Portraits of the artist as a young – and old – man: Hockney
As well as being a sublime artist, David Hockney has a witty, laconic way with words.
That gift is celebrated –along with some of his lovely pictures – in a new book, The World According to David Hockney.
In the introduction, Martin Gayford writes how ‘epigrams and insights cascade out of his month’. How fresh Hockney’s observations are: ‘There’s no such thing as an ignorant artist really; if they are an artist, they know something.’
He is revealing, too, on his own story: ‘In Bradford [his home town], the light was grey, mostly. I’d noticed the shadows in movies and I knew Hollywood was a place with sun – so I wanted to go there. Like Van Gogh going to Arles.’
Hockney is very funny, too, particularly about his student days: ‘At the Royal College of Art, people used to mock me: ‘Trouble at t’mill, Mr Ormondroyd’ – stuff like that.
‘I didn’t take any notice but
sometimes I’d look at their drawings and think, “If I drew like that, I’d keep my mouth shut.’’ ’
The actress Madeline Smith celebrates her 75th birthday on 2nd August.
She set a million pulses racing as Miss Caruso, the Bond girl in Live and Let Die (1973), where Roger Moore nimbly unzips her dress with a magnetic digital watch.
A regular contributor to The Oldie, Madeline has acted with everyone from Ava Gardner to Vincent Price; from Alec Guinness to Arthur Lowe, Paul Eddington, Diana Dors and Frankie Howerd.
In Madeline’s words, it has been a ‘varied life: cinema, television, radio, theatre tours and poetry readings’.
Among this month’s contributors
Roger Lewis (p14) wrote Seasonal Suicide Notes and biographies of Charles Hawtrey and Peter Sellers. Erotic Vagrancy, his book about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, is to be a TV series.
Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (p22) are one of Britain’s greatest screenwriting partnerships. They wrote The Likely Lads, Porridge, Lovejoy and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.
John McEwen (p18 and p79) writes our Bird of the Month column, illustrated by Carry Akroyd. Their new book, Swoop Sing Perch Paddle, is out on 1st August. He helped to found The Oldie in 1992.
Fay Maschler (p80) is restaurant critic of Tatler. She was restaurant critic of the Evening Standard, 1972-2020. She is author of Eating In and, with Elizabeth Jane Howard, Cooking for Occasions
But she regards 1979, when she began an English degree at Goldsmiths, as a turning point in her life.
She says, ‘As a child, I always enjoyed writing, but in my late teens my education suffered because of my convent school and my home life. By the late 1970s, I had a eureka moment, and decided I needed to do some growing up – so I enrolled as a mature student at London University.’
The next three years were ‘challenging, terrifying, exciting, and transformative. David Margolies guided my work and, on graduation, the ingénue with that high-pitched voice from the 1970s was no more; I had changed completely.
‘To this day, I remember studying Robert Frost and my reaction to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Windhover.’ We urge Madeline to write her memoirs.
Bond girl turns 75: Madeline Smith (as Miss Caruso) and 007
The Oldie is sad to hear of the death of Allen Freiesleben, one of our favourite cartoonists, who has died at the age of 90.
He contributed many Oldie cartoons, including the Tarzan one (pictured), and illustrated lots of covers.
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Allen Freiesleben was born in Fulham. His German name caused discrimination during the Second World War: his father narrowly escaped internment.
Allen’s National Service was interrupted by serious illness. While recovering, he discovered Wilenski’s French Modern Painters, a book that set him on a fresh trajectory.
He had an easy acceptance of abstract art and immediately connected Mickey Mouse with Picasso’s work – and venerated them both.
He taught at Elmhurst School in Croydon, yet still had time to paint and draw for magazines such as Punch, as well as The Oldie
Allen will be much missed at Oldie Towers.
‘Harold, I’m leaving you’
After our June article on The Third Man, contributor Michael Barber
Allen Freiesleben’s Tarzan cartoon for The Oldie. Sadly, Allen has died, at 90
got in touch to say that Kim Philby was not the only Soviet spy associated with the film.
A much greater contribution was made by the European correspondent of the Times, Peter Smollett. That was the nom de guerre of an Austrian, Hans Smolka, who, like Philby, was recruited in Vienna in 1934.
Graham Greene, who wrote The Third Man, mugged up several pieces Smollett had written on sewers, four-power police patrols and the penicillin trade.
So derivative were parts of Greene’s script that an assistant of Korda, worried that this might constitute plagiarism, persuaded the producer to pay Smollett a fee of £200 – a large sum then.
Like John Le Carré, Greene often spoke of the affinity between writers and spies.
The producer Alexander Korda’s son, Michael, heard him say, ‘The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people.’
‘Bernard
spends a lot of his time on anti-social media’
The National Gallery will next year exhibit a painting that may be the world’s greatest fraud – not that the art establishment likes to be reminded.
The Madonna and Child will be included in the gallery’s ‘Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350’ show next March.
It’s usually attributed to the late-13th-century Tuscan painter Duccio. Commonly dated to 1300, it was acquired by New York’s Met for $45 million in 2004.
Having shelled out that much, the Met insists it is genuine, but the late Professor James Beck of Columbia University had his doubts. He thought it was a 19th-century forgery. His friend Michael Daley, who runs the London branch of the pressure group ArtWatch, agrees.
The real thing? Duccio’s Madonna and Child, 1300
‘The Metropolitan Museum’s so-called Duccio is probably the greatest museum acquisitions blunder of all time,’ says Daley. ‘Nothing is right: the tiny picture has no history or pedigree. When it emerged in Florence in 1904, it was said to have been found in an antique shop. The city was known as a factory of forgers.
‘The picture was attributed to Duccio by Bernard Berenson’s notoriously venal wife and a protégé who was a front man for forgers.
‘Lord Duveen declined to buy the picture. When it was bought in 2004 by the Met it had been out of sight to scholars
for over half a century and was known only by a single black-and-white photograph.’
Daley adds that modern, round-headed nails were found in the frame. They had been covered in supposedly 14th-century gesso. ‘That such a work was presented by the Met as a seminal work of ‘immense achievement and influence’ and will now be shown 20 years later as such at the National Gallery might suggest a systemic museumworld gullibility – unless the National Gallery takes the occasion to set the art historical record straight.’
Our parliamentary system attaches almost sacred significance to a winning election manifesto.
Whips browbeat their MPs into voting for policies that were in the manifesto. Under the Salisbury Convention, the House of Lords will not block bills that were promised in a manifesto.
In this summer’s election, however, manifestos were hardly dominant. The campaign began on 24th May, but the Conservatives did not produce their manifesto until 11th June and Labour’s came two days later.
The two parties’ candidates can hardly be said to have agreed to all the policies in those documents: they had become candidates before the manifestos were published
Conclusion, perhaps: Whips should be told to get stuffed by their MPs, and the Salisbury Convention (established in 1945) is out of date.
At last, the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing is getting its due.
The school was set up by Cedric Morris (1889-1982) and Arthur Lett-Haines (1894-1978) in Dedham, Essex, in 1937.
After the building burnt down, they moved to Benton End, Suffolk. Pupils included Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling.
And now, in the biggest show of its kind since 1984, both artists are celebrated at Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, in Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines (until 3rd November).
Cedric Morris was always the more celebrated of the two painters, not least for his iris pictures. He was also a great plantsman, producing 90 named iris varieties.
The show puts Lett-Haines on an equal footing, featuring his surrealist works, as well as his own flower pictures.
Set side by side (pictured), you can see that Lett-Haines was quite a match for his dear companion.
Sir Keir Starmer, citing Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair, has repeatedly claimed to be the fourth person to lead the Labour Party to government from opposition at a general election. Is he both right and wrong?
Attlee certainly won the 1945 election but did not do so from opposition,
having served in Churchill’s wartime government.
But Starmer may still be said to be Labour’s fourth from-opposition election winner. Ramsay MacDonald pulled off the feat in 1929 (having had an earlier short stint as PM, at the invitation of the palace rather than the people).
MacDonald is the leader whom modern Labour politicians will not acknowledge. But if Starmer ever finds himself at Westminster Abbey on official duties, he will see a flagstone plaque to poor Ramsay near the abbey’s Great West Door, a few feet from the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior.
‘This one is a husband doll. You wind it up and it runs off with a younger doll’
Ageism at BBC Radio 3 would, oldies will agree, be a terrible thing.
But for what other reason has the wonderful classical music presenter Sean Rafferty been given the boot from the station’s afternoon drivetime show In Tune?
Rafferty may allegedly be 76 years old, but he sounds like an Ulster version of Peter Pan. He is to be replaced by the charming Petroc Trelawny, who is 53 but sounds older.
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‘Juice!’
Flowers in a Portuguese Landscape, Cedric Morris, 1968. Jeunes Filles aux Fleurs, Lett-Haines, 1935
Anyone for Venice?
What a treat to see an altar in the Frari restored by Venice in Peril
When I was a boy, in the 1950s, a few years before Keir Starmer was born, when Harold Macmillan was Prime Minister and we’d never had it so good, and when Andrew Lloyd Webber, aged nine, was starting out as a composer (creating a suite of six pieces for family and friends), the longest-running musical in the history of the West End was an enchanting show called Salad Days.
My parents took me to see it at the Vaudeville Theatre in the Strand. Three times. I loved that show.
I bought the EP and learnt all the songs. The one that is still in my head, almost 70 years down the line, is the one that begins, ‘Summer and sunshine and falling in love…’
I am just back from three fabulous days in Venice and, down every calle I wandered and over every little bridge I crossed, I found myself singing my favourite song from my favourite show.
I fall back in love with Venice every time I go, despite the crowds and the prices.
It’s ludicrously expensive and the main squares and thoroughfares are packed with heaving humanity, but it’s worth every euro and, if you leave the beaten track, you can find any number of deserted backwaters.
The joy for me on this trip was discovering that the British conservation charity Venice in Peril is still going strong. I rather assumed that it had died a few years ago when its great champion and chairman, John Julius Norwich, left us. Not so.
Venice in Peril is alive and well and currently conserving a tour de force of late Baroque sculpture, a huge altar in the Frari (Venice’s second-largest church after St Mark’s), created in 1711 and designed to frame a relic of the Holy Blood. The altar, reckoned the best work of Francesco ‘Cabianca’ Penso (16651737), has become unstable and at risk of collapse.
Venice by John Bratby (1957)
Dr Susan Steer, Venice in Peril’s delightful and awesomely knowledgeable woman on the spot, led me up the ladder and onto the scaffolding to see the conservators at work.
They are doing a painstaking, meticulous and brilliant job – well worth supporting if you love Venice as I do.
I have several paintings of Venice on the walls at home. None, alas, by a great master, but several by my friend John Bratby (1928-92), once quite famous as the founder of the 1950s Kitchen Sink school of painting, so-called after one of his paintings, The Kitchen Sink
John was a colourful character (his paintings were colourful, too) and crafty with it. I met him in the early 1980s when he sent me a letter out of the blue:
‘Dear Mr Brandreth, Would you come to Hastings for four hours, or less, to let me paint you as we talk, with something to eat from my wife, Patti, on the side. No commercial considerations at all.’
He went on, ‘I believe the individual is an endangered species with the advance of the collectivist state and the rapid materialisation of Orwell’s 1984; and for years I’ve been painting individuals from life…’
Among them, he confided, were Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and Paul McCartney.
I imagine he leafed through Who’s Who (and the TV Times) and sent off the same letter to one and all. Vanity being what it is, scores of us succumbed and made our way to the Bratbys’ glorious address – the Cupola and Tower of the
Winds, Belmont Road, Hastings – to have our portraits painted by the great man.
He looked like Raymond Briggs’s Father Christmas, if a touch more dishevelled. Patti, his wife, was delightfully blowsy, with hair dyed as black as her black leather trouser suit – which she wore, she told me, to ‘excite’ her husband. They met through the Lonely Hearts column in Time Out.
We didn’t talk much as he painted, and Patti stayed out of the way, down the corridor, in the kitchen. He worked at speed, piling the paint onto the canvas with a knife.
Every 40 minutes or so, he’d sigh and stop and mop his brow and sip his coffee and call out to his wife, ‘Patti! Patti! Blue paper! Blue paper!’
Patti would then come scurrying down the corridor and into the room, holding a piece of blue notepaper and a pencil. For a second she’d study the work in progress and then write something on the paper and give it to him, retreating at once without saying a word. This happened four or five times.
Towards the end of the session, when John went out to the loo, I got up from my chair and went over to look at the blue papers scattered on the floor around the canvas.
The messages were all in the same vein: ‘I love you, John!’; ‘This is your best work’; ‘Wonderful!’; ‘Keep going. I love you!’
I did not buy his portrait of me (he was asking for £200), but I did buy two of his Venice pictures and they give me real pleasure every day.
Most days, too, I think of Patti as I sit alone in my study working on my next book calling out ‘Blue paper! Blue paper!’ while my wife in the kitchen turns up the volume and carries on watching the latest episode of Bargain Hunt
Gyles Brandreth is author of The Seven Secrets of Happiness
The cowboys of London’s Wild West
I’m a dream client for rip-off builders
matthew norman
As life meanders on towards the grave, the unanswered questions mount up.
Why is the BBC executive who chose Laura Kuenssberg to co-host its electionnight coverage at liberty, and not weaving macramé pot-plant holders in a mediumsecurity psychiatric facility? Is the deity responsible for this planet actively malevolent or plain stupid?
And do mixed-doubles players who cover their mouths when talking between points really imagine there are professional lip-readers in the crowd, poised to decipher their words and relay them, via a two-way radio mic, into earpieces covertly worn by the opposing team? It’s not Visitors’ Day in the White House situation room. It’s mixed bleedin’ doubles out on Court 14.
Of all the myriad mysteries currently crowding the mind, however, the most pressing is this: how is it that decades of experience have taught me nothing about the hiring of tradespeople?
Iron rules worth blindly obeying are scarce, but there are a few. One, obviously, is ensuring that the remote control is at hand whenever there is a higher than 2.3-per-cent chance of hearing the words ‘And now on BBC1, it’s time to join Laura Kuen…’
Another is this. Never hire anyone to do anything without a personal recommendation. Everyone knows it. Even that BBC executive understands this.
What no one should ever do is rely on a website, however scrupulously incorruptible it claims to be.
An orthopaedic surgeon with latestage Parkinson’s and a guide dog to carry his scalpels – the one the nurses know as Slasher – would have a rating of 4.7 out of 5 on Check-a-Doc.
‘Where did you find these people?’ my son rang to ask one morning when I was away.
‘Which people?’
‘I’m not sure. None of them speaks
any English. But they’ve been here since 6.15 am, and my best guess is that they’re scaffolders.’
‘What on earth makes you think that?’ ‘It’s an opaque clue, I admit, but they are trying to erect scaffolding.’
I couldn’t fault his deductive powers, but I was bamboozled. I hadn’t hired scaffolders. A guy from a roofing firm had been round to have a look at some broken tiles the previous day, but hadn’t yet summoned the energy to send the quote.
‘So where did you find the roofer?’ Louis followed up.
‘On one of those websites where people review stuff.’
A short silence ensued. ‘One of those sites you’re always telling me to avoid like the plague?’ Louis murmured.
‘Yes, but the reviews were excellent.’
‘Ah, I see. And how’s that working out for you?’
It took Louis another 40 minutes of frantic miming to convey to the scaffolders that it was time to leave.
Three days later, again uninvited, they were back.
This time, I was there to greet not only them, but the roofer. He did speak English. ‘But you still haven’t sent me the quote,’ I pointed out.
‘I told you the other day. It’s £1,800.’
‘But I need it in writing.’
He shrugged in bewilderment, as though I’d asked him to introduce me to his pet centaur, and sullenly unsheathed his smartphone. A moment later, the quote pinged its way over.
The warning signs could not have been more inescapable had this chap
Never hire anyone to do anything without a personal recommendation
been wearing a stetson and driving a herd of cattle through the front garden.
‘OK,’ I told him, ‘you might as well get started.’
Three hours later, his colleague pitched up, climbed the scaffolding and descended with news that felt utterly inevitable. Now that they could see the roof in its entirety, he explained, it was in a far worse state than they’d realised.
The new quote for essential repairs was therefore slightly higher than the original one.
‘How much?’
‘£26,500.’
‘Aha. So barely more than £1,800, then?’
We settled on £3,000 for work that would take at least three days, he said, though probably four. Two hours later, he and his team were finished. The video of the completed job he showed me suggested the efforts less of professional roofers than of a surrealist artist on mescaline. I meekly transferred the money even as the scaffolders were lobbing iron girders down on to branches of the magnolia tree.
‘Now I’d be grateful,’ said the roofer in a tone of overwhelming entitlement, ‘if you’d post a nice review on the site you found us on.’
And perhaps one day I will, if purely out of gratitude to him for solving one of those mysteries.
One night long ago at his worldfamous Embassy Club, Bernard Manning mused as to what the most useless thing in the world might be. He posited that it was either a good review in the Daily Express or the Pope’s testicles.
Having pondered the matter for 30 years, I now realise that Bernard was wrong about both. The single most useless thing in the world is the 15-year guarantee for parts and labour, lavishly presented to me by the roofer as he dodged the falling girders and took his leave.
what was the National Spoon Campaign?
‘Wear a spoon and be happy’ was the simple message of the National Spoon Campaign. It was created at Winchester College in early summer 1968. Harold Wilson was Prime Minister, the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour was the number-one album, and the world was awash with riots.
Almost every student in the West seemed to be protesting about something. We teenage schoolboys decided to join the throng, keen to promote our own message of peace. The spoon appeared to us to be the least aggressive member of the cutlery family as it was neither sharp-edged nor pronged, and so it became our chosen emblem. We were two 14-year-olds (my friend Robin Parker and I) with an older boy, Anthony Thompson, lending avuncular support.
We had not expected the idea to take off quite as fast or as widely as it did. Soon pupils were wearing spoons in the lapels of their jackets and some even in the hatbands of the straw hats we wore year-round. We
what is air space?
Air space is a term for a particular kind of aesthetic – and a particular kind of place – that started materialising at about the same time that social media was born.
You can find air space in hotels, malls, cafés and workspaces the world over. It is the natural habitat of the ‘digital nomad’, a place where the Wi-Fi is powerful and the coffee is overcomplicated.
If air space has a signature look, it is Apple Store minimalism. Think exposed brickwork, bare light bulbs, potted plants and furniture that isn’t very comfortable.
But the crucial thing is that it is more or less the same wherever you go. It is a ‘frictionless geography’ of ‘generic sameness’. It is air space.
The term was coined in 2016 by the writer Kyle Chayka, who pronounced himself a little freaked out at the ‘bland homogeneity’ of the venues he was
wrote to various celebrities to ask them to support our campaign and were surprised when several well-known personalities chose to endorse us.
On BBC Radio 1, Tony Blackburn played records by the Lovin’ Spoonful every morning for a week. John Peel played Turkish spoon music (very odd) on his Top Gear late-night programme. Spike Milligan appeared as a guest on TV on Simon Dee’s Dee Time, wearing a large spoon and lauding the virtues of the campaign.
Word was spreading faster than we could have imagined, with more and more pupils proudly wearing cutlery throughout the school. Some masters (known as dons by Wykehamists) thought it all highly amusing, while others regarded the whole thing as dangerously subversive.
Then the campaign hit the press.
An eagle-eyed journalist from the William Hickey Column in the Daily Express had seen Spike on Dee Time and decided to follow up. The result was the lead story in the column, quoting my housemaster as saying, ‘It is a step in the right direction.’ (He later denied having ever uttered those words.)
While we were revelling in our
visiting on his travels. He would head towards independent cafés in Reykjavik, Rio de Janeiro or Austin – places that prided themselves on not being Starbucks – only to discover that they all eerily resembled one another.
He would book into Airbnbs and wake up in IKEA beds, staring at white walls, unable to remember where he was. It was increasingly possible, he realised, to circumnavigate the globe without ever experiencing anything truly local.
The microtrends of air space change over time. It might be all about brushed concrete one minute and exposed plasterwork the next; matcha lattes yesterday, lavender flat whites today. The point is that these trends come not from the immediate locality but from social media – and, more specifically, Instagram. Now that every independent business has an Instagram account, they all effectively occupy the same digital neighbourhood, obey the same algorithm and suffer from the same condition: mimetic desire.
new-found success, our elation was suddenly dashed when we were summoned to see the headmaster, the distinguished academic Sir Desmond Lee. We were extremely nervous as we waited outside his study for what we feared would be a dressing-down at best and expulsion at worst.
Sir Desmond was a tall commanding figure whose manner carried immense authority. When it came to it, he could not have been kinder to us. He told us he had found it all ‘most amusing’, but many parents had voiced concerns and one senior master had demanded our expulsion.
His solution was that the campaign must cease by the approaching end of term. We were happy: it had been a roaring success and his solution would keep the dissenters content as well.
We did manage to have the last word in the affair when, on the last night of the school play (King John), the entire cast took their curtain call wearing spoons.
King John wore a large wooden spoon in the centre of his crown. Was the enthusiastic applause aimed at the play itself, or was it the last hurrah for 1968’s National Spoon Campaign?
Piers Pottinger
We don’t want what other people have, said the French polymath René Girard; we want what other people want. You can see this in action on Instagram all the time. An influencer in Seoul puts a pistachio croissant on their feed and – lo! – the influencers of New York and Liverpool want one, too. A street artist paints a pair of angel wings on a wall in downtown LA for people to pose in front of and, before you know it, Instagram walls are generated in Dubai, Strasbourg and Bracknell.
You might think of air space as the physical manifestation of the internet. At times it seems to be swamping entire districts, as you’ll have noticed if you’ve walked through Soho, Victoria or Battersea recently.
Likewise, search the properties on Rightmove or Zoopla, and notice how blandly similar even home décor is becoming. A home might once have been an expression of individuality. Now the algorithm knows best.
It’s enough to make you gasp for air. Richard Godwin
Old school friends of mine, from Bassaleg Comprehensive, who still live in Monmouthshire or Gwent – or whatever the latest designation might be; anyway, Englishspeaking South Wales – refer to themselves, when communicating with me, as being ‘behind the Wall’ – as if what the Principality is most like is the former German Democratic Republic.
This became most apparent during the lockdown shenanigans, when the local rules were the most draconian in the UK.
For 26 months, the Welsh had to wear masks, their contact details were collected if more than six people gathered, and wedding and funeral congregations had to take lateral-flow tests – not that wedding receptions or funeral wakes were permitted.
In Caerphilly, if visiting anyone, you had to remain in the garden and you couldn’t use their lavatory or kitchen, on pain of a fine. Travel was banned – we all felt Mark Drakeford, the First Minister, would have erected pillboxes and machine-gun nests on the Severn Bridge, had this been encouraged.
What annoyed and amused me in equal measure was that the coronavirus was called the coronafeirws, as if this made it more special.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the Welsh language, even if for my generation it has narrow, chapel associations. Mochyn means pig – but in Wales to call someone a mochyn is more affectionate than calling them a pig. Cwtch is cuddle – but also cosy, secretive, hidden. The place under the stairs where the Hoover is kept is the cwtch
What I can’t stand, however, is the compulsory imposition of Welsh, as if English is the tongue of a colonial usurper – and people who are pro-Welsh-speaking are often anti-English in their outlook, which is just daft; even racist. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was routed by Edward I in 1282 – it’s a long time to bear a grudge. Richard Burton was raised speaking Welsh and spoke Welsh with his family all his life, but it never crossed his mind that English wasn’t the superior culture. From his teens, he exerted himself more than anybody to absorb English literature; become its great interpreter.
But the trouble in Wales today is with all this political effort and passion to get everyone understanding Welsh. My sister runs an after-school cooking club. To secure funding, she has to call it a clwb Taxis are called tacsis for the benefit of Welsh people who, as Kingsley Amis said, ‘have never seen the letter x before’.
There’s simply no money left to invest in anything else. So Wales is falling apart,
I weep for Wales
Twenty-five years after devolution, Roger Lewis mourns for the lost world of his youth
Clockwise from above: Shirley Bassey (left), Cardiff, 1955; Richard Burton, Pontrhydyfen, 1953: Tom Jones, Pontypridd, 1987; Anthony Hopkins, Nant Ffrancon Pass, Snowdonia, 1990
getting to be sad and run-down.
It is not a good place to feel poorly. The population is 3.1 million, and with 60 per cent of the adults overweight or obese, a quarter of them are on hospital waiting lists – where they’ll wait 40 per cent longer for treatment than in England.
As the Welsh simply die while awaiting surgery, I wonder if this story points to a clue. A pal of mine, a doctor, went for her interview at the Heath Hospital, Cardiff, or Ysbyty Athrofaol Cymru, to be promoted to consultant.
‘And do you speak the Welsh?’ she was asked.
At this, my pal got up and left the room and immediately obtained a senior post in Lincolnshire. Every single person on her Heath Hospital interview panel was of Asian extraction.
In education, Welsh 15-year-olds have
fallen behind, especially in English and maths, which will be why a sign spotted last week in Newport said, ‘Ladies Only. These’s Toilet’s is for Ladies Use Only.’
The median salary is £27,852 – the lowest in Britain, not excluding Scotland. There is an expansion of food banks. Knife crime has doubled in the past decade. GDP is a quarter lower than in England – so the Welsh government is increasing council tax for 470,000 homes, and tripling the council tax for second homes owned by ‘outsiders’, a move that is spiteful.
For who else wants to live in remote areas with limited opportunities, such as Anglesey? Welsh youngsters, who want
to be engineers or scientists, must move away to find decent careers and make a living. Many in South Wales commute daily to Bristol. Not everyone is content to be a shop assistant, labourer or in social care, wiping the bottoms of the OAPs who survived Covid. This pattern of migration for 15- to 29-year-olds is increasing.
The default 20mph speed limit is symbolic of the creeping paralysis, with everything centrally planned and state-owned by the Senedd – which must mean Senate and has just celebrated its 25th anniversary.
Richard Burton will probably prefer to
remain
buried in Switzerland
When I was growing up in Bedwas, as working-class as you please, a frequent thrill was a trip to the New Theatre, Cardiff, to see the Welsh National Opera – Sir Geraint Evans, Sir Bryn Terfel and Dame Margaret Price in full voice, Sir Charles Mackerras in the pit. In today’s Wales, opera is elitist – so is being stamped out.
The WNO was formed after the war by local doctors, teachers and miners, who wanted a world-class performing ensemble. For the 2023-26 period, the Arts Council is making cuts of 35 per cent, from £6.2 million annually to £4 million. The orchestra and chorus have been told to become part-time, though there’s no freelance work available to make up the shortfall. The touring programme is being curtailed, and voluntary redundancies sought. Soprano Elizabeth Atherton calls this ‘the end of Wales’s largest arts organisation and employer as we know it’, with 222 jobs at risk.
The other week, Vaughan Gething, the first minister, lost a confidence vote in the Senedd – he’d accepted a £200,000 donation from someone who’d been convicted of ‘environmental offences’. Nevertheless, Gething ‘absolutely must carry on’, said Keir Starmer. Gething eventually resigned, jumping after he was pushed.
The future doesn’t look rosy to me. Richard Burton, than whom there was never a prouder Welshman, will probably prefer to remain buried in Switzerland.
And until Wales rediscovers its robustness and ability to laugh at itself, the likes of Anthony Hopkins, Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey and so forth will continue to live elsewhere.
Roger Lewis is author of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor
Magic dirtbuster
Martin Plimmer salutes the Swarfega inventor, Audley Bowdler Williamson, who died 20 years ago
What do women seek most in a lover?
Often they say it’s a man with a good sense of humour, or a sincere heart. They rarely mention the most vital attribute of all: clean hands.
That’s because nowadays we take clean hands for granted. Most women probably don’t give the topic much thought. Yet it doesn’t take much imagination to see how fundamental clean hands are to dating success.
A woman might, once in a while, on a dull night, at a party where there is very little talent, tolerate a dance with a humourless or insincere man, she will never, ever, agree to dance with a man whose hands are covered in tar.
Tar-covered hands are not an issue in the dance halls of today because of the work of one man, Audley Bowdler Williamson (1916-2004).
As a young chemist, AB, as he liked to be known, invented a green gloopy substance in 1947. It removed hydrophobic grime (that’s water-repellent oils and grease to you). AB marketed it as a hand-cleaner for workers in dirty trades, naming it Swarfega: ‘swarf’ for the greasy grit that heavy machinery produces and ‘ega’ to imply its keenness to get stuck in. It was the first product of its type in the world. AB cleaned up.
Now Swarfega is used all around the globe and is available in a variety of forms. Real men use Swarfega Classic, while sensitive types go for an orange or citrus variety. Hardcore grease monkeys won’t touch anything less than a seriously heavy gunk known as Tufanega. AB died twenty years ago at 88, leaving a large slice of his fortune to wildlife and environmental charities, ensuring his reputation remains as spotless as his products.
‘Swarf’ for the greasy grit – ‘ega’ to imply its keenness to get stuck in
Clockwise from above: Swarfega ads from the ’70s and ’60s and a tin of the green stuff
Curiously, AB first intended his multi-talented green gloop to be used in the boudoir rather than the colliery shower. He developed it during the Second World War as a liquid silk preservative to help prolong the life of expensive silk stockings.
When the war ended and the market was flooded with cheap nylons from the United States, AB had to think again.
He remembered the mechanics he had seen in his father’s garage in Belper, Derbyshire, trying to get the grime off their hands at the end of the day.
It doesn’t bear thinking what life was like back then, before Swarfega. It was grim. It was grimy. A dairymaid going to the pictures with a mechanic after a day’s work could expect to come out covered with thumb prints. Conscientious suitors who scraped the muck off with a mixture of petrol, paraffin and sand weren’t necessarily popular either, as it left their hands as rough as glass paper. Women appreciate a gentle touch.
This explains why, given the choice, women tend to go for people who work in clean professions – architects, academics, millionaires and so on –rather than coalminers, foundry workers
and men who scrape grime off the bottoms of tractors.
These are not the last of Swarfega’s bedroom benison. It also possesses a remarkable erotic quality you won’t find mentioned in the sales literature of Deb Ltd, its manufacturers. The most striking physical characteristic of the stuff to anyone who has used it is its unmanly sensuality.
Stick your fingers in the tub and you become aware of a cool, lubricious, sucking sensation that has been known to bring on feelings of giddy delirium in young men and a sense of nostalgia in the old. It has been variously described as ‘intoxicating’, ‘the best feeling in the world, ever’, and ‘sin in a tin’.
This, combined with the fact that the Swarfega tub nearly always comes out at that euphoric moment of the day when work has come to an end and play is about to begin, has endowed it with powerful, mystical qualities in the imaginations of men. And it never has a headache.
All praise to Audley Bowdler Williamson. If it hadn’t been for the innovation of cheap, mass-produced nylons in the early 1940s, Swarfega would be called something like Lushalonga Silk Preservative – and mechanics would have nobody to dance with.
Birdwatcher’s Bible
John McEwen on a new book of The Oldie’s Bird of the Month pictures
by Carry Akroyd
Bird books invariably use illustration as a guide, whether through paintings or through photographs.
Carry Akroyd’s screen prints in The Oldie’s Bird of the Month column are interpretations, with bold, abstract solutions, to convey birds swooping, singing, perching and paddling. Thus the title of our new book of Oldie illustrations.
As Carry is very much a landscape artist, it is always exciting to see her answer to the latest challenge of sky,
land or sea, and how she captures the essence of the bird and fits it to habitat and season.
The aim of my bird columns is to celebrate, amuse and inform, in that order. Where possible, poetry, quotation and personal insight take precedence, to circumvent general knowledge and indispensable Google. John Clare has pride of place as a bird poet by right.
In 2024, it is hard to avoid a repetitive lament when writing of birds, with technology reducing countrydweller numbers as remorselessly as
Clockwise from left: osprey; grey wagtail; great crested grebes; little owl
it has hedges, reedbeds and the rest. As for pollution, even our bodies contain microplastics.
On the bright side, since 1970, of the 130 UK bird species studied in 2022, a Defra report estimated that 24 per cent increased in number, 46 per cent showed little change and 29 per cent decreased.
Age only increases the recognition of how like us in character and circumstance birds are. My mother found consolation as a widow through friendship with a barn owlet; my terminally ill wife in the welcome of a flightless Canada goose.
Adrian Richmond, whose Big Issue pitch is the piazza of Westminster Cathedral, daily pays attention to the needs of the local pigeons through shepherding his feral flock, 40 of whom he knows by name.
And how thrilling to receive a call from my grandson Oscar, aged 10, excitedly reporting having seen his first goldcrest.
Of the authors cited, Henry DouglasHome, my Berwickshire neighbour, known since childhood, was BBC Radio’s bird man in Scotland – hence the title of his ornithological memoir, The Birdman Another boyhood influence, later a friend, was Denys ‘BB’ Watkins-Pitchford. Among the authors he admired was naturalist W H Hudson, himself a friend of Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916, who wrote another bird classic, The Charm of Birds
Birds have been and always will be loved. For BB, there was no song more beautiful than the blackbird’s. For this bird-lover, raised in pink-footed-goose country, no chorus is more stirring than that of a skein of them in full cry.
Thanks to their liking for discarded
sugar-beet tops, there are more of them than ever.
As a boy, I heard the geese with my parents and siblings. Now, in Norfolk, I hear them with Frankie and Albi, my great-great-nephews:
‘Then we heard them!
The tribes,
The generations since the tribes, Coming back.’
Swarden Burn, Pinkfeet
Swoop Sing Perch Paddle (Bloomsbury), by John McEwen and Carry Akroyd, is out on 1st August
Carry Akroyd, Bird of the Month illustrator, has a show of Oldie bird pictures at the Chris Beetles Gallery, London SW1, 13th to 24th August
Buy Swing Swoop Perch Paddle by Carry
Akroyd and John McEwen
at www.theoldie.co.uk/readers-corner/shop 144-page hardback, 230mm x 170mm
132 full-colour screen prints
£14.99 (UK only) inc free postage & packing
Iam one of nature’s Yes Men.
There’s a tendency to dismiss us as craven, spineless creatures of little moral worth. But isn’t ‘Yes, dear’ one of the great maxims of family life?
‘You’ll call the plumber, won’t you.’
‘Yes, dear.’
‘Did you remember to renew the car insurance?’
‘Yes, dear.’
‘Will you pick up the cleaning?’
‘Of course, dear.’
‘Yes, dear,’ is the tranquilliser dart of domestic discourse. We Yes Men say it without thought or consideration.
‘Yes’ is open to multiple interpretations and has a host of subtleties to it.
There’s the energetic, dynamic ‘Yes!’ ‘Yes’ that promises action! ‘Yes’ that means, well, ‘Yes!!!’
‘Say “Yes!” to Jesus!’
There’s the optimistic, positive ‘Yes’. Look online and you’ll find a secondhand bookshop’s worth of self-help books built around the power of ‘Yes’: Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person by Shonda Rhimes; or The Power of Yes by David Hare, about the financial crash of 2007/8.
Innumerable websites link ‘Yes’ to mindfulness (whatever that is), mental health (whatever that is), getting rich and solving every human condition you can think of. But is ‘Yes’ really as obvious and predictable as it seems? When someone asks a question or makes a demand to which they expect the answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, the ‘No’ has a certainty about it. You know where you are with ‘No’. ‘Yes’ is open to interpretation in a way ‘No’ is not.
‘Yes’ can mean one thing to the interrogator and something else to the respondent. To the interrogator, ‘Yes’ seems clear enough. If you answer ‘Yes’, the interrogator assumes you are agreeing with or have done whatever they have just suggested.
But to the respondent, while ‘Yes’ can mean ‘Yes, I agree with you,’ or ‘Yes, I’ve done what you have asked me to do,’ it can also mean ‘Yes, I heard what you said
or have asked me to do, and I may get round to doing it at some point,’ or ‘I’m thinking about it.’ A defensive ‘Yes’, in other words; a straight-bat ‘Yes’.
The reason Yes Men employ ‘Yes’ so readily is that ‘Yes’ gives us yes-men breathing space. For us, ‘Yes’ is not a guarantor of either agreement or action but the guarantor that we’ll consider the possibility of agreement or action, past or present.
When we Yes Men say ‘Yes’, the interrogator naturally takes her or his eye off the ball. They relax their vigilance. Unless they’re prepared to accuse the Yes Man of being an outright liar (quite possible), they have to take ‘Yes’ at face value and accept ‘Yes’ as ‘Yes’.
And, having accepted ‘Yes’ as ‘Yes’, they move on, while we subtle Yes Men sink back into our natural nonconfrontational sloth with a sigh of relief.
‘Yes’ has won me more than a personal – if short-lived – haven. It has brought a sliver of peace and tranquillity into a clamorous and furious world.
To some people, this use of ‘Yes’ might be seen as misleading – deceitful, even. In fact, ‘Yes’ makes for a more civilised world. It creates room for discussion and manoeuvre. Saying ‘Yes’ in the right tone even signifies that you’re deliberately leaving a gap for someone else to speak.
The trouble with ‘No’ is that you know where you are with it. ‘No’ indicates certainty and certainty makes for clarity and clarity makes for trouble. If everyone said exactly and clearly what they thought, the gutters would be running with blood. Indeed, they frequently are running with blood – thanks to social media, we know what people really think, and pretty unedifying, not to say terrifying, it is too.
‘Yes’ is a critical brick in a linguistic buffer zone that allows us breathing space in the storm and stress of everyday life. ‘Yes’ allows for domestic harmony, political discourse, corporate co-operation and social consensus.
Say yes to yes!’
In 1983, Dick and I felt our careers were in the doldrums.
We were partners in a British production company which had many projects in the pipeline, but we were in Hollywood, where nothing much was happening, and we were beginning to wonder whether warm beer and wet weather might be preferable to Californian sunshine and convertibles. Should go back to the UK?
Then a call came from Franc Roddam, who had also moved to California after his successful movies Quadrophenia and Lords of Discipline. He suggested lunch.
Franc told us of going back to his native north-east and meeting an old school pal, Mick the Brick, who had been forced, under Thatcher’s Britain, to find work as a brickie on the building sites of Germany.
The irony didn’t escape any of us: these British workers were helping rebuild the country their fathers had flattened in the first place. And they lived in a hut on the site, reminiscent of a stalag and of all those stiff-upper-lip POW movies the three of us had been brought up on. Creative juices were flowing again and a second bottle of Cabernet was ordered.
Dick and I were instantly charged by the idea. It appealed to the instincts that had made The Likely Lads, Porridge and Going Straight so popular: captive situations; working-class blokes surviving against the odds.
Also, in retrospect, I think the DNA of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet owed more to our military service (mine in the Army, Dick’s in the RAF) than previous films and series had.
We had the title by the end of lunch and the characters by the end of the week. Our producing partner, Allan McKeown, made a deal with Central Television and we owe an enormous debt to executive Margaret Mathieson’s judgement. She green-lit the unlikeliest of series with not a woman in sight.
It seemed an obvious choice for producer Martin McKeand and me to take Mick the Brick with us on a research trip to Germany. We flew to Düsseldorf and as soon as immigration officials checked his passport, they marched him off to a room somewhere, where he was grilled about previous misdemeanours in the republic and unpaid bills. Martin and I used all our per diem and credit cards to free him. It was, we realised later, a pure Oz moment.
We toured the building sites and bars of the Old Town but met very few Brits whom Mick recognised. The brothel he
remembered was still there, but we decided on dinner instead.
Mick did become our official technical adviser. What did Dick and I know about spirit levels or damp courses? We agreed on a weekly phone call between us in LA and Mick in Stockton-on-Tees. He didn’t have a phone in his house – so he gave us the number of a public phone box next to his local pub. And an agreed hour, which was five minutes after closing time.
One night, he was standing outside the vandalised red box with its smell of urine and fag ends when a police patrol car pulled up and a constable alighted. Mick was no stranger to the boys in blue, who assumed he was ‘loitering with intent’.
Mick protested his innocence – ‘I’m waiting on a call.’ Then he added, with some swagger, ‘From my producers in Hollywood.’
He was about to be bundled into the car when the phone rang. It was us and we persuaded the plods of Mick’s credentials, sparing the indignity of custody again.
There would be five joyful series of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. It was a good lunch, Franc. I hope we picked up the check.
Ian La Frenais
Iremember us writing the pilot in my kitchen on a big yellow legal pad. We started with the three Geordies and agreed on their essential characters. Neville was the worrier. If I want to conjure him up in my mind, I hear him saying, ‘How much is this going to cost?’
Oz was obviously the lunatic – the wild card. Dennis was the reluctant leader, the one they looked to to sort problems out – a role that was forced on him.
Now we needed the right actors to bring
Germany calling
Forty years ago, Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement loved creating Auf Wiedersehen, Pet
them to life. One day the producer, Martin McKeand, called and said,‘Come along to the rehearsal room as soon as you can.’
We scurried over. I looked across the room, saw Jimmy Nail and said to myself, ‘Please let him be able to act just a bit,’ because he looked exactly like the Oz I had in my mind.
From then on, it was like putting an orchestra together. Tim Spall played Barry, the boring Brummie. Tim is a wonderful actor, not at all boring nor a Brummie, though people assumed he was for years, as he played the part so well.
Working on the site, Düsseldorf: Wayne (Gary Holton), Barry (Timothy Spall), Bomber (Pat Roach), Moxey (Christopher Fairbank), Dennis (Tim Healy), Oz (Jimmy Nail), Neville (Kevin Whately)
Pat Roach was an ex-wrestler, not really a dyed-in-the-wool actor. He told us, ‘I know they say that wrestling is fixed, but somehow I always lost.’
He became our gentle giant from somewhere in Somerset. Chris Fairbank played an enigmatic Scouser called Moxey. The voice we now lacked was a Cockney. Ian met Gary Holton at a party. He looked like Ron Wood and had the same
haircut. He was in a band called the Heavy Metal Kids who, he assured Ian, were enormous in Sweden. He was the perfect Wayne. Tragically, he died in the middle of the second series. The rest of the cast felt his loss very deeply.
Years went by before there was talk of bringing the brickies back to the hod. We were not at all convinced it was a good idea until we all got together for dinner.
What really impressed us was the fact that the actors so obviously wanted to do it. They shared a genuine bond of comradeship, rapport and respect –which was still present in the recent
British workers were helping rebuild the country their fathers had flattened in the first place
40th-anniversary celebration in Newcastle. The fan club staged two sold-out shows in Newcastle’s City Hall in May.
It was Jimmy Nail and Franc Roddam who came up with the idea of selling Middlesbrough’s Transporter Bridge to an Indian tribe to create better access to their casino in Arizona.
The idea was so outrageous that we thought it was big enough to carry a series. When it aired, it got a warm reception, though a lot of people thought we’d moved the bridge for real and complained to the papers. But it set us a problem: where to go next?
Cuba sounded good – so I set off with Ian and Jimmy to scout it out. We enjoyed ourselves but didn’t have the faintest idea of a plot. We started to get tetchy with each other – imagine that.
On the last afternoon, we were invited to the British Ambassador’s residence for tea. None of us wanted to go, given our fractious state of mind, but it would have been discourteous to cancel.
While we were drinking tea with His Excellency, we heard hammering coming from an adjacent building. HE closed the window, apologised and said that renovations were taking place. Whenever this happened on government premises overseas, British crews were employed for security reasons.
We almost choked on our Rich Tea biscuits. There was our next series! Dick Clement
Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais wrote Porridge, The Likely Lads and Lovejoy
Farewell, my lovely Islington
Cosmo
Landesman
grew up in a bohemian borough crammed with writers and singers. Now it’s a super-gentrified cultural
desert
When I tell people I live in Islington, they tell me
I’m lucky to live in such a ‘cool’ and ‘trendy’ place. When I say that, no, Islington is not cool or trendy but bland and boring, they don’t believe me.
I plead with them: you don’t understand what has happened to my beloved Islington! Back in the 1960s, it had character. Style. Funky shops. Funky people. Bohemians. Eccentrics. Writers. It had working men’s cafés that offered such delights as bread and dripping.
And what does Islington have now? Rich people and a thousand and one shops selling the same artisan coffee, specialist pasta and esoteric cheeses. Back then, we only had one posh restaurant, owned by Robert Carrier, and now it’s one of the most restaurant-dense areas in the UK. No wonder estate agents call Islington a ‘foodies’ paradise’.
My family moved there in 1964 from the USA. Back then, Islington was known as fashionable but slightly sordid. They were part of that first wave of middleclass creative people moving into what was a solidly working-class area.
You had journalists such as Patrick Marnham of Private Eye, men of letters such as John Mander of Encounter magazine, and the pop singer Paul Jones of Manfred Mann. They all lived on my street. Later, we had the writer Peter Ackroyd and Michael Young – who coined the term ‘meritocracy’ – living either side of us. The Old Etonian poet Hugo Williams bought his dilapidated Georgian house in 1966 for £5,000.
Islington was the perfect neighbourhood for people on their way up or on their way down.
I remember the regular appearance of a rag-and-bone man right out of Steptoe and Son, complete with his horse and cart. During the summer of love in ’67, there were stoned hippies in the local park and scary skinheads on the streets.
Every day, I went to the
local primary school down Noel Road, where the playwright Joe Orton was yet to be murdered by his companion Kenneth Halliwell.
And had you been there in the sixties, you might have seen a loud, crazy American couple looking like ageing hippies – yes, that was my parents, Jay and Fran Landesman, both writers.
If you’d been there in the late seventies, you might have seen another odd couple I called Dracula and his bride: it was the lead singer of the Damned and his wife. Islington lost its character when it lost its characters.
Today, walking near my home is a wistful trip down memory lane. The newsagent is still there, but the potsmoking jazz-loving mod who owned it is long gone. So too is the local leather-clad rocker with his loud Triumph motorbike.
And now all I see are affluent men and women; hedge-fund managers, bankers, City types reeking of success and selfsatisfaction. You can always spot the really rich ones by just how scruffy they are.
My parents’ house on Duncan Terrace was Islington’s Boho central. Spandau Ballet co-founder Gary Kemp said in his autobiography that going to the Landesmans’ was his first encounter with the bohemian way of life.
Excuse me while I shamelessly name-drop. My parents brought to Islington the likes of Norman
In the seventies, at one of their parties, Johnny Rotten shared the social spotlight with the critic William Empson. And neighbours never got over the night that Barbra Streisand turned up in a limousine nearly as long as the street.
Creatives can be a pain in the arse when too drunk or too stoned, as they often were. But they had a fundamental belief in books, culture and good conversation. Today, money talks, but it has nothing interesting to say. We hear much about the snobbish North London elite who, according to Islingtonian Dominic Cummings, have dinner parties where people discuss the works of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. If only that were true! Instead, they still grumble about Brexit, and boast about their brilliant children.
What happened to Islington? In the 1990s came a new wave of gentrification, with people such as Tony and Cherie Blair and Emily Thornberry MP moving in. This is when Islington became associated with champagne socialists living in their £3m homes. It’s an image that persists today. In 2021, Boris called Keir Starmer a ‘lefty Islington lawyer’ – Boris should know, as he lived there too. In fact, Keir Starmer lives in nearby Kentish Town.
That wave of gentrifiers was, from 2000, replaced by what Loretta Lees, professor of geography, calls a new breed of ‘super-gentrifiers’, better known as the global elite. And the gap between the rich and poor of Islington has never been so great.
Islingtonians: Barbra Streisand, Robert Carrier and Joe Orton
Of course, times change and so do neighbourhoods. Gentrification is a fact of urban life – so there’s no point in being nostalgic. But I still miss the Islington of old –especially when people tell me it’s such a cool place to live.
Cosmo Landesman is author of Jack and Me: How NOT to Live After Loss
At 90, John Standing tells York Membery about his 70 years on stage and screen
Standing ovation
John Standing is 90 on 16th August – ‘I’m older than God!’ he jokes. He is still basking in the glow from his appearance alongside Michael Caine in The Great Escaper (2023), long-listed for a BAFTA Film Award.
In the film, based on a true story, Caine, 90, plays Second World War Royal Navy veteran Bernie Jordan, who broke out of his south-coast nursing home to attend the 70th anniversary D-Day commemorations in Normandy in June 2014. Standing plays Arthur, an RAF wartime veteran who befriends Bernie.
Despite their long and distinguished acting careers, the duo’s paths had crossed only twice before. First, when Standing appeared with Caine in the film The Eagle Has Landed (1976), about a fictional German plot to kidnap Churchill during the Second World War. Secondly, when the duo played tennis against each other in Beverly Hills ‘a million years ago … and he beat me,’ says Standing, sighing in mock disappointment.
They immediately bonded while making the moving drama.
‘Despite being the most unlikely pair, we struck up a real rapport – in part, perhaps, because we’re both old soldiers, although he fought in the Korean War whereas the nearest I got to any action was dodging bullets in the Welsh hills on a training exercise,’ says Standing.
He is wearing a cravat (to keep his neck warm), cords and cardigan. We meet in the rustic-style kitchen of the home in Pimlico, London, where he lives with his glamorous second wife, Sarah, daughter of the late film director Bryan Forbes and his actress wife Nanette Newman (who has herself just turned 90).
‘One day, I said to Michael, “You talk about the Elephant and Castle, where you were brought up, and what your mum and dad did, but the great thing was that you had a happy childhood,” and he replied, “[Standing puts on a Michael Caine voice] Yeah, I did, I did.”
Standing says, ‘We got on so well that someone even suggested that we should present a podcast together.’
Despite being born to wealth, the Eton-educated Standing – or, to give him his full title, Sir John Leon, 4th Bt – had a much less than happy childhood in some respects. His stockbroker father, Sir Ronald, was the son of Sir Herbert Leon, the builder of Bletchley Park. His actress mother, Kay Hammond – who starred in the original stage version of Blithe Spirit and reprised her role in the 1945 film –‘insisted on living in Park Lane and my father bought her a flat there’.
But his parents divorced when he was a boy and his once ‘stonkingly rich’ father ran his business into the ground ‘through drink’ and was dead at 60.
Standing’s inheritance? A mere 60 quid, though he thinks being left so little was a blessing because it forced him to ‘stand on my own two feet’.
Both his mother – ‘I spent much of my childhood in theatre dressingrooms’ – and grandfather Sir Guy Standing – who appeared in several 1930s Hollywood films, such as The Lives of a
John Standing with his wife, Sarah
‘Olivier didn’t utter a word because he was so depressed at the thought of turning 50!’
Bengal Lancer – were actors, as was his stepfather, Sir John Clements.
It’s no surprise that John should follow in their footsteps. His first acting role was as a spear-carrier in Peter Brook’s 1955 production of Titus Andronicus, with Laurence Olivier and his actress wife Vivien Leigh.
‘For some reason, Vivien asked me to join her, Larry and some friends at a dinner to celebrate his 50th birthday,’ he says. ‘But Larry didn’t utter a word because he was so depressed at the thought of turning 50!’
After a stint in rep, Standing worked his way up the showbusiness ladder and has since appeared in a string of hit plays, often in the West End – earning him the nickname West End Johnnie – such as Private Lives, Hay Fever and Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance
‘I’ve got to play opposite all the dames of my vintage – Maggie, Eileen and Penelope Wilton,’ he observes.
But despite spending ‘nine tenths’ of his acting career on the stage, he’s occasionally ‘sashayed into films to do the odd job – I was brought up to believe that cinema was the medium for people to make a lot of money.’
One of his earliest movie roles was in Cary Grant’s last Hollywood film, the romantic comedy Walk, Don’t Run (1966). ‘After we’d finished filming,’ he recalls, ‘Cary said to me, “I’m not going to make any more movies because I don’t get the girl any more!”’
He also had parts in The Elephant Man (1980), Privates on Parade (1983) and Chaplin (1992). His most successful role outside the theatre was in the ITV sitcom The Other ’Arf, in which he played
an upper-class Tory politician in a relationship with a Cockney model (Lorraine Chase), which ran for four series in the 1980s. More recently, he appeared in The Crown as Captain Imbert-Terry, the owner of Castle of Mey, which the Queen Mother bought.
So what’s the secret of a long life? ‘It’s just down to good fortune,’ he says wryly. ‘I used to suck down French cigarettes, which I absolutely loved.’
bottle and whisky 12 shillings a bottle’, although nowadays he has just ‘the occasional glass of red wine’. Walking up the 21 steps to his second-floor studio helps keeps him fit, he says.
Surely having a glamorous younger wife has helped keep him sprightly too?
‘Undoubtedly,’ says Standing.
‘Although when I started dating Sarah in 1980, I was so much older than her that I didn’t dare lay a finger on her for months. I initially thought I was just going to be her obligatory “older-man fling”, but love blossomed and we married in 1984.’
Forty years on, they’ve got three grown-up children (he also has a child from his first marriage, to the late actress Jill Melford), two grandchildren and a third on the way.
‘Sarah, who is spectacularly sweet, and I are amazingly close,’ he adds. ‘I’m a lucky man, and the fact that she is 25 years younger than me is just by the by.’
So imagine his shock when Sarah, despite being so much younger, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2020 and needed chemotherapy, which made her hair fall out.
‘It was a frightening time – she had something the size of a rugby ball inside her – the most ghastly time of my life,’ admits Standing. ‘I was on tenterhooks for months, but thankfully she’s now completely free of the disease, and firing on all cylinders again.’
So is he excited to be turning 90? ‘Not particularly, because I’m inching ever
Left: John Standing and Maggie Smith, Private Lives, 1972. Below: Arthur Howard-Johnson (John Standing) and Bernard Jordan (Michael Caine), The Great Escaper, 2023
closer to not being around any more – but the thing to do is not to dwell on numbers because that’s all they are.’
But when he was 43, he went ‘cold turkey and quit’ but admits ‘it was difficult’. He drank a fair bit in the army too, ‘because gin was nine shillings a
He adds with a chuckle: ‘And if I don’t drop dead, I very much hope I’ll still be acting in a few years’ time – it’s either one or the other!’
This summer, the park at Versailles will again be full of horses, as it was before 1789, when the King of France lived there.
Between 26th July and 11th August, Versailles is hosting the Olympic equestrian events. A special Olympic arena at the end of the huge Grand Canal in the park will see the dressage competition. Eventing – showjumping and cross-country riding – will take place beside the Grand Canal itself. Pentathlon contests will be held in the park of Versailles: riding, running, fencing, swimming and shooting.
On 26th and 27th September, there will be further displays of horsemanship by the equestrian academies of Versailles, Andalucia and Portugal in the Parterre d’Eau, directly in front of the palace.
As the Olympics committee says, it is ‘only natural’ that such Olympics events are held at Versailles. For Versailles, more than any other palace, was a centre of sports and entertainments, as well as the King’s residence and the seat of government.
Louis XIV himself could ride for 15 hours a day, cross-country, without seeming tired. To ride well showed the rider’s power of control, gentleness and determination, and there are countless portraits of the King on horseback.
Like other monarchs, Louis XIV also used horses for entertainment. On 5th and 6th June 1662, a splendid carousel in the square in front of the Louvre celebrated the birth of the Dauphin –hence the name Place du Carrousel today.
Eight hundred knights on horseback in five rival teams, dressed as Romans, Persians, Turks, Indians and Americans, were led by the King, his brother and their cousins. To the sound of music from the royal orchestras, French nobles, pretending to be medieval knights, jousted against one another, rode with their lances at a ring, threw javelins and paraded in front of courtiers and Parisians. Here, for the first time, Louis XIV, dressed as a Roman Emperor, used the sun as his symbol – the Sun King was born.
Louis XIV would also have appreciated the choice of Versailles for the Olympics, since he was extremely athletic. He was depicted as Hercules, Apollo and Jupiter. Today he might have won a gold medal.
In the summer, he often swam in the Seine. Loyal courtiers called him the best shot in France – he hunted at least once a week and often went pheasant-shooting in the stupendous park he created at
All the Sun King’s horses
Louis XIV would have adored the Paris Olympics at Versailles. By Philip Mansel
Versailles. He walked almost every day through the gardens he designed at Versailles, even when he was 70 and the cold was so ‘violent’ that his beloved spaniels refused to follow him.
Dance was the gym of the day, and the King took daily dancing lessons. He danced in public until he was 30 and in private until he was 70. He also founded the Académie Royale de Danse in 1661 to improve Frenchmen’s posture and agility, and inspired the invention of choreography, the art of noting dance
steps on paper. Under Louis XIV, the vivid French style of dance, with short, springing steps, conquered Europe as easily as French fashions.
At the same time as the equestrian events in the park of Versailles, inside the palace itself there is the mega-exhibition
The Horse in Majesty: At the Heart of a Civilisation (2nd July until 3rd November). It shows that, under Louis XIV, monarchy and horses were inseparable. There will be more than 300 objects, including equestrian
Clockwise from above: the Grande Écurie (royal stables) of the Château de Versailles, depicted by Jean-Baptiste Martin (1688); showjumping at the stables in 2017; King Louis XIV
portraits of monarchs, portraits of horses themselves, saddles, spurs and much else.
Visitors will be reminded of horses’ indispensability in daily life, before their disappearance – what some call ‘dehorsification’ – in the 20th century.
Kings needed horses to escape from angry subjects, as well as to fight foreign enemies. Louis XIV himself fled Paris by night in secret in a horse-drawn carriage on 6th January 1649.
His 750 horses were better housed and fed than most of
his subjects. In the stables he built opposite the palace of Versailles, pages and equerries learnt horsemanship and other skills.
A handsome young equerry might become a royal favourite: the Marquis de Cinq-Mars had charmed Louis XIV’s father, Louis XIII, and nearly overthrew the Cardinal de Richelieu. Riding also brought men and women together, as Louis XIV and one of his last mistresses, Marie-Angélique de Fontanges, knew well. She looked particularly attractive on a horse.
This show and the Olympics aren’t the only reminders of Versailles’s global impact. Earlier in the year, the Palace Museum in Beijing held a huge exhibition, The Forbidden City and the Palace of Versailles. It showed that, after direct French trade with China began in 1698, Chinese works of art, gardens and buildings became an inexhaustible source of inspiration for French artists and intellectuals. For their part, Chinese emperors learned about mathematics, astronomy and Catholicism from the missionaries and scientists sent to Beijing by Louis XIV.
A similar exhibition might one day show Versailles’s lasting impact in England. From the Duke of Monmouth (who, in 1683, organised the first horse race in Paris, watched by Louis XIV) to Nancy Mitford, author of the 1968 global bestseller The Sun King, the English were the most numerous and enthusiastic foreign visitors to Versailles.
For much of the year, there are concerts in the royal chapel and jardins musicaux and grandes eaux musicales – with recordings of French classical music – in the park.
Opera and ballet can be enjoyed in the magnificent opera house, built in the north wing for the marriage of the future Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1770. There is so much to do that visitors are advised to spend a night or two in the town, rather than dash in and out from Paris. Versailles has a new hotel, Le Grand Contrôle, beside the palace. It is expensive but enjoys the luxury of direct access to the park, avoiding queues and security checks. There are also many less expensive hotels, such as the Résidence du Berry on the rue d’Anjou and Hotel le Louis Versailles, directly opposite the palace. Eight miles to the south-west is the moated renaissance Château d’Esclimont, transformed into a hotel.
Here, another reminder of Versailles’s global reach will be the exhibition Versailles: Science and Splendour, at the Science Museum in London (12th December 2024 to April 2025).
Versailles influenced English houses and gardens (Boughton, Chatsworth and many more), as well as manners, music, dance, dress, literature and food – more or less everything. When there was no fighting, Versailles provided an entertaining alternative to the far duller English court
Today, Versailles’s attractions include the palace, with state apartments, private apartments and the museum of French history, and the park, with its secret groves and 400 statues. There are the Grand and Petit Trianons; Marie Antoinette’s mock hamlet; the carriage museum in the royal stables; and the elegant 18th-century town.
Louis XIV, Louis XV and Louis XVI not only had a passion for science, but also sponsored many research expeditions and engineering projects, not least for the gardens and fountains of Versailles.
The first hot-air balloon carrying living creatures, watched by the royal family and admiring crowds, rose from a courtyard of Versailles on 19th September 1783. That year, American independence, won with French help, received international recognition in the Treaty of Versailles.
Then as now, Versailles was a global hub. Versailles is us.
Philip Mansel is author of King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV and Louis XVIII. He is President of the Conseil Scientifique of the Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles
Letter from America
In the line of fire
James Fletcher was photographing the Trump rally when shots rang out
The plan was to film some spectators arriving for the Trump rally. Hear their reasons for believing that Donald Trump is the answer to their struggles and concerns. Maybe listen to a few opening remarks from the Republican candidate and then hit the road.
It’s almost impossible to find a Trump rally visitor not wearing Trump-branded fundraising merchandise. T-shirts, hats, socks, shoes, umbrellas. Often with slogans as outrageous as they are witty.
They’re a genial mob. Polite, warmnatured, unworldly for the most part.
‘You’ve come all the way from London to little old Butler?’ Big smiles and mild fascination that an outsider would want to know more about their hero. There’s zero animosity and an immediate sense that they’re good people, seeking answers to their worries.
Cost of living gets a frequent mention. One man, a petrol station-owner, tells me he watches customers scrape coins together to raise $2 to drive to work. All bills have got higher and are increasing: fuel, food, energy and, of course, taxes. Biden’s age gets a mention here and there. Trump’s not at all.
A mile-long queue keeps nudging forward to the security line, where the Secret Service diligently operate an airport-style security check with metal-detectors, hand-searching of bags, pat-downs etc. A small pile of confiscated pocket knives is testament to the thoroughness of the process. We enter the field to see even more agents dotted around in uniform, suits and plain clothes. They’re all armed and wearing an earpiece. Snipers are clearly visible on every high rooftop. They’re backed up by local police in large numbers.
The pre-show is an eclectic mix of videos. Louis Armstrong sings What a Wonderful World, Celine Dion My Heart Will Go On, with occasional country music. The Village People sing the gay
anthem YMCA. Then there’s some heavy metal with profane – and I mean profane – lyrics.
As often with Trump, he aims to please a lot of people at once, and this playlist is musical evidence. They use the old trick of raising the volume gradually as each song passes. Then, spontaneously, thousands of phonewielding arms shoot up as the motorcade is spotted. Forty or so motorcycles in formation. Black SUVs as far as the eye can see. They disappear behind the stage.
And, after a brief delay, strains of I’m Proud to Be an American fill the air, which they all know means one thing: Trump on stage. On he walks, in his blue suit and open-necked shirt. Possibly not as dynamically as in 2016.
Straight to the microphone and into his old classics about fake news and how they won’t show the scale of the crowd. He tells us Joe Biden is ‘a stiff’ and ‘the worst President in the history of the country’. Then onto immigration. He says 20 million have invaded the country from prisons and mental hospitals … and even has a graph on the vast monitors to prove it.
Five minutes in – that’s when it happens. A few small shots that sound more like metal tapping glass. Among the noise of the crowd, sound system, wind and disorientation, little is immediately obvious.
Then more shots – from the agents on the rooftops, firing back at the would-be assassin. And now a sense of fear and panic sets in. Again, it’s hard to source the origin of the shots. Some people run. Others freeze. Many grab cameras.
These events are designed primarily for television, meaning that many spectators cannot see the stage and instead watch on big monitors dotted around. So nobody knew whether Trump had been hit or not. Nobody knew which exit was safe, or which way led to danger.
But very quickly one important thing was apparent. It was not a mass shooting. No automatic gunfire. No screaming. And it was clear the event was over. The monitors went blank. The sound system was silent. And people turned to leave. Law enforcement yelled at crowds to evacuate, and people filed out respectfully.
Then various emotions surfaced from the shock. There were tears. Anger. ‘Whoever did this deserves the death penalty.’
The mood was sombre and people were stunned. As it turns out, the shooter was outside the security perimeter on a rooftop that should have been sealed off and guarded. The Secret Service is going to face intense scrutiny – and rightly so. There is no way anyone should ever have been able to access such an obvious, proximate roof, or ever have a clear line to shoot at the stage.
A serving soldier tells me the shot is technically very difficult indeed, owing to the distance, wind speed, shooter’s adrenalin and a target moving as much as Trump does. This is referred to as a ‘stressed’ shooting.
The whole outcome is nothing short of remarkable.
James Fletcher directed The Accidental President (2020) about Donald Trump
After the Trump rally – by James Fletcher
Mary Killen’s
Grime is good
Ian Fleming said English women are filthy – if only we were
Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, died 60 years ago – on 12th August 1964.
He was the kind of man I always assumed I would have found attractive, had we overlapped.
But then I read in a 1959 women’s magazine that he claimed English women were ‘not worth a man’s time’ because most of them were ‘unwashed, absolutely filthy – they seem to think that make-up, stuck on in great thicknesses, gives them an excuse for not washing’.
Surely it must have been the drink talking? Fleming did drink a huge amount – at one point, a bottle of gin a day, until his doctor persuaded him to switch to bourbon – and so he was ‘bilious’.
He smoked 60 cigarettes a day, despite the doctor begging him to stop. He died at 56 after defiantly playing golf in the rain, despite having a cold and a temperature of 100, and then driving 60 miles to London in wet clothes. He developed a fever, which reactivated his dormant heart condition, and died five months later.
1950s was usually once a week. And, in the freezing winters, pre-climate change, and pre-central heating, people did not fancy stripping off – even to tackle ‘trouble spots’ with facecloth and soap at a bathroom sink. So they left it a few days. Fleming, of course, moved in sophisticated international circles where gushing hot water was on tap.
In England, we were all so used to
But back to 1959. The Daily Herald responded to the outcry the interview produced by conducting a survey as to whether English women could possibly be as dirty as Fleming claimed. They interviewed hairdressers and beauticians galore and, unbelievably, they came to very much the same conclusion as Fleming. English women were dirty. In 2024, every woman of my acquaintance has at least one bath or shower a day. Many even wash their hair every day. So what was going on in 1959 that could possibly have caused women to be so dirty?
Have a guess. Yes, you’re right. Hot water was simply not available in the abundance it is today. Bath night in the
tobacco smoke, men’s hair that stank of fried food (think antimaccasars) and personal effluvia that we barely noticed this fetid miasma. In the 1950s, people could even be identified by the personal aromas, good or bad, that were our sensory signatures. You could pick up a left-behind coat after a party and identify the owner by its smell.
In 1924, acetate fabric, a man-made miracle fabric derived from cellulose, was invented as a clothing substance – widely replacing cotton, silk and wool with dripdry shirts for men and dresses for women, veritable havens for bacterial growth.
And – FUN FACT –the inventor of acetate was the business tycoon father of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll.
Britons were blithely unaware of how crooked and unsightly our teeth were, until the Americans started teasing us about ‘British teeth’.
In the same way, we women must have accepted our basting in our own juices as normal – thus the removable armpit pads which came with every dance dress to absorb the heavy amounts of bacteriarich sweat produced over the course of an evening on the dance floor.
But think of all those pheromones that excited the dance partners of the times. A whole other sensory dimension to life which has now vanished.
Today, we wash far too much. It would be better for us – and for the environment – if we cut back. I know children whose skin is already dry from the modern trend for bathing a child in hot, soapy water every night before bed. When babies are born, they must definitely not be washed for at least 24 hours, and ideally not for a few days.
The vernix (or white coating on their skin) is left on to be naturally absorbed. It is a natural moisturiser and barrier to infection. Our skin remains the biggest organ in our bodies and we are washing and scrubbing it too much.
Men are the biggest self-spoilers, washing their faces with soap in the bath and not rinsing it off properly, leaving papery, flaky skin. The skin detects germs and produces antibodies – that’s why in babies’ early days we only top and tail them. So let’s start topping and tailing ourselves as adults and give the environment a break from our excess soap and water use.
Leaving one’s skin unwashed provides a protective barrier, prevents a loss of moisture and helps to regulate temperature. Overcleaning and exfoliation just means we have to buy expensive moisturiser to replace what we’ve scrubbed away.
What has made us behave so stupidly? Market forces.
Don’t clean up your act
Prue’s News
My model performance
I recently agreed to model a dress (pictured) made from willow bark from the King’s Sandringham estate.
It was designed by my good friends Vin and Omi. Omi is pretty, dyslexic, creative, and mad. She often wears crazy make-up and a party dress. Vin is big, strong, logical and wise, and dresses in combat gear, a Mohican hairdo and make-up.
They are obsessed with sustainability. Everything they create, from clothes and cosmetics to business processes and feature films, has saving the planet at its core. Their latest venture is a fashion exhibition using textiles made from bog cotton, nettles, wood mulch, you name it – all from the royal estates. You can see it at Sandringham until October.
I should have learnt from experience and refused. I’d once, for a charity do, modelled an Issey Miyake dress, walking between tables of prospective rich donors. Attempting one of those stylish turns while sweeping off a cape –Naomi Campbell-style – to drag behind me, I’d managed to send two VIPs’ wineglasses flying.
Besides, I’m 84, likely to trip and go
flying. For this show, we’d be walking –not on the usual short catwalk, but marching through two floors of the Other House hotel in London, through lounges, kitchen, dining room, library, bars and up and down stairs, with the audience, press and photographers lining the rooms.
However, my natural egotism and the lure of something new and different meant sense did not prevail.
Ultra-skinny models hung about all day in orange jumpsuits, like Guantanamo Bay inmates, waiting for hair, make-up or costumefitting. No smiling, talking, drinking or eating for hours, while their faces, sprayed to a doll-like sheen, dried.
Omi gave us instructions to make sure we could not see the model strutting ahead of us because the audience and paparazzi needed time to concentrate on each costume.
Well, there was no danger of my treading on anyone’s heels: those long-legged models walk faster than I can run. I was the last in the line
– number 30 – and I got lost all the time, having to rely on the audience to redirect me. I could not keep a straight face, and was either panting from the effort, or laughing as I lost my way, tripped or made an ass of myself. Omi grabbed my wrist and pulled me along at a gallop.
I absolutely loved it. The audience, excited by the imagination and daring of the clothes made from cow parsley, clapped and whooped like crazy.
The buzz was terrific; it was like getting a standing ovation – a sensation I’ve only ever had once. That was when I took my one-woman show to Belfast. I was so delighted by it that, the next night, in Dublin, I said to the stage techie, ‘I love you Irish. Last night, I got a standing ovation!’
‘Oh yes’, he replied. ‘That’s because we’re Irish. We stand up for anyone.’
Prue Leith presents The Great British Bake Off
Literary Lunch
Sponsored by
10th September 2024 At the National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE
Jeremy Bowen on The Making of the Modern Middle East: A Personal History
Stephen Fry on Odyssey: the final part of the story started in global bestseller Mythos
Sonia Purnell on Kingmaker: Pamela Churchill Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Seduction, Intrigue and Power
22nd October 2024
Chris Patten on The Hong Kong Diaries
The British governor’s diary of five years from colony to handover
William Dalrymple on The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
Patrick Bishop on Paris ’44: The Shame and the Glory Celebrating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Paris
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History
Roll up for death-defying Blondin
The heart-stopping tightrope-walker was born 200 years ago
david horspool
Two hundred years ago, in Hesdin, a town near Saint-Omer in northern France, the world’s most famous funambulist was born.
Christened Jean-François Gravelet, he became known to millions as Blondin (1824-97), the tightrope-walker.
High-wire acts ran in the family. Jean-François’s father, a Napoleonic veteran, had also been an acrobat. So it was no surprise when he started learning the skill as a boy – a very young boy. By the age of five, he was already adept, and was sent to the École de Gymnase in Lyon, which trained acrobats.
After school and a long apprenticeship in Continental troupes, Jean-François, who along the way had adopted the stage name Blondin, joined the company of the world’s most famous showman, P T Barnum, appearing in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. It was on this tour that, at the age of 38, he first visited Niagara Falls and formulated the idea of crossing it by tightrope.
In 1859, after months of careful planning, Blondin, watched by a crowd of thousands, calmly stepped out onto his rope across the falls, 160 feet below. He crossed in 17 and a half minutes.
A consummate showman, he extended the journey by lying across the rope on his back and dangling a line down to the Niagara tourist boat the Maid of the Mist, hauling up a bottle of wine from which he drank.
Blondin’s Niagara feat, which he repeated several times, made his name, but it didn’t make him much money. That is probably why he took on an English manager and came to perform in London, where he was seen and disapproved of by, among many others, Dickens.
Other Britons were more welcoming – so much so that, in 1868, Blondin took British citizenship. He lived in two London houses, both of which he named after his most famous exploit: Niagara Villa in Finchley Road, and the house in
Ealing in which he died, Niagara House.
Blondin lived at a time when the circus was the height of mass entertainment.
The ring that lies at the heart of the modern circus was in fact not very old in his time. It was invented around 50 years before Blondin’s birth, when the performer Thomas Astley worked out that a circle of a certain diameter (42 feet) was ideal for providing enough centrifugal force to keep a standing rider upright on a horse trotting around its circumference.
came to you. In the bigger cities, that might mean the international sensation of Barnum and Bailey, the result of a merger of two circuses from 1881. It’s still going today, after a further merger with Ringling brothers, though they have eschewed big tops for permanent arenas for more than 60 years.
From this insight grew the variety show that conquered the world in the hands of numerous family concerns: the Astleys, and other horsey dynasties such as the Franconi of Paris and the Schumann brothers of Copenhagen.
Though it began in Britain and was imported to the US, circus, with its performers from around the world, was always an international entertainment.
Innovations travelled in both directions. The big top tent was an American invention of impresario and performer Richard Sands, known as a ‘ceiling walker’ for doing just that (he attached suction pads to his feet).
Dickens may have disapproved of Blondin, mainly because he included his young daughter in his act, wheeling her along the rope in a wheelbarrow. But he didn’t disapprove of the circus. He remembered Astley’s fondly, and in Hard Times Mr Sleary’s circus represents what it has represented ever since: an escape from Gradgrindian reality; a place of wonder and laughter – commodities in short supply in Dickens’s industrial age.
Astley’s had been a permanent ‘amphitheatre’ in Waterloo, rebuilt several times. But it travelled, too: the appeal of the travelling circus was that it
Hundreds of smaller circuses travelled through Victorian Britain –real-life versions of Sleary’s. If the performers were home-grown rather than exotic imports, there were always costumes: ‘The Emperor of Japan, on a steady old white horse stencilled with black spots, was twirling five wash-hand basins at once, as it is the favourite recreation of that monarch to do,’ said a 19th-century commentator.
In the 20th century, as a recent book by the intelligence historian Christopher Andrew explains, the circus could be a great cover for spying. Cyril Bertram Mills combined running the Bertram Mills Circus, based at Kensington Olympia, with working for MI5. Mills was briefly the case officer of Juan Pujol, whom he codenamed Garbo, one of the most celebrated double agents of the Second World War.
Cinema, television and modern views on animal and human cruelty have all taken their toll on the circus. The rise of coulrophobia – the fear of clowns –hasn’t helped. But the urge to watch live entertainment ‘for all the family’ hasn’t disappeared.
Nor has the urge to perform. For some, it remains a vocation, as it did for Blondin. The late Nell Gifford (1973-2019), creator of Giffords Circus, asked in her memoir, Josser – the circus term for an outsider – ‘What was there to do apart from the circus?’
Blondin at Niagara Falls
Town Mouse
Philistines in glass houses
tom hodgkinson
Have you noticed that your children completely ignore the values, principles and aesthetics you attempted to instil during childhood?
Take young Master Mouse, now in his mid-twenties. When he was a young mouse, his parents’ idea of interior design, if they had one, was lots of books, overflowing ashtrays, Persian rugs and black floorboards. Call it shabby Gothic.
It’s a style that shocked and fascinated the young, working-class Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet. He first encountered it at the house of his hip, poetic, posh, swinging neighbours, Fran and Jay Landesman (whose son Cosmo writes about their Islington house on page 24):
‘They were rich people, but inside all the chairs were falling apart and didn’t match the sofa. There were posters of Mao on the wall and something strange that I’d never seen before, called a wok. And then there were old tennis rackets left on the stairs and half-opened bottles of wine and the smell of garlic.’
Sounds like the ideal home to me. But Master Mouse must have been horrified by the clutter and mess he grew up with –
his aspirations are of a very different sort.
Out with the dark wood, William Morris wallpaper, antiques, orange Penguins, open fireplaces and candles stuck in bottles. He told me the other day that what he’d really like (if he had a spare £810,000), would be a flat in a complex in West London, called White City Living.
This new development has sprung up over the last few years and is adjacent to the hideous shopping centre Westfield.
The estate agent describes it thus: ‘Set within eight acres of parks and gardens, surrounded by world-class retail, entertainment, education and culture, White City Living is in the heart of west London, with over 2,500 homes.’
The blurb goes on to say, ‘Be part of the lifestyle club offering over 30 facilities and amenities including a private Mediterranean-style rooftop beach club and more.’
The photos show gleaming white, open-plan kitchens, complete with ‘matt lacquered cabinets’ and ‘polished composite stone worktop and matching upstand’. It’s all ready to move in to, and every flat looks the same (er, sorry, not
precisely the same: the buyer is offered ‘a choice of three colour palettes’).
‘Why would you want to live in a sterile cube?’ I asked Master Mouse.
‘They’re really nice,’ he said.
I wanted to say, ‘You’re no son of mine,’ but kept my mouth shut.
Needless to say, there is not a book, ashtray or half-filled wine bottle to be seen, let alone a pig in the backyard or a flitch of bacon hanging in the fireplace (another fantasy of mine). Just gleaming surfaces and glass everywhere, plus some water features and small areas of green lawn. Brave new world indeed.
I wonder where this bland hotel-like aesthetic has come from? It dominates interiors and has somehow got through to the young mouse generation, who are not fans of their parents’ clutter.
Is it the imagination-free bankers, who all hired the same interior designers, who then promoted themselves on Instagram and in glossy magazines?
Is it the Love Island-viewers, who see acres of flat marble and swimming pools as the ultimate in wealthy living? Is it the houses of the tech bros?
Books are not interesting to them. I recently went to a talk by Brett Easton Ellis, in which he said that he’d had lunch with two very rich tech bros in LA. ‘It turned out that neither had ever read a book,’ he said, appalled.
Then there was the recent comment from the crypto nerd Sam BankmanFried, who told an interviewer, ‘I’m very sceptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you f***ed up, and it should have been a sixparagraph blog post.’ Sam lived in a book-free glass palace in the Bahamas, which he bought for $30 million.
A few months after he’d uttered this grand takedown of all books, it turned out that Sam himself had f***ed up quite badly. He was found guilty of stealing $8 billion from the customers of his FTX cryptocurrency exchanges and was sent to prison for 25 years.
Oh why, oh why don’t people watch Gogglebox instead, and aspire to the sophisticated and relaxing clutter of my friend Country Mouse Giles Wood’s cottage – which he and his wife, Mary Killen, of this parish, call the Grottage? Why the desire for air-conditioned bland uniformity and comfort?
As the rebel says in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, ‘I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.’ He doesn’t want acres of white sterility.
Country Mouse
Time to pay for music lessons, Sir Keir
giles wood
What’s eating James O’Brien?
For some reason, Mary likes to listen to LBC on the radio in the mornings, but the lugubrious, mockney tones of the Old Amplefordian are normally a cue for me to make a sharp exit to my greenhouse.
He reminds me of nothing so much as a Labrador who’s become obsessed by a stone too large for its muzzle but can’t let it go.
His obsession that morning was a favoured leitmotif of O’Brien’s – namely the tyranny wielded by Old Etonians. The then Shadow Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, having observed Cameron, Johnson and Cleverly at a recent Trooping the Colour ceremony, compared the trio to ‘colonial administrators’ who exhibited a ‘certain kind of public-school smallness’.
Intrigued by what ‘public-school smallness’ might be, I lingered to listen, as callers rang in to share their negative experiences of interactions with publicschool-educated people.
One said he had grown up in Hackney – ‘where, if you made one mistake, you were banged up or stabbed’. This was in contrast to the insouciant attitude he had seen in public schoolboys who took risks with impunity, knowing that ‘Daddy’ would always supply a safety net.
Another caller said that, as a schoolboy member of a state-school sporting team, he had arrived for a match at a public school and been unnerved by the vastly superior pitches on which the rival team had trained.
The main shared gripe, though, was the self-confidence exuded by public schoolboys. They claimed it led to misguided deference among those whose education had left them without the same swagger and sense of entitlement.
The original purpose of Victorian public schools was expressly to provide
leaders of men to fill those administrative and bureaucratic roles of the Empire. So the pupils needed self-confidence to wield authority.
Bearing in mind the spiritual context of those times – that most of these men were practising Christians – there was also a sense of mission and service. Service is certainly not the sole prerogative of our new leader of men, the committed atheist Sir Keir Starmer.
The Empire was over by the time I became a music scholar at Shrewsbury. There, not unlike O’Brien at Ampleforth, I sometimes felt like an outsider.
Other boys had ivory-backed, monogrammed hairbrushes from Harrods. One of my principal objectives was to prevent classmates from ever discovering that I hailed from a brick villa, three furlongs from the brave new world of Keele service station.
Nevertheless, an esprit de corps grew up. The first evening I – and other ‘new scum’ – grooved to Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky. Pop music was always an escape from tyranny.
O’Brien’s broadcast that morning wound up with the conclusion that charging VAT on private-school fees would not be enough. With seven per cent of students currently in elite private schools, only a complete ban on the institutions would bring an end to the inequality that has benighted 93 per cent of the rest of the country for so long.
Will Sir Keir go that far?
Elitism is part of the natural order. The happiest moment of my childhood occurred when my grandmother took me, as a birthday treat, to the Portmeirion Hotel in North Wales. When the daytrippers went home and I had the whole enchanted Italianate village to myself, I experienced an unalloyed joy. Was I wrong? Doesn’t everyone dream
of turning left – if not at the poll booths – on an aeroplane? Did my public school, with its superior sports, music and arts facilities, make me look down on less privileged others and swagger with such self-confidence that they defer to me?
No, frankly. The only advantage is that I have never been intimidated by sommeliers.
A ban on private education would have undoubtedly stunted the pop careers of David Gilmour, Florence Welch, Lily Allen, Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Keane, Fred Again and Genesis.
Come to think of it, the word ‘lawn’ as in ‘six saintly shrouded men move across the lawn slowly’ on the Genesis Foxtrot album is a giveaway. (Incidentally Keir’s council-snoopers will be looking to revalue your band if you have a lawn.)
The majority of pop stars – and classical musicians – used to come from state schools. The Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra – made up of local pupils aged between 14 and 18 – secured their place in musical history when they made the first commercial recordings of the (working-class) Staffordshire composer Havergal Brian’s 10th and 21st symphonies for the Unicorn and CBS labels in 1972 and 1974. The standard of their playing was considered so high that Brian remarked that it was impressive the pupils had been able to tackle such difficult music. What changed? One of the main reasons for the current public-school dominance in the pop world is that local authorities used to spend on music provision for state schools. Now their budgets are nugatory.
Levelling down, which is socialism, has never yet delivered the fairer society we all yearn for.
Sir Keir studied the flute, piano, recorder and violin at the Guildhall. I hope he will see fit to redistribute some of the wealth he seizes towards generous music provision for state schools.
‘On a scale of one to ten, how would you describe your pain?’
I need a mansplainer in my life
Mary Kenny likes it when kind men help her out
I don’t suppose I’ll be going Scottish hillwalking any time soon. I’m doing well if I do 4,000 steps in a day.
But if I should choose to brave the Highlands, is it reassuring to know that I mustn’t be addressed as ‘darling’ or ‘sweetheart’ by male mountaineers?
It seems that chaps have had a habit of talking down to females while exploring the rugged heights, explaining – or ‘mansplaining’ – how to read maps, and even offering to accompany ladies for fear they might not be safe.
This should not occur, according to Dr Richard Tiplady, a navigational expert and leadership guru. Men are not to be condescending to women on such adventure trails. He has listened to ‘horror stories’ about women undergoing such ordeals as being patronised with terms of endearment, or taken to be the weaker sex on rough terrain.
What mixed feelings this arouses in me! I indeed dislike the way that perfect strangers address older women as ‘love’ and ‘dearie’. I often long for the American courtesy of every female being called ‘ma’am’. Yet what a constricted and bossy world we would live in if there weren’t some elasticity in relationships, or a little room for context and tone.
Sometimes it’s rather nice if a kind man explains something puzzling. Extrapolating from the mountaineering experience to everyday life, how pleasant it can be when a chap shows a little gallantry and offers to carry your bags when you’re travelling.
Do we have to eradicate all the natural differences between men and women in the name of equality?
When I was hurrying for a train at
a small railway station in Tipperary recently, the guard told me not to rush – he’d hold the train until I got settled into the carriage. He said, ‘Sure, when God made time, he made plenty of it!’
Although this is patently untrue –there’s never plenty of time – and it’s one of those corny phrases that could have come out of Darby O’Gill and the Little People, I found this touchingly comforting. It made me feel I was dealing with a human being who is acting with natural kindness and even ready to bend a schedule to show his chivalry to a lady.
It’s worth paying attention to French philosophers – often the source of fashionable ideas that come our way.
So, as Bertie Wooster might have told Jeeves, ‘You’ll usually find me curled up with Michel Onfray’s latest’ – M Onfray being one of the influential intellectuals across the Channel. His current tome is La foudre gouverne le monde (Lightning Rules, let’s say).
This French egghead sure has some contradictory ideas. He is a crusading atheist – having penned several books denouncing all religions – who nevertheless laments that Christianity is in ruins, leading to ‘decadence’.
He extols freedom and ‘progressive anarchism’, but retains a certain nostalgia for the old ‘France profonde’ – so ‘simple and modest’. He’s a socialist republican who still feels distressed that Louis XVI was guillotined.
He loathes capitalism, which he blames for introducing ‘open borders’, yet he says, ‘Money makes the law.’ He dislikes migrants for bringing ‘different
values’, but he praises Muslims for retaining a sense of ‘honour’. He claims that May 1968 introduced a social revolution and deplores that a new generation now thinks – imagine! – that grammar is ‘negotiable’. He laments that Latin and Greek have been so neglected.
He believes in free love and liberated sexuality – but feels it’s all gone to extremes, and that one of the worst outcomes of all this freedom to choose is the practice of surrogacy, which he calls ‘selling infants’ and ‘child-trafficking’.
He dislikes the EU almost as much as Nigel Farage does, and a favourite insult is Maastrichtien. Is he a Gallic Victor Meldrew, or the flavour of France now?
The King and Queen of Spain have recently been celebrating a decade since Felipe VI ascended the throne.
They’re generally considered to have done a decent job of maintaining stability and broadly keeping the country together. Queen Letizia is also very pretty and it is probably an advantage in a more feminist world that the heir, Leonore, is female.
The monarchy is supported by just over 58 per cent of Spaniards, which is enough to claim majority approval, but doesn’t leave room for complacency.
It’s interesting that traditionally Protestant countries in Northern Europe are more successful in maintaining monarchies than the Mediterranean Catholic countries. Is this for historical reasons – Denmark’s very popular monarchy goes back more than a thousand years – or is it because in more austere societies there is a greater need for ritual and ceremony?
Younger people in Britain and the Netherlands are less supportive of monarchy, according to polls.
But age is on the side of the Crown: as the young grow older, they’ll see the point of having an institution that is above squabbling politicians.
Small World
The Hannibal Lecter of Cleethorpes
Mother has become the most dangerous resident in the local hospital
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…
All married couples argue.
They fall into a pattern of saying unkind things about each other behind closed doors. But most don’t drag their 50-something son into their skirmishes when all he wants to do is watch the latest Doctor Who for a third time, in case he’s missed any nuance of its sophisticated plotting.
I had to press the worn-out PAUSE LIVE TV button for a third time when Father demanded, ‘Do something about your mother – she’s not making any sense.’
I grabbed my peacekeeping pyjamas, thinking this would be a quick diplomatic job, and I’d be back with the Daleks and duvet within minutes.
But when I visited the master bedroom, it became apparent that Mother really wasn’t making any sense at all. When I described her condition to the emergency services, the best I could do was to explain, ‘Not her normal voice and not any real words. It’s not like fully possessed demonic voice –more like Cleo Laine mid-song scatting, if that helps.’
They asked me, ‘Is her face drooping on one side?’
I was able to reassure them that Mother always looks like that.
Say what you like about Broken Britain, but the ambulance came within ten minutes.
The paramedics said they needed to take Mother to hospital. They asked me and Father who was going to travel in the ambulance. We tossed for it, and Father lost.
I poked my head cheerily into the back of the ambulance and waved them off, saying, ‘Don’t worry. Dora Blendell had similar symptoms and she was out in a couple of days.’
Mother, having rallied and now grumpy, growled back, ‘I’m not Dora
bloody Blendell, am I?’, as they closed the ambulance doors.
A pneumonia-ridden mother soon bedded down into hospital life. When I visited her, I admired the choice staff had made. They put her in the bed furthest away from the ward door. That allowed me a Silence of the Lambs stroll past the other inmates, until I finally came face to face with the makeshift ward’s most dangerous resident – my dear mum.
She first threw down a book I had got her from the second-hand book stall in the foyer. She said, ‘What a fine choice. Dead Men Walking illustrated with a coffin on the front.’
I explained it was a very small stall and it had been an emergency pick.
Of all the challenges the NHS has, I suddenly realised the main one was our ageing population – specifically the personality of the members of the population who are ageing.
You can’t throw money at a thousand Mrs Clarkes. At the very least, they need a designated dark room for nurses to lie down in, after a day of ‘doing’ for this generation. They may present as make-
do and unfussy, but at their core they’re thin-elbowed over-demanders.
At one point, they moved a friend and fellow congregant of Mother’s into the bed next to her. I was overjoyed that Mother had real company, but less joyful that it allowed Mum to make some unhelpful comparisons.
Mother said, ‘Last night, Margaret was surrounded by six family members, and they were all playing whist and laughing. It was lovely to watch…’
I said, ‘I bought you a scratchcard, didn’t I?’
Once I got home, I slunk into my little bedroom, lay down and watched the end of Doctor Who. I wondered what fascination there was in a character who lived in a small box and, although surrounded by humanity, felt utterly alien and alone.
I cracked open my door and stared out onto an empty landing. The house was finally silent. It should have been a boon for a solitude-seeking soul like me.
But something – someone – was missing. I guess Doctor Who really isn’t the same without a monster.
Sophia Waugh: School Days
My very rude awakening
I had a university friend from Hull, who claimed there was a local saying, ‘I were that surprised I could write bum on t’wall.’
He also said that you would often find a piece of graffiti – ‘BUM’ in huge letters – which always made him wonder what had surprised the graffiti artist so much.
This week, I surprised myself by writing ‘PENIS’ on the whiteboard. In big block letters, in front of a class of 14-year-olds. I was not teaching biology or sex education. I was, as usual, teaching English. The most boring part of the curriculum, too – English Language Paper 2, Comparing Two Texts.
Trust me, it’s dull. But still no excuse to write ‘PENIS’ on the whiteboard. I stood back and looked at the word, puzzled. I suddenly realised what I had done and rubbed it off, thinking no one would have noticed, but behind me heard an explosion of laughter.
One girl – a beautifully-brought-up, quiet and respectful girl – had spotted it and could not contain herself.
I had an excuse, of course. I had
meant to write PENS, under which I record the names of those to whom I lend pens, so I can reclaim them at the end of the lesson.
I had noticed, a few days before, that someone had inserted an ‘I’ into the word. My first thought had been ‘I must put the N and S close together so that no one can do that.’ Instead of which I had written the word itself.
I looked the girl in the eye and silently pleaded with her to keep silent. She nodded but then could not resist turning to a girl behind her to share the joke.
I sidled over to her and said, ‘I know you’ll tell everyone in the school and I don’t blame you, but please could you bear to wait until after the lesson?’
God bless her – she did. And so far I have had no feedback from pupils or staff. But it did become one of the moments in which my teaching career flashed before me, thinking it was all over. There have been so many times: the time I kissed a boy and told him to take off his
trousers in my cupboard; the time I told a whole class to pray to St Anthony; the time I rushed into my class to read them the riot act, forgetting I was dressed as the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas; the time (very early in my career) when I hissed under my breath, ‘I hope the whole lot of you fail your f***ing O-Levels.’
They heard, but instead of telling me off for swearing, pointed out they were due to sit GCSEs, not O-Levels. It is perhaps a miracle I still have my job.
Somehow I do and, on a good day, I flatter myself that I am really a Miss Jean Brodie (without the fascism) or Hector in The History Boys (without the groping). On a bad day, I see myself as an uncontrolled fool who stumbles from one gaffe to another and somehow endlessly manages to right herself. I have five more years before I can retire. Cross your fingers for me.
And if I do make it to the end, make sure you write ‘BUM’ on a wall somewhere.
I once met Frank Bruno at a clothing factory in the East End of London. The company produced jeans for the Gloria Vanderbilt Collection and sportswear for Nike in the mid-’80s.
I was a sales manager for a distribution company and had driven down from the Midlands to discuss delivery requirements with their transport manager.
I was nervous. It was a prestigious account. If I was lucky enough to finalise the deal, it would be a feather in my cap – not to mention a sizeable bonus in my bank account.
I got there early and parked. There was a buzz about the place with lots of people mingling around; I wondered what was going on.
Entering the reception area, I was aware of lots of balloons in various stages of deflation attached to the walls with sticky tape.
A full-size handwritten banner read ‘WELCOMBE [sic] FRANK,’ and a small wooden table held stacks of leaflets. It was the height of ’80s sophistication. Adjusting my shoulder pads, I stepped forward and informed the receptionist of my appointment with the transport manager.
I Once Met Frank Bruno
Curiosity got the better of me and I asked, ‘Who’s Frank?’
‘Frank Bruno,’ she gushed. ‘He’s here to do a promotion for Nike sportswear.’
Suddenly, for no apparent reason, I launched into a rendition of Frank
Bruno talking to Harry Carpenter.
‘Know what I mean, ’Arry?’ I said, following this with repeated loud guffawing.
The startled receptionist opened her eyes wide and made a slicing motion against her throat with her hand, coughed a little and turned her mouth into a prize-winning gurning shape.
‘What?’ I said laughing, as I heard a loud, deep bellow of laughter bubble up from behind.
Turning slowly, I was embarrassed to see Frank standing there and, behind him, the stern face of the manager I’d come to see.
‘I am so sorry,’ I grovelled. ‘I didn’t mean to…’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Frank graciously said. ‘That was one of the better impersonations, know what I mean?’ He roared with laughter at his own joke, and then asked, ‘Do you like boxing?’
‘No, but my husband, Bob, does.’
He laughed again, said he appreciated my honesty and asked if I’d like a signed photo for my husband.
‘Yes please,’ I said. ‘And thank you for your generosity.’
Frank slapped me on the back, nearly knocking me off my four-inch stilettos before handing over a signed photo. I took it from him and reiterated my heartfelt apology. I thanked him again for the photo before placing it in my briefcase and following the now smiling manager to his office.
Back in the car, I retrieved the photo and to this day I find what he wrote difficult to read. I think it says ‘Bob’, but I’m not sure. The last word, I think, is ‘Bruno’ and I love the funny little face he drew inside the ‘o’ of ‘Bruno’.
A lovely man, with an exuberant sense of fun.
And yes, I did win the contract.
Margaret Mather
Naked attraction of nude pictures
complete process, from the picking of the beans to factory production. I also received bean samples and chocolate.
When I was a child, in the fifties, one of my favourite hobbies was to read magazines.
Well, not just read them. I scoured them intently and every time there was a form to apply for something, I filled it in and sent for it.
Every day, I looked forward to the postman bringing me something: letters, packages and, even better, big parcels.
I received a large teaching display with lots of lovely, coloured pictures about chocolate. It covered the
All kinds of booklets turned up with cookery recipes, gardening offers, décor suggestions, household items, thermal underwear and many fashion catalogues.
I loved to cut out all the pictures of people and stick them into a scrapbook. They would all be named and put together as families. I then spent many hours dreaming up names and matching a child with a parent.
It was a trifle embarrassing when a man knocked at the door demanding a catalogue back as I hadn’t ordered any
items. My mum pretended that it had accidently been thrown away, as we could hardly hand it back with pages honeycombed by missing cut-outs.
Samples of everything arrived. There were packets of seeds, stamps, washing powder and even small packets of cat and dog food (we didn’t have a pet). I had a stockpile of material swatches for carpets, curtains and roller blinds.
The post brought Bibles of all descriptions, including a white Rosicrucian one, a Mormon one, a Jehovah’s Witness one and a Catholic one.
It all ended after the arrival of a pack of playing cards depicting wellendowed nude women. To
add to my father’s fury, a catalogue then turned up advertising sex aids for erectile dysfunction. It all went over my head, as I had no idea what it meant.
As a result, my collection was dispersed (although I found the playing cards when clearing the house after my father died).
From then on, all outgoing post written by me was checked before it left the house. My collecting was afterwards restricted to stamps and dolls.
By Jacquee Storozynski-Toll, Southend, Essex, who receives £50
Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past
Margaret’s signed photo of Frank
sister teresa
Manners makyth the finest men
In Mere Christianity, written in 1955, C S Lewis draws the reader’s attention to failings that occur in Christians of different persuasions and backgrounds.
He says that, come the Day of Judgement, some will be surprised to learn that they have paid far too little attention to social justice, often failing to recognise that the poverty of the poor needed remedying. Others will not be expecting to be reprimanded for their lack of basic good manners.
This year is the 700th anniversary of the birth of the founder of Winchester College and New College, Oxford: William of Wykeham. I think it is safe to assume that the pupils at the school will be reminded of its famous motto, ‘Manners makyth man’. In these enlightened days of gender distinction, Wykeham would be obliged to rephrase his adage, but we should all know what he means and some of us could, perhaps, benefit from a little revision.
Good manners don’t consist in bowing and scraping, nor in fussy displays of jumping up and down every time
someone enters a room. They have nothing to do with class or intellect: ‘gentlemanly’ and ‘churlish’ hardly feature in modern vocabulary. I suspect that, ideally, civility ought to be instilled early on in life, but it should never be too late to learn. And it costs nothing.
As guest sister of the monastery, I am responsible for greeting people from all walks of life, and for seeing to their comforts. I am 78 and fairly obviously lame – therefore carrying a tray of food is hazardous both for me and for the food. Getting to our guest cottage involves going down a short but slippery open-air staircase and walking along an uneven garden path to reach the glass door of the guest’s kitchen.
We have just had three very distinguished men to stay.
on the table; the second got up and opened the door for me so that I could put the lunch tray on the table; the third, an 82-year-old Jesuit, sprinted across the garden path and up the stairs and took the tray from me while I was still on the first step.
I congratulated him on his courtesy and asked where his impeccable manners had come from – was it the Jesuits or his mother?
He burst out laughing and said, ‘Oh no, not the Jesuits! It was my mother.’
The links between good manners, charity and service are obvious. It is these qualities that make us fully human. Courtesy is an intrinsic part of Jesus’s behaviour: he invites without ranting or shouting.
The first remained seated while I opened the door and put the lunch tray
Memorial Service
Former Daily Mail
editor Paul Dacre led tributes to Ann Leslie, the paper’s formidable foreign correspondent, at St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street.
Paul confirms this essential attitude in 1 Corinthians 13:4: ‘Love is never rude.’
Dame Ann Leslie (1941-2023)
Dacre said, ‘A child of Empire, born in a Calcutta of interracial riots, she possessed a brimming confidence, a resilient selfsufficiency and an inner steel that I suspect was forged when she was sent, at four, to a distant Indian boarding school and then, aged nine, back to Blighty to a ghastly, damp, pious Catholic boarding school in the Peak District, rarely to see her parents again.
‘But nothing was as hateful as the bullying she endured on the graduate training scheme – which she was to join at 20 – of the Manchester Daily Express, a swaggering paper which in those days employed 700 people.
‘To be fair, Ann was later to concede that the brutal regime taught her to write clear, concise English, to hold her drink and in subsequent years to fend off drug barons, war criminals, dictators’ goons and manifold gropers. “Stub your cigarettes on their hands – that sorts them,” she would advise.
‘For her, bras weren’t for burning. They were indispensable for hiding press passes, secret documents, airline tickets, contact lenses and mini recorders.’
‘There is no point in crying,’ she once said. ‘It just makes your mascara run.’
Her daughter, Katharine Fletcher, remembered her mother saying she had the best job in the world. She brought back presents: cuddly toy penguins from the Falklands; a piece of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Katharine said, ‘I knew what an intifada was and how to pronounce Mangosuthu Buthelezi at ten.’
Readings were from 1 Corinthians 13 and Edward Thomas’s Adlestrop. Janet Suzman read from Ann Leslie’s memoir, Killing My Own Snakes. Tom Conti read James Fenton’s Memorial. Hymns were To Be a Pilgrim, Lord of All Hopefulness and Jerusalem. Music included Gustav Holst’s Venus, Mozart’s Ave verum corpus and Paul Simon’s Graceland JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW
Manners matter: good behaviour by C S Lewis
The Doctor’s Surgery
Beware of magic health cures
The new weight-loss drug might not be a miracle, after all dr theodore dalrymple
How easy it is to grasp the wrong end of the stick or to mislead without really meaning to!
An article in the Guardian newspaper recently was headlined ‘Weight loss drug could reduce heart attack risk by 20%, study finds.’
The report of the study dealt with 8,803 patients over the age of 45 who were overweight but not diabetic. They were given a weekly injection of semaglutide for 40 months on average.
The study stated that 132 of them (plus or minus a margin of error) would avoid heart attack, stroke or death from cardiovascular disease they would have suffered, were it not for the drug.
Since the reduction in heart attack, stroke or cardiovascular death was not dependent on either the initial weight of the patients or their degree of weight loss, the conclusion was drawn, or at least implied, that the entire adult population over the age of 45 should be taking the injections – though for how long was not stated. Further research would be necessary to answer this question.
Benefits can look larger or smaller depending on how they are presented. If you fell into the category of person investigated in the trial, your chances of benefiting within three and a third years from taking 168 injections (at a cost of £175 each, nearly £30,000) would be 1.5 per cent – that is to say one in 67.
Is this light worth the candle? There is no definitive answer to the question, all the more so as the side effects were not mentioned. In the original paper reporting the experiment, nearly a fifth of the patients dropped out because of them.
An age range of 45 and upwards is very wide. If much of the benefit was in people aged over 65, it would mean that many people under that age were taking weekly injections for little or no benefit. In fact, according to the paper, the
chances of someone aged between 45 and 55 benefiting from the treatment in three years was about one in 87.
Even more important was the fact that the subjects of the trial had already had a stroke or a heart attack before they started the injections.
And, of course, one of the greatest risks for having a stroke or heart attack is already having had one. The difference between primary prevention (that of developing a disease in the first place) and secondary prevention (that of preventing its recurrence once it has already occurred) is not mentioned by the article in the Guardian. It cannot be presumed that they are the same – or even proportionate. Since the risk of people having a stroke or heart attack is so much higher than that of people who have not had one, any beneficial effect of the injections is likely to be diluted the more widely they are given. Again, this is likely, but not
proved. Only further, very expensive research could prove it one way or the other.
Of course, it is also possible that the benefits of the injections (not only to the shareholders of the company making them) will be greater in absolute and relative terms the longer they are given.
But is also possible that long-term deleterious side effects will emerge that will lessen the overall benefit.
What is the moral of this story?
I think it is that one should read of such trials with an open but sceptical or critical mind if one is to avoid hasty and erroneous conclusions. Do not rush off and demand the latest drugs, reported as miraculous in the expectation of salvation, especially if you are not already at death’s door, when hasty conclusions may have to be drawn.
Beware of newspapers bearing stories of medical advance. The medical journals are already bad enough in this respect.
‘You should have read the fine print. “Possible side effects of leaving your body to science!” ’
The Oldie, 23–31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk
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My Viennese whirl
SIR: Harry Mount’s article about the filming of The Third Man (June issue) reminds me vividly of the three years I spent in Vienna (1951-54), teaching English in a private school that was re-establishing itself after having been closed down by the Nazi authorities.
The city was still in four zones: American, British, French and Russian. There were two schools, one in Grinzing (American) and the other in the south (Russian) zone. I travelled daily on trams between the two zones and so could see where the fiercest fighting had been when the Russian troops, who were the first into the city at the war’s end, arrived.
There was also much damage along the main Ringstrasse, which encircles the city centre. The Stephansdom – Vienna’s great cathedral – had suffered damage from fire and the bells had been mostly destroyed, but while I was there the largest bell was restored and was dragged round the Ringstrasse on a huge dray, before being taken into the cathedral to be blessed and re-hung.
Just a number
SIR: Mary Killen (April issue) is right about never revealing or acting your age. Dame Zara Bate, the flamboyant widow of our late prime minister, Harold Holt, resolutely recorded her date of birth in Who’s Who as ‘10th March’.
That’s the way!
Yours faithfully, Don Morris, Hobart, Tasmania
The dray passed below my window along the Ring and people were kneeling in the roadway as it went by.
Another memorable re-installation was the return of the insignia of the Holy Roman Empire, including Charlemagne’s great crown, which Hitler had taken away to Germany at the Anschluss. I queued up to see these celebrated crown jewels displayed in the Hofburg and will never forget the sight of the wondrous 10th-century crown with its gold plaques and cabochons, unlike anything I had ever seen before or ever have since. Old Viennese residents were standing before it with tears in their eyes.
Glenys Arthur, London NW8
Nanny statement
SIR: Prue Leith (‘Please, sir, we don’t want more junk food’, July issue) says, ‘No one cries “nanny state” when the Government insists that we … wear seat belts and resist the temptation to shoot up heroin.’ I don’t know about the heroin, but I do seem to remember that, in the years after car seat-belt legislation was first mooted in the late 1960s, lots of people were on the radio, crying, ‘Nanny state’ (or they would have done if they’d had the expression at their disposal).
Just as with the protests against the imposition of Covid regulations, politicians and others complained about the assault on personal liberty, and warned of the dangers attendant on being strapped into a vehicle – how can you escape if your car bursts into flames, or if you drive it into a lake? I wonder if other Oldie-readers have the same memories.
Michael Duffy, Suwon, Korea
Trojan War comes to Gaza
SIR: David Horspool (History, July issue) is as ever spot-on in reminding us of Gaza’s ancient history, and specifically of
The Third Man turns 75 by
Memories stirred by The Third Man
the unfortunate or horrifying incident of Governor Batis’s death in 332 BCE.
What he spared our sensibilities was a detail as reported by some ancient writers: that Batis’s death was brought about by his being dragged around Gaza’s walls, in an inexact replica of the treatment of the mythical Hector at the ‘man-slaying’ hands of Achilles.
The not unimportant difference was that Hector was already dead, whereas Batis was dragged to his death alive. Yours sincerely,
Professor Paul Cartledge, University of Cambridge
‘OK, so I go back and forth … Then what?’
L’État, c’est Roy
SIR: A N Wilson (Oldie Man of Letters, July issue) refers to Roy Jenkins as Woy, drawing attention to the politician’s speech impediment. When Roy was President of the European Commission and considered rather haughty, my French colleagues called him Le Roi Jean Quinze.
William Wood, Maulds Meaburn, Cumbria
‘No, the breasts are real. It’s the smile that’s fake’
No Welsh swearwords
SIR: Giles Wood should not be surprised by Welsh-speakers swearing in English (Country Mouse, July issue). Welsh is virtually devoid of ‘cuss words’, for reasons that are far from clear – to me, at least. Almost the worst oath in Welsh is mochyn du which translates as ‘black pig’ and which itself is hardly ever heard in conversation.
There is nothing in Welsh as satisfying as the plosive, and explosive, f-word when one’s expressing ffrustration in some situations!
By the way, I’ve noticed recently in Scandi-noir series a marked tendency to import our favourite expletive and pepper the dialogue with it, despite the Scandinavians having some pretty rich varieties of their own in Norwegian and Swedish etc.
Our lexical legacy to the world? Tony Purcell, Sheffield
Don’t Call Me Madam
SIR: Your piece concerning Elsa Maxwell (Olden Life, July issue), the hostess with the mostest, reminded me that she is also named in Irving Berlin’s musical Call Me Madam. This was intended as a satire, with Elsa Maxwell and her rival Perle Mesta as its targets (Mrs Mesta had just been appointed US Ambassador to Luxembourg).
The show was a success, but the satire backfired spectacularly: audiences took to Ethel Merman’s characterisation, and as a consequence the popularity of both ladies was enhanced.
Sandy Wilson once mentioned Call Me Madam in a conversation with Irving Berlin and his wife. There
was a prolonged silence before Mrs Berlin explained, ‘We don’t talk about that one.’
David Culver, London SE9
Name that theme tune
SIR: I very much enjoyed Andrew Roberts’s article (July issue) on the golden age of TV theme tunes and of course the references to Ron Grainer –although no mention of the theme for Tales of the Unexpected.
My criterion for a good theme tune is that it must grab you in five seconds. Approaching Menace (Mastermind), is one of my ringtones; also the simple, synthesised tune to the Protect and Survive public-information films about what to do in the event of atomic attack.
To this day, in pubs, people remember it and say it chills them. It is the ringtone for my good lady of the last 38 years. I still duck and take cover.
Viv Wigley, Mackworth, Derby
‘Push me back to the cave I’ve had an idea’
Don’t tax schools
‘Advertising, actually’
SIR: I share Sophia Waugh’s misgivings about charging VAT on private schooling (School Days, July issue). She rightly mentions that parents of the privately educated pay for education of others’ children through their taxes as well as for that of their own through school fees.
Many oldies may have been educated in a direct-grant school. Most were grammar schools, but there were also boarding schools such as the one I attended at Barnard Castle.
In those days, there was positive provision for parents of modest means to send their children to experience the kind of education that would otherwise be the preserve of the wealthy. Now, negatively imposing VAT on independent school fees tends to deny that choice to families of modest means.
Preferring the negative to the positive seems regrettable.
Alan Fairs, Bewdley, Worcestershire
Hollywood’s funny girl
HUGO VICKERS
Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius
By Carrie Courogen
St Martin’s Press £23.75
Being a dedicated Elaine May fan, I could not wait to get my hands on this book.
Nor was I disappointed. Carrie Courogen has done stunning research, despite the many obstacles in her path, bringing the elusive director, comedian and actress fully into focus.
She calls it Miss May Does Not Exist – the way Elaine described herself on her 1958 comedy album, Improvisations to Music, done with Mike Nichols.
It is an apt title, as much of Elaine’s work has been done without credit or acknowledgment. She likes to work in the shadows. Naturally, she refused to co-operate with the author, who once donned a wig and sat on a bench monitoring the entrance to her Upper West Side apartment, in the hope of catching a glimpse of her recalcitrant subject. A recent interview reveals that, predictably, Miss May has remained silent since publication.
For some years, I have been an apostle for the subtly funny Mike Nichols-Elaine May dialogues that filled a Broadway theatre in the late 1950s. Between them, they more or less created comedy improv, bouncing words and situations off each other with the same dexterity jazz musicians show when they play together.
I have relished Elaine’s 1972 film, The Heartbreak Kid, since I first saw it in 1984. It dealt with the dilemma of a young man (Charles Grodin) falling in love on his honeymoon with a blonde (Cybill Shepherd), while his bride
(Jeannie Berlin, in real life Elaine May’s daughter) languished in their room with diabolical sunburn. I fear the realisation of the commitment of marriage must sometimes inspire such an agonising situation.
To review this book, I had fun watching Elaine May films to see what I thought and what the author then had to say. So I screened A New Leaf, which Elaine directed in 1971, with her starring opposite Walter Matthau.
A New Leaf is about a man who runs out of money, and has to marry an heiress. He finds an unco-ordinated botanist, played by Elaine, with smudged lipstick, clumsily spilling her tea.
When Elaine finished the edit, the film
was three and a half hours long. The studio cut it, and to her fury they removed the essence of the film, including two murders by Matthau, as he planned to kill his bride – making the film ending what she called ‘clichéridden, banal’. Her co-star Walter Matthau commented that Elaine ‘makes Hitler look like a little librarian’.
I also watched Ishtar, deemed a monumental failure in 1987, but considerably redeemed on reissue. This film was meant to be a take on the Road to… films of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. I can see how it was a studio budget disaster waiting to happen, with its exotic Moroccan and desert locations, especially as the press picked up on how much
Elaine May, now 92, and Mike Nichols (1931-2014): created comedy improv
Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman were being paid.
I thought it was rather fun. Most people hated it. As Elaine said, ‘If everyone who hated Ishtar had actually seen it, I’d have been a rich woman.’
The joy of this biography is that, with each film in turn, Carrie Courogen takes us behind the scenes and tells us exactly what went on in production.
Elaine May’s problems were manifold. It was not easy to be one of the first women directors on films. She was judged more harshly than a man would have been if something went wrong (which it often did). She was a perfectionist, demanding endless retakes to get exactly what she wanted. This set her against the money men, as she invariably exceeded the budget.
And she was experimental. She wanted to do imaginative and innovative things, and this was invariably in opposition to the more obviously commercial approach of the studios, who pandered to audiences, assuming they liked schmaltzy endings.
Yet the author makes it clear that the development of films owes much to this elusive director.
Elaine May survived a nomadic childhood and a scratchy education. She became a revolutionary influence in sketch comedy. She scripted The Birdcage and Primary Colors. She doctored Heaven Can Wait, Tootsie and Reds. She lives on at the age of 92 and has inspired from Carrie Courogen a biography that has already been highly praised on the other side of the Atlantic.
I greatly recommend it.
Hugo Vickers has written biographies of the Duchess of Windsor, Queen Mary and the Queen Mother
Posh, Becks – and sex
TANYA GOLD
The House of Beckham: Money, Sex and Power
By Tom Bower HarperCollins £22
Tom Bower is an expert in interesting monsters. He has done Boris Johnson, Mohamed Fayed, Klaus Barbie and Robert Maxwell twice.
Now he’s turned his pen towards David and Victoria Beckham, the footballer and ex-Spice Girl, married for 25 years.
It’s a densely packed summary of every tabloid article he has found.
Because it is written without access or sympathy – you need one or the other to bring the reader with you – it feels strangely discordant and weird. Talk about bringing a tank to a knife fight –and still losing.
David and Victoria are working-class heroes: there is a lot of snobbery in this book. People from a different class are allowed to love money, and they do.
They fell in love when he was at Manchester United, and she was in Spice World. They married, sold the photographs for money, had four children and had varying success in football, music and fashion.
Her clothes express all the poise she doesn’t have. I read her biography: when a balloon burst at the Brit Awards, she thought she had been shot. She is bewildered
He was unfaithful – that is Bower’s main accusation. Beckham’s OCD – he used to buy two pairs of Calvin Klein pants a day – is skipped over.
She continually amended her body – Bower writes a lot about her remade breasts and pitted skin – and barely ate.
That’s the story of a marriage. That’s misery tumbling out. But Bower, who cannot write with kindness – this book is celebrity culture on trial for Newsnight – cannot give us the intimacy of pity.
With every disclosure, the Beckhams move further away from the reader. This is anti-biography, then. It should be a Judith Krantz novel – its spirit is – but Bower offers us nothing so readable.
The chapter headings are calamities scribbled by a bad fairy: Dismay; Wreckage; Downfall; Agony; Qatar.
They are repetitive – I mean boring – although, amid the flights, the fights and the parties, there are nuggets of information.
One of Beckham’s legs is shorter than the other.
The University of Staffordshire offered a 12-week Beckham Studies course. The professor said interest in the Beckhams was ‘compensation for their own powerlessness’. I’d add to that: it suggests greed, envy and a lack of imagination.
What’s it like – being a crucible for all this? Bower can’t say.
David and Victoria Beckham in Portofino, 1997
Beckham once wore a T-shirt with Adolf Eichmann’s face on it. He has never seen Victoria with natural eyebrows. His publicist wanted to send him into space.
‘I love giving birth,’ she says, in one of many documentaries made about them.
‘You had a caesarean,’ he replies.
‘We’ve just bought the serialisation rights to your autobiography,’ the editor of the Sun tells him.
‘What autobiography?’ he asks.
Beckham has a notebook with a list of people who ‘upset me most’. He drinks Coca-Cola but is paid to promote Pepsi. If this was a Beckett play, would Pepsi be a character?
He is followed into the loo. Does he put socks down his pants?
Their children’s names are registered as trademarks.
Bower has done his research – I weep over the tabloid articles he has annotated. But he has, despite all the data (all biographers are a kind of stalker), committed the original sin of the biographer. He doesn’t know them.
There are 339 pages of text and, still, I can’t get a fix on the Beckhams. I don’t know what they fear or what they want. They never come into focus for me. Only their possessions do – and perhaps that is the point. They are, in this book, a nadir of 21st-century consumer capitalism – the only metaphor they give him – but Bower does nothing with this. As I read the book, I often thought of Martin Amis’s Money. What would Amis have done with Victoria, who is a Selina Street if ever I read one?
Bower, though, has his own issues with vanity and security. This book made me more curious about him
It works, I suppose, as a fable about the state of British journalism. Bower used to be a very serious writer, and now he deals in gossip, which others do much better.
The House of Beckham, Bower writes at the end, with a final piece of pulverising cruelty, ‘offers everlasting entertainment’. He’s wrong.
Tanya Gold is restaurant critic Spectator
City of fights
JAMES OWEN
Paris ’44: The Shame and the Glory
By Patrick Bishop
Viking £25
‘We’ll always have Paris,’ says Rick to Ilsa in Casablanca.
It’s meant to be a comfort, recalling their romance earlier in the war, but it’s a more complex statement than it seems.
For the Paris they had was the city not only of love, but of love’s illusion. As Patrick Bishop makes clear in this often gripping history of the capital’s liberation from Nazi rule, Bogart and Bergman were not alone in seeking to cast the period in a more palatable light.
In the 1930s, there was a Paris for everyone. For expatriate writers and artists such as Ernest Hemingway and Robert Capa, the photographer, it was a place of freedom and inspiration, the home of hot jazz and experimental art.
Hitler was a fan, too, visiting Napoleon’s tomb after the German conquest in 1940 and urging his pet architect, Albert Speer, to use the city as the model for the new Berlin.
Yet, for all its réclame, the Allies were in no hurry to take it, once they broke out of Normandy. Their focus was on pushing towards Germany. In Italy, General Clark’s decision to liberate Rome had allowed Kesselring to regroup and, in France, Eisenhower was determined to avoid such a distraction. By August 1944, Paris mattered mostly to the French.
The splits that had deeply divided society before the war still endured. Many on the right had found ways of making their peace with fascist overlords. Antisemitism ensured that the civil service and police had facilitated the deportation of Jews.
Resistance had come chiefly from Communists. But, as Bishop points out, the difficulty of getting weapons into their hands – urban parachute drops were impossible – meant attacks on the occupiers had been few. By D-Day, there were 60,000 potential volunteers in and around Paris, yet only 300 guns.
The liberation was accordingly an opportunity for all to cover their shame with reflected glory. Eager to make his compact with the nation, Charles de Gaulle would become the mythmaker in chief, claiming, in his first speech after the Germans had been evicted, that Paris had liberated itself.
Bishop’s dissection of this fiction, and his telling of the days that led up to it, is as good as anything he has written, going
back to Fighter Boys (2004). If Paris ’44 has a failing, it is that it takes too long –two thirds of the book – before it cuts to that chase.
Partly that is because the reader needs time to get to know Bishop’s customary large cast of characters. Among these are Rose Valland, the curator who surreptitiously recorded which paintings were being shipped off to Germany, and a teenage member of the Resistance, Madeleine Riffaud (now rising 100).
Others, such as Hemingway, are perhaps over-familiar or, like Ernst Junger and J D Salinger, included more for their star value than for insights derived from their experience.
Once emissaries from Paris had convinced the Americans that its population (as was happening in Warsaw) was in danger from the Germans – Churchill had refused to interrupt his nap to see an earlier envoy – the only French unit in the field, an armoured division, rolled into the capital. It was backed up all the way, though, by US infantry.
Attacks by the Resistance had begun, but they lacked the arms to push out the occupiers, who were packing up anyway.
Another myth, assiduously spread in his own memoir, is that Paris’s German governor, Dietrich von Choltitz, defied Hitler’s order to turn the city into a ‘field of ruins’.
Choltitz may genuinely not have wanted to do that but, by the time he had to make a decision, German troops were struggling to reach the sites they had previously rigged for demolition, including the Invalides.
As it was, while there was street fighting at the end and atrocities on both sides, much of the run-up to the surrender was carefully stage-managed by the two sides over the preceding days to avoid unnecessary deaths (not least Choltitz’s).
The Resistance leaders who toured the streets, urging Parisians not to shoot at the retreating occupiers, were escorted by German outriders. The city’s rage was reserved for collaborators, and often vented without care for justice – and largely by men on women.
As he had hoped, De Gaulle had used the liberation to make himself central to France’s future. He cemented his own legend by defying fire from snipers as he walked in triumph across Paris. The identities of the gunmen, perhaps more through chicanery than by chance, largely evaded further scrutiny.
It was the same old story – a fight if not for love, then for glory – and De Gaulle had ensured he would be remembered as the victor.
James Owen is author of Commando: Winning World War II Behind Enemy Lines
‘This is my son, Tom, and that’s his evil twin, Jeff’
A Life in Books – Lady Antonia Fraser
My
It had been extremely good training for me. Shortly after going to work for the publisher George Weidenfeld (19192016), I was compelled to write a book.
I use the word ‘compelled’ deliberately, because it wasn’t a book that I would have chosen to write. It was in fact a children’s book – and was followed by a second one.
George swept into the Weidenfeld & Nicolson board meeting, following his regular session with the directors of Mark & Spencer, at which the list of children’s classics for the next few months was decided.
We would then illustrate them, finding exciting modern illustrators, and sell them in the M&S shops to our entire profit, since classics obviously paid no copyright.
On this occasion, the list included King Arthur and the Knights of the
Hunchback spy
BRUCE ANDERSON
All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil
By Stephen Alford Allen Lane £30
History is written backwards.
From the secure vantage of long centuries, we know how events turned out. The Spanish Armada was defeated. Under Elizabeth I, and with the guidance of Burghley and his son Robert Cecil, England was as well-governed as was possible in an early modern monarchy.
By the end of Gloriana’s long reign, the Church of England was beginning to settle down and that compromise between Protestant and Catholic seemed to suit the English temperament. ‘Dearly beloved’ – what an attractive phrase, especially when the English manage to live up to it.
With Elizabeth’s death, the succession moved effortlessly to the Stuarts, and everything began to go wrong. They lacked both long-term replacements for the Cecils and political wisdom of their own. It required one King’s judicial murder and another one’s exile before everything calmed down.
Thereafter, under stolid kings called George, England enjoyed constitutional stability created under that splendid mystification the Crown in Parliament:
first book – 70 years ago
Round Table. I saw my chance.
‘That won’t do, George,’ I said importantly. ‘T H White [author of The Once and Future King, about King Arthur] is still in copyright…’
‘Then you, Antonia, will write it,’ replied George without a pause, turning to the next book. I gasped.
It was Nicolas Thompson, my co-editor, who pointed out that I would actually be paid – if not exactly what Sir Thomas Malory got for Le Morte d’Arthur in 1485. Anyway, I wrote the book, received the modest sum of £100 as a one-off payment (absolutely no royalties). And so, in 1954, I was published for the first time throughout Marks & Spencer at the age of 22.
After this prodigious triumph – as I saw it – I naturally followed it up the next year with Robin Hood. When the choice was made known, I smiled
the basis for growing prosperity and a great Empire.
Though Whiggery may now be extinguished as a political force, it can often seem that, at least when it comes to history, the Whigs have triumphed. Macaulay’s version of events has passed into the popular consciousness. But it was not like that at the time.
History is lived forwards and, in the 16th century, life was precarious. At moments, Elizabeth herself wondered if her elder half-sister, Queen Mary, might have her eliminated. For almost the first three decades of her reign, Elizabeth’s rightful heir was Mary, Queen of Scots.
Mary was a Roman Catholic. It is hard for the political and religious descendants of the stolid Georges to grasp this but, in the 16th century, men and women were not only prepared to die for their faith: many of them also felt it their duty to do so, even though the methods of execution were often burning at the stake, or a hideous death by hanging, drawing and quartering.
In the first few years of Elizabeth’s reign, a wise Pope refused to excommunicate her. But that expedient could not last. In 1570, Rome did condemn her. Up until then, many English Roman Catholics would have been happy to live peaceably as loyal subjects of the Queen, while Elizabeth herself declared that she did not want to create windows into men’s souls.
But once Rome had issued its dread
complacently. Who else but me could take on this wild adventure story?
But the fact was that with Robin –and not with Arthur – there was a problem of plot. A Malory did not exist: I had to be my own Malory. Fortunately, the spirit of the detective-story writer was beginning to burn in me and, with the invention of a character called Black Barbara, I soon felt I was well away.
My next two published works were of a very different ilk: Dolls (1963) and The History of Toys (1966).
I remember being intoxicated by the history of Queen Mary’s dolls’ house – and then learning how the working classes adapted saucepans and spoons, out of which imaginative toys were constructed.
The two books were good practice for writing to order – and even better practice for researching.
decree, stating that the faithful owed no allegiance to a heretic sovereign, many of the authorities regarded every Roman Catholic as a potential traitor, while some Roman Catholics felt confronted by a choice between mortal sin and martyrdom.
In Protestant circles, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was widely read. So Protestants feared that Elizabeth’s life was all that stood between them and the fires in Smithfield. Highly placed Protestants were worried that Rome’s agents might try to accelerate mortality and assassinate the Queen.
Although the Armada had been defeated, there was always the fear that the Spanish might make another attempt, abetted by English Catholics.
It was in these difficult circumstances that Burghley, Walsingham and Robert Cecil had to work. The first need was
intelligence. Walsingham began to deploy spies. Under his tutelage, Robert Cecil developed the art, becoming the most effective British spymaster until the 20th century.
There were thought to be 367 Catholic émigrés in Paris and others in the Low Countries. Some of them were prepared to turn their coat for cash. Others were flaky characters. So who to trust? It was an endless problem, which Cecil surmounted by effort and cunning.
All His Spies is an impressive account of the tergiversations of intelligencegathering in an age before modern communications, and of Robert Cecil’s career. Born almost a hunchback in an age where physical deformity was regarded as indicative of moral weakness, Cecil never enjoyed good health, more or less working himself to death before his 49th birthday.
Along the way, he earned the affection and gratitude of both Elizabeth and James I. She nicknamed him Pygmy; James called him Beagle. They both knew that they could not do without him, and rewarded him well.
This caused resentment, especially after Cecil encouraged the Queen to have her one-time favourite, Essex, executed for rebellion. He has accrued many detractors among the romantically inclined – including Macaulay. But this book should help to persuade doubters that Robert Cecil was a very great public servant.
He also founded a dynasty and the Marquess of Salisbury still lives in Hatfield, the house that Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, had built. Alas, he died before it was completed.
This work takes us through the labyrinth that Cecil negotiated so superbly. Our author evokes those turbulent years when so much could have gone so wrong, so quickly. Robert Cecil helped to ensure this did not happen.
Bruce Anderson is author of Drink!
The Loadsamoney era
IVO DAWNAY Good Chaps
By Simon Kuper Profile Books £9.99
Margaret Thatcher used to make Cabinet members pony up for the cost of the sandwiches during political meetings.
As the grandees fumbled grumpily for pound coins, she explained that catering could be supplied by the public purse only when they were addressing government business.
Her Foreign Secretary Peter Carrington resigned in 1982 for failing to see the Argentine threat to the Falklands – perhaps the last truly honourable resignation in modern political history.
Somewhere around that time, the party of estate owners morphed into the party of estate agents: a life in politics was less one of public service than a career. Labour were little better. Fuelled by the fashionable notion of a cash-powered transactional meritocracy, just weeks before his 1997 landslide, Tony Blair accepted a £1m donation from the Tory-voting Formula 1 boss, Bernie Ecclestone. Not long after, the new PM fought for an exemption for the motor sport from a Europe-wide ban on tobacco advertising.
The ensuing scandal shamed the man who had promised to ‘clean up politics’ into returning the money and passing the last significant law regulating political donations – the Political parties, Elections and Referendum Act of 2000.
Money and corruption have always been deep in the DNA of the British state, ebbing and flowing like a tide.
In the 18th century, when Robert Walpole was establishing the office of Prime Minister, normal custom and practice for fighting for an MP’s seat was to hose down the voters with beer and pies.
Walpole himself cashed in his shares in the South Sea Company at a 1,000-per-cent gain, just days before the Bubble popped. Hardly surprising that his Norfolk palace of Houghton Hall had one of the finest art collections in Europe.
Yet 200 years later, in the two decades following the Second World War, the pickings for scandalmongers were slim indeed. This was the relatively short-lived Good Chaps era, when political parties were funded largely by their 2.8m members. The corruption tide was out.
In 1947, Hugh Dalton, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, resigned after tipping off an Evening Standard reporter on some minor Budget measures just minutes before going into the Chamber
to reveal them. (He was unaware of how swiftly they could update the paper.)
Today, entire budgets are systematically leaked to friendly media well before the Chancellor gets to his feet.
Small beer, indeed. But if the grey, austere 1940s and ’50s were sleaze’s nadir, its zenith surely is not far behind us, especially during the Merrie England culture established with such brio when the slapstick court of that Lord of Misrule Boris Johnson settled in at No 10.
The first line of Simon Kuper’s latest insists, ‘This is not another book about Boris Johnson…’ and then immediately adds, ‘but he did embody Britain’s lurch towards political corruption.’
This strikes me as a little unfair – it had started much earlier. And, as Kuper himself points out, the trouble really set in under the tidal wave of cash flowing from Nigel Lawson’s tax-slashing budgets and the Big Bang, which transformed the City of London from a sedate gentlemen’s club into Vanity Fair.
Almost overnight, it felt, a classic Good Chap career in the civil service, with its promise of a comfortable retirement with a ‘K’ in a Queen Anne rectory in the Cotswolds, looked like a mug’s game. As early as 1988, Harry Enfield’s ‘Loadsamoney’ had replaced the bowler hats.
When the oleaginous Peter Mandelson told a US businessman that he was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’, it seemed everyone agreed that the rules had changed, possibly for good.
Kuper’s book – at 166 pages, barely more than an extended essay – misses some open goals. Its main thrust is to concentrate on the flood of dirty (often Russian) money that poured into the Tory Party’s coffers, and the new peerages that oiled the flow.
It entirely ignores the Owen Paterson affair, in which the Northern Irish Randox health company received £480m worth of government contracts in non-competitive tenders. Paterson was paid £8,33 a month for 16 hours’ work.
No mention either of the pneumatic Baroness Mone, the Cruella De Vil of the Covid PPE-supply market, or of the decision not to prosecute companies cheating the Treasury’s furlough scheme.
And, as for solutions, Kuper’s bathetic conclusion is: more regulation. Given the mountain of ordure in Westminster, it would seem quite hard to make a book about political corruption boring.
Simon Kuper succeeds.
Ivo Dawnay was Washington Bureau Chief of the Sunday Telegraph
OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH
Deft in Venice
PHILIPPA STOCKLEY
The Night in Venice
By A J Martin
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £22
Like Death in Venice, Andrew Martin’s The Night in Venice is set in 1911
Former barrister Martin, now writing under the pen name A J Martin, has made offbeat, unsentimental historical fiction his own. His well-researched stories feature strong-flavoured, wry, idiosyncratic – and since The Winker (2019) – sometimes seethingly violent characters. Never sunk slavishly in period, they somehow bridge time, allowing the reader to join in the game.
The first half of The Night in Venice happens over two days, largely in the fevered imagination of bookishly clever, difficult, sexually obsessed 14-year-old orphan Monica.
Inside the mind of a well-bred Edwardian we may be, but demure frock, parasol and sailor hat, in Tadzio style, do not dampen Monica’s prurient fascination with penises, French kisses, farting and burping. So far, so teenage, with the distinction that she’s also psychopathic – on which the tale turns.
Orphaned at ten after losing both parents to cancer, she chafes in a claustrophobic London flat with her former governess, now guardian, Rose Driscoll, to whom she is jaw-droppingly rude. The intellectual Driscoll is punctilious, good with a needle and repeatedly needled by the contempt of her charge (who considers herself an unwanted parcel).
The selfish, cruel teenager spends much time, when not rifling through Driscoll’s locked drawers or reading her private letters, getting ideas from books.
Monica’s previous guardian, gay uncle Leo (killed by a tram), used his will to task Driscoll with taking Monica to Venice. His odd death is just one event revealed in dribs as the author mercilessly teases with clues and red herrings.
The novel opens in Venice, as Monica awakes, thinking she might have shoved long-suffering Driscoll into a canal.
Everything hangs on her illogical response to this possibility, for she’s too cowardly to go and check whether she’s actually committed murder, or just dreamed it. So a peripatetic day unfolds.
The struggle to separate dreams from reality is Monica’s Achilles’ heel. Settling in Caffè Florian at lunchtime, she
interrogates a blind KC about the law relating to murderous minors, asking, ‘How do we know we’re not in a dream now?’
Self-obsessed and impressionable, Monica believes men are ‘going to be her allies in the world’. Magnetically aware of them, she has instant crushes, and fantasises about ‘it’. This compulsion results in a snog with a dim-witted shepherd, ‘love’ for the blind KC, and then for a blue-eyed policeman. Again, so far, so adolescent.
Except that, when crossed, Monica’s thoughts leap to murder. Any psychoanalyst would have a field day. Some crushes result in callous violence, done from behind.
She’s already assaulted (and left for dead) a boy who annoyed her. Later, she also assaults a Scot who follows her into a Lido bathing hut with an erection which only Martin could describe thus: ‘Monica could no longer help noticing that a wrong bit of his body had rudely declared itself.’
Sometimes, Monica behaves like a lawyer, as when she mentally composes a lengthy ‘plea for clemency’, or quizzes the blind KC. Another time, she reviews recent events, like a lawyer going over evidence. Bit by bit, the author shows her to be loopy. One recalls mature Agatha Christie’s interest in motive and the proponents’ psychology.
Here, we can only imagine the motive but, on the twist-and-turnometer, Martin out-Christies Christie.
Martin’s customary dark wit
underscores his distinctive style, with its rich play with language and setting throughout.
Marvellous similes abound: on the brilliantly described train journey from London to Venice, French engines are seen ‘fuming like abandoned bonfires’.
Unexpected emphases, through italicisation or inverted commas around words – ‘monthlies’ (periods) or needing to ‘go’ (to the toilet) – and a delight in everything railway are all reassuringly present.
To evoke 1911, newfangled Venetian telephone lines are called ‘down-to-date’ (a rare expression even then; quickly superseded). Hilariously, Monica loves calling things ‘swaif’, mispronouncing suave. It reminds us that she’s still a girl.
As Monica dashes, increasingly dishevelled, around Venice, driving herself madder by wondering whether Driscoll lives or died, both city and story close in. What’s true? What’s fiction? Did she kill? More importantly, could she kill? And can human nature be changed?
This unusual, imaginative, whipsmart psychological thriller explores that question of human nature and whether we can change it.
When Driscoll disappoints her, Monica dangerously thinks, ‘Nothing and nobody ever changed unless you took steps to force the change.’
She’s heading for deep water. Or is she?
Philippa Stockley is author of Black Lily: A Novel
‘I’m in beatings all day’
Iris Murdoch’s Damascus moment
My dear friend would have loathed the private-school tax
a n wilson
I recently went to the unveiling of a blue plaque in South Kensington for my old friend and heroine Iris Murdoch.
I thought of her political journey, from member of the Communist Party to someone who thought Ian Paisley would save Ireland.
What prompted her to abandon being a lefty was what she rightly regarded as the Labour Party’s betrayal of the poor in one vital area, which had remained central to British life since the Middle Ages – education.
The system of grammar schools and direct-grant schools was not perfect, but it could have been tweaked rather than swept away. All these schools taught languages and science to a standard as good as that of the private schools and, in many cases, it taught such subjects far better.
Then came along the foolish educational reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, the abolition of grammar schools in many areas, and the concept of ‘mixedability classrooms’. As Iris pointed out, you don’t pick mixed-ability football teams.
She came from a modest home and was an only child, and her civil-servant father could just afford to give her a private education.
Many of her Oxford contemporaries, however, came from backgrounds of poverty. Because they were clever, they were nurtured, encouraged to go to grammar schools, and went on to university.
The consequence? There was a far better civil service than we have today. Britain led the world in its technological skills. British businesspeople could conduct their trading activity with those who did not speak English.
The decision by the Labour Party to impose VAT on private schools is utterly evil. It is an attempt to stamp out one of the few surviving areas of excellence in our country. In many parts of the country, the local schools and sixth-form
colleges simply do not teach languages properly, nor maths.
Pupils in these bad schools have to do ‘general science’ papers rather than physics, chemistry and biology, and in consequence are ill-fitted to go on to become engineers or doctors. Those unselfish parents who are only just able to afford school fees, but willing to pay them, will be priced out of the market to send their children to get a decent education.
Then what will happen? The doctors, engineers, diplomats and businesspeople of the future will all come from rich backgrounds.
The last two Prime Ministers who gained first-class degrees at Oxford were David Cameron and Rishi Sunak, both privately educated. David Lammy decreed that Britain was being governed by the ‘wrong class’.
Presumably, he meant he did not want to be ruled by clever people. He certainly can’t be accused of cleverness himself. His appearance on Celebrity Mastermind was cringeworthy. The new Foreign Secretary believes that the 2003 Rose Revolution – he was told it toppled Eduard Shevardnadze – happened in Yugoslavia rather than in Georgia. When asked who succeeded Henry VIII, replied, ‘Henry VII.’ He also thought Marie Antoinette won the Nobel Prize for Physics.
Is it just me? I don’t much like the idea of being ruled by stupid people. Especially stupid people who are so malicious and vindictive that they want to destroy something that is excellent –namely the great majority of our private schools. Why not, instead, devote time and money towards making the state schools so good that no one would dream of wasting money on having their children educated privately?
That would be a worthy way of making the private schools go out of business.
I am not blind to the unfairness of the present system – though, at all the better
private schools, huge numbers of pupils attend for much-reduced fees, or for free. But you do not improve the standard of education – and thence the standard of public life – by driving into bankruptcy those who would maintain proper intellectual standards.
I know from bitter experience what utter hell private boarding schools can be – my prep school was a nest of sexual perversion and cruelty, though probably not quite as awful as that attended by Earl Spencer.
On the other hand, it taught me just enough Latin to get into Rugby, where my headmaster, Walter Hamilton (a Catford boy, educated at the local grammar, now a private school) was one of the best classicists of his generation.
The standard of teaching – languages, art, music, science – was superlative. This was in the days of the grammarschool-educated premiership of Harold Wilson. So I joined the Labour Party under the impression it would strive to give everyone, rich or poor, as good an education as I was enjoying myself.
What I don’t ‘get’ about the Labour Party is that there is nothing inherently left-wing about encouraging stupidity. Those educated in Communist lands might have had a horrible time but, on the whole, they are far better educated than me.
Only the British Labour Party, apparently, is so malicious and envious that it wants to drag down schools that teach pupils to high standards.
I have loved Diane Abbott ever since she sent her son to City of London School. Channel 4 News, on the day the news broke, stood outside the school in Hackney, where the boy might have gone, hoping other mums would denounce Diane.
None of them did. They all said that if they had the money, they would give their children the best education money could buy.
Yes, black is slimming, but it’s not always youthful. The right tone of red, however, is flattering on all women.
Twiggy
You never know a guy till you’ve tried him in bed. You know more about a guy in one night in bed than you do in months of conversation. In the sack, they can’t cheat!
Edith Piaf
People think it always rains in Manchester. Not true, though I admit it’s the only town in the country with a lifeboat drill on the bus routes.
Les Dawson
‘The on’y thing the Army cures you on,’ Arthur retorted, ‘is never to join the Army again. They’re dead good at that.’
Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)
I think I have more humour in me than anger. But those two things are great bedfellows, performance-wise.
Elaine Stritch
Habits. A pipe for the hour of work; a cigarette for the hour of conception; a cigar for the hour of vacuity.
George Gissing (1857-1903)
Free lunch Somerset Maugham’s 1926 short story The Luncheon says it all.
A rich, greedy woman asks a broke, younger male artist to buy her an expensive lunch, saying she eats nothing – and then guzzles course after course.
Should they have split the
Commonplace Corner
Girls have an unfair advantage over boys: if they can’t get what they want by being smart, they can get it by being dumb.
Yul Brynner
The trouble is that people seem to expect happiness in life. I can’t imagine why; but they do. They are unhappy before they marry, and they imagine to themselves that the reason of their unhappiness will be removed when they are married.
bill? Or should she have paid it all? The answer’s not clear-cut; the story was written when men still generally paid.
A century later, to finish becoming equal, women must act equal. Though pay inequality is still here, you should cough up half or take turns to pay – if you can afford it.
Put your money where your napkin is – don’t nip to the loo when the bill comes. Don’t say, ‘Oh, if you insist,’ unless the other person really does insist because they earn ten times more, which is a fair argument.
No hands hovering over a handbag that never quite opens. Come up trumps by declaring in advance, ‘It’s my treat,’ or ‘My turn,’ or ‘I’ll get this – you did last time.’
When it isn’t they blame the other person, which is clearly absurd. I believe that is what generally starts the trouble.
Nancy Mitford, Christmas Pudding (1932)
Germans really did bomb our chippy and the fish got battered.
Stan Boardman
It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.
Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)
I’m at my best in a messy, middle-ofthe-road muddle.
Harold Wilson
I don’t want yachts, racehorses or a Rolls-Royce. I want my family and my friends, and health, and a small treadmill; and a temperature of 80 degrees in the sea and in the shade to come to every year for two or three months. And to be able to work there and enjoy the flowers and birds and the many fish, and somehow to give pleasure, whether innocent or illicit, to people in their millions. No one could ask for more.
Ian Fleming, who died 60 years ago, on 12th August 1964, aged 56
For maximum progress, declare, ‘Women can’t be equal unless we behave equal. I insist on paying – you can next time.’ That’s real power; turning the cog a notch. Do as you would be done by, even if you earn less.
In my youth, young men were affronted if I tried to split the bill. Their fathers had always paid; they found
SMALL DELIGHTS
Creating a new pair of socks from two solitary ones that happen to match.
HILARY O’SHEA, BERWICKUPON-TWEED
Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk
it normal and comfortable. And they were pretty well-off. But I stuck to a coffee or a drink, and strove to balance their gift with good company.
A decade later, when I was a hand-to-mouth painter, men offered dinners. I worried about hints of amorous implication and usually said no, because I couldn’t afford to offer dinner out in return; but I could – and did – cook.
Ditch the coy term ‘go Dutch’, which makes you think of sticking your thumb in a dyke. Instead, pay half or, even better, take turns, unless you’re dining with Elon Musk, or it’s your birthday.
It’s a valuable way for girls to become women.
PHILIPPA STOCKLEY
Lady in red: Twiggy, 1970
FILM
HARRY MOUNT
THE CONVERSATION (12A)
If I wanted to show a curious Martian what America was like in the 1970s, I would point him in the direction of Gene Hackman in The Conversation. The film, made in 1974, has been restored for its 50th anniversary.
Hackman, at 94 still thankfully with us, is run down in a ’70s way: double chin; flappy, grey, see-through plastic mac; $50 suit with a tacky tie-pin.
He’s playing Harry Caul – ‘The best bugger on the West Coast’. A surveillance expert in San Francisco, he records the conversation of an unfaithful wife and her lover, both apparently worried that the betrayed husband – a disagreeable, paunchy Robert Duvall – is going to bump them off.
Arts
The film’s lurid yet washed-out colours are gloriously seventies, too: orange bedspreads; dark beige curtains; a blue plastic suitcase.
Hackman was only in his early forties but the movie’s director-writer, Francis Ford Coppola, told him he wanted Harry to be an over-the-hill nudnik – a boring, lifeless nerd.
It all makes for a thoroughly convincing look at mid-ranking 1970s professional life – particularly in the office-party scene, where Harry and his colleagues get loaded on six-packs of Miller High Life and Ancient Age Kentucky Bourbon in their wonderfully disgusting office.
Their girlfriends, too, are ropy, over-made-up and a bit pudgy or scrawny and undernourished. Everyone looks just a little bit ill – as people did in the ’70s.
Harry turns out to be a heroic nudnik,
as he fine-tunes the long-distance recording of the unfaithful couple to work out when and where the murder will take place – only, spoiler alert, it’s not the murder he’d predicted.
The film has its longueurs when Harry plays back the recording of the couple again and again. But Hackman’s low-key, softly-spoken delivery magically builds tension into these repetitions. And when the action speeds up at the denoument, the thrill is all the greater for the slow build-up.
The Conversation, Coppola’s favourite of his films, seemed astonishingly prescient because it was released at the same time as the Watergate scandal, which serendipitously depended on the same surveillance equipment Harry Caul uses.
In fact, Coppola had been trying to make the film since the mid-1960s – long before Watergate broke – but it was a little too recherché for Hollywood. Only with the huge success of The Godfather, in 1972, did Coppola get the film greenlit. It was nominated for three Oscars and won the Palme d’Or for Best Film at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival.
Still, the film remains prescient of what followed – the modern surveillance society, where we all have tiny recording devices on our phones with a thousand times more power than the long-distance shotgun microphones with telescopic sights that Harry constructs.
It also features early performances by some greats. Harrison Ford plays a pleasingly grumpy, preppy-looking Martin Stett, who commissions Harry’s surveillance work.
And John Cazale is his customary, convincing, nervy, wise-cracking self as Stan, Harry’s colleague.
Cazale was starting his golden run of five extraordinary films in six years: The Godfather (1972), The Conversation
Wired for sound: Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) in The Conversation (1974)
(1974), The Godfather Part II (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and The Deer Hunter (1978). He died of lung cancer in 1978, aged only 42.
How consoling, though, that Harrison Ford (82), Robert Duvall (93) and Francis Ford Coppola (85) are still with us.
What a fertile, evergreen generation it was for making convincing films about the real America.
THEATRE
WILLIAM COOK
THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL RSC, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 6th September
‘There’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill nature,’ wrote Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816). This flamboyant rendition of his greatest play confirms his shrewd maxim.
In our woke new world of cancel culture, where the slightest faux pas can end in ignominy, Sheridan reminds us that causing offence is a fundamental part of art and life.
Sheridan’s scurrilous, vivacious characters are gloriously bitchy, trading snide bons mots and put-downs in an orgy of salacious gossip. But there’s more to his caustic comedy than cutting repartee, and that is why it has lasted.
Nearly 250 years since he wrote it, The School for Scandal’s central message endures: kindness always trumps cruelty, and character, like the truth, will out.
Unlike most comedies of manners, the plot is actually pretty simple. Sir Oliver Surface returns to London from the East Indies, keen to bestow his fortune on one of his two nephews. At first, the choice seems clear. Joseph Surface is a moralistic man of letters. His brother, Charles, is a drunken layabout, happily racking up huge debts to fund his lusty, boozy revels.
The clever twist of Sheridan’s play is that Charles is at heart an honest man – loyal and trustworthy, with no malice or hypocrisy in his nature. Joseph, on the other hand, is a pretentious, backstabbing humbug, hiding his duplicity behind a mask of piety and erudition.
There’s an equally entertaining subplot, an age-old cautionary tale: what happens when a rich old man weds a pretty, penniless young wife? These storylines are beautifully intertwined, and their final resolution is as perfect as a Mozart sonata. I wonder whether Mozart ever read this play. He was in his prime
when it was first performed, in 1777, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
With such rich material, you might suppose that staging The School for Scandal would be a doddle, but I’ve seen other productions bend and buckle beneath the weight of Sheridan’s invective. It’s a very wordy play with a running time of nearly three hours (including interval). To make it work, the characters must be larger than life yet still believable.
This RSC production manages that balancing act extremely well. Director Tinuke Craig keeps these talented players on their toes. And there are deliciously catty performances throughout the cast, particularly from Emily Houghton as Mrs Candour, Siubhan Harrison as Lady Sneerwell and Patrick Walshe McBride as Sir Benjamin Backbite (a camp cameo reminiscent of today’s influencers and Instagrammers).
The subject matter of this play is so contemporary (fame and status, love and money, the eternal tug of war between fidelity and lust) that any attempts to make the script more ‘relevant’ are
entirely unnecessary – and rather irritating, too.
We begin with an updated prologue, which diminishes rather than enhances the drama, and there are several other anachronistic aberrations – most notably when Joseph’s servant tells her master to f*** off. This brought the house down but it made me cringe. Theatre is a fragile edifice and our suspension of disbelief is a delicate feat of mind over matter. Crass additions like this make the whole thing come crashing down.
Thankfully, such crude intrusions are eclipsed by the joie de vivre of this production. The exuberance of these performers is intoxicating.
You feel ten years younger watching them – sophisticated and flirtatious, just like the characters on the stage. Stefan Adegbola and John Leader are especially enjoyable as the warring brothers. Even the smaller parts (John Dougall’s Rowley, Jason Thorpe’s Crabtree) really live and breathe.
When it refrains from meddling with the text (invariably an error in any new version of a classic play), this reboot
Gossip girls: Mrs Candour (Emily Houghton) and Lady Sneerwell (Siubhan Harrison)
is full of nice surprises. A live band plays a funky backing track which matches the hedonistic mood of the drama, and Alex Lowde’s dayglo sets and costumes are a lurid delight. It’s a show full of fun, right down to the ridiculous wigs and make-up.
It made me wonder why the RSC doesn’t give Shakespeare a rest for a year or two and revive a few more Georgian plays instead. Craig’s sexy, sassy production reinvents Sheridan as a poster boy for the TikTok generation. In fact, his erudite, acerbic wit has never gone out of style.
RADIO HUNTER DAVIES
I got a call from the Today programme one night.
They expect you to salivate at the very mention of their programme, jump to attention and drop everything.These radio johnnies, eh, on the so-called posh progs, they really can be up their own bums. Like me, really.
I said, ‘Ring me back later. I’m frightfully busy.’
I was watching England. But, at half-time, as England were so rubbish, I rang Today back to find out they wanted.
I assumed they were stuck for someone to twit on about football or the Beatles. It turned out to be the latter –something about Paul McCartney going on tour at 82.
I said there was nothing remarkable about that. How very ageist of you. When I was 82, I was still playing football and had five girlfriends. But I agreed to go on.
Then I got a strange text message from one of the producers. ‘Can I just confirm with you, as we are in an election period, if you are a candidate or a former candidate for a political party.’ I had to think. I do now forget things.
Last time was in 1957, when I stood for election to be Senior Man of the JCR at my college at Durham. I got in, by the way.
The interview was done by the lovely Mishal Husain, my wireless pin-up. I rather messed her around by
immediately asking if she had heard the news. ‘What news?’ I said Gareth Southgate was calling up Macca to give some life and imagination to England’s midfield. Hee hee, what a tease.
Of course I was pleased to be on Today, as I listen to it every day, but I probably won’t be asked again, after mucking them around.
All in the Mind I also quite regularly listen to – but rarely really deliberately. It seems to come on when I am about to turn off. So I listen to a bit, if just to scoff as a Medical Professor of the Bleeding Obvious tells us to try breathing. It does help keep you alive.
This time the subject was toxic positivity. Me neither – so I hung on, hoping to learn something.
Apparently, when someone is moaning about being poorly, having a headache, under stress, about to have a serious operation, or possibly dying, you should never say to them, ‘Chin up – don’t worry.’
This causes them harm and distress. You demoralise them and make their condition worse by dismissing rather than sharing their worries. Dear God, what is the world coming to?
I remember my mother, when I had a cold, flu or, worst of all, an asthma attack, would say, ‘You never died a winter yet.’ Which was clearly true.
This was during the war when we had other things to worry about, such as being bombed. We all had to keep our chins up, keep smiling through.
There was a woman in our street on our council estate who was said to have had a nervous breakdown. When my mother heard, she reacted as she usually reacted to people sharing their pain.
My mother had four children under five (two were twins), a sick husband in bed and no income, and was poorly herself with varicose veins.
Hello,
Goodbye: Macca to tour at 82
So she did not have much time for sharing. She would look upwards, roll her eyes and mutter, ‘Oh help.’
Then she would pause. ‘We could all have a nervous breakdown, if we had the time.’
I think, at 88, I am finally turning into my mother.
TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON
The drama team at the BBC has its work cut out, what with Happy Valley being over and ITV now the moral pulse of the nation. No sooner had ITV given us Mr Bates vs The Post Office than it rolled out the superb Breathtaking, with Joanne Froggatt as a front-line Covid consultant in a city hospital in the early months of 2020.
In a bid to keep up, the Beeb’s summer treats include Jenna Coleman as rooky detective Ember Manning in The Jetty investigating how a house fire connects a podcast journalist, a missing-persons cold case and a man in a ‘relationship’ with two under-age girls. The BBC is also running High Country, an Australian crime thriller inspired by real events which took place in Victoria’s ancient and perilous Alpine region.
Neither will make news headlines, but both have a good enough grip and can be happily binged.
Increasingly, in formulaic genre packages, the scenery does most of the work. Without the backdrop of the Lancashire lake town, The Jetty would be duller by far, and the beauty and terror of the landscape in High Country adds profundity to an otherwise workmanlike rural noir. It doesn’t matter that Sergeant Andie Whitford (Leah Purcell), who has moved to the tiny town of Broken Ridge from Melbourne with her partner and teenaged daughter, has lines like ‘Something just doesn’t sit right’ and ‘You gotta look at every angle’ or that her neighbours are hicks from central casting. At least the eight episodes are shot in an Australia most of us have never seen before.
This is not the emptiness of the Outback, with its high proud mornings, tumbleweed and pristine air.
The Alpine region, in the north-east of Victoria, is so dark and primeval that it clutches at your throat. The landscape is smothering and deathlike; nothing can survive here. No wonder five of the locals have disappeared, leaving poor Andie, boss of the police station, to search for them with the aid only of the local psychic, Damien Starc (Henry Nixon).
‘In the city, we call that a pattern,’ Andie says of the missing people.
‘Up here, it’s a fact of life,’ replies Sam Dyson, her retired predecessor, who is played by Ian McElhinney, last seen as the put-upon dad in Derry Girls, which adds a whole new layer of weirdness to the show.
Because Damien knows where the
bodies are buried, he is assumed by Sam Dyson and the rest of Broken Ridge to be the murderer. Andie’s job is to lure him in and catch him out.
I was reminded throughout High Country of D H Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo, written during the 100 days he was in Australia. Lawrence’s short time there was spent writing about the country outside his room. Even Australians say he nailed the place.
‘You can feel such fear, in Australia,’ Lawrence says. You feel it in the ‘ferndark indifference’ of the vegetation, in the people who ‘haven’t got any insides to them’, in the ghostly moonlight and the ‘tall pale fir trees and many dead trees, like corpses, partly charred by bush fires’.
Being in Australia is like being under a spell, and High Country works hard to recreate this effect. The inhabitants of Broken Ridge live inside Australian fear. Leaving the house at night stirs the hair on their scalps and turns their blood cold. Every road is on the brink of a thousandfoot fall through a vertical forest inside another vertical forest, after which there is endless emptiness.
When, in the opening scene, Andie discovers an abandoned car and then falls down a verge like Alice down the rabbit hole, she knows that this is not normal terrain.
‘The bush seems to recede from you as you advance, and then it is behind you when you look round,’ wrote Lawrence. The camera repeats this effect in the woods, spinning about like a dervish.
‘There’s just so much country out there, Sam,’ says Andie, wiping away a tear. ‘Sometimes I just feel really lost.’
Having shot her horse after it broke a leg bolting in terror, she is being stalked by a luminous dingo. They should film I’m a Celebrity… out here.
MUSIC
RICHARD OSBORNE
PAUL WEE PLAYS ALKAN
Saturday afternoon is not normally the time for a major London piano recital.
My pilgrimage to the Wigmore Hall on a wet and windy Saturday this June was my first since 1982, when Vladimir Horowitz ended a 30-year absence with a recital at the Royal Festival Hall.
The Horowitz was due to begin at 4pm. By the time he’d made his strategically delayed appearance, received a five-minute standing ovation and played the National Anthem – his visit had been arranged by the then Prince of Wales as a fundraiser for the
McLachlan
‘Waiting for the Prince has got us clamped again’
Royal Opera House – it was quite a while before the first note sounded.
Paul Wee’s Wigmore Hall recital could not have been more different. Lasting less than an hour, it featured just one work. Yet it was no less of an occasion where aficionados of the piano are concerned.
The work was Charles-Valentin Alkan’s 50-minute Concerto for the Piano, arguably the finest composition by the 19th century’s greatest piano virtuoso. We were there both for the music and for the spectacle. Crowds who flocked to Evel Knievel’s motorcycle stunts probably had a similar mindset.
A child prodigy, Paul Wee studied in the pre-college division of New York’s Manhattan School of Music with Nina Svetlanova, a pupil of Heinrich Neuhaus, Sviatoslav Richter’s teacher. Later, he jumped ship to read law at Oxford.
Mixing music with law or high finance is not unusual these days. Want a job at Goldman Sachs? A degree from New York’s Juilliard music school should secure you a place on any shortlist.
The rock-solid, low-maintenance technique acquired from Svetlanova has given Wee time to run parallel careers as a London-based barrister specialising in commercial law and as an exponent of some of the most difficult 19th-century piano music.
Alkan himself is perhaps best known for his death, in 1888: he was crushed by a bookcase from which he was attempting
to extract his beloved Talmud – a wellattested event (whatever you might read on Wikipedia) echoed by E M Forster in the accidental death of the music-loving Leonard Bast in Howards End.
The day after the accident, an influential French journal sniped, ‘It was necessary for Alkan to die in order to suspect his existence.’ The recluse has never been a popular figure in French society. Yet Alkan was no recluse.
Complex, yes. ‘A man caught between the opposing forces of ambition and retreat, hovering in a kind of no-man’sland of uncertainty,’ as his biographer, the pianist Ronald Smith, memorably put it.
An Ashkenazi Jew raised in the Marais district of Paris, Alkan was 21 when he moved to the newly fashionable Square D’Orléans, where he lived cheek by jowl with Chopin and George Sand. Chopin had few close friends, but Alkan was one.
If you love Chopin and long to find a near-equivalent, Alkan could be your man – best heard in the Hyperion recordings of the great Marc-André Hamelin or Wee himself.
As with Horowitz, Alkan’s stellar playing career was interrupted by long lay-offs. The first was occasioned when he was 25 by the birth of an illegitimate son, Élie Delaborde, to an unknown woman of fashion. The second followed the revolutions of 1848 and Alkan’s being cruelly passed over as head of piano at the Paris Conservatoire. It was
around this time that he wrote two of his finest works, the Grande Sonate and the Concerto for Piano.
As for the terrors of the 1871 Paris Commune, it can have been only the self-sufficiency of an ascetic who’d always refused to allow anyone else to shop or cook for him that guaranteed his survival.
Ever the paradox, he resumed public recitals soon afterwards. Indeed, for the final 15 years of his life, he could be heard on Monday and Thursday afternoons by anyone visiting the showrooms of the great piano-manufacturer Érard.
One such visitor was the gifted young composer Vincent D’Indy, whom Alkan auditioned and, duly impressed, treated to a performance of Beethoven’s Op 110 Piano Sonata.
D’Indy recalled, ‘What happened to the great Beethovenian poem beneath the skinny, hooked fingers of the little old man I couldn’t begin to describe – above all, in the Arioso and the Fugue, where the melody, penetrating the mystery of Death itself, climbing up to a blaze of light, affected me with an excess of enthusiasm such as I have never experienced since.’
As Paul Wee rose from the piano stool at the end of the Alkan, he looked like a man who’d just survived a 1,500-metre Olympic run. There was, however, an encore: an arrangement of the slow movement of a piano concerto which, in its day, drew the crowds like no other. It’s by Adolph von Henselt and it features on Wee’s latest BIS CD.
A touch of product placement, then. Not that we were complaining. After Alkan’s diabolical alla barbaresca finale, we were all in need of a little therapy.
GOLDEN OLDIES MARK ELLEN
THE LATE MADONNA
If you feel short-changed at a pop concert these days, you don’t just shrug, moan about it and promptly flog the now offending records. These days, you sue. Madonna is being sued by someone who went to her recent show in Los Angeles. He complained it was ‘too hot’ – she refused to allow any air-conditioning, he contends, and told anyone overheating to take their clothes off.
You can’t imagine this holding up in court. He declared himself ‘emotionally distressed’ by the ‘pornographic nature’ of her act – aka topless girl dancers and sauce-related simulation – but, after 40 years of Madonna shows, how could you not know the raunchometer would be in the red? And he claimed she was ‘in breach of contract’ for saying she’d be onstage at half eight and deigning to show up at ten.
Here he may have a case. In what other branch of the entertainment business would that be tolerated? Imagine if an opera started
90 minutes late. Or a football match. Hamlet at the National? The Last Night of the Proms?
Are we not past the age when punctuality seemed antithetical to the spirit of rock and roll, especially when half the stadium now has babysitters, trains to catch and work the next day –and paid (as he did) a ruinous £1,600 for four tickets?
But I’ll give you ‘late onstage’, mate. Forty-eight years ago this month – 21st August 1976, to be exact – I was waiting to see the Rolling Stones at Knebworth, with 200,000 others. It was scorching hot. Drink had been taken.
The act immediately before theirs was 10cc, but nervous stage announcements about ‘technical problems’ meant they were 95 minutes late. And thus so were the Stones, eventually shambling on at 11.30pm, when the show was due to end. The crowd naturally blamed the agonised 10cc, rewarding them with relentless spirited booing and a generous hail of missiles.
Years later, I interviewed both 10cc and Keith Richards and uncovered the glorious truth. The Stones’ guitarist had refreshed himself so enthusiastically all afternoon that he was declared incapable of performing and the band had to buy time to sober him up.
As he was carted off to a four-poster at nearby Knebworth House, the Stones’ roadies sliced through all the multi-core cables to the PA system, leaving 10cc’s crew to splice them frantically back together before their band gingerly tried to soften the mood with a stab at The Wall Street Shuffle
So this was way beyond imperious can’t-be-arsed wanton lateness. This was deliberate, malicious sabotage at the expense of nearly a quarter of a million sun-fried ticket-holders.
Nowadays it would be an international scandal and the air thick with writs. Back then, we’d have been appalled if the Stones hadn’t been late. We thoroughly enjoyed the excuse to chastise their hapless support act and drove off to sleep in a lay-by, delighted with a story we could tell for years to come. Indeed, one of us is still telling it.
Unpunctual girl: Madonna
Paul Wee performs Alkan’s Concerto for Solo Piano, Wigmore Hall, June 2024
EXHIBITIONS
HUON MALLALIEU
LEONORA CARRINGTON: REBEL VISIONARY
Newlands House Gallery, Petworth, to 26th October
TURNER AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Turner’s House, Twickenham, to 27th October
In May, the $28.8m sale of Leonora Carrington’s Distractions of Dagobert at Sotheby’s New York set a record for any female British artist.
Thus the show at Petworth could not be more timely. It includes over 70 paintings, sketches, prints, sculptures and pieces of jewellery, and covers her
whole long career, although emphasising the later
Having been presented at Court, Carrington (1917-2011) avoided the life expected of a deb by moving to Paris to join the Surrealists. There she became the lover of Max Ernst, and on the Nazi invasion she fled to Spain where she spent time in an asylum.
A marriage of convenience won her passage to New York, and finally she settled in Mexico City, where she painted in a manner that derived from Bosch and the Italian Renaissance.
To those ingredients she added Irish tales learned in childhood, and European, Jewish and Mexican mystical elements, creating a surreal world that was all her own.
Newlands House is a new gallery in an
18th-century town house, and its focus is to be on major 20th- and 21st-century artists. Carrington is certainly one of those, and the show is curated by her cousin, friend and biographer Joanna Moorhead.
Petworth, of course, is also a place to see Turners, but I would point you elsewhere. Far be it from me to hector, but if you have never visited the house that Turner built for himself (with a little help from Soane) near the Thames at
Twickenham, then you really should. It is very small, and this very loaned by the Tate – four watercolours, plus a lovely one by Ruskin, and several prints; all in bedroom where the
The theme is Turner’s
It is organised by we should ‘learn for looking at the past’,
must be imposed on the past.
Turner was concerned not with blaming, but with studying the effects of pollution. As the naturalist and art-lover Chris Packham, who opened the show, puts it, ‘Turner’s paintings are beautiful evidence [of pollution].’
Clockwise from above: Shields, on the River Tyne, engraved by Turner, 1823; Sunset, Turner, 1830; Daughter of the Minotaur, Leonora Carrington, 2010
works.
GARDENING
DAVID WHEELER
SECOND COMING
Lammas Day is 1st August, halfway between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox.
It’s a little-honoured ancient festival, whose name derives from ‘loaf’ and ‘mass’. It celebrates the earliest fruits of harvest, when bread made from the year’s first ripe corn was taken into church for a blessing.
mid-season surge of energy a couple of months later.
Some plants, however, are in such a hurry they seldom bother with a pause, belting on regardless. The earlyflowering Paulownia tomentosa, the foxglove tree, is one. With Jack’s-beanstalk determination, it surges upwards from the moment it comes into leaf until autumn’s first frosts, getting its vigour from who knows where.
And then there are ‘Lammas lands’. One is that area of some 70-odd acres of grassy floodplain alongside the River Wey in Godalming, Surrey – so-called because the land was deemed private until Lammas Day, after which it resumed common rights of pasturage until the following spring. Similar traditions are followed on some Cambridge meadows.
‘Lammas growth’ (aka Lammas leaves or Lammas flush) is a term thought to have been coined by Theophrastus, Artistotle’s Greek contemporary. It’s applied by gardeners and arboriculturists to the fresh foliage seen on some trees in temperate regions of the northern hemisphere during, yes, Lammastide – now.
Oak, beech, sycamore, poplar, hawthorn, ash (if not suffering from ash-dieback disease) and many conifers, including yew and plantations full of Christmas trees, can all show signs of this secondary burst of new leaves and shoots, most noticeable on young rather than mature plants.
It’s as if, exhausted by spring’s full-on rush to get a new season under way, the plants have taken a pause to regain their breath before having another
Some gardeners find August a tricky month. The floral glories of May, June and July have passed and the excitements of September and October have yet to come.
Although many a rose goes on flowering into the shorter days, it is the hydrangeas that rule supreme among the decorative shrubs in my own and many another garden this month. Some will have started flowering in mid-June and show no signs of giving up.
The past few years have seen a resurgence of interest in hydrangeas, with umpteen new and highly desirable macrophylla and serrata types – both mopheads and lacecaps – obliterating memories of those dismal wishy-washy pink monstrosities that littered seaside gardens throughout the 1950s and ’60s.
My own collection now exceeds 150 different hydrangea varieties. To prevent scorching, I group the whites together, where there’s midday and early-afternoon shade. But the strong reds – ‘Rotschwanz’, ‘Westfalen’, ‘Brugg’ and their like – happily take full sun if the plants can benefit from ground that’s none too dry. Equally so the blues, such as ‘Blue Ball’, ‘Mathilde Gütges’ and the newly popular black-stemmed ‘Zorro’. Don’t be alarmed if you grow any of
these and notice that some of the reds are blue, and some of the blues are red. As ever, the answer lies in the soil, my dears.
Simply put, you’ll have pink and red hydrangea shades on alkaline soil; and blues where the ground is acidic. But that too needs a qualifier: acidic soil alone won’t guarantee blue flowers. It’s the presence of aluminium that does the trick. Hydrangea colourant (aluminium sulphate) from the garden centre will help. Your maiden aunt’s insistence on some rusty nails in the planting hole may not.
Hydrangea-fanciers unfamiliar with Maurice Foster’s new book, The Hydrangea: A Reappraisal, have a treat in store. It instructs. It enthuses. I’m giving it as the ideal Lammas Day present.
David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal
KITCHEN GARDEN
SIMON COURTAULD CAPE GOOSEBERRIES
Having acquired a metal hip at the end of May, I have been out of gardening action for much of this summer. I have had a bit of help with sowing and planting, but the kitchen garden is not producing as successfully this year, and weeds have been outnumbering vegetables.
After a spring largely free of frost, however, I have been admiring the quantity of fruit growing on trees and bushes, and have been introduced to a new fruit which is progressing well in our small greenhouse, with very little attention required from me.
This is the cape gooseberry, also known as physalis. It’s a small orange fruit when ripe, growing out of a papery husk, which accounts for its more familiar name of Chinese lantern.
Lammas growth
Although the fruit originates from South America, the ‘cape’ refers not to Cape Horn but to the Cape of Good Hope, where these gooseberries grow prolifically – or possibly to the form of the husk which covers the fruit. They have nothing to do with English garden gooseberries.
I was given a small plant by a lady who lives locally, and have grown it on, like a tomato, to which it is related. Although described as perennial, the cape gooseberry is better grown as an annual.
Like the tomato, it needs staking and feeding, but requires no extra heating, and we should be picking the fruit by the end of August.
Cape gooseberries should last about a month if left inside the husk when picked. Their sweet/sour flavour can best be enjoyed when they’re eaten raw; otherwise they make a tasty jam or jelly.
The tomatillo is also of the Physalis family and, like tomatoes and potatoes, it is a nightshade plant, popular in Central America and known as the Mexican husk tomato. It grows happily in this country; the fruit should be picked when green.
The principal use for tomatillos is in a classic salsa verde, made with garlic, shallots, chilli and coriander. The fruit are sometimes roasted first, to soften and sweeten them.
COOKERY ELISABET LUARD FRENCH LESSONS
Amuse Bouche is Carolyn Boyd’s excellent new guide to the regional joys of France at table. She reveals how the baguette de tradition (flour, yeast, water, salt – no preservatives) has lately achieved a listing in UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. What took them so long?
When I was a student in Paris, fresh out of a dismal English boarding school in the late 1950s – miniskirt, black stockings, white lipstick, kohl-rimmed eyes, channelling Juliette Greco – the most delicious thing that ever happened was baguette jambon buerre – warm baguette, salty Normandy butter, thick-cut Bayonne ham – eaten on a bench by the Seine with a view of the bookstalls on the Left Bank and the possibility of a second-hand copy of Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book. Those were the days. France is still the best place in the world for good food in out-of-the-way places where they mind about what they eat.
That’s the subject of this excellent up-to-date guide by a fine writer who’s really done her homework. She’s witty, too. Pair it up with a spanking new
hardback of Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food from Grub Street (bless their little cotton socks) and tuck ’em both into the glove compartment before you head for the tunnel. Or stay at home and dream.
Vichysoisse: This is the classic leek-andpotato winter soup, served chilled and summery by a Bourbonnais chef working in the US. To serve 4 (or 6, delicately), melt a walnut-size lump of butter in a roomy pan, add 3-4 sliced, well-washed leeks (green part only), lid loosely and leave to cook gently without browning until perfectly soft. Add half a litre of chicken broth, bring to the boil with 100g peeled, diced potato and simmer until the potato collapses. Allow to cool. Tip everything into the liquidiser, or push through a mouli-légumes, and process to a purée. Stir in 250ml single cream. Serve chilled with an extra swirl of cream and a sprinkle of finely chopped chives.
Salade Niçoise: In an olive-wood bowl (let’s keep it local), combine sliced raw young artichoke hearts and/or skinned, peeled raw broad beans with very ripe chunked tomatoes; chunked cucumber; chopped and trimmed spring onion; salt-cured anchovies under oil from a tin or barrel (if the latter, soak the fish in milk to de-salt); tinned tuna, roughly flaked; un-stoned black olives from Provence (preferably the little wrinkled ones of Nyons). Top with peeled, quartered hard-boiled eggs. Finish with basil leaves, new-season olive oil and salt. That’s all. No lettuce or cooked vegetables, although a handful of croûtons crisped in olive oil is possible. Petits pots au chocolat: This was the only pudding my Parisienne landlady ever made at home. It was always prepared in special little brown china pots: replace with one-person soufflé dishes or coffee cups. To serve 4, break up in a bowl 150g top-quality dark chocolate (at least 70-per-cent cocoa solids) with 4 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice (save a scraping
of zest for later). Set the bowl over a saucepan of hot water and stir over a gentle heat till the chocolate melts and is perfectly smooth (if it goes grainy, remove from the heat and beat in a little cold butter). Meanwhile, separate 4 medium eggs into whites and yolks.
Whisk the whites with a spoonful of caster sugar till stiff, and fork up the yolks with a little orange zest.
Beat the yolks into the melted chocolate as soon as it cools to finger heat, then fold in the whites with a metal spoon till well blended. Divide the mixture between your chosen individual containers, and set in the fridge to firm.
RESTAURANTS
JAMES PEMBROKE PUB GRUB
After a day’s work at Oldie Towers, I cycle through Soho, past the throngs of workers standing outside pubs, sinking pints.
I used to be one of them. Now, I’m bewildered by them; I just want to get home.
‘Fancy a drink after work tonight?’ used to be the standard cry at four o’clock, just two hours after we’d left a packed pub at lunchtime. But now pubs are all but empty during the lunch hour. Maybe this is why so many evening pavements are dominated by drinkers, often cordoned off from the street by a rope.
I very rarely go to pubs at all now, but last month I went to the Devonshire Arms near Piccadilly Circus on a Tuesday and to the Jugged Hare near the Barbican the very next evening.
There I was at 6.30pm with my mate Kerin, both of us within the rope. We could barely hear each other. ‘It’s a classic stand-and-shout, this one.’
Everyone is raving about the Devonshire. It used to be an Ask Italian until three very blokey blokes turned it into their dream boozer, over four floors.
Don’t worry. The noise dissipates – and there are women – when you hit the first floor, where there is a vast charcoal grill with huge cuts. Before I could ask for a wine list, two enormous, uncooked rib-eyes were thrust under my nose.
Kerin and I went straight for the bargain set menu: prawn and langoustine cocktail, skirt steak, chips and Béarnaise sauce plus sticky toffee pudding. Two courses for £25; three for £30. And it was exceptional. Book well in advance and try to get a table on the roof terrace.
The next night was my treat of the month: two tickets for Kiss Me, Kate – but where to eat near the Barbican?
The Oldie sub-editor, Penny,
recommended the Jugged Hare. Yet again, the noise in the main bar could have drowned out an entire chorus singing Too Darn Hot – but, once we were through to the restaurant, all was calm.
And another bargain: the £30 two-course set menu allowed us a very crunchy guineafowl-and-ham-hock fritter with piccalilli, followed by a confit duck leg with creamed sweetcorn. And the service was terrific.
And then another pub. This time, the tiny oak-beamed Chesil Rectory in central Winchester, which I have never properly visited. And it’s a treat, especially if you can break into the college.
The very old rectory was built between 1425 and 1450 by a rich merchant and was then seized by Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries. He passed it on to Mary Tudor. Her lavish wedding in 1554 to Philip II of Spain in the cathedral nearly bankrupted the city. So the following year she handed the rectory to the good burghers, as part payment.
I can’t help thinking they would have preferred hard cash in that preknighthood era, but our Mary had a penchant for burning her imagined enemies. So maybe a well-appointed detached house was a happy compromise. It’s been a restaurant for the last 85 years.
That Monday lunchtime, it was packed – not surprisingly, given they were offering a delicious mackerel rillette followed by venison and bacon ragu for just £24.
It’s right by the canal, which gave us the perfect post-prandial stroll. Well worth a detour if you’re heading west this summer.
DRINK
BILL KNOTT
PEARLY WHITES
In early July 1996, I found myself in the small fishing town of Corme, on Galicia’s Costa da Morte – the ‘coast of death’, a craggy corner of the Atlantic strewn with shipwrecks. I was happily eating and drinking at a trestle table under a marquee.
I was one of hundreds of guests at the annual festa do percebe the local goose-necked barnacle, a delicacy scraped from the rocks. Its unprepossessing exterior – percebes are sometimes called ‘devil’s toenails’ – masks tendrils of delicate, sweet, briny flesh. Even then, a small plate of percebes with boiled potatoes cost
1,500 pesetas (about £7.50). So most guests filled their bellies with slabs of empanada, a local pie stuffed with salt cod or tuna with onions and peppers, washed down with glasses of Ribeiro, the local white wine.
Meanwhile, more affluent celebrants (quite possibly denizens of the region’s drug-smuggling underworld, a nefarious notch or two up from Kipling’s ‘brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk’) feasted on the barnacles and drank Albariño, at twice the price of Ribeiro.
I splashed out on a bottle: a dry, heavenly, apricot-scented wine from Rías Baixas. Its name is sadly lost in the Galician mists.
In the intervening years, I have sampled many Albariños, but none has quite recaptured the ethereal aroma of that first bottle. Some have been too thin, some too oily, and many smelt of apples, not apricots. Not exactly a fruitless search, just the wrong kind of fruit.
I recently, however, tasted a clutch of Albariños that have restored my faith. Ranging in price from £15 to £20, they are also terrific value: for my money, much more interesting than whites from Burgundy in the same price range.
Try the juicy, harmonious Quinta de Couselo 2022 (£19.95, terrawines.co.uk), from vineyards just by the Miño river that divides Spain from Portugal; the silky, peachy Bernon Aquitania 2023 (£15.50, dbmwines.co.uk), or the aptly named and apricot-scented – hurrah! – Esencia Diviña 2022 from Adegas Gran Vinum (winecellarclub.co.uk, £17.20). Both are from a little further north, in the Rías Baixas sub-region of Salnés.
Albariño is also grown (as Alvarinho) just over the Miño, in northern Portugal, where it makes some excellent, singlevarietal white wines, or is a component of some of the best Vinhos Verdes.
The Festa do Percebe, I am happy to say, is still in rude health: they have just celebrated their 32nd edition. I am not sure whether the local mayor who, in 1996 and amid much ceremony, was presented with the ‘golden percebe’ is still in office. Nor do I know whether a brass band is still cheerfully murdering Beatles tunes. But intrepid fishermen are still scraping barnacles from the Costa da Morte’s treacherous rocks. And the festa is bigger than ever, with 1,000kg of the frisky little crustaceans devoured in just one day; washed down, I suspect, with oceans of Albariño.
This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a beautifully made Vouvray with a touch of weight to it; a Pinot Noir made by Bristolian Phil Cox in Romania; and a proper yet pleasingly fruity claret at a very decent price. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.
Vouvray Sec ‘Confidences’, Famille Bougrier, Loire 2022, offer price £13.95, case price £167.40
Classic dry Chenin blanc with hints of grapefruit: long, zesty and complex.
Pinot Noir ‘Calusari’, Banat, Romania 2022, offer price £9.95, case price £119.40 Generously fruity with soft tannins: even better when slightly chilled.
Château Terre Blanche, Castillon Côtes de Bordeaux 2022, offer price £12.50, case price £150.00
Long and savoury right-bank claret with plenty of plum-and-raspberry Merlot fruit.
Mixed case price £145.60 – a saving of £37.99 (including free delivery)
9am-6pm; or
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 17th September 2024
The Oldie
Juicy: Quinta de Couselo
SPORT
JIM WHITE
LAST FAREWELL
It’s been the summer of the long farewell.
All around us, great British legends are heading off to spend more time wondering what on earth to do next.
On Wimbledon’s Centre Court, Andy Murray, encouraged by the returning Sue Barker, dutifully turned on the waterworks.
He was not the only one. His mum, Judy, was caught by the cameras crying. Nearby, his wife, Kim, blubbed away. Down by the umpire’s chair his brother, Jamie, with whom he had just played a doubles match, was in floods.
We are unlikely to see his like again – arguably the greatest British sportsman of all time.
Murray himself looked a little uncomfortable as he stood amid the torrents of eulogies. Not because his back was stooped by the lingering effects of a life of pummelling tennis balls. But because his send-off came after a defeat.
There is nothing he dislikes more than losing. That was what made him such a great champion: he was driven by a loathing of finishing second best.
Meanwhile, across the Channel, Mark Cavendish, like Murray knighted for his myriad successes, was doing something no one had done before. He was winning sprint stages of the Tour de France at an age reckoned geriatric: 39. Now, having broken the record set by the legendary Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx for Tour stage wins, a mark that had remained untouched for half a century, he was bowing out, his work done.
Then, at Lord’s, the still plain old Jimmy Anderson, easily the longestserving international fast bowler in history, swung his last ever Test match ball to tumultuous applause.
And how deserved it was. While most cricketers are compromised by their physicality in their early thirties, he was still flinging the ball down at improbable speeds into his forties, his spine apparently constructed of carbon fibre.
The longest-serving sporting oldie who may well say goodbye this summer is dressage rider Carl Hester. He will be heading to Paris for his seventh Olympic Games, a record of participation unmatched in British sporting history.
Since his first outing in Barcelona in 1992, he has won the full set of medals: gold in London, silver in Rio and bronze in Tokyo.
Now, at 58 (even if he can turn out every four years with a new, youthful four-legged partner), he is reconciled that he is approaching the end.
Well, almost. The competitive fires still smoulder within him. When I met him at his yard as he was preparing his horse to dance and prance in the historic surrounds of Versailles, I asked him if this was his last Olympics.
‘I bloody hope so,’ he said. ‘But I’m not saying anything about it, just in case I don’t make it and have to come back next time. What happens if I break my leg on the Eurostar on the way over and I’ve said it’s my last Olympics? I don’t want to go out like that. I want to go out with a bang, not on a complete downer.’
That is what marks out the sporting great. Everything – even the manner of their departure – becomes an act of competition.
MOTORING
ALAN JUDD THE ROVER RETURNS
Why choose one car over another?
Leave aside the usual utility reasons – affordability, availability, reliability, running costs, fitness for purpose – and you’re left with reasons that are more about you than about the car.
Status, colour, aesthetic appeal and performance are some of the obvious ones, indicative of aspects of you. Others, less obvious, include sentimentality, memory, nostalgia and admiration of the qualities your choice represents.
This list largely accounts for my renewed yearning for a Rover P4.
You have to have been automotively aware in the 1950s and 1960s to recall those large, well-rounded, dignified beasts with a noble nose. Nicknamed Auntie Rovers, they were the opposite of flashy. They were the personification of solidity and stylistic restraint. A fellow enthusiast reckoned them the Labradors of the automotive world.
Like most car companies, Rover emerged from the Second World War with modified pre-war models, albeit with its reputation for engineering excellence, comfort and quality intact.
The P4 was born in 1949. It was the company’s first new postwar saloon. Ironically – given its later reputation as the most traditional of Rovers – it was initially controversial because its shape was inspired by an American Studebaker, with no running boards or sharp edges.
Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, there were various iterations of engines and important body modifications by Rover’s design genius, David Bache. Responsible for the Series 11A Land Rover as well as the later Rovers
P5, P6 and SD1 – and partly responsible for the Range Rover – Bache’s flair was tempered by Rover’s MD, Maurice Wilks. Despite being the originator of the Land Rover, Wilks was probably unique among car-makers in rejecting adventurous designs if they were head-turners. He said, ‘The Rover Company don’t make head-turners. We like to make vehicles that pass unobtrusively and are not noticed.’
The resulting compromise through generations of Rover was a design language that, though noticeable, was characterised by restraint, integrity and purposefulness – unassertive yet unignorable. It suited the selfperceptions and aspirations of the middle-class professionals who bought Rovers; people for whom Bentleys were unaffordable and Jaguars, though beautiful, too flashy.
They exemplified a strain of Britishness – or Englishness? – which to its critics was staid, stolid, cosy and complacent but to its admirers spoke of dependability and quiet good taste. Not for nothing was the Rover P5 the chariot of choice for successive prime ministers – a preference continued by Margaret Thatcher long after they ceased production.
The P4’s Auntie moniker dates from 1958, when Denis Jenkinson of Motor Sport took one to Casablanca and back. He said he felt so safe and secure it was like ‘going to Auntie’s for tea, even [down] to the clock on the walnut mantelpiece’.
This is why they appeal to me.
Mr Lester, headmaster of my Kentish secondary school, an authority figure in days when there were authority figures, had one. He parked it outside his office – not on the rough ground where other teachers parked their Fords and Austins – and it personified for me much of what I felt I lacked and wanted.
In fact, in my salad days, when I changed cars every few months, I owned four. The first, a 105S, cost £50 and sold for £22 10s. The last, a 110 which I should never have sold, cost £1,275 and sold for £1,400.
They remain one of the more affordable classics, ranging now from around £3,000 to £10,000-£15,000.
Cocooned in walnut and leather, you can cruise contentedly at motorway speeds, while the mpg in the early twenties becomes acceptable when compared with the environmental cost of a new Tesla. No tax or ULEZ. You can get spares through the Rover clubs.
Buy one and help keep old Auntie going.
Matthew Webster: Digital Life The computer isn’t always right
Why do we trust what a computer tells us more readily than anything a human says?
Think of weather forecasting. If a website or app on your phone says it will rain, that’s good enough for most of us, even if it turns out to be wrong.
I am an Englishman – so naturally I often discuss the weather. In fact, for many years I have kept rain records in our garden. For the last few years, my love of things digital has included my buying a small solar-powered garden weather station that continuously transmits all sorts of climate-related data to a website located in, appropriately enough, the cloud.
I can check the weather in my garden
Webwatch
For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk
severeweather.wmo.int
Facts on severe weather around the world as supplied by the World Meteorological Organization.
www.netweather.tv
A huge store of weather data for professionals and amateurs alike.
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
from anywhere in the world, as well as look at the records since I bought the equipment.
This doesn’t mean I am any good at forecasting weather. For that, I rely slavishly on the websites and apps that claim to be able to predict the weather, minute by minute, to within a few yards of any given point.
The trouble is that, because it’s digital – on a computer – we imagine it to be accurate. In the olden days, we relied on an experienced meteorologist (such as Michael Fish) to collect whatever data they could get their hands on, add a dash of experience and instinct and come up with a forecast.
No one expected it to be perfect because we knew a human was involved. However, if the computer proclaims that it must be right, it must be –mustn’t it? Computers don’t make mistakes, do they?
Well, yes, they do, I’m afraid. As Niels Bohr, the Nobel laureate in Physics, said, ‘Making predictions is difficult, especially about the future.’
While a computer can assimilate far more information than Michael Fish ever could, its predictions are still no more than guesswork, based on past patterns and speculative assessments. Computers don’t have prescient crystal balls, any more than mankind does.
Nonetheless, when I looked into it, I discovered that it’s big business. Competitive, too; a few years ago, the BBC changed its supplier from the UK
Met Office to MeteoGroup, originally a Dutch company.
There are scores of companies collecting what must surely be the same data from many sources: government agencies, satellites, weather stations, weather balloons and competitor companies, construing it and then selling it to the tens of thousands of apps that we use.
Some of those apps interpret it again themselves; others simply pass it straight on. The more sophisticated gather the opinions of several sources and then apply their own analysis.
Most will enhance their offering with radar displays showing the weather as it moves, and as they expect it to move, as well as all sorts of comments about air quality, pollen and so on. My own preferred app is AccuWeather, for which I pay a few pounds a year.
How accurate is it? Not very. I am sure it has more data to go on than Michael Fish ever did, but it still predicts thunderstorms that never appear, or dry spells that prove to be wet. But I check it all the time, as if one day it will become infallible.
With all my enthusiasm for high-tech methods of forecasting, the most accurate sign I get that rain is imminent is the sound of my neighbour cutting his grass before the clouds open.
He doesn’t use a computer or a smartphone, but he has farmed the land around us both for over 70 years, and his instincts are impeccable.
Neil Collins: Money Matters
Share performance anxiety
New issues are the lifeblood of any stock market.
Without them, a combination of takeovers and failures means the market is forever shrinking. There is much angst at the way the number of stocks listed on the London Stock Exchange has been falling, compounded by the lacklustre performance of those remaining, compared with other major markets. There are convincing reasons for this. Pension funds were effectively penalised
for holding shares by Gordon Brown in a policy that drove them towards bonds instead. Investors everywhere have been diversifying internationally, which in practice has meant holding more US stocks. London is also one of the last exchanges where buyers must pay stamp duty. One per cent may not sound much, but it looms large when dealing costs generally have fallen.
On top of that, the quality of new issues has been, well, mixed. Many
of those companies that did come to market were the products of private equity houses, looking for an exit from a company where they thought the past looked better than the future (and hoping the buyers wouldn’t notice).
There have been some real humdingers. Buyers of Aston Martin, Dr Martens or THG (formerly The Hut Group) have lost most of their capital. Of the significant arrivals since 2021, only Darktrace, a cyber security
company, stands at a premium to its original listing price.
Last month, a swallow arrived in the somewhat unlikely shape of Raspberry Pi. In 2022, this maker of DIY computers sold 5m Pis, at an average $43.10 each. Last year’s sales totalled $266m. Rather than selling down, in the flotation Pi’s big shareholders bought more.
The market loved it. Priced at 280p,
the shares immediately jumped to 380p, where the business was valued at £540m. If they were cheap at the float price, they aren’t now.
Pi is a British techie success story, but its prospects are distinctly limited. It is surrounded by much bigger competitors. And its majority shareholder is a charity determined to get as many children programming as possible.
This laudable aim promises a clear conflict with the managers of a listed company. These conflicts can be managed, but are always uncomfortable, and do not encourage high ratings for the shares. We wish the Pi men well, but one swallow does not make a summer. It may be that the greatest contribution to helping London overcome its market malaise is to make us all feel better.
‘The British are coming!’
Join Harry Mount in Boston and New York to commiserate over the loss of the Colonies 250 years ago 3rd to 11th April 2025
On 18th April 1775, Paul Revere rode through Middlesex County to warn the minutemen that the British were leaving Boston and heading towards Lexington at Concord – where, at 5am the next day, they were faced by a militia company of 700 men. And so it all began…
Harry Mount was the New York correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, 2005-2006. With advice from local friends, he has put together a tour of his favourite places in New York, where we will be staying at the Washington Square Hotel, and in Boston, where we will stay at the Copley Square Hotel.
Readers can make their own way to New York, but we advise catching the sensibly priced Norse Air flight on 3rd April and returning on the Virgin Atlantic flight from Boston.
We will have our own 24-seater minibus in both cities.
Thursday 3rd April – Gatwick to New York JFK. Norse Air flight departs 1.05pm, arrives 3.55pm. Check in to Washington Square Hotel. Dinner at Minetta Tavern, 113 MacDougal Street.
Friday 4th April – 11.30am Circle Line cruise round Lower Manhattan, taking in the Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge.
1.30pm lunch in Greenwich Village – with a cupcake for pudding from Magnolia Bakery, star of Sex and the City – followed by a walk through
Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill, 1775. Inset: Boston’s Old State House, 1713
Washington Square and Greenwich Village back to our hotel.
Dinner in Greenwich Village.
Saturday 5th April – Morning walk in the High Line gardens, followed by lunch at Tiffany's. Afternoon visit to the Frick Gallery, which reopens later this year. Dinner at the Algonquin.
Sunday 6th April – In the morning, we take the ferry to Hoboken, New Jersey, and stroll around Frank Sinatra’s childhood neighbourhood. Lunch at Leo’s Grandevous Italian restaurant in Hoboken.
Then we visit the Met Cloisters and Ulysses Grant’s Tomb. Refresh at the hotel before visiting McSorley’s Old Ale House. Dinner on the Lower East Side at Estela.
Monday 7th April – We take the 10.02 train from Penn Station to Boston Back Bay, arriving 13.39. Late lunch at the Tavern Club, followed by Freedom Trail walk round Boston State House, site of the Boston Massacre, Faneuil Hall and the Paul Revere House. Dinner at Union Oyster House, an 18th-century restaurant.
Tuesday 8th April – Lexington and Concord: tour of battlefields and Louisa May Alcott’s House in Concord. Lunch at Harvest in Cambridge; tour of Harvard; dinner at the Tavern Club, the Garrick of Boston.
Wednesday 9th April – Leave at 9.30am for Plymouth Rock and Plymouth Museum; visit Mayflower II, a replica of the 1628 original; lunch at The Tasty; visit Pilgrim Hall Museum; drinks and literary talk at Athenaeum; dinner at Cheers restaurant, Beacon Hill.
Thursday 10th April – Tour of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum followed by lunch at the museum. Departure: Virgin Atlantic flight departs Boston 10.10pm, arrives Heathrow 09.40am on Friday 11th.
HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 or please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Price per person: £4,995 excluding return flights to the USA but including all accommodation, transport in the US, all meals, drinks with meals and entrances. Single supplement: £750. A non-refundable deposit of £1,250 will be required, with the full balance due on 3rd January 2025.
Stonechat
by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd
A flint-on-flint ticking – and there he is,
Trim and dandy – in square miles of bracken
And bog and boulders a tiny work of art…
Norman MacCaig (1910-96), from Stonechat on Cul Beg
Cul Beg/Beag is a mountain in Sutherland overlooking Loch Lurgainn. Owned by the local Assynt Foundation, it is a popular challenge for walkers.
For MacCaig, three-quarters a Gael, who was born and bred in Edinburgh and earned his living there as a primaryschool teacher, Assynt was Eden.
As Alan Taylor writes in The Poems of Norman MacCaig, temporality became his poetic obsession. And mountainous and loch-strewn Assynt encouraged him ‘to imagine a time before man existed and a future in which he might no longer exist’.
That MacCaig chose the stonechat (Saxicola rubicola) as the bright spirit of that immemorial landscape haunts a reader all the more in the ominous present.
The male in summer plumage is particularly bright, with his black head and flashes of white from head, wing and rump.
Of British birds, it is a rare example, like the wren, of a resident insectivore. This places it at the mercy of harsh winters. Advanced oldies will remember 1947, when snow fell somewhere in the country from 22nd January to 17th March. Drifts blocked roads and rail lines, animals froze to death and ‘Manny’ Shinwell, Minister of Fuel and Power, had to have a police escort. There was also a near extinction of the stonechat population.
Similar setbacks in 1963, the coldest winter for 200 years, 2009/10 and 2011/12 were recorded. But warmer winters now find 59,000 pairs –inclining to the west and south, the main stronghold being north-western Scotland.
The stonechat has evolved as a partial migrant, not least within Britain, to guarantee winter survival. Highland birds are known to migrate in search of warmth and insects as far as Spain and Portugal.
Stonechats mate for life. The male’s courtship includes plumage spread to expose his white flashes. The female builds the nest, which is near or on the ground, in gorse, heather, bracken or the grass around bramble bushes. Nesting can begin as early as March, with a second and, sometimes, a third brood extending into August.
The Popinjay (E W Hendy, 1872-1950) – never mind that ‘popinjay’ in heraldry is a parrot – brings to mind our happy 1980s family holiday in Brittany, another stonechat stronghold: The stonechat is a saucy fellow;
When the gorse and broom are flaming yellow,
In cap of black with collar white, A debonair and dainty sprite, He preens himself on a tip-top spray, This russet-breasted popinjay…
The whinchat (Saxicola rubetra), a summer migrant from tropical Africa, is less numerous and declining (47,000 pairs) through intensification of lowland farming; also less colourful (identified by white eye stripe) – but charmingly similar in habitat (whin, Scots for ‘gorse’), prominent perching and more of a songster, even into the night.
Swoop Sing Perch Paddle (Bloomsbury), the collected Oldie Birds of the Month, by John McEwen and Carry Akroyd, is out on 1st August
Travel Ode on melancholy
After she broke her back and her daughter died, food critic Fay Maschler found solace in a Bath health retreat
The French have a phrase for it: un coup de vieux or, I suppose in my case, un coup de vieille
It refers to a sudden perceived lurch in ageing. I had one recently. I went to see my genial GP and said to him, ‘I have suffered un coup de vieille.’
He looked understandably perplexed and suggested an aspirin.
Then came the opportunity to spend a week at Combe Grove Metabolic Health Retreat near Bath. I decided to go there with my youngest child, Ben (aged nearly 50) – because he suffers from sciatica, and needed a little respite from his job running a country pub and because geography means I don’t spend nearly enough time with him.
Combe Grove is not, by any stretch of the imagination, what in my youth was called a fat farm. The perception and understanding of good health have moved far beyond spartan rooms, deprivation and calorie-counting –short term gains those.
Helen Aylward-Smith, the powerhouse behind the retreat, is a successful businesswoman and now philanthropist who made her fortune in storage. She is a fan of Buchinger Wilhelmi spa in Bavaria. I too favour that institution, family-run into the fourth generation. I have been there several times to fast for two weeks at a time.
Combe is somewhere equally systematic, and kindred, but – dare it be said – more British.
‘Eat all your food in an eight-hour window, avoid refined carbohydrates and sugar, get moving and get some sleep pretty much covers it,’ pronounces Ben.
Allowing for the flippancy of relative
youth, that does embrace the basics. But they are attended to here in unusually meticulous detail, starting with a blood-test kit sent to you before arrival. Because of my spavined state – I have fractured a vertebra in my lower back in a fall on some restaurant stairs – I don’t manage to get this done. But, in the initial consultation with Dr Campbell Murdoch, a visionary expert in metabolic
Combe Grove Metabolic Health Retreat
health, blood is taken and, more alarmingly, ACCUNIQ measurements, via electrodes, are made, which evaluate body composition.
Let’s just say my lean muscle mass could be a lot better and there could be a more ideal result of dividing my waist measurement into my height…
I look through the information folder tailored to my programme, tastefully designed in muted colours and natural fabrics. It’s carried in a linen tote on which the words ‘Rest, Restore, Reset’ urge me onwards. At lunch on the first day in the orangery of the Grade II-listed, 18th-century manor perched high on a hill, Ben and I meet our fellow campers (wrong word, given the well-appointed rooms).
Places at the communal table are marked by napkins in rings made from twirled twigs and their positions are changed daily. Women outweigh men in every sense of the word. There is already a feeling of camaraderie and purpose, firmly underpinned by imagery of the five roots of the tree of wellbeing – Mindset, Movement, Nutrition, Sleep, Environment – stencilled on the wall.
There is choice on the menu today and every day (huzzah). My selection of smoked-mackerel pâté with horseradish and dill, served with pickled cucumber and salad leaves, comes in at 6.5g carbohydrates and 28g protein. As many ingredients as possible are grown in the manor’s kitchen garden.
Unsurprisingly, there is no alcohol offered, but there are Pentire botanicals on hand, one of which a chap tentatively, optimistically compares to a gin and tonic. I am pleased to see an espresso machine in the bar, and genial staff prove willing to ferry coffee in.
My first appointment is for reflexology with Rosalind Oxenford.
I ask her if she is any relation to Daphne Oxenford of Listen with Mother fame – we both remember her. She is not, but I am undeniably sitting comfortably in a hammocky sort of chair before she begins.
As she cradles my feet in her warm hands and works on pressure points that connect to ‘blockages’ in the body, it is soothing, salutary and dreamily enjoyable – so much so that I ask to make another appointment before the week is up. Does my broken back feel better? I think it does. Is my broken heart – my
eldest daughter died of cancer just four months before my visit – a little bit mended? No, but kindness, sensitivity and empathy never go amiss and always soothe. I find more of all those when I have a particularly penetrating shiatsu session.
Ben addresses his back issues more energetically. He takes advantage of the indoor and heated outdoor swimming pools and finds a tennis partner he thinks will match his game. I know I am his mother but he really is very talented –as was his father.
He also has only high praise for the various practitioners he meets and concludes, as do I, that they have been carefully selected at the top of their game.
Every day, there are group activities, talks and demonstrations. They fuel our various determinations to live healthier lives henceforward.
One activity I like particularly is qigong, the gentle co-ordinated movement, breathing and meditation that feeds health and spirituality and also has undertones of a martial art. I used to practise it at home using an online video and am going to do so again.
I also resolve to start entertaining once more. My cooking muscle, once strong and capable, has sort of atrophied and I am going to address that.
Do I want to increase the number of my Instagram followers? No. Do I want to live longer? Not especially. Just in a livelier way. At my age, I decide there is optimal and then there is reality.
Even within the six-night stay, there are, if not transformations, quite dramatic results. One woman who has been suffering migraines daily is freed from them. Closer to home, Ben has conquered his Diet Coke habit and forged an improved relationship with sugar, with Ben having the upper hand. I, who drink too much wine, have not pined for it.
The counsellor I saw was blessedly non-judgemental and bristling with good ideas – such as supplementing with saffron to address the possible ADHD that might be stopping me from getting down to writing my memoir. And getting a pet. I took her advice and a tabby kitten I’ve christened Arlo is a new member of the family. He is a scamp and a delight and reunites me with an old pal, the vet Bruce Fogle, whose son Ben, the TV presenter, was at prep school with my Ben.
To be metabolically healthier can be life-enhancing in many ways. It effectively staves off diabetes, one of the real hazards of our age.
When you sign up to a stay at Combe Grove, the price includes a three-week lead-in and 48 weeks of online support afterwards, plus a one-year membership of the Club at Grove, particularly handy should you live near Bath.
My back still hurts, but I am possibly less of a pain in the neck to my friends and family. My stay has most definitely been the opposite of a coup de grâce.
Fay Maschler is restaurant critic of Tatler. She was the Evening Standard restaurant critic for 48 years Combe Grove (01225 834644 combegrove.com)
Fay (far left) and son Ben (far right). Below: chop-chop in Coombe Grove’s kitchen
‘Eastern limit of Latinity and southern extremity of Germanness’: Canal Grande and Sant’Antonio Nuovo Church, Trieste
Crossing the border
Fifty years after Jan Morris wrote about her sex change, her biographer Sara Wheeler visits her beloved Trieste, a city in limbo
You never know, looking at the war memorials, what army they were in.’
Jan Morris (1926-2020) wrote those words in Trieste in her 90th year. She was distilling a lifetime’s reflection on a city she first knew as a 19-year-old officer in the Ninth Queen’s Royal Lancers – an elite regiment, if not quite the Guards.
Like everything she wrote, the comment was really about her – it concerned fractured identity, unknowability, mystery.
That was why, above all places, even above Venice, Trieste was Morris’s place. This year marks the 50th anniversary of her pioneering memoir about her gender transition from James Morris to Jan
Morris, Conundrum (both Faber and Folio are publishing special editions). But, to my mind, her writings on Trieste tell a truer story.
Trieste, Morris admits, is ‘not one of your iconic cities, instantly visible in the memory or the imagination’.
Tucked away at the north-east corner of the Adriatic, it conjures little except the gleam of Hapsburg epaulettes.
It lacks the characteristics of its Italian motherland to such an extent that, in a 1999 poll, 70 per cent of Italians did not know it was in Italy at all. The language you hear most often in the bufets (not trattorias, up here) is the Triestine dialect.
This summer, I sat on a bollard on Trieste’s Molo Audace with a notebook in
my hand, just as young Morris did. Trieste became her foundation myth, recycled through 58 books and many, many hundreds of travel essays.
She even brought it into Pax Britannica, the imperial trilogy she called ‘the centrepiece of my life’. She said, ‘I feel that this opaque seaport of my vision, so full of sweet melancholy, illustrates not just my adolescent emotions of the past, but my lifelong preoccupations too.’
Enveloped by Slav territories, Trieste, uniquely, is of both western Europe and the Balkans. ‘We are the eastern limit of Latinity and the southern extremity of Germanness,’ a Triestino mayor once remarked.
Walk up stone steps a block or two
behind the handsome Austro-Hungarian seafront and you see another Trieste –medieval streets without the flapping laundry and Vespas of Naples. There are a few ten-storey 1980s blocks, some seventies shockers and the Cathedral San Giusto, with its Byzantine frescoes and Roman carvings in the bell tower.
An hour after downing the first couple of neros (not caffè normales) and a cornetto crema, I looked up at Miramare from the open deck of a Delfino Verde ferry. The Hapsburg Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, known as Max, brother of Emperor Franz Josef, built the palacecastle in the late 1850s and lived in it with his wife, Charlotte of Belgium.
A tour reveals the extent to which a wealthy family can commission many portraits, and buy many expensive paintings, and still make a home hideous.
But, looking out of the gabled Miramare windows at the wheatfield ripples of the Adriatic, you can’t help thinking of old Max facing the firing squad in Mexico after his dynastic family dispatched him to be Emperor. Or perhaps one has looked at too many Manets.
Do not return to Trieste from Grignano, the port below Miramare. Get back on the next ferry and keep chugging north-west to Sistiana, where you disembark again and climb to Duino, the fabled castle of the Thurn und Taxis family. That’s where Rilke, a house guest, in 1912 wrote the Duino Elegies, among the finest lyric poetry in any language.
The family open their castello to the public some mornings. Inside, I learned that the incomparable Rilke is not the only poetic genius to have laid his head in one of Duino’s rooms. Dante stayed there in the 14th century, in his capacity as Ambassador of Cangrande della Scala.
Below, you can scramble over rocks to swim from the kind of old-fashioned, piano piano resort where you rent a lounger for ten euros a day and factorymade ice creams have wrappers – as opposed to the otherwise ubiquitous scoops of artisan gelato, flavoured with caramelised fig and salted wild blackberry.
Desuetude is a word made for Trieste – then, now, for all time… That said, one morning, emerging from my diminutive Airbnb in Cavana, the old port and now vibey and rounding the corner of the Piazza Unità, I came upon a 12-storey cruise ship bigger than Max’s
Clockwise from right: James Joyce by Canal Grande; Jan Morris, 1988; James Morris reports conquest of Mount Everest, Nepal, 1953
Miramare. It blocked the sun.
The effect is notably shocking in Trieste, as the stern of the ship actually touches the corniche.
Morris, typically, was not prepared to despise the vulgarity of the masses (she would have laughed her head off at Thurn und Taxis, too).
On the monster vessels that dock in Venice, she wrote, ‘The doges would have loved them! Showy, moneymaking, marvellous engineering!’
On Bloomsday, 16th June, I was able to touch the hand of Joyce himself, as his bronze likeness (pictured) stands on the Ponte Rosso over the Canal Grande. In fact, he is all over Trieste, even hosting an eponymous caffè. It was in Trieste that Leopold Bloom coalesced in Joyce’s imagination. The Dubliner and Nora Barnacle settled in the city in 1904 when James was 22, and he taught at a second-floor language school which today bears a plaque in his honour.
In Finnegans Wake, the narrator exclaims, ‘And trieste, ah trieste ate I my liver!’, Joyce’s mangled version of Verlaine’s O triste, triste était mon âme
One of Joyce’s pupils at the language school was Ettore Schmitz, better known as Italo Svevo, author of the wonderful Zeno’s Conscience. Svevo was a true
Triestino, Italian his second language. He and Joyce became close. Svevo said that for Joyce, Trieste was ‘a little Ireland’. There is a statue of him, too, in the Piazza Horti (one of the best buffet restaurants is on the corner there).
Morris admired both writers. She was an encyclopaedist like Joyce and a miniaturist like Svevo.
In June 2002, at the age of 76, she made her second appearance on Desert Island Discs. She was waspish with presenter Sue Lawley, compared with her subservience to the programme’s creator and original presenter, Roy Plomley, 17 years earlier.
The chat started with Trieste, as Morris’s book on the city, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, had just been published:
‘Bang on a fissure between east and west, nobody knew what was going to happen to Trieste [in 1946, when Morris was there as a soldier]. It was limbo. Still is limbo for me. A fold in the map.
‘I’m a permanent compromise. I think I was wrong to say I found an identity [in Casablanca, where she underwent gender-transition surgery]. I can’t pretend I’m one thing or the other. Nor can Trieste.’
First time round, she had picked Venice, which she had written herself, as her desert-island book. This time, she chose the 11th-century Mabinogion in modern Welsh. She had by then become a Welsh nationalist.
‘The past is a foreign country,’ she had written in Trieste, ‘but so is old age and, as you enter it, you feel you are treading unknown territory, leaving your own land behind.’ Indeed.
She continued, ‘Trieste might be Italian by sovereignty, but in temperament it is more or less alone.’
So are we all, in the end.
Sara Wheeler’s Jan Morris: An Authorised Life will be published in 2026, the centenary of Morris’s birth
Overlooked Britain
Devon’s magic circle
Deep in the West Country, two cousins built a cottage based on the Byzantine Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna
lucinda lambton
A la Ronde in Devon has a kind of magical strangeness that as a child one could only dream of coming upon.
Tiny, shoulder-width staircases are encrusted with shells and fossils – no common sight. There are diamondshaped windows galore, as well as painted birds with real feathers, flying on the walls. Some strangely special rooms are minute, triangular and always jam-packed with curiosities.
It is no common sight from start to finish. Built in 1795 by two cultivated cousins, the Misses Jane and Mary Parminter, it was the culmination of a ten-year-long grand tour of Europe, as well as marking their return to England.
What a house and a half! It is a cosmopolitan cottage orné, modelled on the 16th-century Byzantine Basilica of
San Vitale in Ravenna and riddled through with domestic gaiety.
Surprises and delights are to be found round every corner. The hexagonal, shell-covered central hall soars to the skies, seeming to be at least three times the height of its modest 35 feet.
There are eight elegantly arched doorways, each framed with a dark green moulding over a charmingly convenient secret bench – let down for extra comfort for those sitting out the dance. Eighteenth-century chairs provide equally stylish seating arrangements.
With great wisdom, the Misses Parminter arranged their remarkable house so that this central hall, with its scanty and rising heat, could be avoided during the winter. Every room within its 16 walls was interconnected. You could
A la Ronde, Lympstone: the cottage was built in 1795 by the Parminter cousins. It has 20 rooms and shell-lined staircases
walk from one to the other, through magnificently decorated chambers. So it was that the house could be enjoyed without anyone’s ever having to put their nose out into the hall’s icy wastes.
Picturesque practicality was pursued throughout. A la Ronde was built so that daily life should progress with the sun: it rose into the bedrooms, shone into the library drawing-room and anteroom during the morning and afternoon, and set through the windows of the oval sitting-room, used specifically for the sight of it sinking into the River Exe.
Jane Parminter was born in Lisbon, which must account for the
Clockwise from above: shellwork vase of flowers; drawing room; octagonal hallway; shell-encrusted wall in the gallery
very un-English flair of the house.
Certainly an extraordinary frieze of feathers was based on a Portuguese tile design, produced at the time of the Moors’ invasion. In regular pairs of circles, it marches round the top of the drawing-room walls. Nearly all the feathers were from the game birds plucked at the kitchen table.
There were also tame parrots and peacocks around, but their brilliant hues do not seem part of the design. According to Ursula Tudor-Perkins, the descendant of Jane Parminter who moved into the house, Jane was convinced that ‘moths never go near their colour’.
Jane’s father was a flamboyant figure, who had houses in Lisbon, Devon and London. He owned coffee houses in Fleet Street, a glass factory in Lisbon and a fleet of ships that exported wine as far afield as Brazil.
Many aspects of A la Ronde’s architectural ingenuity must have come from the family’s knowledge of shipbuilding. John Parminter had a great triumph when he invented a new form of concrete for the rebuilding of Lisbon after the great earthquake of 1755. The King of Portugal built him a glass factory in gratitude.
Any changes suffered by A la Ronde over the years have been at the somewhat
clumsy hand of the Rev Oswald Reichel in the early 1880s – the only man ever to have owned the house. The roof was originally thatched and without windows, with little dovecotes hanging from the eaves and a Byzantine cupola with a weathervane on its peak. The walls were plastered white and rampant with honeysuckle.
He added the ungainly square windows, undoubtedly to the relief of the staff who had been forced to toil for years, almost in the dark, behind the elegantly latticed diamond-paned windows.
Reichel also installed a terrifying heating system with elephant-trunk-like radiators in every room. For a laugh, one alone still remains. He had the last laugh: two bombs fell on the roof during the war; had it still been thatched, A la Ronde would be no more.
High above the lofty hall is the house’s crowning glory; a gallery encrusted with shells, feathers, sand, china, lichen and bones, reached by a tiny and very narrow Gothic staircase. The steps slope so that you are forced to bend forwards, with your shoulders scrunched together by the walls. Up you squeeze, past walls fashioned from quills and a grotto of shells, with the walls and ceilings
embedded with glistening protuberances, their mirrors and fossils ablaze.
The gallery is a veritable explosion of rarity: razor-clam shells zigzag; limpets are laid as petals in flowers; feathers are styled as birds.
Seals, porcelain, fossils and minerals, a fir cone, a teapot spout and even a horse’s neck bone are all there, arranged in dazzlingly meticulous patterns, with every architectural line most decoratively pronounced.
It took the cousins 11 years to create these wonders. When the house was finished, they painted an immense crown over the doorway to celebrate both the triumph of their work and the 1809 Golden Jubilee of George III and Queen Charlotte.
In spring 1811, Jane Parminter built a church in the grounds of the house, with four almshouses for ‘spinster ladies’ and a school for six orphan girls, which was strangely incorporated into the building.
She died that summer, having finished all she’d set out to do. It had taken two women only 13 years to create all the glories of A la Ronde.
Cinema’s hottest ticket
Film director Bruce Beresford braves the heat – and icy coldness – of the world’s most remote film festival, in the Australian Outback
Since my movie Breaker Morant was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980, I’ve been to film festivals all over the world: Venice, New York, London, Toronto and Tehran – Mr Trump cancelled my US visa because of that one.
An invitation to the Vision Splendid Outback Film Festival in Winton, Queensland, baffled me. Online research revealed it to be a small town 700 miles from Brisbane – accessible by way of an eight-hour trip from Sydney, involving two plane flights and a two-hour car journey. This final stretch is along a dead-straight road sadly littered with dead kangaroos – prone to leaping in front of or onto cars.
with the bones of animals from the era when the landscape was lush rainforest, not semi-desert.
More thrilling than the prehistorical animals, the films and the rather charming old bush town, was my trip, of a couple of miles, into the countryside at night.
There, lying on a blanket, I watched thousands of stars –far more than in the Northern Hemisphere. Invariably, after a short wait, a falling one streaked across the night sky. After a few minutes, another fell, and then another.
Winton has been holding an annual film festival since 2014. During the wool boom some years ago, it was a thriving town. It prospered again during the Covid lockdowns, when Australians couldn’t travel abroad. Now the doors are unlocked – so they’re heading for Asia and Europe.
Most of the stores in the town are closed, though a surprising number of large hotels do good business. I checked into one and was thrilled to be told, ‘Your suite is ready.’ This would no doubt be appropriate for my Film Director Guest status.
My suite was a tiny, clean, small room with a minuscule shower/bathroom. The walls appeared to be made of cardboard – I could hear people talking and TV sets in many other rooms. The hotel had burned down four times – the owners probably decided that money spent on solid walls was money wasted.
I was very hungry after my eighthour journey.
‘The kitchen closed at 2pm,’ the young receptionist told me.
‘It’s only five past two,’ I said, casually.
‘That’s after two,’ she pointed out.
‘Couldn’t they make me a sandwich?’ I pleaded.
‘No.’
Opposite my hotel, a large sign read ‘NEWSAGENT’. I crossed the road and looked over racks full of puzzle books and magazines about rock groups. An assistant told me they don’t receive any newspapers any more. There was little demand for them and they were very expensive by the time they arrived from Brisbane or Sydney.
At my hotel the next morning, I sat in the deserted breakfast room.
Around 8am, a man came out from the kitchen and said, ‘We don’t serve breakfast.’ He told me there was an ‘arrangement’ with a café two doors away. I dashed into the café to find their breakfast repertoire consisted of a small dish of muesli and a weak coffee.
During the day, films were shown in a theatre in a well-designed modern building constructed in honour of the song Waltzing Matilda. The poet Banjo Paterson wrote the song in 1895 while visiting friends at a Winton sheep station. In a room full of memorabilia (including Paterson’s handwritten song lyrics), there’s a film clip proving the famous tune is an adaptation of a Scottish folk song.
A plaque in the street informed me that Winton is famous as the birthplace of Qantas (Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services), which began in 1920, with flights to Outback towns.
A more recent claim to fame is the establishment of a museum of prehistoric creatures. Central Queensland is littered
At night, the screening venue shifted to an outdoor theatre – a large space with no roof and tin walls. These were once common all over Australia – the one in Winton is said to be the only survivor.
Although the days in Winton were pleasantly warm, after sunset temperatures dropped dramatically to near zero. After one freezing night, I attended the screenings with a couple of blankets borrowed from my luxury hotel suite. The cinema is closed during the summer, as the temperature varies between 45° and 50°C. There are so many flies that everyone has to wear a net around their face. Those who can afford it spend summer in one of the coastal towns, a mere five hours away by car.
Another problem at the cinema was that the dialogue of the films bounced off the tin walls and became garbled to the extent that only the front row could understand what was being said.
From the halfway point to the back of the theatre, the dialogue sounded as if it was in Bulgarian.
Anxious to have the audience understand the speech in my 1977 film, The Getting of Wisdom, I asked people in the back half of the theatre to move forward to the many empty seats.
I didn’t succeed. They were encased in overcoats and blankets and quite happy with the incomprehensible dialogue.
Bruce Beresford directed the Oscarwinning film Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
Far cry from Hollywood: the local news
Taking a Walk
I found my thrill on Strawberry Hill
In 1988, a few years before ‘rewilding’ was coined, and decades before it took root, a farmer in deepest Bedfordshire took the unusual decision to stop farming his 377 acres.
Ever since, Strawberry Hill, an ordinary slice of gently rolling countryside hiding between the A1, A6 and A14, has been left alone – no ploughing, cutting or pesticide-spraying.
What’s emerged is something extraordinary – a new (or old) English Arcadia. I took a midsummer walk there to experience its magic.
Bedfordshire is disparaged as the nadir of our intensively farmed, naturedenuded countryside. Look on a map and it appears dominated by busy roads and sprawling suburban towns.
But as soon as I left the A14, I found myself bumping on to rutted country lanes, traversing a somnolent, almost traffic-free landscape of sweeping arable fields, interspersed with woodlands and rough meadows, beside tributaries of the Great Ouse.
Strawberry Hill encompasses a graceful farmhouse and barns, built by the Duke of Bedford as a model farm in 1868. Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire (BCN) Wildlife Trust has bought half the farm and is fundraising to buy the other half.
On either side of the footpath that once stepped between two large open fields, there was a vivid green jungle of hawthorn, blackthorn, sallow. Among the trees was a befuddling maze of grassy glades that danced with meadow browns, marbled whites and golden skippers.
I took the footpath east through the farm, accompanied by Brian Eversham, a brilliant entomologist and chief executive of BCN. He was tipped off about the farm’s imminent sale three years ago and raced over. ‘I fell in love with it immediately,’ he said.
There was little trace of these thickets in 2000, when an old photo shows a dog-walker crossing open if unkemptlooking fields of long grasses.
But wild plants spring back at
patrick barkham
astonishing pace the second we leave the soil alone, and these thickets are now home to half of all nightingales found in Bedfordshire. Even though the birds were beginning to fall silent by midsummer, this wild scrub still bounced with the songs of blackcaps, whitethroats and Cetti’s warblers.
Britain’s wild plants may be assailed by record deer populations but here there was simply too much growth to munch.
Grand hummocks of flowering brambles provided shelter for larger trees – field maples and oaks – poking through the tops. On the path edge, common spotted and bee orchids were flowering. It would be easy to get lost, except that it was impossible to leave the path – I might twist my way into the first glade, but thorny barriers repelled further exploration: ‘Walk ten yards off the path and you’re into a habitat no human has ever seen,’ Brian said, eyes gleaming. These thickets are thrilling for naturalists: there is almost certainly a host of unrecorded plants, beetles and
hoverflies merrily making a living a few yards from view.
Abruptly, the rewilded acres ended and we were catapulted back to reality: a vast field of blue-green wheat, striking in its own way but bereft of all but one species.
Happily, there was another public footpath returning along the line of a little stream marked by willows, and then a new path cut by the Wildlife Trust, which led towards the summit of Strawberry Hill. We were rewarded with a view of wild, green life to the far horizon and the churr of a common green grasshopper. ‘It sounds like a freewheeling bicycle and it’s not common in central England any more,’ Brian said.
Here’s to this uncommon land, and to the Wildlife Trust’s bid to save it all.
Park on road beside farm (What3Words: incensed.access.hippy). Take public footpath east for almost a mile and then loop around to the south and back beside stream. Other paths offer a longer round trip. Please don’t bring a dog!
Across
1 Neat - until due for renewal before the first of December (9)
6 Raging Bull’s first into attack (5)
9 Thus taken in by returning Mafia’s warm embrace (5)
10 Cause consternation as Bears and Rams play (9)
11 Job position needing name for very quiet baptismal ceremony (10)
12 Wake up for porridge (4)
14 Model learnt about hotel transport (7)
15 Guardian backing the Tory left - a discontented read (7)
17 Money needed as result of reviewing obligation to cover botched DIY? (4,3)
19 Parody about Liberal providing a way to the top (3,4)
20 Long house originally used in service (4)
22 A bit rude at home, feeling fragile? (10)
25 Have a fun time – eight pints, four with worker (9)
26 Fixes trouble between points (5)
27 Amusing sweet girl capturing Byron’s heart (5)
28 Under new African organization Spain gets strength (9)
Genius crossword 442 EL SERENO
Down
1 I’m not sure Britain needs a feature of an eclipse (5)
2 Had fun seeing high priest full of love hugged by Doctor of Divinity (9)
3 Pale yellow marijuana plant (5,5)
4 Short story about Channel Island current (7)
5 Ridicules the lower socioeconomic groups and sleeping arrangements (7)
6 Unusual end to war – a run on energy (4)
7 Creature comforts ultimately found during police round (5)
8 Raise doubts about detective’s financial status (9)
13 Ernie to tip off one with a suit (10)
14 Disaffected editor drinking rum (9)
16 Setter’s in a state, showing spirit (9)
18 Authority given to crew on engagement (7)
19 Got wind of a certain amount of adolescent edginess (7)
21 Can peeled onion produce such a welcome? (5)
23 Macron’s in, certain to reject right result (5)
24 Bottle essential for life without heart (4)
How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk Deadline: 21st August 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.
Winner: Len Watts, Stockport Runners-up: Richard Snailham, Windsor, Berkshire; Marianne Edwards, Dundee
There are a couple of rare coups I’d love to pull off at the table. One is the smother coup. Take this three-card ending:
Spades are trumps, and South has to win the last two tricks. It appears impossible. However, say East is on lead. Now, after ♥A, ♠ J, West’s ♠K is ‘smothered’.
Dealer South Neither Vulnerable
1. 15-19, forcing to game. 2. Delayed (three-card) support. 3. Control bid, showing the fifth heart.
Declarer won West’s queen-of-spades lead with the ace and ran the queen of hearts, winning (although the fall of East’s nine was ominous). Declarer continued with the knave and, as declarer feared, East discarded (a diamond).
It appeared declarer was bound to lose a club and a heart, but there was a ray of hope. Declarer crossed to the king of spades and ruffed a third spade, then cashed the three top diamonds. He now cashed the king of clubs and crossed to the ace (if West had begun with a singleton Club, he’d have been unable profitably to ruff the second club – ruffing a loser).
The scene was set – at trick 11, declarer exited with a third club. East won the queen and led a diamond (perforce), but West’s king-seven of hearts was perfectly smothered. After declarer perforce ruffed (from the ten-eight), West waved the white flag. ANDREW ROBSON
Competition TESSA CASTRO
IN COMPETITION No 308 you were invited to write a poem called The Knee ‘Long will you search before you see/ A rhyme to celebrate the knee,’ John Robinson began. No longer. Jenny Jones apologised to Keats: ‘Season of skin and pallid tightlessness, / Close-scrutinised in the revealing sun.’ Basil Ransome-Davies’s thoughts turned to film: ‘Though Claire’s Knee proved a winner for/ Director Eric Rohmer,/ Whose talent cineastes adore,/ It put me in a coma.’ Bruce Maunder Taylor even incorporated a crossword clue: ‘Keen athlete fell, so late withdrawn.’ Commiserations to them and to Ian Mason, Clare Hawkins, Ian Higgins, D A Prince, Erika Fairhead, Erica Smith, Ann Beckett and Sue Smalley, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Ann Drysdale.
The knee encroaches on the central aisle Despite the overcrowded circumstances. It hogs the spotlight centre-stage awhile And, unacknowledged by its owner, dances.
The metatarsi spread to take the strain As the man pushes but, in spite of him, A rogue electric spasm in the brain Sends tremor after tremor through the limb.
It is as if I can perceive the knee Beneath the trousers, watch the living sinews
Respond to this insistent mystery. The train progresses and the dance continues
While, here and there, other ungoverned knees
Are celebrating private jubilees.
Ann Drysdale
Age is a state of mind, we’re told, Eternal youth our lifelong goal. Yet facelifts, t’ai chi and the rest Are limited in their success…
For once you kneel – perhaps to pray Or read the gas meter’s display –Your knee joints give the game away, Revealing that you’ve had your day…
Sometimes they even crunch and crack, These joints that keep relentless track Of your attempts to hold age back Despite their merciless attack…
You struggle to regain your poise And laugh it off as background noise;
Arthritic wear and tear are cited. Just hope to God you’re never knighted… David Dixon
I limped home. Blood was trickling down my leg.
‘What’s this?’ said Mum. ‘The Battle of Wounded Knee?’
‘We tunnelled underneath a barbed wire fence,’
I said with pride. ‘We’re playing Normandy.’
Her face changed then. ‘It’s not a children’s game.
Next door’s boy’s there, for sure, and still no word.
Let’s wash that knee of yours. It’s deep, this cut.
They’ll not have a moment’s peace until they’ve heard.
You’ll have a scar there, to bring back this day.’
And so I have, a pale medallion, That stiffens up and nags me when it’s wet. But that’s not what revives a time long gone.
It is the crying and crying that we heard next day,
After the postman came, and brought a letter.
Next door’s boy couldn’t write one for himself.
I left off playing soldiers, knowing better.
Peter Hollindale
He bent his knee, imploring her To make his life complete.
‘Let’s hike along some famous trails. The world is at our feet.’
No ring – he bought her boots instead. ‘We’ll tramp the Pennine Way. You’ll love the moors, the open skies –We’ll cover miles each day.’
They trudged in rain. His knee collapsed –It was a trek too far.
The surgeon’s knife cut short his hopes –They travel now by car.
Veronica Colin
COMPETITION No 310 Autumn brings new years at school, university and some jobs. It used to make me apprehensive. A poem, please, called Autumn Feeling. 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 310’, by Thursday 22nd August.
On the Road
My Indian summer
Felicity Kendal, 77, tells Louise Flind about growing up in India, the joy of The Good Life and her latest show
Is there anything you can’t leave home without?
A sleeping mask. One of the things I like about going away is leaving all the things behind.
Is there something you really miss? I don’t miss anything except the dog.
Do you travel light?
Not as light as I should. My son has everything in his rucksack for three weeks. I envy that.
What are your holiday memories from seven to 13, when you lived in India, where your father was an actor-manager? I didn’t have holidays as a child. There would be two days in the hill stations with some friends in my early teens. We travelled for a living – so staying in one place was a holiday.
Did you act as a child?
I was put to work very early on in my father’s theatre company; I was working by the time I was 12. I’d played page boys aged nine, and as a baby I was a changeling boy.
Did you go to drama school?
I arrived aged 17 to make my way as an actress and hit a brick wall really because people said, ‘Which drama school did you go to?’ I explained I had grown up on the stage; they thought I was barking.
What do you remember about India?
It was an incredible blessing of a childhood. There was no money – so the people involved had to love it. My father always said the horizons are so near in England, and in India you can see for ever. I sat on the knees of some incredible, interesting people. Now and again, I thought I wanted to be ordinary.
What was your first big break?
A friend, Ismail Merchant, got me a very good agent and I got a few little parts. Then I got a two-hander opposite Sir John Gielgud because Sarah Miles turned it down. So it was a fluke. He was
absolutely wonderful to work with; he really took me under his wing. Several times after that, I auditioned for him. He never gave me the part but he sent me Christmas cards most of his life.
Do you prefer TV/film or theatre?
Television to me is more like work. The theatre is more where I live.
What’s been your favourite role?
Annie in The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard, and I recently played Dotty in Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, one of the hardest and most wonderful plays.
How did you get your break on The Good Life in 1975?
Dicky Briers came to see Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests. After the show, he said, ‘I’m doing a little television series.’ Penny Keith was in The Norman Conquests too and the producer John Howard Davies took her for ‘the one next door’.
What were The Good Life’s cast like?
We were all very, very similar in the way we worked. That may be why it was so successful – and we all got on very well.
Where was Rosemary and Thyme filmed? Mostly outside, so it was filmed in the summer in extraordinary gardens and houses in the UK and in Europe.
What’s the most exotic place you’ve filmed in?
You can’t beat a Maharaja’s palace in India [for Shakespeare Wallah (1965)].
And the least exotic?
Probably again in India. I did a documentary in some pretty rough prisons in the south of India.
How do you stay so thin and so young? I do need to move a lot. I go to the gym. I
remember waking up and my mother would be doing yoga and it just became part of what I did. And my dad used to walk everywhere. Also, I’m slightly more positive than some people. I enjoy things.
Where did you go on your honeymoon?
I went to the theatre because I was in The Real Thing. The honeymoon was delayed. My husband said we’re going to get married but there’s a condition: that you get a handicap at golf. I had to take lessons and our honeymoon was in Bermuda on a golf course.
Do you go on holiday?
I’ve been to India twice recently, America, and somewhere in the Caribbean, but it’s inevitably to join up with one of the groups of family we have all over the world.
What’s your favourite food? Italian, definitely.
Do you have a go at the local language? Hindi.
What’s your biggest headache when you’re travelling?
Queuing and security and the fact that it’s not as romantic now. I would love to go to India by sea – not on a moving Las Vegas palace or mobile retirement home, but on an actual ship.
Where’s your favourite place to sleep while you’re away?
I love to sleep on a train, or by the sea.
What are your top travelling tips?
Use the journey as part of the holiday, and everything is actually an adventure.
Felicity Kendal stars in Filumena at Theatre Royal, Windsor, 4th to 19th October, and then on tour
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Passing judgement
QHas anyone else noticed the horrible habit of describing anyone who has died as having ‘passed?’ Why is this now the fashion? Name and address supplied
AThe last time I was in the States I saw, on sale, a book called 100 Ways to Live to 100
As I am myself a recently-turned-80year-old beset with the usual – and unusual – ailments, I can think of nothing more horrifying. But in the States they don’t seem to be able to countenance anything but living for ever.
I’m afraid the word ‘passing’ is an Americanism that has polluted our shores, too. Here in the UK, people pass you in the street; they pass exams; they make passes at you in lifts; they pass muster; or they may pass you over if you apply for a job. In my book, passing has nothing to do with dying.
I slept with husband’s pal
QSixty years ago, I married a wonderful man. But, about ten years in, we went through a really bad patch and I ended up having sex with a friend of a friend of his. Only once. I was so tormented by guilt that I told my husband what I’d done and, though he was upset, he eventually understood, and our marriage became stronger than ever. I love him dearly.
He is now 88 and I am 82. But as he has got older, this event seems to have preyed on his mind. He is constantly interrogating me: did I enjoy it? Who else did I have sex with? Did the ‘affair’ continue? Recently, he has become so agitated, he has been physically violent
Ask Virginia
virginia ironside
towards me. I can’t go to the doctor because I’m so ashamed of my affair. Name and address supplied
AThis is a horrible situation for you, but I’m afraid it’s all to do with your husband’s age. It’s not uncommon for old people to revisit things that have troubled them in the past, as if trying to resolve or make peace with them before it’s too late.
Or perhaps he is indeed suffering from some kind of dementia – but even if you raise your concerns with your doctor, he or she won’t be able to discuss your husband with you. If he can be persuaded to see one himself, the doctor should be able to assess whether any other symptoms might suggest such a diagnosis. Whatever the reason, though, you can’t have him lashing out at you physically. This is unusual and erratic behaviour, out of the ordinary for your husband, and he needs help.
Try not to let your feelings of shame stop you from helping your husband to seek the support he needs.
Row over family silver
QOur mother left our family home to all three of us children when she died, and it’s resulted in us all feuding – when before we were a close and happy family. My husband and I would like to sell it and get a third of the money, so we can buy a larger house ourselves. My sister wants to keep it for sentimental reasons (we had wonderful holidays there). My brother has moved in with his family and lives there at a very small rent, which is divided between us. What can we do? It’s causing such bitterness.
P A, Cornwall
Distribution Ltd, 2 East Poultry Avenue, London EC1A 9PT; www.seymour.co.uk
ISSN 0965-2507.
by Seymour
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AThey do sometimes say, ‘When there’s a will, there’s a war.’
I suggest you find a lawyer who deals with these issues regularly. He or she will be able to outline exactly what your legal options are. You don’t have to tell anyone else about this – but I’m certain it’ll help to clarify your thoughts. Maybe your sister could buy you all out, for instance. That way, you’d get the money and she’d have to sort out the situation with your brother. There are dozens of ways this could be computed that could free up your share of your inheritance. Instead of sitting at home grinding your teeth with resentment, find out the facts and explore the possibilities. I would get out of this toxic arrangement as soon as possible, even if you lose a bit of money. It would give everyone peace of mind.
Stairlifts come up again
I’ve had quite a few responses to the letter about stairlifts (June issue). Most people have pointed out that you don’t have to buy them – you can hire them, which is often better value. The reconditioned and preowned ones are cheaper and just as good. There are other possibilities if you can’t afford one. Social services will come and assess your needs and may decide you are worthy of a free one. You might be able to get a Disabled Facilities Grant. Otherwise, if you can’t afford the service charges for one you’ve already bought, try looking for a firm that will service it for half the price. It took me a morning to discover one, but I got there in the end.
Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.
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