Folio Society continues to produce beautiful boxed reprints of classic (and sometimes not-soclassic) books. Their latest is a gorgeously packaged new edition of Pandaemonium 1660-1886: the Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, Humphrey Jennings’s wonderful compilation of reactions, appalled, fascinated, fearful, to the unfolding Industrial Revolution (Folio, £110).
There’s another foody memoir from Nigel Slater, author of the justly acclaimed Toast. Now, A Thousand Feasts muses not just about food but also gardening and travel. Get ready to feel a bit jealous of a life full of exquisite pleasures and impeccable taste (Fourth Estate, £20).
Tom Parker Bowles, both a well-known cook and Queen Camilla’s son, has cunningly combined these two happy circumstances in Cooking and the Crown: Royal Stories from Queen Victoria to King Charles III (Aster, £30). There’s a dash of history, a generous helping of recipes and sprinkles of enticing illustrations. We learn that his mother’s signature dish is porridge – endearing but also a bit disappointing.
Loveliness of a different kind to be found in Blythe Spirit: the remarkable life of Ronald Blythe by Ian Collins. Blythe, the author of Akenfield, died last year at 100, after a writing life in which generations of readers have warmed to the gentle, intimate, perceptive descriptions of rural life and history he summoned from his Suffolk home (John Murray, £26).
Our Language of common
Simon Heffer’s Scarcely English: an A-Z of Assaults on Our Language runs through a whole litany of common confusions and unidiomatic English – just the ticket for the resident fulminator at Christmas, if the blood pressure can bear it (Hutchinson, £16.99)
A new book for Swifties
Above: Where the Old Roses Grow
Queen Camilla loves porridge
One for the road
Give a wine-lover a minibreak, says HENRY JEFFREYS
Usually my two girls aged four and twelve could not be more bored when I drag them around wine estates but even they got swept up in the magic of Sandridge Barton.
This Devon producer has to be a contender for the most beautiful vineyard in England. With its steep slopes of vines running down to the Dart River, it’s a landscape with the drama of the Douro valley in Portugal or the Mosel in Germany.
On our first afternoon, we walked from our cottage through vines, orchards and a wood, to a beach by the river which my youngest, literally dancing with excitement, called a pirate cove. Here we found rock samphire which I collected –sorry, ‘foraged’–for our supper.
They also loved the Land Rover Safari (£45 per person, including a tasting at the winery) around the estate and found some dogs to play with, while my wife and I tasted and chatted with Charlie, the winemaker.
Sandridge Barton is a veteran producer by English standards. It began life on the other side of the river at the Sharpham Estate in 1981. Then in 2008, the team planted vines on the opposite, south-facing slopes and gradually moved the whole operation over. The Champagnestyle sparkling wine is superb, nice and rich for those like my wife who can find English fizz a little lean, and the still whites made from pinot gris and a pinot noir are regularly judged the best in the country.
Guests can rent the two-bedroom cottage (from £1,000 a week) which sits right on the banks of the Dart or the larger six-bedroom house which has a swimming pool (from £3,750 a week, book well in advance) if you’re seeking a venue for a landmark birthday. There’s a restaurant on site called Circa that would not be out of place in fashionable parts of London or Bristol.
My only advice would be if you’re visiting from the south east, especially in August, then leave early.
I nearly lost the will to live with roadworks on the A303. But you don’t need to travel that far to find good wine. In fact, England has one huge advantage over other wineproducing countries: most of the country’s best vineyards are within an hour or so of one of the world’s most visited cities. And yet most
tourists in London are probably not even aware that such riches exist on the doorstep.
This is beginning to change as English vineyard tourism is getting serious. Here we’re learning from the masters, the South Africans. The English industry is awash with Saffers and none more so than Leonardslee in West Sussex.
The winemaker Johann Fourie and viticulturist Barry Anderson are South Africans and the whole project is the brainchild of Cape Town-based entrepreneur Penny Streeter. It began life as Mannings Heath golf club but now there are vines, a boutique hotel (rooms from £195 per night), a Michelin-starred restaurant (a tour tasting and two course lunch costs just £60), great quality sparkling wine, particularly the blanc de blancs, and, perfect for my parents, there’s still an 18 hole golf course.
If you like your weekend breaks a little more quirky then you can’t do better than Oastbrook in East Sussex. Run by Anglo-Brazilian couple Nick and America Brewer, they have a Hobbit house on site
Vineyard tour: Sandridge Barton
in which you can stay (from £250 a night). Or rather it used to be called that until the producers of Lord of the Rings sent them a letter threatening legal action. Boo!
The accommodation might be a bit wacky but the wines aren’t. Oastbook, whose production is tiny, makes some of the best still wines in the country from chardonnay, pinot gris and pinot blanc. Vineyard tours cost £30 per person.
And finally a mention for my local vineyard, Westwell near Charing in Kent. It’s another child friendly one that does pizza on weekends as well as tastings and tours (£28 per person). It’s run by Adrian Pike, who is ex-music business, and his wife Galia, an artist, so it has a laid-back, fashionable vibe. The wines are innovative without being weird.
I’m particularly fond of their ortega, which tastes like Kent’s answer to vinho verde; perfect with a plate of Whitstable oysters. They put on themed nights, with cult films like Withnail and I, and supper clubs throughout the winter (around £40 per person). And it’s only an hour away on the train from St Pancras.
So if you’re looking for a present for the wine-lover in your life, instead of just getting a bottle of something nice, why not give a whole vineyard experience?
‘Making memories’, as my eldest daughter always says though I think she’s being ironic. It’s hard to tell.
Vines in a Cold Climate: The people behind the English wine revolution by Henry Jeffreys is published by Allen & Unwin £10.99.
The Hobbit House at Oastbrook
Don’t get stuffed!
MARY KILLEN dreads the Christmas feast
In olden times it was traditional for Britons to eat too much on Christmas Day. People looked forward to feeling ‘stuffed’ like the proverbial turkey because we didn’t often feel that way. I well remember a snobbery incident in the 1970s when a rich, thin woman in Kensington was disgusted when an adolescent guest was sick after eating too much in her house.
‘But children are always sick on Christmas Day!’ cried the less privileged boy’s mother.
It was certainly the norm for adults to feel sick at least on Christmas Day, even if they did not vomit. It was the one day of the year when greed was encouraged.
The trouble with Christmas dinner (or lunch) was/is the number of ingredients. – turkey (brown and white meat), two types of stuffing, pigs in blankets, bread sauce, cranberry sauce, roast potatoes, carrots, sprouts, parsnips and Yorkshire pudding. Even if you had only one mouthful of each thingand human nature meant you had at least two – you were feeling uncomfortable even before you tackled the Christmas pudding with brandy butter and the coup de gross – the truckle of Stilton.
and the worker behind the counter would smear margarine and the mixture onto a slice of plastic bread, then top it with another slice. The only nice thing was the way it was wrapped in greaseproof paper and slid into a brown paper bag.
Pudding options were an apple or a two-fingered KitKat. No wonder we didn’t overeat.
eat abnormal loads on a regular basis. There was no campaign to Keep Christmas Day Special. Why would we ever go back to the nasty lunchtime sandwiches of yesteryear or the drab dinners we ate at home – corned beef or macaroni cheese?
I remember one year my husband Giles suggested that his mother add Alka-Seltzer to the stuffing mix in expectation of later dyspepsia.
But those were the days when Christmas dinner was considered a once-a-year sensory treat, before ‘treat food’ became a daily occurrence and our stomachs became more used to abnormal loads.
Food didn’t used to be that nice, as Oldie-readers will remember. During the 1970s and early 1980s, I remember going out for my lunch hour and staring through grimy glass cabinets at fillings such as petrolly ham, fishy-tasting bacon with milky residue, hard-boiled eggs featuring black sulphur rings, shiny sliced cheese, cucumber rings and tomato rings – oh yes, and tinned tuna mashed with sweetcorn.
You would say what you wanted
Giles suggested his mother add Alka-Seltzer to the stuffing mix
The better alternative was the equally unhealthy workman’s café, which served the likes of full English breakfast to taxi drivers and builders, but these were not ubiquitous.
Then Pret A Manger came along in the late 80s, offering good quality fast food. Suddenly a typical office lunch would be organic baguette filled with smoked salmon or Parma ham with goats’ cheese and salad, fresh fruit salad and a café latte with a packet of chocolate covered almonds… healthy but too tasty. So we ate too much.
Simultaneously we came to expect there to be a Waitrose, Marks & Spencer or a farm shop somewhere nearby. There was also a proliferation of takeaway pizzas, burger bars etc and many of us could
Besides, we could afford it. In the 1980s and 1990s, there were tax arrangements about costs, as the taxman accepted that deals would be brokered over expensive lunches and dinners. And they were. Eating out seemed to be vaguely affordable, even if paying for yourself, and it was normal to do so of an evening with friends – Chinese, Indian, Thai. And for London students there was the glorious Chelsea Kitchen where you could eat three courses of reasonably nice, hot food, sitting in a booth with friends and drinking a bottle of plonk, for the equivalent of £12 a head in today’s money. Whoever owned The Chelsea Kitchen, and its Knightsbridge equivalent, The Stockpot, deserves some sort of retrospective medal. These were life-enhancing venues.
The only modern counterpart I know is the Mona Lisa café in Chelsea’s World’s End, where a waiter serves you at a table and you can pay as little as £11 in today’s money.
Eating out is now incredibly expensive but gluttony and treats at home have become the norm and diabetes, cardiac and stroke risk are soaring. No wonder we have come slightly to dread the excesses of Christmas Dinner. When are we going to learn that less is more? But rationing is still alive in the folk memory and we are tempted.
I went to an office lunch in the fashionable Ivy restaurant last Christmas. I was dreading the excess but we were pleasantly surprised.
We were served with an elegant sufficiency. Every ingredient of the traditional Christmas dinner was there, but presented in a manageably sized, stripey terrine.
Miniaturisation is the way forward for our Christmas dinners of the future.
Der Völler (‘The Glutton’) by George Emanuel Opiz, 1804
We asked well-known oldies for their must-have gadgets – perfect for anyone in need of last-minute inspiration
Dream gadgets
Rachel Johnson finds debobbling her jumpers therapeutic.
‘I have invested in a batterypowered jersey debobbler. It is very satisfying and therapeutic to use. It gobbles those telltale bobbles on the wool like nobody’s business.’ From £14.59.
swiss-store.co.uk
Rowley Leigh depends on his trusty potato-peeler.
‘I’m not really a great fan of gadgetry in the kitchen. My drawers are replete with bits and pieces, such as a cavatelli roller, used once before being consigned to oblivion. Is a potato peeler a gadget? To me, it is an essential piece of equipment and I am always amazed in holiday houses, or even in other people’s houses, that I can never find one. Of course, if you can’t be arsed to peel a potato, an apple or an aubergine or run a peeler down the side of a runner bean, I suppose you don’t need one. Much better to chop up unpeeled potatoes and put them in the air fryer, whatever that is. From 80p. avica-uk.com
John Humphrys is a new devotee of the air fryer. ‘Ovens are great. I use mine regularly – once a year on Christmas Day. I have to roast a turkey for
everyone and my air fryer is, sadly, too small.
If you are yet to join the devoted band of fryer converts, I need to explain that they don’t actually fry. Then again, neither do ovens. But, boy, do they roast. Or grill. Or even ‘fry’ chips. Perfection.
When my daughter Catherine told me some years ago that she’d bought one, I was shocked. She’s a brilliant chef who makes her living from cooking. But an air fryer?
Yet another gimmick surely. What’s wrong with an oven?
Then she bought one for me too and I found out.
An oven is fine if you don’t care how much electricity (and cash) you waste while it’s taking for ever to heat up or how many hours you spend cleaning all the gunge from it afterwards. And are you really happy to shoulder the guilt of global warming just to bake a potato?
fits under any fitted sheet, supplies extra foot warmth, which is a joyous bonus when so many other electric blankets make you have to choose which part of your body you want to keep warm. You can set your preferred temperature on the controller which will then heats up the blanket swiftly and efficiently. It’s transformed my insomnia into a positive, indulgent From £70.
johnlewis.com
But, yes, I know they’re probably just another fad and we’ve managed without them perfectly well all these years haven’t we? Must dash now though. My stove is running out of coal...’ From £21.
dunelm.com
Gyles Brandreth discovers an electric blanket is bliss.
‘As the nights became colder, I’ve been delighted with my heated underblanket. The Snuggledown Intelligent Warmth underblanket
Andrew Roberts’s Wine Opener allows him to be lazy ‘As I grow older and weaker (and much lazier), I want to be able to take a cork out of a bottle of wine without even bothering to have to use a corkscrew. The Cork Pops Legacy Wine Bottle Opener With Gas essentially does it for you with no more effort than pressing a button. It looks distinguished, is simple to work and doesn’t affect the wine. You occasionally have to buy the little gas refills, but they’re cheap too. I know I sound like a salesman, but I promise I’m not!’ From £30.
topnotedesign.co.uk
Prue Leith’s life was transformed by her champagne opener.
‘The Dorre Carla champagne opener has changed my life. Not that I drink champagne every single day, but I do like bubbles, especially the real thing. But getting at the stuff has always been a nightmare. Often the cork is stuck fast and you end up contorted over it, wrists and thumbs sore, trying all those tricks that don’t work like turning the
Anyway, all this angst is a thing of the past. This little gadget (worth every penny) is easy to handle, it works if held sideways or upright, never fails, and takes absolutely no pressure. We have given away so many of them to gob-struck friends admiring the ease of operation, I think I should be on commission. £26.30. royaldesign.co.uk
John Suchet defends his iPhone – the ultimate gadget.
‘When you finally go to the big newsroom in the sky, I’m going to put your iPhone in the wooden box with you,’ my wife Nula said recently. It’s a touch unfashionable to praise the iPhone. Teenagers spend too much time staring at the screen when they should be doing homework, reading books, sleeping, plus there’s a dark side: what are they watching?
I recently gave a talk on a Cunard cruise about my life in television news. (It’s what retired hacks do.) I described how, as a TV news reporter, the first thing I did when I arrived on a story was find the nearest phone, wherever I was in the world. I nearly missed a flight back from Algiers
when, after securing an exclusive interview with the mastermind behind the Munich Olympic massacre, I spent too long at the primitive post office trying to get through to ITN. In my talk, I described how a TV news team comprised a skilled cameraman and skilled soundman (they always were men back then).
Nowadays everyone is a cameraperson. Just select video on your iPhone. You want to phone the news desk from Timbuktu? Just press ITN Foreign Desk on your iPhone. You want to send your video to London from Ulan Bator? Easy. All the above, plus every note Beethoven wrote, and Wagner, and Johann Strauss, and Verdi, and more. And my contacts. And my calendar. All saved in the Cloud. No wonder when Nula made that comment, my instant response was, ‘Just don’t forget the charger!’ From £429.
apple.com
Sarah Sands finds a clever eco short-cut to sparkling water
water. So, no more lugging packs of large plastic bottles, just jugs of water on the table, still or sparkling.
I am a trustee of the Science Museum and marvel at visionary feats of engineering, but sometimes cleverness in household appliances can be pretty good From £179.
uk.aarke.com
Peter York applauds George Foreman for his Grill.
‘I only came across the George Foreman grill this century. As a veteran sandwich toaster owner, I felt it reapplied the technology and philosophy of the sandwich toaster to the crucial business of grilling meat. It cooks a steak by compressing it between hot metal plates, gently melting the fat and squeezing it into a little plastic trough at its base – reducing fat is a key selling point of the GFG. It takes a supermarket ‘roast’ chicken breast (actually steamed) and turns it into a barbecue sizzler with crispy skin, while avoiding all the absurdities and health dangers of barbeques.
‘Of course we all want to be more environmentally friendly but it sometimes feels that this comes at a personal cost, either aesthetic or of comfort and convenience. The Aarke carbonator is a little feat of engineering and design which cheers your spirits. My elder son, Henry, brought it back for me from LA to solve my preference for sparkling water over still. It is a sleek stainless steel cylinder which powers CO2 into a glass bottle, producing carbonated
George Foreman, the American boxer, is the oldest man ever to win the world heavyweight championship at (at 46) and is a man of multiple achievements a ‘minister’ (preacher), author and entrepreneur. Under the latter hat, he gave his name to the marvellous George Foreman Grill and made a great deal of money from it (in 1999, he sold the commercial rights to the grill for $138 million!).
Thank you, George Foreman, for adding so much to my standard of living! From £20.99.
www.georgeforeman.co.uk
Gifts for gardeners
DAVID WHEELER recommends garden visits and indispensable tools
We aging or disabled gardeners are blessed with an array of new products to make lighter work of our horti endeavours. To my modest Christmas list, I’ve added DeWalt’s cordless pruner – essentially batterypowered secateurs. There are several models enabling my benefactor(s) to spend as much or as little as they like.
The basic pruner (around £100 but go online for offers) gives 1,000 cuts per charge and weighs less than a big bag of sugar.
I dislike garden hoses. They snag, are never quite long enough and are a struggle to keep tidy and put away. So, thinking ahead to summer days less wet than this year’s, I’ve acquired an Oumuik foldable watercarrying bag that holds a thousand litres (220 gallons in old money) that sits comfortably in a wheelbarrow for painless irrigation among my verdant acres. It costs around £80 but internet searches will spotlight others – less durable perhaps –for under a tenner.
Miserly, but how about an extremely useful £1.99 stocking filler? The dinky little twine cutter (gardenersworld.com, under their ten best garden gadgets) has a high carbon steel blade – polished, sharp and precise – slips on your finger like an engagement ring, leaving your hands free for other tasks.
Mega spenders might consider the gift of a robotic lawn mower Contained within dedicated limits by cables or a global positioning system, it costs anything from a grand to £5,000 depending on its sophistication. People seem to name them. We regularly pass two busily working half an acre of nearby greensward. So familiar are they that we’ve named them Colin and Terry (well, they become pets). A local dealer has a client who calls his N’Golo after footballer N’Golo Kanté because it ‘covers every blade of grass’.
Books? For a touch of dark comedy, I recommend Gardening Can Be Murder: How Poisonous Poppies, Sinister Shovels, and Grim Gardens Have Inspired Mystery Writers by Marta
McDowell (Timber Press). Tulip fanciers (we’re a numerous bunch) will love Polly Nicholson’s The Tulip Garden (Phaidon), a spotlight on her own and history’s rare and covetable varieties. Irishman T J Maher offers a faultless masterclass and a painter’s insight into garden artistry in his Grounded in the Garden (Pimpernel Press).
Stay-at-home gardeners will also gain endless pleasure from a heated propagator. I recommend sourcing from twowests.com or harrodhorticultural.com. From windowsill models no larger than a breadboard, to others the size of a coffee table, these indispensable contraptions bring on seedlings and cuttings at Olympic speeds.
The non-stay-at-homes will thank you eternally for a short gardenthemed holiday, weekend break or day out. Book a place now and bestow the recipient with the blissful pleasure of having something to looking forward to. I’ve been taking readers of my own periodical, Hortus –apologies for the shameless plug – to gardens for the past 20 years.
Convivial times have been spent in
Venice’s hidden gardens, private bowery domains on the Côte d’Azur, Normandy, the Balearic islands, most of Italy and its offshore marvels, Scandinavia, Morocco and as far as New York (city and state). And we’ve tramped through Britain’s best gardens, many rarely open to the public.
Join me in Suffolk next year, where we’ll stay in the delightful market town of Lavenham from 2 to 5 June. Our itinerary includes Benton End (now an outpost of London’s Garden Museum), where Cedric Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines – they met on Armistice Night, 1918 – made a celebrated garden around their school of art.
Nearby we’ll see a collection of Cedric’s amazing irises – many immortalised in his voluptuous canvases (fineandcultural.com).
As ever, other excursions are available. The Oldie itself has a tempting tour of Mallorca’s private gardens led by horticulturalist Kirsty Fergusson (19 to 25 June).
‘Fully booked’ says the Sisley garden tours website for next year. Best then to bookmark their sisley.co.uk page to see which glorious British gardens they plan to visit in 2026.
Perennial (formerly the Gardeners Benevolent Fund, a charity dedicated to people working in horticulture) offer days out to otherwise difficult to visit destinations.
It’s game, set and match for grass lovers on 15 May at the All England Lawn Tennis Club at Wimbledon, when head of courts Neil Stubley describes the upkeep of Britain’s most hallowed turf – grand afternoon tea included (perennial.org.uk).
Think lovingly of your gardening friends and relatives this Christmas. And, if none of the above fits the bill, do as I tirelessly suggest: buy a few hours of manual labour for that oldie in your life who worries endlessly about chores undone.
Clockwise from top: twine cutters, cordless pruner, heated propagator, water-carrying bag
Genealogy
To advertise, contact Monty on 0203 8597093 or via email MontyZakheim@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £48+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 28th October 2024
Art Books & Publishing
Christmas Prize Quiz
A delicious Partridges Christmas Treats Hamper goes to the winner of our quiz –set by MARCUS BERKMANN
1 Which month is also a 1978 song by Earth, Wind and Fire, a 1987 film by Woody Allen and a 1990 novel by Rosamund Pilcher?
2 If Corfu is the noun, what is the adjective?
3 Peter Mandelson and Jimmy Savile. What nickname did they both give their mothers?
4 In the 1997 film The Devil’s Advocate, Al Pacino plays Satan in the form of a New York lawyer. His character shares his name — forename and surname — with a 17th-century English poet. What name might that be?
9 Which former leader of the Conservative Party is the son of a flying ace and a ballerina?
10 Which pudding or desert, said to have been created by a confectioner named Robert Linguanotto in the late 1960s, has a name that means ‘pick me up’ or ‘cheer me up’ in Italian?
11 Which 1987 event was attended by Tom Jones, Anneka Rice, George Lazenby, Nigel Mansell, Christopher Reeve, Kiri Te Kanawa, Meat Loaf, Chris de Burgh, Cliff Richard and at least four members of the Royal Family?
5 Who was the first politician to be given an audience with Donald Trump after he became President in 2016?
6 In which book, covering ten years of elapsed time, are chronicled the following: the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London, the Dutch raid on the Medway, and one of the first references to a Punch and Judy show, as well as a description of a watch fitted with an alarm, a cutting-edge innovation for the time?
7 Which is the only fence at the Grand National to have killed a jockey? Joe Wynne was the casualty, in 1862.
8 Which American film director, who died in 1973 aged 79, is the only person ever to win four Academy Awards for Best Director? He did so in 1935, 1940, 1941 and 1952.
12 Which of the five New York boroughs has no subway stations at all?
Jean Borotra and who? It’s still a well-known surname, in a related context.
17 Canada has only once declared war on another country. In which war?
18 It is still manufactured in the Czech Republic under the tradename ‘Uragan D-2’, as a ‘disinfecting, disinfesting fumigation agent.’ Its original tradename was rather more notorious. What was that?
13 In the books by Ian Fleming, James Bond is very rarely seen to be reading a book. But in Goldfinger, which was published in 1959, he buys the latest novel by which American crime writer? By weird coincidence, three days after Goldfinger came out, the aforementioned crime writer died.
What, in Germany, is an
Which malt whisky has styled itself as ‘the single malt that started it all’?
Tennis in the 1920s was dominated by four Frenchmen, the so-called ‘four musketeers’: Henri Cochet, Jacques Brugnon,
19 Who was the first professional cricketer to be knighted?
20 Edward Oxford in 1842. John Francis and John William Bean in 1844. William Hamilton in 1849. William Pate in 1850. Arthur O’Connor in 1872. And Roderick MacLean in 1882. They all tried to do what? None of them succeeded.
A wonderful Partridges Oldie Christmas Hamper (see p12 for more details or visit partridges. co.uk – to buy at the exclusive Oldie price of £130) is the prize for the rst set of correct answers drawn out of a hat. Email your entry to: comps@theoldie.co.uk, subject heading Xmas Gift Quiz Prize Draw. Closing date: 28th November 2024. Result: on oldie.co.uk, 2nd December.
It is strange that the years teach us patience; that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.
Elizabeth Taylor
I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time.
Charles M Schulz, Snoopy cartoonist
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
G K Chesterton
Most successes are unhappy. That’s why they are successes – they have to reassure themselves about themselves by achieving something that the world will notice.
Agatha Christie
I was born in London, and went to school in Scotland – I used to be dead tired when I got home at night.
Norman Wisdom
All the people like us are We, and everyone else is They.
Rudyard Kipling
I was educated once – it took me years to get over it.
Mark Twain
Commonplace Corner
I think you can make fun of anything except things people can’t help. They can’t help their race or their sex or their age, so you ridicule their pretension or their ego instead. You can ridicule ideas – ideas don’t have feelings. You can ridicule an idea that someone holds without hurting them.
Ricky Gervais
Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.
John Ruskin
My mother-in-law said, ‘One day I will dance on your grave.’ I said ‘I hope you do; I will be buried at sea.’
Les Dawson
What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.
Beethoven
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
Herman Melville
A man is lucky if he is the first love of a woman. A woman is lucky if she is the last love of a man.
Charles Dickens
If you take care of the small things, the big things take care of themselves. You can gain more control over your life by paying closer attention to the little things.
Emily Dickinson
Never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. People will take you very much at your own reckoning.
Anthony Trollope
Long goodbyes – by Griff Rhys Jones
I am not a big party person. My dad once went to a wedding and got so flustered by arrival-line etiquette that he kissed the groom’s father. It’s a Welsh thing. Hearty back-slapping, please. No mwahs for the Cymry. And if I am wary of hellos, I can’t abide goodbyes. Nobody can.
Why the hell can’t we just
say ‘Ta-ra’ and go? What is this extended departure gavotte? My wife is so saintly that she can’t leave without a farewell hug for everyone in the room. I can go home, switch off the security systems, feed the cat, read all my emails and come back to the party to find she hasn’t got halfway through her chatty valedictions. Do people really require this prolonged farewell? Of course, you have to pay your respects to the host – but why does that have to take an hour?
That irritating little queue around the beaming householder – and each person has (1) a joke to impart, (2) a gushing, lengthy thanks for a perfectly ordinary ritualistic gathering
and (3) a declaration of the agreement to reconvene. And it could be so quick. What about ‘Lennie! Nice do. See you’?
Instead, as a parting shot, the man in front has decided to spew out his forecast for the American election, while you grin fixedly in their direction. What happens when you
SMALL DELIGHTS
When you drain a large bottle of water and it fills your cup perfectly, meaning you don’t have to open another bottle.
DAVID READ, ST PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
don’t have a baby-sitter any more as an excuse? ‘Early start, I fear.’
Why the outright lie? The host can’t wait to get you out.
And that ultimate delusion: ‘Let’s do lunch.’ It’s hollow. If future gatherings are as bad as this, the next time you’re going to see him is from the fake grass above his coffin.
Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk
Here’s a tip. Arrive at any party, any time, and immediately say goodbye to the first person you meet. Repeat with every subsequent encounter. Look at your watch. It’s time to go. I think it should be inscribed on the invitation. ‘7.30 –11. Dress informal. No lengthy farewells.’
And here’s another thing… No, never mind. Forget it. Goodbye.
Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011), c 1955
Open thy Goethe
FERDINAND MOUNT
Goethe: His Faustian Life
By A N Wilson Bloomsbury £25
It’s unmistakably a mission.
As he sets out on his entrancing journey, A N Wilson willingly concedes that ‘Goethe is, surely, among all the truly great writers of this world, the least read in the English-speaking world.’
What are we all missing, in particular, by not reading his acknowledged masterpiece, Faust? Wilson declares that ‘he is going to attempt the impossible – to read Faust and persuade you to do so too’.
It’s not as if the English are instinctively hostile to foreign literature. We lap up War and Peace; we descend eagerly into Dante’s Inferno. Wilson has written brilliantly about both Tolstoy and Dante, learning Russian and Italian for the purpose, just as he has learnt German to master Goethe.
I was apprehensive when he announced that he would be offering his own translations of the wonderful shorter lyrics, which are notoriously hard to convey in English. I need not have worried. Some of his versions – of Selige Sehnsucht, for example – seem truer to me than the standard renderings of Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton. Wilson’s eagerness to help Goethe cross the North Sea has not softened his critical gaze. On the contrary, the literary hero we meet here is not very nice at all. Only Thomas Mann in his novel Lotte in Weimar has painted quite so devastating a picture of Goethe in old age.
The sage of Weimar turns out to be a cold, pompous, petulant egomaniac and controlled alcoholic (he was a three-
bottle-a-day man). He allows his much-put-upon lower-class wife, Christiane, to address him as Herr Geheimrat on all occasions.
At almost every difficult moment in his life, his behaviour is less than endearing. As chief minister of the tinpot duchy, he insists on the death penalty for an unmarried mother, Johanna Höhn, who cut her baby’s throat – an episode skated over by most biographers. He mercilessly derides a sentimental novel by his former lover Fritz Jacobi and nails his copy to a tree in a mock crucifixion.
Yet he himself has just made a bomb out of an equally sentimental novel,
The Sorrows of Young Werther. He then proceeds to mock all such soppy tosh, including his own, by staging at the Court Theatre a satire, The Triumph of Sentimentality, which distresses his fans who wept serious tears over young Werther’s suicide.
When Napoleon fetches up in the duchy on his rampage through the German-speaking lands, having killed tens of thousands of Germans, Goethe sucks up to him shamelessly, calling him ‘ mon empereur’ and ‘the gigantic hero of our century’. He is overjoyed to hear that Napoleon was equally impressed by Goethe, remarking, ‘Voilà un homme.’
Devil’s pact: Goethe, Faust and the Devil
The Emperor claimed to have read Werther seven times; President Xi of China claims to know the whole of Faust by heart. It’s the sort of boast dictators like to make. Throughout his life, Goethe remained sternly opposed to democracy in any shape or form, and strongly in favour of censorship – except of his own work.
But then, as Wilson makes equally plain, Goethe’s hero Faust is no more lovable. In the very first of the many versions of the play that the poet toyed with from his student days to his death 60 years later, Faust seduces a 14-yearold servant girl, Gretchen, drugging her mother and killing her brother.
Gretchen murders the resulting baby and is sentenced to death (shades of Johanna Höhn). This earliest version also contains Gretchen’s lovely sad songs. As ever in Goethe, the merciless and the moving go together.
Faust, Part One is a lively romp, all the same. Mephistopheles is an engaging rogue, on joshing terms with the Lord God in Heaven, who is himself a jolly old cove. But Part Two is a tougher proposition to stage for the most ambitious director.
There’s no question of Faust being ultimately damned for his sins, as he is in the more orthodox versions of the old tale, such as Marlowe’s Dr Faustus. At the end, he is wafted up to the heavens on a cloud of assorted angels. The whole thing is a chaotic mishmash of time travel and space travel, including in its cast Helen of Troy and the Homunculus, an artificial intelligence in a glass globe, devised by Faust’s old lab assistant.
The Homunculus is a weird extrapolation of Goethe’s lifelong obsession with science, to which Wilson pays generous and deserved tribute.
Goethe was a serious researcher, and the modern consensus is that he was more often right than wrong in his theories of colour and anatomy.
He was certainly a better scientist than novelist. Wilson finds his most famous novel, Elective Affinities, ‘unbearably overwhelming’; I find it merely creepy. Goethe was surely handicapped by his lack of interest in other human beings. As Wilson rightly concludes, ‘Goethe’s greatest work of art was Goethe himself.’
To give us some idea of what reading Faust is like, Wilson tells us that seeing Walt Disney’s Fantasia ‘is as close an aesthetic experience as I know to what is the strangest reading experience so far known to me – namely reading Goethe’s Faust in both its parts’.
This isn’t as far-fetched a comparison as you might think, because Fantasia was designed by Disney as an animated version of Goethe’s poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, with Mickey Mouse as the Apprentice whose magic broomstick unleashes a huge flood which he is powerless to control.
More bizarre still, Mark Burnett, the fertile creator of the original TV series The Apprentice, tells us that The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is where he got the idea for the show, though he had no idea that his Sorcerer would end up in the White House.
At the end of Part Two, Faust becomes a greedy property developer who evicts an elderly couple from their seaside cottage because he lusts to own the whole coastline, and you cannot help thinking of Donald Trump winkling recalcitrant home-owners off the coast of Aberdeenshire to make way for his golf courses.
Similarly, when you read about the Homunculus leading Faust and Mephisto into weird other worlds where they meet gods and monsters, you are inescapably reminded of Elon Musk’s experiments in AI, and his vaulting ambition to insert ‘a Fitbit in your skull’.
So far, Musk’s most advanced implant has taught a macaque monkey to play video games. In an updated version of Part Two, Faust would surely be a passenger on one of Musk’s spaceships.
Wilson is absolutely right to deploy such seemingly extravagant parallels to evoke ‘the endless striving’ which both Goethe himself and his Lord God in Faust so fervently endorse.
Totally lacking in anything resembling a tragic sense, Goethe/Faust presses on regardless, foretelling, and halfapproving, the terrible wayward path of the modern godless world. Goethe is not merely anti-Christian; he is anti-moral too, which is why Nietzsche admired him so.
This daemonic zest won the approval of the hero-worshipping Thomas Carlyle, who famously advised, ‘Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.’
I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say ‘Close thy Carlyle; open thy Wilson.’ But this is a wonderful book. You really will understand Faust better after reading it. Is Goethe still great? Yes, of course he is, but what he makes you wonder is whether greatness is all it’s cracked up to be.
Ferdinand Mount is author of Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How They Fall – From Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson
RIP Gannex Man
ROGER LEWIS
Harold Wilson
By Alan Johnson
Swift £16.99
Harold Wilson, in his Gannex raincoat, was a pudgy, pipe-smoking target of TV impressionists – Mike Yarwood, for example, getting laughs by saying ‘the pound in your pocket’ and blinking his eyes very fast. (The other one Yarwood did was Edward Heath, heaving his shoulders.) Jason Watkins played Wilson in The Crown as a sort of croaking grey blob.
In Alan Johnson’s trenchant study, Wilson is much bigger – more important – than these caricatures. He is ‘the first Prime Minister perceived as being of the modern age’, who set about ‘espousing the causes of modernity, efficiency and science against the sclerotic influence of the old-boy network’.
Wilson put an end to Edwardiana –Alec Douglas-Home and Harold Macmillan in plus-fours on the grouse moor – and in came (he was elected party leader in 1963) this ‘common little man’, who enjoyed glugging HP Sauce on a cold pork pie, while listening to Gilbert and Sullivan. Wilson awarded MBEs to the Beatles; a knighthood went to Stanley Matthews, the first footballer to be honoured; he was a self-conscious guest on Morecambe and Wise’s show.
But Wilson’s administration went beyond eye-catching stunts. He expanded higher education and inaugurated the Open University, ‘aimed at the millions of adults who’d been denied the opportunity to study for a degree’. Capital punishment ended, as did the birching of young offenders.
Homosexuality was decriminalised, divorce made easier, abortion laws liberalised; equal pay for women was brought in, and discrimination on grounds of race or gender prohibited.
The Health and Safety at Work etc Act saw industrial fatalities fall by 85 per cent over the next 20 years.
Even if detractors ever afterwards condemned Wilson (and his beetrootfaced Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins) for ushering in the depravities of the permissive society – a place that, like Leonard Rossiter’s Rigsby, I never managed to locate, despite my best efforts – none can deny the good turn Wilson did the country by keeping it out of the Vietnam War.
The Americans were furious. They fully expected our armed forces to fight and die alongside them in Southeast
Asia. Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of State said, ‘Well, don’t expect us to save you again. They can invade Sussex and we won’t do a damn thing about it.’
Nor would Wilson send troops into Rhodesia, to sort out Ian Smith: ‘Britain does not believe in the use of military force to settle constitutional disputes’ – a lesson Blair never comprehended.
Wilson’s great-grandfather was a Yorkshire cobbler. His grandparents ran a workhouse. Wilson’s own father was an industrial chemist, in charge of scouring, drying, pressing and cutting fabric at a Huddersfield dye works. Harold was born in 1916, a child prodigy who, in amongst bouts of typhoid, ‘could effortlessly reproduce entire pages of the textbooks he’d read, complete with their complicated lists of figures’.
He won an Exhibition to Oxford, where he was ‘the outstanding student of his generation’, winning a First in PPE and prizes for his essay on Victorian railways, which contained 400 footnotes.
‘He was noted for his love of statistical analysis,’ says Johnson, and as a postgraduate Wilson helped Beveridge compile his report, determining ‘how society could be better ordered to ensure full employment’, hence eradicating poverty.
Wilson lectured at New College, as a junior don, and during the war was a civil-service clerk, based at the Oxford office of the Potato Control Board, for which he was awarded the OBE. He then went to the Board of Trade to work on fuel, principally coal, where he saw a ‘rational justification’ for nationalisation.
He similarly supported the introduction of the NHS, and opposed prescription charges for spectacles and false teeth.
Wilson entered Parliament as the Labour member for Ormskirk in 1945. He had little public charisma. ‘His speeches were dull and overburdened with technical detail … a mountainous sandwich of tedium.’
But at least he knew his stuff, tackling the shortage of timber for building projects by acquiring it from America and Canada.
Wilson made official visits to Russia, where he impressed the Soviets ‘because he could hold his drink’. He’d later drink whisky at Cabinet meetings.
By 1947, Wilson was President of the Board of Trade and began abolishing rationing regulations. The pound was devalued to make our exports viable –and, at this point, with Wilson’s career getting going, and with no disrespect to Alan Johnson, I found the story sagging, until the advent of Marcia Williams, who
came along in 1956 to, as Wilson put it, ‘deal with my enormous mailbag’. Oo-er, missus.
Wilson, says Johnson, ‘relied on Marcia’s judgement and valued her opinions’. There were rumours of an affair. ‘If only it were true,’ said Gaitskell. ‘It would be the one human attribute in the man.’ Marcia said they had sex six times and ‘it wasn’t satisfactory’.
When speculation about the pair was rife, in an episode of Steptoe and Son Harry H Corbett’s character went to bed with a woman whose husband was in prison. Harold Steptoe’s ‘fictional seductress’ was named Marcia.
Galton and Simpson were lucky to elude a writ, as Wilson and his secretary sued people who alleged a sexual relationship. When, for example, in 2006, Francis Wheen wrote a brilliant BBC television play (starring Kenneth Cranham and Gina McKee) called The Lavender List, based on the testimony of Joe Haines, Marcia won £75,000 plus £200,000 costs, and the BBC promised never to show it again.
Wilson, who in 1971 received £224,000 from the Sunday Times for serial extracts from his memoirs, retired as PM at the age of 60, fearing the onset of Alzheimer’s. He is summed up here as a man with ‘an unrelenting sense of public duty’, who believed state planning could be combined with free choice, and ‘social discipline with civil liberty’.
How innocent that all now sounds, in our era of rules, regulations and woke cancellation.
Because of his visits to Russia, MI5 kept a file on Wilson, under the pseudonym Norman John Worthington. I’d welcome knowing more on this, and about Wilson’s wife, Mary, whom he married in 1940, and who sold 75,000 copies of her poetry, which was admired by John Betjeman – I’m sure not totally piss-takingly.
Roger Lewis is author of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor
‘Just let me finish this episode’
Paragon of actors
SIMON WILLIAMS
A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare and Other Stories
By Simon Russell Beale
Abacus £25
Twenty-five years ago, Russell Beale told his publisher this biography would ‘never happen’. Let us rejoice he changed his mind so quickly.
This dazzling book is a new must-read for theatre aficionados on both sides of the footlights. In Noël Coward’s recent biography, Masquerade, there is a similar work ethic; a dedication to truth and understatement – the less-is-more mantra. ‘Naturalism is a shifting and receding target,’ Russell Beale writes. ‘Garrick was as truthful as Burton, Sarah Siddons as Dench.’
I wonder.
Lesser showbusiness memoirs chug along as if dictated in a Winnebago; not this one. Russell Beale’s writing is effortlessly eloquent and intriguing – full of colour, clarity and panache. Like his acting.
As always, there is a wise teacher in the mix; a photograph shows a teenage Russell Beale as Desdemona in false eyelashes – looking not unlike Penelope Keith. He was hooked.
In his Oxbridge year, he played King Lear – ‘Shakespeare’s greatest play … with its sense of cosmic disorder and the intensity of human despair’. From it he cites a lovely line of Poor Tom’s: ‘Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness.’
Nobody knows what it means, he says, but it has ‘a dark, magnetic power’.
On grounds of feasibility, a career in ballet or opera – his passions – fell by the wayside. And, unlike his father, he says he’d have made ‘a pretty ropy doctor’. From his parents he inherited his sense of adventure and curiosity and a generosity of spirit (key ingredients for an actor). When he told them of his career choice, his father said, ‘We all knew that’s what you’d end up doing.’ His first season in Stratford was ‘like being at an extended summer school’.
His life and career are full of insight and ecstasy in all things. Reading it, I wanted to see all his monumental performances again and be his friend.
Russell Beale has a scholarly approach to his work – forensic is the go-to cliché. The goal is always truth and clarity. From Ariel to Falstaff, he’s played them all: ‘In my head, I have transformed his characters into my character.’
Like his acting, his writing is free of sentimentality and self-aggrandisement.
A Life in Books – Lady Antonia Fraser Gunpowder, treason and plot
If it’s important to convey beauty, then it is equally important (and arguably rather more fun) to convey the ugly side of life. In other words, wickedness. But it is perfectly possible that your wicked is my wonderful. In the wild terrain of wicked plots, a profound disagreement can exist not only between the plotters at the time, but between historians and other commentators ever since.
The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 is a perfect example.
As a Protestant child (I was converted, emulating my mother, when I was 13), I thought I knew everything about the Gunpowder Plot. As a Catholic, I tried to persuade people not to burn or torture Guy Fawkes –although it could be tricky in wartime, when almost everything seemed worthy of being pitched into the flames.
My conversion to Catholicism changed the emphasis entirely. I was now on the side of the Catholic plotters – but wait! What plotters? Was the whole conspiracy a nasty English Protestant invention?
The story of the Gunpowder Plot
Theatricality is the big taboo. He loves his work, claiming it’s a kind of therapy; though, like the inscrutable Alec Guinness, perhaps he himself is the character we see least clearly.
When he’s rehearsing Iago (‘Shakespeare’s nastiest character’), Sam Mendes asks him, by way of a note, what time Iago has his first drink? Simon suggests 11am. Et voilà – the possibility that ‘Iago is a high-functioning alcoholic’. Playing the role was ‘like walking around with a dense ball of basalt in my stomach’.
Interesting to note that, when Shakespeare’s characters talk directly to the audience, generally they speak the truth. Not so Iago.
Playing Hamlet (‘the greatest exploration of grief ever written’), he magnificently defied the tradition of haggard Hamlets, David Warner et al. Of course one smartarse critic wrote, ‘Tubby or not tubby – fat is the question.’
Back in the day, Burbage was no ectomorph in the role. So the kindly bard added the line that Hamlet ‘is fat and scant of breath’.
Surprisingly he found the bedazzling Lehman Trilogy ‘exhausting but required
taught me a valuable historical lesson about wickedness.
You could accept the fact that a lot of very nasty people had deliberately planned a crime, of which murder by bombing was the simplest part. These nasty people were incidentally Catholics. It was much easier for me to relate sympathetically to the intense Catholic problems of Jacobean England and then suggest the solution that might have been planned by the hard-pressed Catholics at the time.
One such solution was a conspiracy to do away with the powerful Protestant forces by planning their demolition.
When I was writing about the Plot, I investigated things that weren’t in general use (not in my household, anyway), such as gunpowder and its staying power. How long can you leave a pile of gunpowder mouldering in a stone tower and expect it to do its duty at the end? There are other easier questions: who has easy access to gunpowder in the first place?
My research took me to some weird places. My favourite place was the archives at Farm Street Catholic
no emotional expenditure at all – and was no less thrilling or intense for that’.
His approach to the role of the hapless King Arthur in Spamalot, galloping about on an imaginary horse, was again rigorous: ‘Psychologically, he knew he didn’t really have a horse, and that uncertainty gave him a bit of depth.’
On Falstaff, he wonders if he isn’t ‘fundamentally a shit’.
Mercifully, he long ago resisted the suggestion to change his name from Beale to Beagle to enhance his comedy potential. He wonders if he has the necessary ‘funny bones’ for comedy; but, remembering his Malvolio, I am sure he has.
He is blessedly parsimonious with name-dropping. But, en passant, there’s Stephen Sondheim ‘a bona fide genius’. Paul Newman is ‘quiet, shy and beautiful’. Lauren Bacall is ‘quite simply magnificent’.
While filming House of The Dragon, the prequel to Game of Thrones, he valiantly likens its bloody internecine power politics to Shakespeare’s history plays. Hmm.
Returning to Stratford to play
church, conveniently opposite the Connaught Hotel.
Because the archives lay beneath the church, the lighting seemed to me to come out of a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth, as the slim, dark figures of priests and monks passed silently to and fro. There was definitely an otherworldly feel to it all.
My favourite priest – a keen student of the Plot – was Father Francis Edwards S J. Unfortunately, Father Francis and I disagreed about the Plot itself: his plot was something invented by Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers to besmirch the Catholic reputation; mine was a real plot born out of desperation. All the same, we became great friends. Years later, going sadly to his funeral at Farm Street, I reflected that now Father Francis knew the truth of the plot – before sitting up with a jolt and thinking, ‘Perhaps he had it right all along and he is confirmed in his view that he was right and I was wrong.’
Antonia Fraser is author of The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605
Prospero 25 years after his debut, he writes, ‘I had the acute sense that Shakespeare himself had literally been here before me.’
What a piece of work is this man. How noble in reason. How infinite in faculty.
Simon Williams played James Bellamy in Upstairs, Downstairs
Gauguin redeemed
HUON MALLALIEU
Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin
By Sue Prideaux
Faber £30
Hurrah! Sue Prideaux assesses Gauguin within the mores of the societies in which he lived rather than our own, and has no truck with an intellectual colonialism that seeks to appropriate the past.
This is a grown-up and level-headed account of a flawed 19th-century genius, rather than the cancellation of a 21stcentury bogeyman. In recent decades, Gauguin has been criticised as a matter of course for deserting his wife and
for his several relationships with ‘under-age’ girls in Polynesia.
As Sue Prideaux makes plain, in his marriage there was both love and fault on both sides. At 14 to 16, his Tahitian and Marquesan lovers were under-age neither in French eyes, where the age for marriage was 15, nor in Polynesian societies, where early sexual relations were vital for the populations’ survival.
After all, average life expectancy in the French South Sea Islands was around 22, and the indigenous peoples were in catastrophic decline, due to inbreeding and the introduction of venereal diseases and tuberculosis by the colonial incomers.
Inevitably, as well as of paedophilia, Gauguin has been accused of spreading syphilis to his lovers. That was irrefutably disproved by the 2000 discovery of four of his teeth in the clogged-up well beside his final house on Hiva Oa. There were no traces of the arsenic, cadmium and mercury that would have been used to treat the condition.
Two other 21st-century events have helped to ensure that, for the time being at least, this biography (the first in 30 years) will be essential reading for anyone interested in Gauguin and his contemporaries in the art world of the Belle Époque. In 2021, the Wildenstein Plattner Institute published the third and final volume of the catalogue raisonné of his works, which can of course easily be updated online with addenda and errata.
In 2020, there was the rediscovery of Gauguin’s memoir and manifesto, Avant et Après, written on Hiva Oa during the last two years of his life. This passed to the Courtauld Institute under the government’s Acceptance in Lieu scheme and can be consulted online.
It had been missing for over a century, although what Prideaux calls ‘a messedabout version’ was published in 1918, giving rise to mistaken biographical assumptions. As Prideaux says, ‘So much new material coinciding with contemporary debate around his troubling reputation made it seem important to re-examine Gauguin’s life; not to condemn, not to excuse but simply to shed new light on the man and the myth.’
Sue Prideaux is the Anglo-Norwegian author of three previous biographies which have all won prizes, her subjects being Munch, Strindberg – a good friend of Gauguin – and Nietzsche.
Her Scandinavian roots are valuable in her forming a balanced assessment of the marriage between Gauguin and Danish Mette Gad, and the difficulties that the one encountered in Copenhagen and the other in Paris. She has made great use of
the correspondence that they maintained before and after the final separation, and also of the letters between Gauguin and the Van Gogh brothers.
The latter show the affection and admiration that continued between Gauguin and Vincent after the Arles episode, despite the impossibility of their living and working together. Together with his account in Avant et Après, they disprove the canard that Gauguin was responsible for the incident of the ear.
I had not realised before what an extraordinary ancestry Gauguin had, ranging from a Viceroy of Peru descended from the Borgias; and a grandmother who campaigned against child prostitution and was admired by Marx; to small shopkeepers who had built an agricultural marketing empire.
He was partly brought up in Peruvian splendour and made a stockmarket fortune, which went in a crash before he taught himself to paint and sculpt. He was a master of colour who became a leader of the avant-garde but seldom made money through his art, although Degas was a keen collector.
Later, despite racist attitudes – no different from those throughout almost all humanity at the time – he became a formidable fighter for the rights of the Polynesians among whom he settled, and a torment to the colonial administrations.
What a pity that he and his almostneighbour R L Stevenson never met.
Huon Mallalieu is The Oldie’s art critic
Goodbye, Dr Chips
DANIEL HANNAN
Jeremy Catto: A Portrait of the Quintessential Oxford Don
By David Vaiani
Unicorn £25
As the college’s Senior Dean, Jeremy Catto (1939-2018) once had to fine an Oriel man who, intending to impress his inamorata, had clambered into Hertford after hours.
The undergraduate was unlucky in his choice of window, and managed to fall into the bed of Hertford’s principal, Geoffrey Warnock, who was occupying it at the time alongside his fellow philosopher (and wife) Mary Warnock.
The Oriel man tried to pass himself off as ‘Tom Smith from Iffley’, but the philosophers were not fooled – among other things, they thought that Tom Smith from Iffley would not have tied his own bow tie – and the poor chap ended
up wretchedly having to explain himself to the don in charge of Oriel’s discipline.
‘I suppose I’ll eventually look back at all this and find it funny,’ he sighed, only to be interrupted by a whimper from Catto, who could no longer contain his mirth: ‘I find it bloody funny now.’
Catto was the last of the brilliant, eccentric celibate dons who had been such a feature of Victorian and Edwardian Oxford. Their race was thought to have perished with Maurice Bowra in 1971, but Catto gave it one more generation, rather as the Byzantine Empire lived on in Trebizond after the fall of Constantinople.
As his former student and biographer, David Vaiani, puts it, ‘Catto possessed those qualities that had characterised dons of an earlier age: he was clubbable, civilised, devoted to his college and, most important of all, he was dedicated to teaching his undergraduates.’
The modern Oxford academic writes prolifically, returns at the end of the day to a home in Summertown and hopes to be remembered through citations. Catto barely wrote anything, lived in and for his college and is remembered through anecdotes.
Few dons were better connected. Most tutees have stories about Catto coming (or at least claiming to have come) straight from a call with William Hague or Chris Patten. ‘My students run the world,’ he used to purr.
And so they did. Vaiani reveals some of the friends whom even Catto generally held back from name-dropping: Benazir Bhutto, Harold Macmillan, Princess Margaret.
Nigel Biggar, that heroic defender of academic rigour against wokery, was Oriel’s chaplain in the 1990s, and recalls Catto as ‘one of a dying breed of college men, who had the time and inclination to devote themselves to college life’. The first time they met at high table, Biggar asked the tubby historian what he specialised in.
‘1468,’ came the disorienting reply.
So soft was Catto’s manner that it was easy to forget how clever he was. He could come across as a sort of Winniethe-Pooh: cheerful, plump, imperturbable.
His bons mots – ‘Historians make the best bankers’ – seemed to be thrown out casually; but challenge one and you soon found how much insight had gone into it.
What he was really doing, of course, was teaching his students how to think – how to approach a subject in more than one way; how to spot what others had missed. His tutorials used to start with sherry or pink gin, but many of his most important lessons were imparted
elsewhere – at the Oxford Union, at cocktail parties, at the Canning Club. He had a strong sense, rare these days, of university life as a constant and convivial symposium.
Oriel in those days was philistine, rowdy, obsessed with rowing and all-male. Indeed, largely thanks to Catto, it did not admit women until the mid1980s, a decade after other colleges.
‘The intellectual level was low, very low; whatever method of calculation was used, Oriel always came out at the bottom of the list of colleges, measured by results in [examination] schools’ wrote the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, whose time overlapped with Catto’s. ‘The Senior Common Room was characterised by a tepid cosiness.’
Catto arrived from Durham in 1969 (Vaiani adroitly captures the texture of upper-middle-class Tyneside life in the middle years of the last century), wearing his thick black glasses and, in those days, still skinny, looking for all the world like Andy Warhol.
Was he drawn by the small-c conservatism of the place, its association with Cardinal Newman and the Oxford Movement? Catto had converted to Catholicism as a teenager, as much, perhaps, on aesthetic as on theological grounds. Whatever the explanation, it was a perfect fit, and his personality came to be felt in every aspect of college life.
Vaiani has collected anecdotes and recollections from men (and one or two women) who have succeeded in every imaginable walk of life, and all of them speak with unfeigned feeling about how a single languid don, armed with alcohol, made them see the world differently.
Not a bad legacy, I’d say.
Lord Hannan was taught by Jeremy Catto at Oriel College, Oxford
OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH
The strain in Spain
PENNY PHILLIPS
Gabriel’s Moon
By William Boyd Viking £20
Why can’t Gabriel Dax sleep?
When his doctor – who’s been prescribing him sleeping pills for years – asks if he’s ever considered psychoanalysis, Gabriel insists that ‘there’s no mystery here – I know exactly why I can’t sleep… There’s nothing for anyone to explain to me.’
Gabriel’s self-analysis harks back to a cataclysmic childhood event – with which Gabriel’s Moon opens.
And, transcending even Hollywood film producer Sam Goldwyn’s preference for ‘a story that starts out with an earthquake and works its way up to a climax’, the ensuing 250-odd pages deliver a non-stop spiral of action.
Recognising that he can’t go on leading ‘the onerous half-life of an insomniac’, Gabriel embarks on a course of therapy with the bejewelled and immaculate Dr Katerina Haas, at her Regency cottage in Hampstead.
However frustrating for him, this affords us a useful window onto his past: orphaned in early childhood, abandoned a medical degree at Cambridge, worked as a bookseller, became a travel writer.
And then.
It’s 1960. Back in Chelsea after a journalistic assignment in the Congo interviewing Patrice Lumumba, Gabriel becomes aware that things in his flat are not quite as they should be. Who has come a-snooping – and making little effort to conceal it? Out buying groceries, he sees across the street a woman he noticed earlier, on the plane home, reading one of his books. Is this more than coincidence?
The woman, it transpires, is the enigmatic Faith Green, a self-confessed handler for MI6. When they meet, Gabriel is struck by her ‘intriguing juxtaposition of confident, mature beauty and girlish unconcern’.
Is this what he can’t resist when she seeks to dispatch him on cryptic missions for the dodgy-sounding Institute of Developmental Studies? Her job, she claims, is to root out ‘traitors, double agents’ in MI6 and MI5.
William Boyd’s narrative zigzags heart-poundingly between the UK, Madrid, Cádiz and Warsaw. Gabriel’s unfathomable errands have him liaising with a string of would-beimpenetrable misfits.
‘I am the British Secret Intelligence Service’s head of station here… Not some drunken old poofter looking for a souvenir of past glories,’ he is told not very convincingly in Madrid.
As for Gabriel, ‘I’m what you might call a “useful idiot”,’ he says. ‘I’m paid … very well. But I know nothing. I’m completely in the dark.’
And we feel for him. But at the same time, we wonder what is propelling him. Why does he accept the spymasters’ seemingly trivial assignments? And why does he fancy the pants off the woman who is clearly not only manipulating him
to get his pants off, but also – perhaps – putting his life in jeopardy? She calls him ‘my spy’ – but what is she hiding from him?
As if that’s not enough, Gabriel has other things to worry about. His girlfriend, Lorraine, who ‘had an insecure grasp of English grammar and worked as a waitress in a Wimpy Bar’ – and sometimes introduces him to people as ‘my posh boyfriend’ – is to Gabriel ‘exotic, strange … terra incognita, wild, fascinating’. She says things like ‘I’m gasping for a gasper.’ And the sex is good. But is she hoping for something more – which might conflict with his new ‘creeping obsession’ elsewhere?
Then there’s his older brother, ‘inscrutable, bluff, bland Sefton’, who works in the Foreign Office and sometimes asks Gabriel to do ‘favours’ –which he insists are ‘completely above board’. Is Sefton lying to him?
His editor at the foreign desk, Jeff Muldoon (in Chapter 1, he’s called Grant Muldoon – you just can’t get the proof-reading staff these days), having pulled Gabriel’s Lumumba piece, suddenly demands all his interview notes and tapes for ‘our archive’. ‘What the f**k are you talking about?’ says Gabriel, his paranoia building.
‘There’s no shame in this room,’ Gabriel’s therapist tells him. ‘Only honesty.’ But is Dr Haas herself all she makes herself out to be?
Who can be trusted? ‘Everybody was lying,’ Gabriel decides at one point. Even he resorts to lying when he finds himself cornered.
Maybe Gabriel’s attitude to the mouse running amok in his flat epitomises his shifting priorities. At the beginning of the book, ‘He’d catch the little bastard in due course.’ But, towards the end, after he has ‘crossed some sort of a defining line as a person’, he sees that ‘everything about him was different now’. And so, on his return to Chelsea, does he kill the mouse or let it go?
Some pretty bleak incidents punctuate Gabriel’s Moon – murder, betrayal, suicide, tangled affections – but somehow Boyd, without trivialising anything, absorbs them so that they are neither heralds of disaster nor beacons of tragedy.
Shit happens; people get over it. That may be the stuff of a lot of spy fiction; Boyd’s skill is in turning it into something not just compelling but positively exhilarating.
Penny Phillips is author of When Cherry Lost Terry
FILM
HARRY MOUNT
THE APPRENTICE (12A)
Do we really need to know anything more about Donald J Trump? Hasn’t the poor man now finally got over his innate shyness and revealed everything we could possibly hope – or hope not – to hear about him?
Well, no, in fact. The Apprentice (released on October 18) is a marvellous, original film about Trump’s early years in New York in the 1970s, when he set about stamping his mark on his father’s building empire.
It won’t tell Trumpologists anything they don’t already know, but the story is told with such wit and verve that it feels incredibly fresh and original.
Because Trump became megafamous recently – as President in 2017 and, before that, as host of The Apprentice TV show (from 2004 to 2015; not to be confused with this film’s era) – it’s easy to forget how long he’s been in the public eye.
Born in 1946, he’s a year younger than Blondie – and his first New York boom years coincided with hers in the seventies.
Arts
Instrumental in Trump’s rise was the diabolically brilliant lawyer Roy Cohn (1927-86). Cohn cut his teeth as Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel in the 1954 Communist hearings. He also prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953 for spying.
Cohn unsuccessfully defended Trump against racism charges under the Fair Housing Act in 1973 and helped get Trump Tower built in 1983.
All this sounds pretty dry, but it’s lifted to gripping, high-comic levels by a whip-smart script – full of Noo Yawk whaddya-whaddya abuse and quips – by Gabriel Sherman, with smooth, quick direction by Ali Abbasi.
It’s all so convincingly done – down to the slightly grainy, faux-seventies film stock – that even the ins and outs of arcane New York property tax law become enthralling.
The performances are Oscar-worthy. Sebastian Stan has done an acute analysis of Donald Trump’s speech and body movements. He’s wound them back from the pantomime moves of today to their incarnation: the froggy moue of the mouth, with the carefully enunciated words; and the gettingcomfortable outward spread of the elbows.
And there’s that batsqueak of insecurity which – it doesn’t take a top Park Avenue shrink to see – powers Trump’s raging egomania. Stan is more devastating in his takedown
of Trump by being understated – and is also funnier as a result, with his deadpan delivery, never vamping for laughs.
We first meet Trump in the early 1970s, when he’s slightly unsure of himself, a slim, attractive construction ingénu, tutored in the wicked ways of Manhattan building law by Cohn.
Through the film, he gets slowly fatter (when he isn’t having the fat liposucked out of him), more orange –and more grotesque, forcing himself on his poor airhead wife, Ivana Trump (Maria Bakalova).
The real stand-out star is Jeremy Strong as Cohn. Strong takes all the loathsome monster aspects of Kendall Roy, his character in Succession, and adds in Cohn’s high intelligence and elite ruthlessness. He fixes his sunken bulldog eyes on his opponents, speaking in a low, threatening monotone, as he takes them down.
Cohn’s heavy dose of evil is undercut by the tragedy of his concealed homosexuality. He died in 1986 from AIDS, aged 59, still denying he had the condition. As he grew more ill and lost his power, his old protégé Trump drifted away from him.
No wonder the Trump election campaign has damned the movie and, by doing so, made it even more irresistible.
The campaign spokesman said, ‘This “film” is pure malicious defamation, should never see the light of day and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store; it belongs in a dumpster fire.’
If you do happen to see it on sale on DVD – or indeed lying on top of an imminent dumpster fire – grab it and watch it pronto. It’s the perfect amusebouche on the evening of 5th November before the election results start coming in.
Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) and Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan)
THEATRE
WILLIAM COOK
LOOK BACK IN ANGER
Almeida Theatre, London, until 23rd November
Kenneth Tynan said he could not love anyone who did not want to see Look Back in Anger. I would find it very hard to love someone who wanted me to watch this infuriating play again.
My loathing for Look Back in Anger dates back only to last night, when I saw it performed on stage for the first time in 40 years. This new-found hatred came as a complete surprise to me – before I watched this adept revival, I had fond memories of John Osborne’s most famous play.
What’s changed? Well, partly, I have. Osborne’s fierce domestic drama seemed daring and thrilling when I first saw it in my teens. Seeing it again in my fifties, I found it trite and gratuitously cruel.
The biggest thing that’s changed, I’ve realised, is the world we live in. Forty years ago, I hardly noticed the play’s inherent violent misogyny. Today, it’s unmissable, and it left me feeling wretched, as if I’d somehow been complicit in an incident of matrimonial abuse.
Osborne was a struggling young actor when he wrote this savage diatribe. His first marriage was disintegrating, and his first fully formed play, which he wrote in just a few weeks, feels intensely autobiographical – a nightmare vision of the life that awaited him when the acting jobs dried up.
Jimmy Porter is a lower-middle-class graduate from a provincial university, selling sweets on a market stall in a humdrum Midlands town.
He lives in a shabby bedsit with his working-class flatmate, Cliff, and his posh wife, Alison, whom he treats appallingly – mocking her, tormenting her, never letting her get a word in edgeways, shouting at her, screaming at her, reducing her to tears. When she finally finds the courage to leave, he shacks up with her friend Helena – and treats her much the same.
None of Osborne’s characters is remotely sympathetic. Jimmy is a selfish bully. Cliff, Alison and Helena are all doormats, incapable of standing up to Jimmy or doing anything to help themselves. In a more nuanced drama this might not matter, but here there’s no development.
From start to finish, everyone remains utterly unchanged. I ended up suspecting that Osborne actually sympathises most
of all with Jimmy. In his endless narcissistic monologues, you can hear the playwright talking.
So why did Look Back in Anger cause such a sensation when it premièred at London’s Royal Court Theatre back in 1956? Because it seemed so different from anything that had come before. Here was a play about contemporary Britain, played out in a realistic setting – a world away from the polite, wellmade plays of Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan.
Yet now, when one looks back, those differences seem rather superficial. Despite the kitchen-sink setting, this is really a very conventional play. People stand around talking. They tell one another what they’re thinking. Compared with Beckett or Pinter, it seems positively old-fashioned.
The thing that’s aged worst of all is the play’s central character, Jimmy Porter. He moans about everything, and his gripes are banal and humourless. The original angry young man now seems like a saloon-bar bore.
Billy Howle does his best as Jimmy (shades of Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay) but there’s nothing he can do
to make him likeable, and the other parts are even worse – chiefly merely foils for Jimmy’s immature invective.
Director Atri Banerjee strives valiantly to mitigate these fundamental flaws. His powerful symbolic staging tries to frame the play as a bold indictment of misogyny – but to my mind it’s not just Jimmy who’s misogynistic; it’s the play itself.
Osborne went on to write some great plays – most notably The Entertainer – but Look Back in Anger isn’t one of them. Why did I find it so inspiring all those years ago? I must have been mad.
When such a famous play leaves you feeling so bereft, it’s tempting to blame the actors, but this time I know that’s not where the fault lies, because this cast are performing another play alongside this one in the same theatre and it’s absolutely brilliant.
Like Look Back in Anger, Arnold Wesker’s Roots is a passionate critique of the sterility of fifties Britain, but unlike Look Back in Anger, it’s profound, subtle and full of meaning. Morfydd Clark gives a wonderful performance as the play’s autodidactic heroine, Beatie Bryant.
Forget about Look Back in Anger. Go and see Roots instead.
Angry young man: Jimmy Porter (Billy Howle), with Alison (Ellora Torchia)
RADIO VALERIE GROVE
What do mimics do these days?
Rory Bremner gave us his Trump voice – almost too easy, like Boris. He nailed poor Keir Starmer – apologetic, earnest, adenoidal. Bremner’s Trump claimed to have known Keir Hardie (‘loved his films – such good films with Stan Laurel, beautiful films’) and to have advised Hadrian to build his wall –‘That’s what I told Hadrian and he did put up a wall, a beautiful wall.’
That was on Broadcasting House, which does its Sunday best to lighten a conflicted, war-torn world. Michael Berkeley’s Private Passions had interesting choices from Lucian Msamati, currently in Waiting for Godot. Having once turned down the part of Othello, he’d rather like to play Juliet.
‘A barrel-chested, deep-voiced man of African origin,’ he laughed, ‘playing a lovestruck 14-year-old girl.’
Next came Jenny Beavan, the brilliant designer of film costumes. Stephen Fry said only she could turn up at an award ceremony ‘looking like a bag lady’.
‘Look, Michael,’ said Beavan. ‘I’m short, fat and Welsh. There’s no way I’m going to wear a dress.’
She’s funny, forthright, a great music enthusiast and proud of her father, who was one of six cellists on the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album.
Andrew O’Hagan, the Glaswegian novelist, in Friendship (Radio 4, in five parts), went to Ireland to give the eulogy at the funeral of his friend Edna O’Brien.
On his last visit to see her, he took champagne. She thanked him with, ‘Oh Andrew – the great enemy is Prosecco!’
He’d also been spending a lot of time with his ‘imaginary friend’ Charles Dickens. ‘He isna exactly a friend, but I felt he was by my side, and lighting the way, in the writing of a big London novel.’ That’s Caledonian Road – which several critics indeed found Dickensian.
Dickensian is the umbrella title of Radio 4’s dramatisations of Hard Times and Little Dorrit. The association of period drama with Sunday seems ineradicable: can it still work on radio?
Little Dorrit is far too massive to contain in three episodes – so bravo to seasoned adaptor Mike Walker for undertaking it. Andrew Davies’s 2008 TV version took 14 episodes.
With Jeremy Mortimer directing, this production still manages to convey the atmosphere of the Marshalsea, the Circumlocution Office and the dim, dreary Sundayness of a Victorian London Sunday. It helps that Dickens himself is the narrator, played by Jason Watkins, who also plays the villainous Rigaud.
When Hillary Clinton popped up on Today in praise of Kamala Harris, sounding distractingly shrill, it was a relief to listen next to Kate Kennedy, cellist and author of a new book, Cello. She told the story of the Hungarian composer and cellist Pál Hermann, who (with cello) vanished into a Nazi camp 85 years ago, when he was last seen by daughter Corrie. She, now 92, was, amazingly, there in the Today studio.
Even more amazingly, there too was the lost cello, a Gagliano, played by the Australian virtuoso Sam Lucas. ‘The cello is the nearest thing to our human body,’ as Kennedy said. ‘A torso-sized, resonating cavity that we hold against our breastbone.’ A too-brief musical interlude, yet sublime.
I am bewildered by how many prolific podcasters come garlanded with social-media likes: the chefs Michelin-starred, the novelists bestselling, the actors award-winning. Arthur Smith once announced himself as an ‘award-winning comedian’ – then added, ‘Unfortunately, the award was for swimming.’
And what sad news about Ed McLachlan (1940-2024), the great Oldie cartoonist.
How he captured the moronic back-slapping you can’t avoid these days in radio interviews – see his divine cartoon to the left.
TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON
The ubiquitous comedian Romesh Ranganathan and his mum, Shanti, are the hosts of a new quiz show, Romesh Ranganathan’s Parents’ Evening (ITV).
Ageing celebrities and their brightest child compete for a cash prize to be donated to charity. In advance of each round, the parent determines what they think their child will be capable of getting right and gambles accordingly.
While the questions – such as naming boy bands or animal emojis – could be answered by the average ten-year-old, the ‘nepo babies’ are grown-ups. Some are even middle-aged.
But will they meet their parents’ low expectations? How well, Romesh challenges us, do we really know our children? The show’s only appeal is to assess the child-rearing skills of the famous. Have they produced little madams, little monsters or mini-mes?
The first episode features the smug and perfumed Richard Madeley and his 37-year-old daughter, Chloe (a personal trainer). Also there are Jonathan Ross and Honey Kinny (a spokesperson for ‘body positivity’ and ‘self-love’). And then there’s Mel B, aka Scary Spice, with her youngest daughter, Phoenix, a 24-yearold former ‘fashion chameleon’, currently making a name for herself as an artist.
‘It just kind of came about,’ Phoenix said of her career change, to the Daily Mail. ‘I was like, “I wanna be in the arts world,” so … I just kind of went for it.’ The three teams are as inbred as a family of rabbits. Richard & Judy was produced by Jonathan Ross’s brother, Simon Ross. When Judy Finnegan had her knee operation, her place on the sofa was taken by Mel’s B’s fellow Spice Girl Emma Bunton.
While Jonathan and Richard, confident in the genetic transmission of their IQs, play hard and fast on their daughters’ abilities to name Tarantino films and hangover cures, Mel B, dressed head to toe in leopard skin, has little faith in Phoenix. Poor Phoenix, according to her mother, wouldn’t know that Spare was written by Prince Harry or the name of the band Ringo, John and Paul had been part of. ‘I’ve brought the wrong child with me,’ she says, as charmless as ever, passing on the fourth round. ‘I’ve got two other kids.’ Phoenix, the only one of the three girls to appear unimpressed by her parent, swings her leg, rolls her eyes and looks at her watch. While Mel, not knowing what an anagram is, opts out of putting
Phoenix through the cheese-anagram round, Jonathan says that Honey, being dyslexic, would probably not see ‘Bonking piss hit’ (Stinking Bishop) or ‘Love Porno’ (Provolone) as anagrams at all. She would just see a list of cheeses. Honey dutifully rocks with laughter.
It’s left to Chloe, once hospitalised for a Camembert overdose, to unscramble the letters – and she smashes it. Chloe Madeley, dressed for some reason in white tennis shorts, frilly ankle socks and a blue blazer, is a cheese genius!
Can we see, beneath Richard’s bronze mask, a trace of resentment? Has his daughter actually earned her laurels? Did Chloe, like her parents, climb the coalface every morning? Does Chloe even know what a coalface is? Or could his sour expression be the memory of the Richard & Judy phone-quiz scam, ‘You Say We Pay’, where the winners were selected beforehand while the viewers were encouraged to keep calling the premium-rate entry number?
Phoenix’s only chance to shine is when Mel is persuaded by the audience, now ready to mutiny, to risk her naming four US states where cannabis is legalised for recreational use.
‘My gosh!’ Mel says, as Phoenix sails through the challenge.
Given the girl’s hidden resources, she might have been able to name four animal emojis. But then again, she might not.
‘I think we’ve discovered that we don’t know very much about life, do we,’ Mel says to Phoenix, who looks gnomic.
If they let the cameras keep rolling, it would be like watching Couples Therapy Next week, it’s Carol Vorderman and her son, Cameron.
MUSIC
RICHARD OSBORNE
MANCHESTER MUSIC PIRES AT 80
I’d never been to Manchester – through and round it, yes, but never to stay.
Needless to say, I’ve read a great deal about its music in the writings of Neville Cardus and more recently, Paul Driver’s 1996 Manchester Pieces, a minor classic by another Lancashire-born writer turned music critic.
With a visit in prospect, Mrs Music asked our son, a two-degree Courtauld Institute graduate now working in gin, where should we stay. ‘The Midland Hotel,’ came the reply – less a recommendation, one sensed; more a statement of a self-evident truth.
Bob Wilson
‘For God’s sake, lock all the doors! We’re passing Planet Earth’
I should have known. The hotel was opened by the Midland Railway in 1903 to accommodate the Great and the Good arriving from London’s St Pancras, and its design reflected Manchester’s unimpeachable credentials as a city of culture.
If London’s Savoy Hotel had a theatre attached, why not a 1,000-seat auditorium for plays, vaudeville and opera within the Midland Hotel, plus a roof terrace on which Europe’s finest string quartets could play?
The money was there, and the audience. Having arrived in Manchester to trade, the city’s German and Jewish communities had brought their culture with them.
Cardus recalled gazing through the windows of the Continental Restaurant and seeing the head of the recently founded Royal Manchester College of Music, Adolph Brodsky – the man who’d premiered Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto after its intended recipient Leopold Auer had declared it unplayable – dining with Hans Richter and Richard Strauss. In those days, Manchester was England’s Munich.
As a teenager, Cardus had earned the
6d needed to get into Old Trafford cricket ground by carrying visitors’ bags from Central Station to the rear entrance of the Midland Hotel. Later, it was in a shilling seat in the hotel theatre that he heard the ‘Vilja-Lied’ from Franz Lehár’s latest sensation, The Merry Widow
‘When I heard that song,’ he later wrote, ‘something moved in me’. Nothing would be quite the same again.
In 1927, Cardus was appointed to the semi-sacred position of chief music critic of the Manchester Guardian – no longer carrying bags to the back of the Midland Hotel but walking through the foyer to lunch with some of the great musicians of the age.
One such was the revered Beethoven pianist Artur Schnabel. He wanted to thank Cardus for a review that had devoted more space to the music than it had to the pianist. ‘My ideal is to give a recital in which the audience goes home thinking about Beethoven – not about Schnabel.’
The story reminds me that this summer was the 80th birthday of another such self-effacing musician of genius, the Portuguese-born pianist Maria João Pires.
If you don’t know her work, seek out on YouTube an 80th-birthday performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K271, in which Pires is filmed by Bavarian Radio with a handful of players from its exemplary symphony orchestra directed by Giovanni Antonini. The dress is informal; there’s no audience. It’s just musicians making music. And it’s sublime.
Another artist who was remorseless in steering us away from himself towards the music in hand was Sir John Barbirolli.
There’s a wonderful chapter in Manchester Pieces in which young Driver is taken by his uncle, ‘a retired shop steward with a love of Sibelius’, to see the Hallé being rehearsed by the great ‘Baa-bir-olli’ – the protracted northern vowels of this grizzled veteran of a hundred Hallé concerts turning the great man’s name into a form of invocation.
Driver’s book ends with ‘Salford Toccata’, a theme and 29 variations on this ancient dwelling place (older than Manchester) on the far side of the River Irwell, where Driver grew up.
‘Capital city of grime and grind,’ some used to call it. That was before Manchester’s abandoned docklands were transformed into Salford Quays, with its capacious waterfront, glass-fronted media palaces and the Lowry gallery, one of the jewels in Manchester’s capacious crown.
Forget matchstick men, I realised as I traversed the gallery. Lowry was as gifted a British artist as any from Blake to Bacon. An enigma, it’s true – his several selves hermetically sealed within bespoke boxes – but a vastly endearing one, as we can discover from Michael Howard’s superbly written and lavishly illustrated Lowry: A Visionary Artist (Lowry Press, £40).
Lowry loved music and owned multiple recordings of cherished works by his favourite composers – Vivaldi, Handel, Haydn, Beethoven and Stravinsky (with Bach for comfort).
In later years, after his move to Mottram in Longdendale, he took to painting at night. There the operas of Donizetti and Bellini, with their mad heroines and sublime melodies, joined his troop of close companions.
As the nights draw in, an evening spent with Howard’s Lowry and some Bellini playing on the gramophone might be just the ticket.
GOLDEN OLDIES MARK ELLEN
WORDS WITHOUT MUSIC
‘My ex-wife left me again. She’s a tennis player. Love means nothing to her.’
A hopelessly lame gag but, in Bob Dylan World, it’s legendary – because he rarely speaks onstage. He just trots out a series of often unrecognisable songs and there’s precious little to distinguish that performance from any other. But, one night in the 1990s, he told that joke and the people who were there still talk about it.
Because it’s what musicians say, not what they play, that’s often more memorable.
Ray Davies and James Taylor both toured a ago with shows where they explained how and why they wrote greatest hits before singing them –unforgettably magical – and you could already sense the words-to-music ratio starting to shift. Taylor even had a slideshow. Every song you’d heard before. Every comment was a revelation.
But the announcement of a John Lydon ‘spoken word tour’ next autumn takes this to a new level.
The phlegm-flecked,
flame-haired former Johnny Rotten, leader of the Sex Pistols, refuses to join any further band reunions and only the most devoted of his hardcore following can cope with his cacophonous experimental outfit Public Image Limited.
But he’s about to appear at 48 UK and Irish venues just to talk. He does this very entertainingly – about his cashstrapped childhood in Islington, his year in hospital aged seven, being expelled from the family home when a teenager, the punk-rock wars and how much he detests most pop music and politicians.
Give him a subject, light the blue touchpaper and he’ll get righteously incensed about it and have something immortal to say. He has no record to promote; both his memoirs came out years ago. This is how he now makes a living. He’s a musician who’s infinitely more popular if he doesn’t play music.
Maybe more people should do this. I’ve no burning desire to hear Marianne Faithfull reboot the tremulous hits of her past, but if she delivered a patchouliscented soliloquy about the ’60s and the Stones, I’d hang on every word.
The wise and discriminating Randy Newman on the shifting sands of American pop culture? Count me in. The impossibly witty and self-mocking Jarvis Cocker on his potholed 16-year journey before Pulp were successful? Yes, please. Records by Courtney Love, the bellicose, finger-pointing rock-star widow of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, are almost unlistenable to, but I’d be enthralled by her version of their lives together.
Elvis Costello? A fizzing, magnetic presence with a peerless knowledge of songs and songwriting. Would I rather hear him dissect the genius of the Kinks, Joni Mitchell and Jamaican rocksteady or attempt another challenging crack at Watching the Detectives? No contest.
And when Elton John and Rod Stewart can’t hit the high notes any more, surely they should go on the road just telling stories. Studded leather armchair, standard lamp, drink to hand.
Incautious, star-packed tales from two of the world’s best raconteurs? Top-dollar entertainment guaranteed.
The Bob Dylan Comedy ? You have to draw the line somewhere.
Maria João Pires on tour in Spain with maestro Trevor Pinnock in 2023
Mellow yellow: John Lydon
EXHIBITIONS
HUON MALLALIEU
DRAWING THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
King’s Gallery, to 9th March MICHELANGELO, LEONARDO, RAPHAEL
Royal Academy, to 16th February
Lovers of Old Master drawings who fail to get to central London for these linked and complementary shows will regret it. An autumn banquet is spread out for them.
Drawing is fundamental to art. No matter what -ists artists are, nor what -isms they follow, drawing teaches them to look, looking to see, and seeing to make art – even when it’s an installation, conceptual or video art. It was trahison des clercs of the most damaging sort when later-20th-century art teaching allowed ‘mark-making’ – pleasant enough in its unambitious way – to be regarded as an equivalent to drawing.
The appeal of drawings is manifold. The first collectors were artists who used examples by respected predecessors as working aids. For early royal and aristocratic patrons, the pleasures were aesthetic and intellectual. Drawings were a natural extension of cabinets of curiosities. Then, more widely, they humanise art, allowing us to see minds at work. We almost touch hands across
time. On my wall is a modest example by a good 18th-century second-rater; every time I see his figure sitting on a rock rendered in a single squiggle, I feel a bubble-burst of pleasure.
As Michael Clayton, curator of the King’s Gallery exhibition, puts it, ‘The Italian Renaissance would have been impossible without drawing.’ About 160 works, many of them not previously shown publicly, by around 80 artists, including Michelangelo, Leonardo and Titian, are included.
The arrangement is thematic, rightly beginning with life drawing. A highlight is Raphael’s red-chalk Three Graces (1517-18), drawn from one nude model in three poses. There is also information on the evolution of materials between 1450 and 1600, and three artists-in-residence are at work. Visitors are encouraged to try their hands.
Left and below: The Three Graces, Raphael, c 1517-18, and Head of a Man, Giovanni Bellini, c 1460-70; both at the King’s Gallery. Bottom: The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist (The Burlington House Cartoon), Leonardo da Vinci, c 1506-08, at the Royal Academy
The Royal Academy concentrates on Florence from the beginning of 1504, when Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael were there together. For this
occasion, Leonardo’s Burlington House Cartoon returns home from the National Gallery, and there are further loans from the Royal Collection. There are studies for Michelangelo and Leonardo’s murals commissioned for the Palazzo Vecchio. One theme is their rivalry and their influence on the younger Raphael.
The Oldie November
GARDENING
DAVID
WHEELER
SPRING BULB MOMENT
I’ve done it myself – so I know what you’re up to. It’s autumn and you’re guiltily averting your eyes from bags of unplanted bulbs bought recently with unbounded zest.
The catalogue and packaging photographs were alluring. Special offers ensured we bought more than we needed or wanted.
We promised ourselves, as if our lives depended on it, that they’d be planted during the week of purchase.
Dream on. More likely, we thought or hoped a willing pair of hands would materialise from nowhere to help. Even more likely – mañana!
in a nursery or online that they simply cannot live without. Snap! Buttons pressed. Money spent. Plant ticked off on the multi-page wants list.
And there, by the potting-shed door or in a corner where other forlorn desirables lurk, bought in rash moments, it sits – and waits, longing to be set free in your rich alluvial soil, where it promises to reward you a hundredfold for the tiny effort required to get it in the ground.
‘Tomorrow’ might well be the gardener’s leitmotif. Or is it ‘Next year’? However well a plant is doing in my garden, I still think it’ll look better in 12 months.
But how many next years do we have? We oldies must cross our arthritic fingers, garden for today, hope for the best and plant as if we’ll live for ever.
In my now much reduced world, the garden’s importance has greatly intensified. It claims more and more of my time – not least because everything takes much longer to do. Help is essential. Buy what hours you can afford from strong and willing folk. In minutes, they’ll have done that difficult chore in the time it takes to boil a kettle.
Box-tickers are probably the worst offenders when it comes to planting delay. They’ve seen a much-coveted plant
I have excuses for the plants that languish. Several were gifts from well-meaning friends who thought I’d love one of their lovelies – so be careful what you lust aloud for in friends’ gardens. Sure as eggs is eggs, cuttings or seeds will be raised and, whoops, you’re the beneficiary of something you strongly dislike, don’t have room for or already have in abundance.
Now for those loitering bulbs. My advice is to plop them into pots of compost and forget them. Job done –partly. When they’re in bud or flower next spring, it’ll be a moment’s work to decant them into beds and borders. They won’t have fed the mice throughout the winter, and you can place them where you know they’ll thrive.
I’m doing this with some Sternbergia lutea bulbs – autumn-flowering, bright yellow crocus lookalikes which arrived by post. They were first given to me by a former gardens editor of Country Life magazine (provenance is all), who in turn was given them by artist-plantsman Sir Cedric Morris. In an act now deeply frowned upon, if not forbidden, he dug
them up from Andalusia’s arid hills in the 1950s.
They have died out in Morris’s garden at Benton End in Suffolk (now an outpost of London’s Garden Museum). Mine also perished – because of neglect during a bout of illness, but not before I had given some to friends, for whom they multiplied like locusts.
Descendants of these have now been returned to me – enough, should they want them, to restock Morris’s East Anglian turf. That’s gardening.
David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal
KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD PLUMS
I haven’t had much luck with growing plums. After one old tree died, we planted another Victoria perhaps too close to the site of the previous one. The blossom was hit by frost – the tree never really got going and was producing very few fruit in its second and third years. I’m not sure whether it was self-fertile.
If I try again, I shall plant the tree, possibly one of the gages, against a south-facing wall. Old Green Gage is a very reliable sweet variety; bare-root trees are available from late November.
Gages came originally from the Middle East; it was Sir William Gage who introduced them from France in the 18th century and gave the plums their name.
I was enjoying the fruit last month in Amiens, where the French call the greengage Reine Claude after the 16th-century queen consort of Francis I.
While conventional British plums can be delicious fresh or cooked, I am rather partial to the small mirabelle plums, originating from France and known
Sternbergia lutea
for producing a memorable eau de vie. A few varieties are available in this country, including one cherry-plum hybrid, Golden Sphere, which was bred in Ukraine.
Another French variety, the Agen plum, grown in the south-west, is the one most suitable, when dried, for conversion to a prune (pruneau in French, not prune, which means plum).
While we may not have eaten as many stewed prunes with custard since childhood, we can still enjoy them wrapped in bacon, when they are known, curiously, as devils on horseback.
The Prune Damson is not a prune but a variety of the dark blue fruit which flowers late enough to escape most spring frosts and should crop for many years. Damsons make excellent jam and a ‘cheese’ to rival that made with quinces.
We have two bullace trees, which bear small, dark fruit similar to damsons. The crop this year has been modest but, without a blackthorn winter, there have been plenty of sloes in the adjoining hedges.
COOKERY
ELISABETH LUARD BUNNIES GO TO BELGIUM
The Belgians are a serious bunch of trencher-folk – possibly the most enthusiastic in Europe.
Ruth van Waerbeek explains just how and why in a handsome hardback reprint of The Taste of Belgium, first published in 1996 – when we could all skip around the Continent without a care.
Belgian food at home – rather than in the truffle-heavy expense-account restaurants of Brussels – is honest-togoodness country cooking.
It’s as good as anything rural and regional in France, but comes in German-size portions.
Much of it is cooked with Belgian beer in slow-cooked stews – as with wine –with the same attention paid to the subtleties of flavour and fragrance appropriate to the dish.
Rabbit with prunes in beer
Farmed bunny is big in Belgium, rather more so than chicken, which might be why they invented the Flemish Giant. Choose a dark beer – Rodenbach, Abbey, Gueuze lambic – as the cooking liquor. Chicken can replace the rabbit. Serves 6.
350g pitted prunes
4 tbsps seasoned flour
2 rabbits or 1 Flemish Giant (about 1kg), jointed
2 tbsps unsalted butter
3 tbsps oil
3 tbsps diced streaky bacon
4 medium onions, coarsely chopped
2 bottles (2 x 330ml) dark beer
2 tbsps cider or white-wine vinegar
2 garlic cloves, chopped
2 sprigs thyme
2 bay leaves
1 whole clove
Salt and pepper
Set the prunes to soak in warm water for an hour.
Dredge the rabbit pieces with 2 tablespoonfuls of the seasoned flour. Heat the butter and oil in a large, heavy casserole or Dutch oven, and sauté the pieces till golden brown on both sides, then remove from the heat, and set aside. Add the bacon pieces to the casserole and cook gently till the fat runs, remove and set aside.
Discard all but 2 tablespoons of the fat from the pan. Add the onion and fry gently till it takes a little colour.
Return the rabbit pieces to the pot, sprinkle with the remaining seasoned flour and turn everything over the heat for a few minutes.
Add the beer gradually, allowing the juices to thicken a little between additions. Tuck in the garlic, thyme, bay leaf and clove, turn down the heat, cover, and simmer for an hour, stirring occasionally. Add the bacon, prunes and soaking water, and simmer for another 45 minutes, till the meat is falling off the bones. Serve with plain boiled potatoes.
Pears poached in spiced brown ale
Ruth suggests Rodenbach, a Flemish sour-style, oak-matured brown ale, as a poaching liquid for fresh pears or any of the fresh stone fruit that’s still in season – plums, apricots, peaches.
To poach four pears (peeled, halved and cored, or left whole): in a roomy pan, bring 1.5 litres (2 bottles) strong dark beer to the boil with 4 tablespoons sugar.
Add 4 short sticks cinnamon, 1 tablespoon ground ginger, a strip of lemon zest stuck with 2 cloves, 4 slices peeled lemon and 4 tablespoons red currant jelly, and simmer for 20 minutes. Settle in the pears and simmer, covered, for 25 to 30 minutes, then remove and reserve.
Cook down the poaching liquid till shiny and syrupy – allow 20 minutes. Combine the pears with the syrup and allow to cool.
RESTAURANTS
JAMES PEMBROKE
NO TURKISH DELIGHTS
I’ve just returned from the Oldie trip to Istanbul, Troy and Gallipoli.
Banish from your minds (and palates) any idylls about Suleyman’s banquets or Agamemnon slaying 56 oxen.
It’s the Age of Erdoğan, which gastronomically translates as the age of the meatball and excessively expensive wine. Around £65 for the cheapest wines on the list to exploit us infidels.
Wherever we went, the mighty kofta was dropped onto our plates, whether in a motorway caff or at the Matbah, a posh gaffe not 100 yards from Suleyman’s kitchens at the Topkapi Palace, which alone are the size of the old GLC.
I wish I could tell you where you can find the best kofta, but I can’t – a good kofta in Turkey is an oxymoron, unless you count the ones they call ‘chicken’, which taste the same but are paler.
On our penultimate night overlooking the hell zone of Gallipoli, where our little gripes were put firmly in perspective, an episode of Masterchef Türkiye filled the huge TV screen in the restaurant. I was too engrossed in the banter of our merry group to watch the show – and there was no need. It was easy to imagine the opening sequence. Of every episode. Of every series.
‘Contestant one, what are you cooking?’
‘Meatballs and chips.’
‘Contestant two?’
‘Meatballs with rice.’
‘Contestant three?’
‘Meatballs with chips and rice.’
‘And for dessert?’
‘Baklava!’
‘Baklava with extra honey.’
‘Baklava with extra nuts.’
‘Baklava with chips’.
‘Ah…’ – presenter looks to camera –‘the infinite variety of our national cuisine.’
Rabbit with prunes in beer
Imagine the monotony of living in a country where one has to eat the same regional dishes night after night. Aren’t we lucky to live in Britain, where one’s appetite can change nationality at the drop of a fork. Even lowly Bridport has three Thai restaurants.
Last night, I went for a Burmese with my friend Val, who years ago bought the film rights to George Orwell’s Burmese Days. He’s been scouting for locations for the last 23 years – and how about our dinner venue, Lahpet, for the drinks-party scene?
What a discovery. We chose the new one in Covent Garden over the mother ship in Shoreditch. Every mouthful was at first subtle and then exciting. It was the most exotic and delicious Asian dinner I have had since dining at Dorshi in Bridport which may as well be twinned with Rangoon. The two winning starters were the yellow-pea paratha and tea-leaf salad for a tenner each. Then Val had the coconut noodles with chicken, half of which he left – but that’s a compliment; normally he leaves three quarters.
The absolute ‘worth-a-journey’ dish was the hake masala. That tired cliché of ‘crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside’ was taken to a new level. What a crust. And the tomato pepper sauce lapped it up. All this with a bottle of Garganega for just £27. Oh, and don’t leave without a scoop of lime-and-ginger ice cream.
Quick lunch while you’re doing Xmas shopping? Go to Ochre (the old National Gallery restaurant) for their bargain main course and a glass of wine for £18. It’s a very lovely room – and if you get there early, sneak into the National Portrait Gallery.
Always fun to see who’s been cancelled.
DRINK
BILL KNOTT
BEST ENGLISH WINE EVER
Winemaker Dermot Sugrue is, according to his wife, Ana, ‘the Don Corleone of English wine’. Ana is also an accomplished winemaker, and she knows of whom she speaks.
I first tasted the fruits of Sugrue’s labours 20 years ago, when he was the winemaker at Nyetimber. In his peripatetic career thereafter, he has tipped his trademark flat cap at a host of English wineries – with offers that, it seems, they haven’t been able to refuse.
I was reminded of this on a recent jaunt to Wiston Estate, Pip and Harry Goring’s beautiful patch of Sussex. Their
equally delightful winery has nurtured not just their own-label wines, but also releases from Black Dog Hill, Jenkyn Place and Digby, among others.
Almost all the Wiston wines I tasted had been made by Sugrue. Sparkling wine takes a few years to mature before release, and he left Wiston only in 2022.
I especially liked the Brut NV, its prolonged ageing on its lees (a Sugrue trademark) giving it a savoury complexity,; the Pinot Noir-heavy Estate Cuvée 2016; and the Blanc de Blancs NV, based on the 2019 vintage, which demonstrates Sugrue’s mastery of Chardonnay.
A visit to Wiston Estate (wistonestate. com) is a congenial way to learn more about English wine. My tasting, held in their very smart shop next to the winery, was hosted by the hugely knowledgeable Candace Bugden, and I stayed for a terrific lunch at Chalk restaurant.
Dermot’s new home is something of a contrast. Under the Sugrue South Downs label, he was making his own wines while he was at Wiston. Now, with investment from, among others, hotelier Robin Hutson, actor Hugh Bonneville and wine sage (and Oldie fan) Hugh Johnson, he has his own winery.
It is a converted barn next to the Bee Tree vineyard a few miles from Haywards Heath, and it will be a while before it has anything as slick as Wiston’s visitor centre. In fact, when they threw a lunch in September to celebrate its opening, Dermot and Ana admitted they had been up late into the night making the winery fit to receive visitors.
We started in the vineyard, slurping oysters and ZODO MV (‘multi-vintage’, but based on 2017). ZODO stands for zero dosage, and the wine has great purity and focus, with a lemony finish which made it ideal with oysters. Its Chardonnay grapes came not from Bee Tree, but from a vineyard near Lewes called Mount Harry (not to be confused with the Oldie’s esteemed editor, Mount, Harry).
Sugrue’s best-known wine is named after a remark made to him by a philosophical priest (and his business partner at the time), after birds had eaten all his grapes one year: ‘Dermot, that’s the trouble with dreams.’ We tasted The Trouble with Dreams 2010 from magnum just before lunch: it is, I think, the best English wine I have ever tasted.
And, admitted Dermot, it was a mistake. ‘I thought I’d forgotten to chaptalise [add sugar to] it. But I had. So I actually did it twice.’
It was, I was delighted to discover, the happiest of accidents.
This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a brace from France – a versatile, nicely judged white from the south of France, a fresh, lively, fruity red from Sicily, and a classic claret (an Oldie favourite) that will repay a year or two in the cellar. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.
Guilhem, Moulin de Gassac Blanc, IGP Pays d’Hérault 2023, offer price £8.95, case price £107.40 Smartly assembled from three blanc grapes (Grenache, Sauvignon, Terret): dry, herbal and floral.
Frappato, Baglio Gibellina, IGT Terre Siciliane, Italy 2022, offer price £11.50, case price £138.00 Exuberantly fruity, racy, purple-hued wine from old vines, fresh and free from oak.
Château Floréal Laguens, Bordeaux Supérieur 2022, offer price £12.50, case price £150.00 Brambly fruit knitted with firm tannins. Bags of potential – for now, it’s great with roast beef.
Mixed case price £131.80 – a saving of £27.59 (including free delivery)
HOW TO ORDER Call 0117 370 9930 Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk Quote OLDIE to get your special price. Free delivery to UK mainland. For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 10th December 2024
The Oldie
SPORT
JIM WHITE
ONE MORE GOAL FOR PLEAT
In June, Brighton appointed Fabian Hürzeler as their new manager. At 31, he is younger than six members of his playing squad. It’s becoming increasingly clear that football is no country for old men.
Still, it would be unwise to say so to David Pleat, 79, a one-man barrier to the game’s tidal wave of youth.
‘I’m still here,’ says Pleat. ‘I have no intention of retiring. You’ll have to drag me off kicking and screaming.’
Turning 80 next January, he heads to matches at least three times a week. Across the country, you can spot him, up in the stands, notebook in hand. He isn’t there just as a spectator. He is applying his vast experience to locate the next generation of talent, passing on invaluable analysis to a number of clubs for whom he works as a consultant. And he insists he is not going to stop at any time soon.
‘I’m afraid I’m a football obsessive,’ he says. ‘I’m interested to a small extent in politics. But if you ask me about showbusiness or films or pop stars –not a clue.’
Across more than 70 years, his obsession has only grown. He was a much-admired teenage winger at Nottingham Forest in the sixties, before his early promise was curtailed by injury.
‘I always say I had less of a playing career; more a geography A-level,’ he says. ‘Forest to Luton to Exeter to Shrewsbury to Peterborough to Nuneaton – quite the journey.’
At the latter club, already having earned his first coaching qualification at 18, he became player/manager at an age even Hürzeler would consider young: 26. And he was really good at it, encouraging his teams to adopt an open, attacking style of play. From there, his trajectory was ever upward.
His finest moment in the dugout came 41 years ago, when he managed to keep his Luton Town side in the top flight with a last-second victory at Manchester City on the final day of the 1983 season, a win that prompted him to invade the Maine Road pitch in a jig of unhinged delight.
‘Oh no – don’t mention that,’ he smiles, remembering his impromptu audition for Strictly Come Dancing, still one of the most charming moments in football history. ‘I’ve had so much stick for that over the years.’
Across nearly 1,000 games in charge, his shrewdness – and ability to conjure winning performances – took him on to
Leicester and Sheffield Wednesday. It was with Tottenham Hotspur that he had the longest relationship: first as manager (and twice as emergency stand-in boss), then as technical director, and latterly as chief scout.
He was brilliant at all three roles, alert to modern methodologies while adhering to fundamental principles that never age. It is all there in his new memoir, appropriately – for a manager who never sought to play defensively – Just One More Goal
‘I always said I wasn’t going to write about my life until I retired, and given I had no intention of retiring, that meant I was never going to write it,’ he says. ‘Then Covid came and I was so bored without matches to go to, I started jotting down my thoughts. And the book came from that.’
Not that its publication should serve as a full stop. Even when Spurs decided to call time on their relationship earlier this year, he did not for a moment consider stepping away from the game. He took up a couple of offers that immediately came his way and carried on.
‘My word,’ he says. ‘You won’t get rid of me that easily.’
And football should be thankful that its most distinguished active oldie is going to be involved for a while yet.
MOTORING ALAN JUDD
MY IMMORTAL LAND ROVER
Land Rover MOT last week.
Passed again, although this time with an advisory: new exhaust centre and rear would soon be needed. She’s 31 years old with 136,000 miles on the clock, of which 5,000 were since the previous MOT. During that year, I’d fitted a new battery (£108), a new door seal (£11.50 plus £6 postage), a new driver’s door-lock striker (£12.95) and a new door-hinge gasket (£0.49). The new exhaust parts were £118 delivered.
Not bad for an old girl. I’ve had her three and a half years, covering the same mileage each year, and she’s yet to fail an MOT. Parts in previous years included a new starter motor (£90), wiper blades (£18.92) and speedo cable (£4.52).
I’m lucky to have the help of an excellent mechanic, a serious Land Rover man who services her and conducts running repairs; he sorts out fuses etc in his spare time. Cheap motoring?
Well, yes. Parts for older vehicles are often cheaper and more immediately available than for newer. For Land Rovers, you can get almost everything off the shelf. Also, my chugging old 200Tdi
diesel, properly maintained, is said to be good for 350,000 miles.
There’s no depreciation – the greatest cost in modern motoring. On average, cars lose about 10-15 per cent of their value each year over their lifetimes, bottoming out from about the age of ten.
Elderly Land Rovers, as long as they’re kept in or restored to good condition, don’t depreciate – rather the opposite, in fact.
Against that, you could say that 5,000 miles a year is pretty low – roughly half average – and that diesel consumption of around 30mpg is high compared with that of modern vehicles. As a 1993 car, she’s not ULEZ-friendly, and not everyone –hardly anyone, perhaps – is prepared to be bounced around in a noisy, draughty and far from rapid off-roader.
As a general rule, then, does it really make more sense to run older cars?
Depends on your use of them. If your mileage is average or lower and if you buy wisely, then it can. Cars of the early-to-mid-1990s were mostly well-made with better rust protection and greater reliability than their predecessors, but without the electronic complexity of their successors.
Worn components may make them more likely to break down than today’s cars, but the breakdowns are often less costly and serious. They don’t demand hours of expensive computer analysis to discover why the engine goes off when the wipers go on. With an older car, that kind of fault would soon be revealed as a simple earth or connection problem.
On the other hand, if you’re likely to do a higher mileage or if it’s imperative to have a reliable runner at all times, then probably the newer, the better. Especially if it’s a Toyota with its ten-year warranty. Or a Kia with seven years. But you pay for it, and it will depreciate significantly.
If you don’t want to pay for that, there are plenty of cars out there offering acceptable reliability without swingeing depreciation. A friend’s daughter wants something for around £6,000-£7,000 that’s unlikely to leave her and her new baby stranded on the hard shoulder.
I’ve suggested a Honda Jazz, famously reliable and practical and available at that price from main dealers with history and a year’s warranty (and ULEZ friendly). No worry about high mileage, as long as it’s been looked after.
But my choice cheapie today would be eBay’s smart 1990 Mercedes 190E: 111,000 miles, new injectors, pump etc. It’s an attractive, wonderfully overengineered model, with good parts availability for £2,750.
And a year’s warranty. Tempting.
Matthew Webster: Digital Life Internet cables all at sea
What a marketing masterstroke to call the internet ‘the cloud’. It has a reassuring sense of non-threatening technology, administered by some sort of supranational and beneficent United Nations.
The truth is very different; the internet relies on a monumental amount of physical infrastructure, almost all of it privately owned. You may not realise how important, and abundant, undersea cables are. They carry more than 95 per cent of global internet traffic. This includes trillions of financial transactions every day, as well as your emails.
When someone tells you that satellites are the backbone of the internet, smile knowingly. It’s underwater cables that are doing the work.
Perhaps, like me, you are old enough
Webwatch
For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk
submarinecablemap.com
See the full extent of the network.
Laying the cable https://tinyurl.com/webster445
A short film showing how cables are laid.
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
to remember the excitement of the first transatlantic telephone lines in the 1960s. They seemed almost magical.
Those cables were long pieces of copper wire, and they only just worked. Nowadays, fibreoptic technology is used, which means that pulses of light are flowing through them all the time, with the only limiting factor being the speed of light. You might have thought that was fast enough, but the internet engineers would like even more speed.
I’ll leave them to sort out that problem; we will concentrate on the sheer scale of these cables. There are almost 500 of them, with a combined length of about 900,000 miles (roughly three times the distance to the moon), and more are being laid all the time.
Astonishingly, most of the cables are not much thicker than a garden hose. They stretch across all the oceans, but it’s not as simple as just laying them in a straight line from one county to another.
The planners have to consider avoiding areas with underwater earthquakes, volcanoes or geopolitical uncertainty, and regions where lots of ships drop anchor or trawl for fish.
On top of that, cables shouldn’t be too deep, as that would make maintenance more difficult. Actually, mending a broken cable is not hard; they just haul it up to the surface, mend it and throw it back overboard. Finding the break, though, can be difficult. Even when it’s been located, there are surprisingly few vessels capable of doing this work, and they can’t work in severe weather.
So the consortia that own the cables (most of them are owned by partnerships of many private companies and possibly some governments) will generally lay more than one cable at a time, so that they have a spare.
Sometimes the damage is not accidental; these cables are an obvious target for terrorism, and it is a growing problem. Some very serious military brains are worried about the start of an era of ‘seabed warfare’, as James Stavridis, a former NATO boss, refers to it. There is no doubt that the reliance placed on these cables by the world’s financial systems, not to mention Netflix, could be a very weak spot.
The answer, you might think, is that supranational and beneficial organisation I imagined earlier. Good luck organising that; at least 14 of the longest transoceanic cables have joint US and Chinese ownership. No doubt sharing the cost seemed like a good idea at the time, but which of those two superpowers will be the first to unplug their end?
Then there are the natural challenges. The cable-designers are careful to make the cables shark-proof but, as it turns out, a real problem is octopuses. They love the rubber that tends to be used to protect cables and their associated equipment.
I rather like the idea of a harmless octopus baffling the mighty brains that run the internet and frustrating major industrial powers.
More power to all their eight arms.
Neil Collins: Money Matters Today’s
Just as in everything else, there are fashions in investment.
A very few observers can see these fashions emerging before the rest of us, and can make themselves rich as we stumble to get on board. As we buy, we don’t think we are joining a fashion trend. We think we have an insight to the future, and that today’s exciting new thing will become mainstream – at much higher prices than today.
If you think this, you are probably
fooling yourself. Fashions go as fast as they come. The most recent example is the dash for ESG, investments that ticked the boxes for Environment, Social and Governance compliance.
This was so self-evidently a Good Thing that buyers assumed it would soon shine through to the bottom line. Not only would the holders have a warm glow; so would their bank accounts. Billions were invested in the array of companies claiming to be ESG compliant.
The most obvious beneficiaries were companies associated with renewable energy. Offshore wind power was the future. Those dinosaur oil companies would be left with worthless (‘stranded’) assets as windmills took over.
The poster child here is a Danish company called Orsted. Once an oil explorer trading as the perhaps unfortunately named DONG Energy, Orsted bet the farm on windmills in the North Sea and elsewhere. From 2018 to 2021, the shares quadrupled.
Reality has since arrived – as it so often does. Orsted’s latest accounts show massive write-downs of its assets in the US, plans for an e-fuels plant have been scrapped and the dividend is ‘paused’ until at least next year.
The shares are now back to the same price as in 2018, before all the fun started. With a big investment programme to be funded, they are not obviously cheap. It’s a familiar tale for many other stocks that floated up on a green agenda.
Meanwhile, those dinosaurs are surviving pretty well, thank you. By remembering that they are oil companies, rather than some vaguely aspirational energy-supplier, they have rediscovered their sense of purpose.
World demand for oil and gas continues to rise, while the constantly improving technology of extracting it has ensured plentiful supply at a price that leaves some of those windmills looking like stranded assets.
ESG today seems to be one of those nice-to-have add-ons that politicians love so much, but which are a distraction from the business of running a business.
A clue is that nobody has yet come up with a short, satisfactory definition. Some organisations might find that the idea helps with the running of the show, like free coffee and chocolate biscuits for employees.
For the rest, it’s just another fashion that has passed. Ra-ra skirts, anyone?
La Rioja, San Sebastian and the Basque Country
1st to 8th June 2025
On our first tour with Insider’s Travel in northern Spain, readers clamoured for a tour of La Rioja and San Sebastian, where, Jo Wivell told us, we can enjoy some of the best food and wine in Spain. And she has plotted a top itinerary.
Flying in and out of Bilbao, we start our tour in the mountainous wine region of La Rioja; we then journey to the Basque Country, with its dramatic coastline. We also step over the border into French Basque Country to explore Bayonne and pretty St Jean de Luz, and finish at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
The first of our two bases is the avant-garde four-star Hotel Viura in the Riojan village of Villabuena de Álava, which boasts over 37 wineries; the second is the converted fortress four-star Parador de Hondarribia, perched above the fishing village.
ITINERARY – for full itinerary go to www.theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours
Sunday 1st June – arrival
Depart Gatwick at 14.25 on Vueling flight VY6306; arrive Bilbao at 14.30. We head south to Hotel Viura.
Monday 2nd June – the mountain villages of Rioja
A short drive to Santo Domingo de la Calzada, with its 12th-century cathedral
Above: La concha beach. Right: wine region of La Rioja
before we go on to San Millán. After lunch, we will continue to the pretty village of Ezcaray with a Gothic church and the famous blanket factory.
Tuesday 3rd June – the wines of Rioja
Thursday 5th June – San Sebastian Tour of the old town, La Concha beach, the Victoria Eugenia theatre and the Maria Cristina hotel, followed by lunch at Michelin-starred Kokotxa.
Friday 6th June –Bayonne and Saint-Jean-de-Luz Morning tour in Bayonne including the cathedral and Basque museum. After lunch, we visit the pretty fishing village of Saint-Jean-deLuz, where Louis XIV married Maria Teresa of Spain.
We drive to visit the Roda winery. Traditional Riojan lunch; then we drive on to Elciego, for a tasting at the Murua winery. Our final stop is the medieval hilltop town of Laguardia.
Wednesday 4th June – Getaria
Drive to the medieval port of Getaria, famous for anchovies; lunch at the classic El Astillero, with some delicious grilled fish and some very dry Txakoli wine. Onwards to check in at the parador at Hondarribia. Pinxtos in Kale Nagusia.
Saturday 7th June – Pasaia
We make a short crossing by steamboat to arrive in Pasaia for our walk through the port and visit to the Albaola museum; then lunch at Pasajes and farewell dinner at the renowned Arroka Berri.
8th June – Bilbao and the Guggenheim Museum
A guided tour of Frank Gehry’s masterpiece. Light lunch before we depart at 14.35 on Vueling flight VY6308; arrive Gatwick at 15.30.
HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 or please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Price per person: £3,400, which includes all meals, wine with meals, transport and entrances. You need to book and pay for your own flights, travel insurance and gratuities. Single supplement: £700. A non-refundable deposit of £750 will be required, with the full balance due on 1st March 2025.
Pintail
by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd
A story in Viscount Grey’s The Charm of Birds concerns that most elegant of ducks, the pintail (Anas acuta).
She was his only bird to earn a sentimental name, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was one of a brood reared by a wild pintail, which in 1921 ‘paid the enclosure at Fallodon the compliment of nesting there’. It was a considerable compliment. Like most of our wild ducks, the pintail is principally a winter migrant – 500 pairs are resident; 20,000 individuals migrate here.
Only the brood (one male, two females) to which Elizabeth belonged dared take corn from Grey’s cupped palm. His pinioned pintails would take only bread.
In 1922, the grain-feeders left for the summer. The two females returned that autumn and left in spring 1923. Only one returned in the autumn and for convenience was named Elizabeth.
Elizabeth spurned being fed among the resident pintails, choosing a mound next to a bench under a larch tree, where she would stand and wait.
‘If, in the business of feeding the other birds, her arrival was not noticed, she would make a little noise that sounded like gentle reproach.’
In spring, Grey’s resident waterfowl did not attend the evening feed regularly, being busy nesting. Elizabeth remained in spring 1924 but appeared only ‘now and then and it was evident from her manners that she had a nest and was sitting’. She was, but the eggs were eaten and at the end of May she migrated as usual.
In November, when Grey had given up hope of seeing her again, he heard ‘the little note of reproach’ – and there was Elizabeth standing in her usual place.
‘The unexpected return of a favourite bird after months of absence, during which it must have led a perfectly wild life and perhaps visited the Arctic zone, uplifts one with satisfaction.’
One evening in January 1925, Elizabeth arrived so weak that she was
unable to swallow the palm-cupped grain. Grey quelled her hunger with soaked bread. He never saw her again.
‘It is impossible to have tame birds without facing these tragedies: one has to make up one’s mind to do so, and to reflect that over a long series of years the tragedies are intermittent, whereas the interest given by the birds is a daily pleasure which not only is unflagging, but increases,’ he said.
If her arrival was not noticed, she would make a little noise of gentle reproach
The pintail is roughly the same size as the mallard – but longer, because of its pin-pointed tail, especially the male’s.
The world population is 7.2 million, the mallard’s 19 million. This reflects the mallard’s ready domestication, which means it can weigh over 3lb to the wilder pintail’s 2lb.
I have a painting of pintails by my brother, James McEwen (1924-71), a bird artist much admired by Sir Peter Scott.
If anyone knows the whereabouts of any painting by him (signature: monogrammed ‘JM’), I would be grateful for information.
You can buy Swoop Sing Perch Paddle by Carry Akroyd and John McEwen at www. theoldie.co.uk/readers-corner/shop
Travel
Irish Sea shanty
Harriet Rix sailed to Ireland – in the truckers’ lounge
They dimmed the lights at Crewe.
In the half-light, England rushed by, and a young man scolded his nan for drinking brandy before he was there to look after her.
He would be with her in 40 minutes, he said. She said she’d downed her third.
His tone was performative, coaxing concern. Hers, ashamed and triumphant, had the ring of truth and resonated down the carriage.
The reservation lights on the 8.20pm from Euston flashed red, blue, white. And the board announced that the train was delayed six minutes and would call into Holyhead at 5.20am.
We all have a boat train in our past. Mine was in the first year of Oxford – a weekend in Westmeath just before prelims. It was an enchantment; the truckers settling down to their sausage and chips and gravy, the women with anxious faces on their way to 12 days in Roscommon, the children bawling with tiredness, while outside on the deck the poor tired dogs gave their owners gentle looks, and a fluffy white cat – natural ally of Blofeld – glared over the back of its owner’s head, silhouetted against the sea.
The narrow cabin thrilled with the cross-rhythms of the mighty engines, the restraint of the beds an aphrodisiac.
Oscar Wilde, who said that the ‘tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young’, must have understood the wormhole burrowed out through time by the Irish Mail
In April 2023, Irish ferries added the Oscar Wilde to their roster of ferries. ‘She has the largest duty-free shopping space for any cruise ferry on the Irish Sea of more than 17,000 square feet; an ideal shopping destination for those travelling between Ireland and Britain,’ said the press release.
Boats and their design fads come and go, but by the time the vessel leaves the port, passengers have returned to the age of their first crossing and are willing to endure any amount of discomfort.
In the 19th century, discomfort was rarely an issue. In its golden age, from 1848 onwards, the Irish Mail was a glamorous engine of cut-and-thrust capitalism, with superbly fast speeds matched by immense luxury.
Fuelled by lucrative government contracts for the transfer of the mail, the Irish Mail became a fast, efficient combination of train and boat. Its passengers were whisked from Euston to Holyhead by bright red steam engines named after duchesses and transferred to steam packets with mahogany cabins and silver-plated cruets.
It was only in 1947, with a fleet much in need of investment, that it was nationalised. It remained in government hands until in 1984 it was sold for the absurdly low price of £66 million to James Sherwood, who later gorgeously revamped the Orient Express. This could have been the beginning of the new golden age, turning the Irish Mail into the luxury route to Ireland, but few of the promised changes emerged.
Now, however, there are hints of a resurgence. The much-hated charter ferry the Norbay, which had no space for foot passengers or cyclists, only one restaurant and no facilities for disabled passengers, has been replaced on the
Harriet sets sail
Pembroke-to-Rosslare route by the Isle of Innisfree, a Yeats-worthy mass of cabins almost as large as the Oscar Wilde – a hive of gambling, shopping and restaurants, and a sign of Irish ferries’ ‘ongoing commitment to the route’.
Lo here I sit at Holyhead
With muddy ale and mouldy bread
So wrote Jonathan Swift on 24th September 1727, when, as a 60-year-old dean, he was stranded on the shore of Wales, longing, unusually, to return to the ‘slavish, hateful shore’ of Ireland.
He had had a painful journey from Chester, but his intimate – perhaps lover – Stella was gravely ill, and he was desperate to see her. The captain of the ship for Dublin refused to sail, citing bad weather, although in Swift’s view he was waiting to fill up the ship with more passengers.
Swift was so desperate that he climbed the mountain in a vain attempt to see the hills of Wicklow through the drizzle.
Failing, he retired to the dry discomfort of Mrs Welch’s inn, which ‘had not one drop of wine’.
As I arrived at Holyhead Station in the early hours of the morning, desperate for a stiff drink, I understood his distress.
The wind is very cold here, and wet enough to reach to your bones. Not the tamed wind of London, but gusts into which seabirds can hitch their wings and ride all the way from the Arctic, meeting nothing but a few freak waves, and the curve of Belfast along their way.
There are brick walls which emphasise the wind, metal gratings which emphasise the cold – and even the coffee-dispensing machine is broken. Even in a summer London heatwave, Holyhead is still Swift’s ‘bleaky shore/ Where loudest winds incessant roar/ Where neither herb nor tree will thrive’.
Above: Irish Mail boats at Holyhead, 1949. Right: first-class passengers on the Hibernia, an Irish Mail boat, 1963
Below: Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
to the far end of the pitch, with five wickets down and 90 needed to save the follow-on’
Working on a US Department of State-funded mine-clearance programme near Fallujah, I’d considered both of these trumped by the rustle and glint of acknowledgement on an Iraqi minefield, as 200 phones go up and start to film any woman who appears.
Camaraderie flourishes; unlike when you have to declare yourself at an airport, the boat check-in is like being received into a charming small hotel.
After a brief wait in an antechamber, a man flings open the doors with the aplomb of the town crier, shepherding foot passengers into a little bus to shuttle them on board, and lifting prams, cases and spare bags on board with the amiable flexibility of Hercules.
And, on board, what awaits? Not the cold-leather embrace of an airline seat, but the world of Stena Lines or Irish Ferries; worker-bee cells of white cabins with neat beds, heavy watertight doors not quite managing to exclude the hint of seaweed and sea air, wide sweeps of staircase and bold prints like the gardens of Roberto Burle Marx.
Jonathan Swift was also transfigured, in 1999, into an eponymous ferry, the high-speed catamaran in Irish Ferries’ roster which can cross from Dublin to Holyhead in an hour and 49 minutes.
This runs counter to the spirit of the boat train, which is slow travel at its best. Bare and painful as the waiting room is, the warmth and jollity of the welcome as you transition from train to boat is remarkable.
Here, the trucker is king.
On my last trip, I walked into the trucker café in all ignorance, surprised by the half-closed door but following the smell of chips and sausages.
An Oxford don once told me he knew of nothing more intimidating than walking into an Anatolian village.
Dorothy L Sayers compared Lord Peter Wimsey’s entrance into an allfemale dinner at Shrewsbury College to the ‘long trek from the pavilion at Lord’s
Jonathan Swift longed for the ‘hateful shore’ of Ireland
But the truckers’ room came a close second – it conferred an electric, absolute feeling of being out of place. Everyone was male, most were tattooed and almost all had extraordinarily large arms, on show.
There was a camaraderie and a feeling of collective rest after work, an intense concentration on relaxation and recharging, of gathering strength before the next leg, the feel of caravanserais along the silk road, Everest base camp and horse-changing spots along Genghis Khan’s postal system.
The man at the nearest table was looking at me with the ketchup bottle upturned over his sausages.
‘I shouldn’t be in here, should I?’ I said to him.
‘Not unless you’re a trucker?’ he replied, in polite interrogation. ‘Well, you’re here now, aren’t you. Have a chip.’
The lady behind the canteen winked and gave me tea for free, and my friend and I settled down to our sausages. His name was Dave, and he’d just come from Latvia – but he’d been further afield in his time.
‘To Ulan Bator,’ he said.
This, I understood, was a metaphor, but he had been as far as Istanbul, and often through the Baltics.
At this point, in came Glenn, a vast man with tattoo sleeves of acanthus leaves and flowers, cradling duty-free Baileys for his daughter. He picked up on Istanbul. ‘An amazing place,’ he said.
‘And you know what? It was the capital of Byzantium, one of the greatest empires the world had ever known.’
Hours later, I went away to curl on a window seat, and woke with the dawn, stiff and cold, drawing into the calm waters and the low headland of Dublin Bay.
Harriet Rix’s Earth, Wind and Fire: How Trees Mastered the Elements and Conquered the World (Bodley Head) is out next year
Overlooked Britain
Brodsworth’s last châtelaine
Sylvia Grant-Dalton presided over a sleeping giant of a Yorkshire palazzo
lucinda lambton
What absolute joy it was first to go to Brodsworth, a lush and luxurious great empty house in Yorkshire that defies ordinary description.
With its stupendously grand staircase, peopled by a multitude of statues and its strangely huge corridors, again filled with statues and giant mirrors, it has the most marvellous sense of a time long since gone.
Its occupant was, when I visited, a memorable figure called Sylvia Grant-
Dalton, who lived there all alone in silent isolation until her death in 1988, aged 89.
One night, I lost my car keys and had to wait forlornly for a long time in the dark, standing under the porte cochère, knocking loudly over and over again.
At last, a footfall sounded; those steps will never leave my mind, getting nearer and nearer, from a complete silence, to me standing behind the great, grilled front door. Eventually, after a very long time, the door opened, revealing a tiny old lady.
Delightedly accepting her offer to spend the night, I followed her upstairs, past sadly grim and emptied rooms, into a tiny chamber next to hers, with her wireless as a loud companion.
What an atmosphere it turned out to be: I was kept awake all night by a seemingly shouted blow-by-blow account of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination,
thundering out into the Yorkshire air. It was odd indeed.
The house was built in 1861 for Charles Sabine Thellusson, whose great grandfather Peter Thellusson, a merchant and banker, had bought the estate in 1791. It survived as a midVictorian beauty of a comfortable country house with umpteen original furnishings, as well as the grand formal gardens all around it.
While the exterior of the house is solidly straightforwardly neoclassical, inside it is a veritable forest of columns and statues, marching about its great halls and corridors. With marbled, gilded, damask, mirrored and gilded walls and the thousandfold reflections of naked marble mothers cuddling naked marble babies, the effect is of quite astonishing, old-fashioned opulence.
Brodsworth was built by Philip Wilkinson to the designs of Chevalier Casentini, an Italian architect from Lucca, who it is thought never put his toe in England, let alone on Yorkshire soil.
The atmosphere of the place is steeped in southern climes, with its columned ‘courtyards’.
Space flows into space, with Minton tiles galore and matching Axminster carpets underfoot, stretching off in seemingly limitless directions.
When great good fortune took me there, Sylvia alone was in charge. And what a glorious ‘in charge’ that was, with her reading in her filled-to-the-brim sitting room within the eerie silence of the great house.
At that point no modernising hand – not even the plumbers; there are several handsome valve closets –had been laid on the house since it was finished.
The library and the study were still hung with their hand-blocked and brilliantly gilded wallpapers, and the original damask still glowed on the furniture, curtains and walls.
On either side of every downstairs window hung thick ropes with leaden weights.
Brodsworth was built on the proceeds of a curious and celebrated will made in 1797 by a Swiss banker, Peter Thellusson. He left £700,000, stipulating that it was to accumulate at compound interest during the lifetime of his sons’ sons. Over the years, thousands of pounds were spent by the enraged family contesting it.
By 1859, when the House of Lords pronounced in favour of two greatgrandsons, Charles Sabine Thellusson and Lord Rendlesham, there was precious little left of the original capital.
A coal mine and the Brodsworth estate was Charles Thellusson’s share. After demolishing the Georgian house, he set to work with plans to build his palace.
Sylvia Grant-Dalton serving lunch in the dining room, 1965
‘It was built to impress,’ said Sylvia who had lived there for nearly 60 years. ‘With its size, the length of its drive, how many pineapples there were on the roof – such a dotty way to judge people. I do think that they were really rather horrid sometimes.’
She married Charles Grant-Dalton
(Thellusson’s nephew) when she was only 16. He had made up his mind to marry her when she was 12 and he 30.
‘He was always in the nursery, making such a botheration of himself, which got Nanny and then my governess in a rage,’ Sylvia said. ‘“Why can’t he have tea in the drawing room like everybody else?”’
He died in 1944, and eight years later Sylvia married his first cousin Eustace Grant-Dalton.
‘Dear old Eustace,’ she said. ‘He was such a brave man. He got into all the wars he could. Queen Victoria signed his first commission for the Boer War and he fought in the Kaiser’s war and the last war. When he died, he left me the house to look after and I haven’t left it for a single day.’
She grew very fond of Brodsworth although she much preferred Georgian architecture. ‘I don’t care for the
sentimentality of Victorian times. The statues, which I call “the poor cold ladies” to the children, are not quite my gusto, I’m afraid.’
When I left Brodsworth after my most magical stay, Sylvia’s daughter was the only person left to live there – with some difficulty! There was no one else who felt the desire to live in this electrifying time warp and the house was in gravest peril.
Such was the sorry situation – but, joy of joys, it was to be saved by English Heritage. It was to be saved with a superlative sympathy and as much wisdom as is possible to imagine.
I went there when it was being most proudly shown off to the public and was entirely delighted to see my dear old friend bought back to its much-deserved vibrant life.
Clockwise from above left: Brodsworth Hall, by Italian architect Chevalier Casentini; inner hall; the drawing room
Taking a Walk
Take a walk on the Wye’s side
Beginnings are often tentative, awkward and riddled with doubt.
And so it was with this walk, which began in a Morrisons car park in a shabbier corner of Ross-on-Wye. I had devised a two-hour walk guided by my new best friend, the Ordnance Survey app, and this was not the scenic start I’d envisaged.
I headed up Brampton Road, out of Ross, a lovely but not-too-twee Wye-side town, cars accelerating noisily up the hill. The suburbs were full of hanging baskets and privet hedges in front of handsome local-authority semis, and the occasional tetchy household sign. ‘Don’t even think of parking here,’ read one. This was not a street where parking was at a premium.
The road soared over the busy Ross bypass, linking middle England to South Wales, and I took a lane that ducked down into a verdant valley and then up again. House martins chittered in the grey sky. I passed a farm so large it had become a village and continued onto a path through fields of wheat, the ripe heads sighing as the wind blew over them. Fissures were opening up in the hard red soil between the rows.
Turning west beyond Brampton Abbotts church, I tramped beside a swish wooden eco-home, looking as if it was waiting for Kevin McCloud to stride across the pasture towards it, nodding appreciatively.
I reached a modest hilltop overlooking the Wye Valley, with fine views west to the blue hills of Wales. The far horizon glowed orange, below blue-grey cumuli. On the near horizon, the spire of Ross’s church, St Mary’s, stood attractively tall against a wooded hill, beside dainty houses perched on the river cliff.
I took an ancient, pink-dusted track downhill, meeting a handsome hedgerow oak, decaying now but still standing 12ft tall. Rowans in the hedge were laden with bright orange berries. It was a lovely old way.
At the bottom, I turned onto an old railway line, a tunnel of green with badger citadels excavated into the embankments. A red admiral flew past; rooks called.
Finally, I reached the climax of my walk: a path beside the Wye. What a river! Big,
patrick barkham
silvery and muscular, as wide as the Thames as it flows through Berkshire but with a far more powerful flow.
The sticky-sweet smell of decaying hemlock and damp vegetation rose from steep banks where shone the lurid pink flowers of Himalayan balsam, an invasive species I struggle to get worked up about when its blooms are so popular with pollinators. Every short while, there was an informal snicket forced through willowy scrub and down the steep bank, where people sought an encounter with the river’s rapids, stony shallows and deep swirling pools.
The walk was my warm-up for a talk about Roger Deakin, wild swimmer extraordinaire and subject of my latest book – but I’d let myself down by forgetting my swimming trunks.
Many dire things are said about the water quality of the Wye today, and this beautiful river is a brown facsimile of its former silver-and-green, salmonspouting glory, but locals still swim here.
I suffered small agonies of regret and inadequacy. Rog wouldn’t have forgotten!
Rog would have dived in in his pants. I sweated along the bank, the pink, blue and cream patchwork of old Ross growing larger as I approached its river cliff. A kingfisher called, an officious whistle like a stationmaster of yore hurrying latecomers to the water.
Despite my regrets, the walk’s end was beautiful, on to Rope Walk – a sign that fishing was once a staple of this riverside community – up through the Pleasure Gardens and past the Royal.
Outside the Man of Ross, drinkers savoured the evening sunshine. We all looked back over the Wye, twisting and glistening like a serpent in its green valley, and sighed with pleasure.
Start at Morrisons (what3words: airship, jugs, identify), take roads and paths to Brampton Abbotts, turn left on the footpath and track down to the Wye, then circle back to finish at the Man of Ross
The Swimmer: The Wild Life of Roger Deakin by Patrick Barkham is out now
On the Road
From Darkest Peru to the M25
Emily Mortimer tells Louise Flind about marmalade sandwiches – and filming the new Paddington movie in a not-so-glamorous location
Do you travel light?
I never did, but my husband’s incredibly bossy about travelling light – so I’ve learnt to pack just carry-on luggage. But I can’t just have a very neat bag and a backpack. I have about a million satellite bags with things trailing out of them.
What’s your favourite destination?
It’s a house in Italy that my dad (John Mortimer) and mum used to visit every summer. My dad died 15 years ago, and we went back only in the last couple of years. It really reminds me of my childhood and of him. It’s down a very precipitous dusty track near Siena, with wild boars and vipers.
What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?
The South of France – a magical place owned by Tony Richardson outside Saint-Tropez. He used to put on a play and my mum and dad would be in it.
Did you grow up in a very creative house?
My dad was a writer and there were always other writers or actors around. I was more enchanted by ice dancers Torvill and Dean, the dancers on Summertime Special and Delia Smith. I was a very quiet, shy child; I watched a lot of television. Apparently, David Niven did a magic trick on me, but I definitely didn’t know who David Niven was.
Did you always want to be an actress? I found myself acting and being drawn to it.
Didn’t your father want you to become a barrister?
Being a lawyer was his day job because his father had wanted him to do that. He loved the law and it gave him so many good stories – Rumpole – but he definitely wouldn’t have wished it on me.
Do you think you prefer directing to acting?
Acting has always made me quite neurotic in a way. When it’s good and you’re really in it, it’s such an exciting
feeling. I am quite shy and it makes you feel embarrassed and worry about whether you’re pretty, charming or good enough. When I was directing, I really did enjoy it because there was none of that – it was just a compulsion to tell the story.
What’s it like acting opposite Paddington? Presumably you don’t actually see him?
You don’t see the figure of him, but when you’re acting in a film, you often don’t see the figure you’re acting opposite. With Paddington, you’ve got so much information because of Ben Whishaw’s incredible inhabiting of Paddington in the other films.
Why is Paddington so magic? What’s his secret ingredient (apart from marmalade)?
It’s really the thing of marmalade sandwiches in his hat. And he’s all about people looking after other people – also he’s sweet and maddening as well.
Where was it filmed?
Not in Peru – closer to the M25.
Did you always love Nancy Mitford, and particularly The Pursuit of Love? Where was that filmed?
I read The Pursuit of Love when I was very little, but first I read Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford. She described this mother of five girls and the boy, tearing her hair out trying to work out how they would grow up respectable because they were so feral and wild. And every week she made them write how they would economise on a household on £200 a year. And Nancy, every week, wrote ‘£199 flowers’ and that made me love Nancy Mitford so much. It was filmed in Badminton mostly, in Gloucestershire.
What’s the most exotic place you’ve filmed in? Sarawak in Malaysia, in long houses with the Iban tribe.
The least exotic? Everywhere becomes unexotic once you start filming it. I remember filming in Winchester Cathedral and your breath is taken away by the beauty of this place. And, within five minutes, there are Styrofoam cups everywhere and it’s not a cathedral any more – it’s just a set.
What do you miss about England, living in America? Is it nice having your friend Dolly Wells living near you in Brooklyn? I miss my family, mum and best friends, and also the circle of friends that I don’t see enough who I love. And the BBC. If there’s one compensation, it’s that my best friend is a ten-minute walk away and our two little dogs are best friends…
Would you like your children to become actors?
Whether I like it or not, they are.
Where did you go on your honeymoon?
We went to Seville and Grenada and I was very pregnant.
Do you lie on a beach?
I find that I’ve got more like my dad as I get older, where I have to do some work every day – otherwise I feel a bit strange. I’m not very good at relaxing.
Do you have a go at the local language? I speak Russian, but I don’t get any practice, apart from taxi drivers in New York.
What’s your favourite food?
I think it’s ravioli, but my daughter claims she’s never seen me eat it.
Paddington in Peru is in cinemas from 8th November
1 Bar staff’s offer for bohemians (4,7)
7 Protective covering on a parrot (3)
9 Survey’s right with European community committee disheartened (5)
10 Argumentative understudy initially replacing number of small parts (9)
11 Bird finding husks of corn in church (9)
12 Joint in carpet? (5)
13 Mean gesture with one family after vacation (7)
15 As it happens, going west must be wrong (4)
18 Swallow in trepidation as promotion is rejected (4)
20 Failed broadcast by revolutionary scientist (7)
23 Some drinks and a single shot (5)
24 Working dog must collect bird immediately (2,3,4)
26 Cooked most of tripe and onion, getting wine (5,4)
27 Country where you’ll find tea drinking popular (5)
28 Cold shoulder – of lamb? (3)
29 Understand he’s let eight out (3,3,5)
Down
Genius crossword 445 EL SERENO
1 Outlook of accountant employed by Amazon? (8)
2 Argument coming from retired coppers, perhaps (8)
3 The girl left with no regulars may be on this! (5)
4 Popular whim of early childhood? (7)
5 Novel Russian part of Plymouth (7)
6 Dark, rough sea, about to go to bed (9)
7 An obsessive sort of habit? (6)
8 Artificial flowers at zebra crossing (6)
14 Sister and boyfriend trapped in island’s swamps (9)
16 Sanctimonious seaman infringing copyright law (8)
17 Firm supporter breaking law in beginning (8)
19 Recommend writing about work (7)
20 Awkward chat about a bishop’s complaint (7)
21 Subject adopting right line (6)
22 Basket in which jokes may be caught? (6)
25 Do better than forty in Latin oral (5)
13th November 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.
1 Indeterminate (area)
efficiencies, reduces staff etc (12)
gay red (anag.) (7)
Exams (5)
(5)
Up to the time
(5)
Shakespeare’s spouse (4,8)
Exciting, intoxicating (5)
Russian shooter (3)
Massage (3)
Landlocked South African kingdom (7)
O3; bracing sea
(5)
Boredom (5)
Purloin (5)
Winner: Florence Proctor, Kinrossie, Perth
Runners-up: Susan Puddy, Wargrave, Berkshire; Phillip Wickens, Faygate, West Sussex
The opening lead is the most influential card of the 52 played. And it’s unique –the only card played without a sight of dummy. Often (mostly, even), your aim is to avoid giving away a trick. But sometimes you can create something out of nothing – as was the case on this month’s deal from the Provost Spring Foursomes.
Dealer South North-South Vulnerable
9 8 7 4
9
The bidding South West North East
1 ♠ Pass 2NT (1) Pass
3 ♥ (2) Pass 4 ♠ (3) End
1. Game-forcing spade raise – the Jacoby convention. 2. Natural second suit in a non-minimum hand. 3. No slam interest. Four spades went down at only one table – the one where West found the diabolical opening lead of the two of spades. Declarer beat East’s knave with the ace and tried a club to the queen –even if the finesse lost, he could discard two diamonds on the ace-queen. East won and switched to the eight of diamonds – to the queen, king and ace. Convinced West had led a singleton spade – for who would lead from queenlow? – at trick four declarer ran dummy’s nine of spades. Unfortunately, this lost to West’s queen, who then cashed the knave of diamonds and switched to a heart. East’s ace was the setting trick, declarer losing a trick in every suit.
At one table, North-South had bid boldly to six spades. West kicked off with the normal passive seven of clubs. Declarer won the ace and guessed right to lead a heart to the king. He then cashed the ace-king of spades, painlessly drawing trumps (note the effect of the two-of-spades lead). Declarer then lost a second heart to West’s ten, West exiting safely with the queen (nothing better). Declarer now led the queen of clubs, ruffing away East’s king. He then ruffed his fourth heart, cashed the knave of clubs, ruffed a fourth club and led his last spade, squeezing West in the minors. Twelve tricks and slam made. ANDREW ROBSON
Competition TESSA CASTRO
IN COMPETITION No 311 you were invited to write a poem called Apple Pie. There was a glut of tasty entries, though I was rather shocked by the sentimentality of some. Bruce Maunder Taylor, however, in a more Rabelaisian spirit, recounted an aerial battle of apple pies engaging with magpies and flying pigs. Back at the table, Vivienne Woods described a moment of tasting: ‘Ugh! his appetite had abated/ She had used a garlic tainted knife,/ A taste he really hated.’ Commiserations to them and to Erika Fairhead, Peter Jarvis, William Wood, Julie Wigley, Catherine Cooper, I White, Mike Morrison, Iris Bull, Rob Salamon, D A Prince and Jane Moth, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Erica Smith.
Stuff Lamotte-Beuvron and the tarte Tatin, Also Ferrara’s torta di mele! I feel the same about Connecticut, All that pumpkin pie and apple jelly.
Don’t bother with Telemark’s eplekake Cologne’s Apfelkuchen’s very spartan. Eschew and evade The Hague like the plague With its fiddly crumb-topped appeltaarten
Perhaps, having badmouthed all these great places
And superb desserts one really ought try, Facetious me should sit very quiet And eat my English apple (humble) pie.
Erica Smith
Lightheaded sweetness and scents of delight; The memories of summers so long ago. Heaven on earth in the tree dappled light; Angels defended by my bended bow With green lichened arrows of apple wood. A faithful companion with such sad eyes Sees feast-fattened wasps on their fallen food,
While birds swooped and swept in ever blue skies.
I could linger all through the livelong day And wander beneath the fruit bearing boughs
Till the sun gave out its last evening ray And to hunger and home my thoughts aroused.
In the kitchen where my mother had been While I played and lazed as the time tripped by,
The sense and scents of my day so serene Were all to be found in her apple pie.
Roger Farrance
The pastry may be short or puff. Make it fast and bake away!
Cold hands. Bramleys. Cinn– enough! (The pastry may be short or puff –Keep it simple – that’s the way, Like a well-filled triolet.)
The pastry may be short or puff, Make it fast and bake away!
Bill Holloway
Forage in the flower-bed for fallers plump and sweet,
Remove the sticky snails and slugs, Pick out deeply burrowed bugs
And gather your ingredients to make a summer treat.
Forget the fiddly fluffing of the butter in the flour;
To cook a crust of crispy gold
Just buy your pastry ready-rolled And save yourself a messy, stressy, sticky, lumpy hour!
Pick a pretty pie dish; press the pastry round the edges.
Now with apples get to grips: Off with peel and out with pips And carefully cut the clean fresh fruit in neat and tidy wedges.
Then pop the blackbird in the middle, apple piled on high, And with a generous sugar shake, Cover, pat and prick and bake, And eat your very own delicious homegrown apple pie.
Jenny Jones
COMPETITION No 313 How’s your high street? A poem please, called The Closed Shop. 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 313’, by Thursday 14th November.
‘THIS is your plan to pay for our retirement?’
FOUND
Cambridge historian, genealogist for 50 years, researches your family's history. No task too big or small. Phone 07517 662870 for brochure, sample report and free estimate.
To advertise, contact Monty on 0203 8597093 or via email MontyZakheim@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £48+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 28th October 2024
To
& Publishing
Books & Publishing
Books
Jewellery
Clothing & Bedding
To advertise, contact Monty on 0203 8597093 or via email MontyZakheim@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £48+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 28th October 2024
I still send her flowers
QI have been a widower for nine years now. I buy flowers for the house every two weeks, usually alstroemerias. My wife always had them in the house. My buying flowers reminds me daily of her. There’s nothing soppy or silly about them. Your correspondent (September issue) should buy flowers for his wife while he is still able to.
Jim B, Doncaster
AI was so touched to read of this charming ritual. You sound like such a kind and sensitive man. I am sure this weekly reminder of the love you had – and still have – for your wife spreads itself to all your visitors and, if you believe your house has some kind of vibe, even in the bricks and mortar.
I am sure the flowers wreak their own magic on you, too, and lift your spirits every time you see them. I’m now going to copy your example and buy regular flowers for my late grandmother.
Readers may think I’m a bit barmy, but I feel sure it’ll have a positive effect that will help dispel some of the gloom so many of us feel about everyday life.
Not such an easy rider
QI’ve just bought a mobility scooter and I’m really nervous when I go out on the street on it, and especially when I have to cross one very busy stretch of road. Distant cars approach so fast, and then there are cyclists everywhere, Deliveroo riders who fail to obey any road rules, and fast motorbikes. Sometimes my courage fails me and I sit petrified waiting for a break
Ask Virginia
virginia ironside
in the traffic. The nearest zebra crossing is some way away.
I’ve seen other oldies all the time in town on scooters who just stick two fingers up to traffic and sail across roads without a care. How do I stop being such a ninny, Virginia?
L S, Herefordshire
ARing up your local council and ask if they have a department for helping oldies. Some may have training for people in your position. I’m sure some of the mobilityscooter companies can recommend organisations that could help you, too.
Until then, why not stop a passer-by and ask if they can help? It’s amazing how kind people are when you ask. Most people love going into the traffic and holding up their hand to help someone like you. It makes them feel like your knight on a white charger.
Grandson’s small mistake
QI wanted a mirror put up in the bathroom and my 15-year-old grandson offered to do it for me. I told him where I wanted it, and he did a reasonable job and I paid him £20 – just as a tip, really – but it’s in the wrong place. He said he ‘thought it looked nicer there’. I’d feel so mean getting him to come back and I don’t want to discourage him from offering to help, but it annoys me that I have to get someone to redo it.
Althea B, Hayes
ADon’t dream of it. Get your grandson to come back and redo it and fill in the holes left in the wall, if there are any, from his first
Distribution Ltd, 2 East Poultry Avenue, London EC1A 9PT; www.seymour.co.uk
ISSN 0965-2507.
To order a print subscription, email theoldie@subscription.co.uk, or call 01858 438791, or write to The Oldie, Tower House, Sovereign Park, Market Harborough LE16 9EF. Print subscription rates for 12 issues: UK £51.50; Europe/Eire £58; USA/Canada £70; rest of world £69.
endeavour. You can just say, ‘Darling, you’ve done it beautifully and I’m so grateful, but I’ve tried it out and it just doesn’t work. Could you put it where I asked you to in the first place?’ This way you’re teaching him a big lesson – in a kind way – that he’ll be grateful for all his life. Whether he becomes an employer or an employee in later life, he’ll learn an essential rule: the customer is always right.
Update your will
QI’ve just made my will and I’m rather upset to find that the ‘wishes’ one makes have no legal binding at all. The executors can just ignore them. There are a few friends to whom a little gift of money would make all the difference. Do I have to go back to the solicitors and rewrite the whole thing? It was quite an expensive procedure to start with. Name and address supplied
AI’m afraid it’s true. Such details are often steamrollered over by the executors. You’ve reminded me that I must do the same myself. It’s also worth revisiting your will regularly, because smaller gifts are often going to people who die, or you may make new friends. Your expression of wishes needs constant refreshing.
It’s the same with a medical advance decision. It needs re-signing every year to keep it valid.
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.
To buy a digital subscription for £29.99 or a single issue for £2.99, go to the App Store on your tablet or mobile and search for ‘The Oldie’.
All rights of reproduction are reserved in respect of all articles, drawings, sketches etc published in The Oldie in all parts of the world. Reproduction or imitation of any of these without the express prior written consent of the publisher is forbidden.
The Oldie is available in audio and e-text format for the benefit of blind and partially sighted readers through RNIB Newsagent. Telephone 0303 123 9999 or visit www.rnib. org.uk/newsagent for further details.
The Oldie is published by Oldie Publications Ltd, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA
Printed in England by Walstead Group. Distributed by Seymour
