Oldie June 2024

40 Oldie Man of Letters A N Wilson

42 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson

was

18 The Third Man Harry Mount

Harvey Moon keeps shining Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran

22 Lost photos by Patrick O’Higgins Nicky Haslam

Magic book-remover Charlotte Metcalf

26 Roman Holiday from Hell James Pembroke

28 Make classical music live Alexander Amstrong

Regulars

43 Country Mouse Brough Scott

45 Small World Jem Clarke

46 Postcards from the Edge

Mary Kenny

49 School Days Sophia Waugh

50 God Sister Teresa

50 Memorial Service: Lord Morris of Aberavon

James Hughes Onslow

51 The Doctor’s Surgery Dr Theodore Dalrymple

52 Readers’ Letters

54 I Once Met … Archduke

Franz Ferdinand's doctor

John M Pollak

54 Memory Lane

Meredith Christopher

67 Commonplace Corner

67 Rant: The bagging area

Kathryn Cave

68 History David Horspool

93 Crossword

95 Bridge Andrew Robson

95 Competition Tessa Castro

102 Ask Virginia Ironside

56 Horace Jones: Architect of Tower Bridge, by David Lascelles Clive Aslet

Editor Harry Mount

Sub-editor Penny Phillips

Art editor Michael Hardaker

Supplements

editor Charlotte Metcalf

Editorial assistant Amelia Milne

Publisher James Pembroke

Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer

At large Richard Beatty

Our Old Master David Kowitz

57 The Quality of Love: Twin Sisters at the Heart of the Century, by Ariane Bankes

Lucy Lethbridge

59 The Missing Thread: A New History of the Women of the World Through the Women Who Shaped It, by Daisy Dunn Paul Cartledge

61 In Pursuit of Love: The Search for Victor Hugo’s Daughter, by Mark Bostridge Frances Wilson

61 The Giant on the Skyline: On Home, Belonging and Learning to Let Go, by Clover Stroud Philippa Stockley

63 The Lost Paths: A History of How We Walk from Here to There, by Jack Cornish Patrick Barkham

65 Long Island, by Colm Tóibín Jasper Rees

70 Film: Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger Harry Mount

71 Theatre: Much Ado About Nothing William Cook

72 Radio Valerie Grove

72 Television Frances Wilson

73 Music Richard Osborne

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74 Golden Oldies Mark Ellen

75 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu Pursuits

77 Gardening David Wheeler

77 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld

78 Cookery Elisabeth Luard

78 Restaurants James Pembroke

79 Drink Bill Knott

80 Sport Jim White

80 Motoring Alan Judd

82 Digital Life Matthew Webster

82 Money Matters Neil Collins

85 Bird of the Month: Ringed Plover John McEwen Travel

86 My Maldives pin-up Anne Robinson

88 Overlooked Britain: birth of the Picturesque at Rousham, Oxfordshire Lucinda Lambton

90 On the Road: Richard Coles Louise Flind

91 Taking a Walk: along the River Ouse Patrick Barkham

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Front cover: Landmark Media /Alamy

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Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA

Cure for book addicts page 24

Shy John Humphrys page 14

The Old Un’s Notes

Happy 100th birthday to Roy Cross, the artist who painted the iconic covers of Airfix models – so close to the heart of so many oldies now. Roy turned 100 on St George’s Day.

In 1942, when Roy was only 18, he had his first published work with line drawings of aircraft in the Air Training Corps Gazette. In the war, he joined an aircraft factory to draw illustrations for manuals for aircrew and maintenance personnel.

After the war, Roy painted the boxwork art on Airfix kits which sold by the millions. Over 10 years, he did more than 200 Airfix pictures, beginning with a Dornier Do 217 – the ‘flying pencil’ German bomber.

He also drew the middlepage spread in the Eagle comic, with meticulous pictures of the Flying Scotsman, the Queen Mary liner or some fab new car.

But it was for his Airfix art

that he was best known: Spitfires, Wellingtons and Gladiators fighting their

way over the skies of Britain and Europe.

Oldie-reader Roger Sims says, ‘When work took me to London, graphic artists were everywhere in the newspaper world. So were the vandals like those who stripped out the old home of Eagle and piled priceless artwork into skips. A few were to survive.’

Roger was lucky enough to meet a designer from the Eagle, who had climbed into one skip to retrieve ten original Roy Cross cutaways. The designer gave him one of a German biplane, a Fokker D.VII.

Roger says, ‘ “12/30” was

Among this month’s contributors

John Humphrys (p14) presented the Today programme on Radio 4 from 1987 until 2019. He presented the BBC’s Nine O’Clock News, 1981-87. In 1966, he covered the Aberfan disaster.

Nick Newman (p33) is a cartoonist for the Sunday Times. He writes for Private Eye and wrote sketches for Harry Enfield & Chums. His cartoons have appeared in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.

Brough Scott (p43), racing presenter for ITV and Channel 4, was the Sunday Times racing correspondent. He won more than 100 races, including the Imperial Cup and the Mandarin Handicap Chase.

Anne Robinson (p86), aka the Queen of Mean, presented The Weakest Link and Countdown. She’s written for the Mail, the Mirror and the Telegraph. She wrote Memoirs of an Unfit Mother

crayoned on the back of the art board. As the internet opened research doors, so I was able to work out it was Week 30 and 12th year of publication. Calendar calculations made that 29th July 1961.’

Today, Roy’s son, Anthony Cross, manages his father’s website. Although retired from commissions in the early 2000s, Roy continued to draw in retirement.

The centenary of the First World War encouraged him to paint a flight of the Royal Flying Corps BE2a aircraft crossing the Channel in August 1914 in support of the BEF. Only a handful of the aircraft survived more than three months.

As we celebrate the 80th anniversary of D-Day on 6th June, let’s also celebrate the 100th birthday of a great war artist.

Mark Roberts, who worked for the British Institute of Florence for 43 years, has written an enchanting book, Florence Has Won my Heart: Literary Visitors to the Tuscan Capital 1750-1950. Perhaps the rudest literary visitor to Florence was Evelyn Waugh. Roberts, who looked after Sir Harold Acton’s papers at his house, Villa La Pietra, records Acton’s observations of Waugh, his guest. In 1950, Acton and Waugh went to dinner at the Florence house of American writer Sinclair Lewis.

Achtung, Spitfire! The Mark 1, painted for Airfix by Roy Cross

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£15 for published contributions

When Lewis burped loudly, Acton reports that Waugh ‘flinched in his chair on the host’s right with an expression of growing alarm. “What is that frightful noise?” he kept asking me.’

It gets worse. When Lewis asked another guest to tell the party about his war exploits, Waugh said, ‘I don’t want to hear them.’

When the man started to spin his yarns, Waugh ‘pressed his fingers to his ears and sat back with an air of weary resignation. Towards the climax, he turned to me and asked, “Has he finished?”

If you ever want not to be invited back to someone’s

Guest from Hell: Evelyn Waugh’s visit to Florence, recorded by Harold Acton

SIGN UP! SIGN UP! for the FREE Oldie newsletter house for a nightmare dinner party, use the Waugh Method.

Every Friday, we will send you the very latest stories and features – the more timely stuff which doesn’t make it into the magazine. And a joke from the late great Barry Cryer. Plus you get advance notice of our literary lunches, reader trips and courses. Don’t miss out. Go to www.theoldie.co.uk and enter your email address in this box:

Carry On actor Peter Butterworth (1915-79) was imprisoned in Stalag Luft III in 1941, as the

John Soane’s tomb, Old St Pancras Churchyard, painted by Henry Parke, 1816. It inspired Gilbert Scott’s 1924 phonebox. From Bruce Boucher’s John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities

Old Un discussed in the previous issue.

Oldie theatre critic William Cook adds an interesting twist to the tale.

Cook reports that Butterworth was a heroic and indefatigable escaper, tunnelling his way out of a POW camp near Frankfurt with a soup spoon.

After six weeks on the run, Butterworth was recaptured and sent to the notorious Stalag Luft III camp in Silesia.

There he participated in numerous escape attempts, forging documents (he was a skilled draughtsman) and concealing coded messages in his censored letters home.

Back in Blighty after the war, working as an actor, Peter heard that a new film about one of these escape attempts was in production, so he went along to audition.

As one of the actual POWs on whom the film was based, Butterworth was confident his first-hand experience of Stalag Luft III would stand him in good stead. But the casting director of The Wooden Horse (1950) rejected him as ‘not convincingly heroic or athletic’.

When Peter protested, the casting director’s response was even blunter: ‘You’re too fat.’

‘Where’s all my stuff?’

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‘Colin, look! It’s that couple who were here last year... must be their favourite destination’

Sir Ray Davies, the sometime actor, writer, Kinks front man and allround national treasure, celebrates his 80th birthday on 21st June.

Born and raised in north London, Davies showed early promise as a story-teller and mimic. His future career first took shape on his 13th birthday, when the oldest of his six sisters gave him a Spanish guitar.

Tragically, she died of a heart attack that same night while dancing at the Lyceum Ballroom, aged just 31.

‘Please don’t be mad, honey... I didn’t crash the car’

Despite the Kinks’ huge British success, a combination of bad advice, bad luck and bad behaviour meant that the band never really made it in America.

Matters came to a head one night in August 1965, when Davies had a difference of opinion with the producer of a New York television show.

Things grew heated, and the two men ended up rolling around on the studio floor, discussing the matter. As a result, the Kinks were banned from performing in the US for the next four years.

Continuing his run of ill luck across the Atlantic, Davies was strolling with his girlfriend around the French Quarter of New Orleans one night in January 2004, when a mugger jumped out of a car and demanded the woman’s purse. Davies chased after the assailant, who shot him in the leg. Luckily, he made a full recovery.

The Kinks themselves last performed together in 1996, but always seem to be on the verge of reuniting.

Sadly, The Oldie learns from an unimpeachable source that the prospects of a full-scale reunion tour are remote. ‘But there’s a ton of unfinished songs lying

around, so a new album at some stage isn’t out of the question,’ the source adds.

Here’s hoping!

Oldie contributor

Michael Barber was moved by my reference in the previous issue to the ‘hardbitten, hard-drinking hacks of the Daily Express’.

Hanging on the wall of Barber’s study is the original of Willie Rushton’s caricature of Lunchtime O’Booze, the greatest living journalist, who stars in Private Eye. Barber bought the portrait 40 years ago at an exhibition of Private Eye ephemera.

The days of the harddrinking hack are in decline, but we salute Mr O’Booze and his fellow gentlemen of the press who still heroically prop up the bar.

Warm up the set! A new vintage channel, Rewind TV, launched on the Sky Network on 23rd May.

Just like Talking Pictures TV, it’s a refuge for those who, like the Old Un, often find themselves saying, ‘There’s nothing good on TV any more.’

Programmes include oldie favourites such as The Prisoner, The Tony Hancock Show and Whicker’s World. Also featuring is Shine on Harvey Moon, the classic ’80s series. On page 21 of this issue, the show’s writers, Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, reveal how Harvey Moon was born.

Happy viewing!

‘Broken

Happy birthday, Nanette Newman, who turns 90 on 29th May.

The actress first appeared in 1953 in Wheel of Fate with her husband-to-be, actor and director Bryan Forbes. She is renowned for her ‘hands that do dishes’ in the ad for Fairy Liquid. Her daughters are the presenter Emma Forbes and the writer Sarah Standing. In a rare double, Newman’s son-in-law, actor John Standing, also turns 90, on 16th August.

Nanette: hands that do dishes

Nanette has kindly written a poem, Growing Old, for the The Oldie; you can read it in full on our website.

In the poem, Nanette imagines that growing old is like a new acting part. Below is an extract:

You find yourself saying new lines, like –

‘Everything looks a bit blurry’

‘Why do my legs hurt me?’

‘Why do my arms have flabby bits?’

‘Why can’t I run any more?’

‘Why do people speak so quietly?’

‘Why is my iPad such a mystery?’

(Even though my six-year-old grandson has shown me how to work it ‘ten’ times)

And ‘Why do people hide my house keys?’

Also you suppose this new career (growing old) is going to Have a long run, but Showbusiness being what it is – It could come to a sudden end.

Congratulations and many happy returns, Nanette!

chairs, unmade beds, porridge everywhere … and a one-star review. Worst Airbnb customer ever’

Legendary hack: Lunchtime O’Booze, captured at work by the late Willie Rushton

Sorry, Emu – I killed Rod Hull

I told the entertainer to go up on the roof and fix his TV aerial – with fatal consequences

‘I killed Rod Hull – the emu man.’

Well, of course I didn’t, but I have an awful feeling those seven words will be my epitaph. I spoke the words in passing, almost as an aside, but I am fearful they will come to define me.

The other day, on my Rosebud podcast, the great John Cleese, 84, told me how, years ago, a man died of convulsive laughter while watching his film A Fish Called Wanda. Prompted by this anecdote from Cleese (who, incidentally, might have been called Jack Cheese, had his father not decided to change surname), I offered my story of being with the entertainer Rod Hull on the night he died.

In March 1999, Rod and I both happened to be in the audience for the West End opening of Animal Crackers, a musical about the Marx Brothers. Rod had come with his (and my) friends, the Earl and Countess of Bradford. Rod was in a grumpy mood, banging on about how he wasn’t going to be able to watch the football because his TV aerial was playing up. We told him to stop whingeing.

After the show, I said to him, ‘Go home, Rod, get a ladder, get onto the roof and fix it.’

He went straight home and did just that. But it was a dark and stormy night. Trying to wrangle the aerial, he fell off the roof and died. I was not there. Had I been, I am sure I would have urged caution. But I wasn’t, I didn’t and, naturally, I did feel a bit guilty when I read about the accident afterwards.

Rod

Hull and Emu, 1999

As I casually shared this 60-second story with John Cleese, it didn’t occur to me it might be picked up by the national press.

But it was. And how. For 72 hours I received more media coverage than in the 76 years of my preceding life. My publisher got in touch to ask if I’d consider a quickie book for the Christmas gift market: Rod Hull: My Part in His Downfall.

When I go, if I get obituaries, I have no doubt now that Rod Hull and Emu will feature. We cannot choose how we will be remembered. When Sir John Gielgud passed away in May 2000, the headline in the Sun read, ‘Dudley Moore’s Butler Dies’. The greatest Hamlet of his day had won an Oscar for his appearance in the comedy film Arthur. So fair enough. My biography of Gielgud has just been reissued to mark the 120th anniversary of his birth. As well as being an extraordinary actor, he was a funny man. Naughty, too. Judi Dench told me about being in a rehearsal room when everyone was sitting around the table waiting for the morning’s work to begin. Gielgud broke the awkward silence by enquiring cheerfully, ‘Has anyone had any obscene phone calls lately?’

When Julian Glover was a young actor, he appeared in a play with Gielgud. After the opening night in Brighton, the whole company was walking along the promenade from the theatre to a restaurant for a post-show meal.

Because Glover owned a snazzy little sports car at the time, he drove it very slowly on the opposite side of the road at the same speed as his colleagues who were on foot.

Seeing him, Gielgud said, ‘Julian looks as if he’s trying to pick someone up.’ He paused, before adding, ‘If he tried me, I’ve no doubt I would yield gracefully, as usual.’

Treat of the month for me was my second visit to Winfield House in London’s Regent’s Park, the residence of the US ambassador, and the mansion with the largest private garden in the capital, apart from Buckingham Palace.

The occasion was one of the Poetry Hours founded by the writer and producer Josephine Hart, and continued in her memory by her husband, Maurice Saatchi. Elizabeth McGovern, Damian Lewis and assorted thesps read American poetry to us. The Ambassador, Jane D Hartley, welcomed us in fine style.

My first visit to Winfield House was 30 years before, almost to the day.

That occasion was the farewell party of the then Ambassador, Raymond Seitz. Because I keep a diary, I can tell you that my wife, Michèle, thought it was the best party of its kind she had ever been to. Ray Seitz exemplified ‘discreet charm’. He wooed and won the entire British establishment, and they all seemed to be on parade that night.

According to my diary, A N Wilson and I shared High Church memories: smells and bells at St Stephen’s, Gloucester Road. Peter Ackroyd was fruity and funny. He said he’d loved my biography of Dan Leno. My wife said, ‘You could see he was drunk.’

The best moment came when we were lining up to take our leave. We were standing in the queue, just behind David Frost, when up strode Michael Heseltine, then Deputy Prime Minister, and his wife.

Hezza saw the length of the line, stalked grandly past us and went straight to the front.

‘No line-jumping,’ said Ray with a smile – and back the humbled Heseltines came. Perhaps that moment should be his epitaph.

Breaking the Code: Westminster Diaries (Biteback) by Gyles Brandreth is published this month

Join my new religion

My son’s friend never follows the news so is elected chief prophet matthew norman

If the details are paltry at this embryonic stage, the same could once have been said for Jesus, and the Buddha.

The gist is this. I have decided to start a religion.

If you want to get very rich very quick, but lack the criminal talent to cash in on the absence of a functioning police force, founding a religion is the obvious way.

L Ron Hubbard’s creation of Scientology enabled him to keep both himself and his dear old mum, L Mother Hubbard, in resplendent style. As L himself put it, ‘If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be start his own religion.’

That was a long time ago, of course. If we factor in compounded inflation, a billion quid seems a more sensible ambition today.

How to achieve this modest target remained a nebulous pipe dream until a recent dinner at an Iranian restaurant with Louis, my son, and my nephew Carl.

As confirmed at the table, whereas Louis closely follows national and geopolitical events and suffers the anxieties that come with that, Carl pays no heed to news of any kind and is enviably tranquil.

Admittedly, given the tiniest assistance (‘First name rhymes with fishy; surname sounds just like the red spice you’re sprinkling over your food. Yes, Carl, yes, the sumac,’), he did conjure the Prime Minister’s name in a shade under seven minutes. But that, so far as his knowledge of domestic and international politics went, was that.

Far from being a dummy, Carl is a bright guy of 22. I have mentioned before his staggering ability to find the best possible word from the nine letters on the Countdown screen within a fraction of a second. If he took an IQ test, he’d be invited to join Mensa.

Yet knowledge and intellect are wholly unrelated, and his lack of the former is almost absolute.

As a result, he has a pivotal role to play in the Holy Cocoon of Cosseting Ignorance, a religion built on the sacred belief that a little knowledge is less a dangerous thing than a lethal threat to sanity.

To us the faithful, ignorance is not merely bliss and strength, but the only route to salvation.

We are five months shy of a presidential election in which Donald Trump is a warm favourite to recapture the White House. Should the old crook land the odds, you may look forward to the cancellation of American democracy, the hastening of the planet’s incineration via a demented drilling spree, and the withdrawal of the US from NATO, ushering in an era of destructive warfare in and quite possibly beyond Eastern Europe.

In that event, the only safeguard will be complete withdrawal from the world. It will become essential to know nothing about anything happening anywhere at any time, for at least four years or until the mushroom cloud becomes visible. Each of us, in other words, must become Carl.

This is where we come in. For as little as 85 per cent of your liquidated wealth, we will guarantee protection from all news.

About £100 million will be required to buy a few dozen suitably secluded stately homes; to install hi-tech broadband filtering equipment (the Chinese will assist here) to exclude anything other than sport, entertainment and a little light pornography; and to

I favour Fiona Bruce, as a one-time recipient of the Rear of the Year award

hire security staff to patrol the grounds with orders to capture and return anyone trying to find a mobile-phone signal at the perimeters. All donations are welcome.

As for our deity, where so-called rival religions favour omniscience, we at the Holy Cocoon demand what might be termed divine nulliscience. To this end, I have decided to deify the Shadow Foreign Secretary, David Lammy.

You may recall the Celebrity Mastermind appearance during which, among other intriguing answers offered to John Humphrys, Mr Lammy (His name be praised) revealed that Henry VIII was succeeded by his son, Henry VII; the Marie awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering radium was Antoinette; and the blue cheese traditionally served with port is in fact Red Leicester.

As to the demonic figure central to any Manichean faith, there are various candidates. At this point, I favour Fiona Bruce, both as a generic representative of the news-disseminating classes and as a one-time recipient of the Rear of the Year award.

The identity of our chief prophet and earthly leader comes as small surprise.

‘Carl,’ I enquired by way of his final test, ‘can you name the Labour leader?’

He looked blankly across the table.

‘First name rhymes with clear. Surname rhymes with farmer. No? Nothing? Nothing at all?’

Nothing at all.

‘On that basis,’ I congratulated him, ‘you are hereby offered the post of Galactic Patriach of the Holy Cocoon of Cosseting Ignorance.’

‘OK, but what’s in it for me?’ he quite reasonably asked.

‘Nothing that could be called hard work – for a colossal amount of money.’

‘In that case,’ he said, underlining the disconnect between knowledge and intelligence, ‘I’ll take it.’

what was Kensington News?

Kensington Church Street in London was part of the Swinging Sixties – especially the lower end, when Biba the boutique arrived 60 years ago, in 1964.

But, in the less fashionable bit near Notting Hill Gate, there was a business that had changed little during the last century. The Kensington News and West London Times was slowly dying.

It had three reporters – all male, because the editor Barbara Denny thought women were less likely to work long hours. The starting salary was £150 a year. She claimed to have employed Barry Norman and Michael Winner, both local lads, and fired them.

The paper was printed on an elderly press in a mews building round the corner. It struggled to produce eightpage broadsheets. Readers were often festooned with strips of paper like confetti because they had not been cut

properly. The circulation was officially 20,000 – but I discovered it could not have exceeded 4,000.

The managing director motored to Kensington from his Sussex home each day to do nothing noteworthy. His main aim was to keep Barkers, the department store in Kensington High Street, paying for a front-page ad.

Kensington was a favoured spot for entertainers such as Spike Milligan, sometimes seen painting the Elfin Oak in Kensington Gardens. A mother constantly came to the News to tell us about her talented daughter’s latest acting success. The daughter’s name was Francesca Annis.

The News also reported on slum landlord Peter Rachman and his wicked ways. He was so angry that he told Barbara Denny to stop publishing stories about him. But she was made of sterner stuff and was unmoved by his threats to set snarling dogs on her. The national press did not report this story until after Rachman had died.

what is a vertiport?

A vertiport is where our flying cars will come in to roost in the not-too-distantfuture. Yes, that’s right: actual flying cars, as in The Jetsons or Back to the Future II – only cheap, sustainable, environmentally friendly, and available at the push of the button.

You laugh, but the UK’s first vertiport is taking shape as we speak. It’s in Bicester, henceforth known as Futuropolis 1. The company behind it, Skyports (not to be confused with Sky Sports), describes it as a ‘a major step for UK aviation innovation’. So, first Bicester, then, well, Reading, Aldershot, Bracknell, Didcot, Yateley…? The sky is literally the limit.

If this still sounds fanciful, well, as Ira Gershwin had it, ‘They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother/ When they said that man could fly.’ And eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) technology has come on in leaps and bounds.

We already have the Jetson One, a Swedish-designed ‘people’s helicopter’,

powered by four blades. Now we have Pivotal’s Helix, an ultralight singleperson aircraft with eight propellers, which technically makes it an octocopter.

According to its Californian manufacturers, it was created ‘to bring the wonder of flight to anyone with a spirit of adventure [and $190,000]’. There is also the Chinese EHang autonomous aerial vehicle which offers ‘worry-free smooth mobility and real-time connection’. Worry-free? If you say so!

For the moment, these are expensive toys, but the first practical application is predicted to be flying taxis: first manned, then unmanned. By the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, eVTOLs may even be used to carry athletes from vertiport to vertiport. The more people use them, the more prices will drop – and then, who knows? The New Yorker evokes ‘a system of cheap, sustainable aerial transit

There were race riots in Notting Hill, which were horrible to behold. The News consistently reported on the crying need to help newly arrived West Indians and wrote passionate editorials, but it was too small a voice and no one was listening.

When the Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people in 2017, commentators asked if a stronger local press would have drawn attention earlier to the shocking state of the area.

Regretfully, the answer had to be no. Papers like the News were too feeble to have much impact, and Mrs Denny’s pleadings were not taken up nationally in Fleet Street.

When Mrs Denny took a holiday, she left the least callow youth in charge –once it was me and I just survived.

But another reporter was not so lucky. He wrote a libellous story about a landlord and the resultant legal action left the paper ripe for a takeover – which duly occurred. Meanwhile, crowds flocked to Biba down the hill, with almost nobody spotting that the old News had gone.

Adam Trimingham

– ribbons of humming vehicles interlaced overhead’.

I don’t know about you, but there is a schoolboy part of me that finds all this pretty exciting. We’ve had good reason to become cynical about technology in recent years. As the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel put it, ‘We wanted flying cars; instead, we got 140 characters.’ Well, here is something to bring back a little magic and wonder. As Kristina Menton of Pivotal says, ‘Everybody comes down from their first flight and has the same exact face – just the pure joy of flight.’

But, still, there is a slightly more grown-up part of me that suspects none of us will ever get to fly in these things; that flying cars are primarily a means for listless billionaires to hoover up yet more billions from gullible investors; and that all that money would be better spent on rural bus services.

Still … flying cars! Richard Godwin

For over 30 years, John Humphrys terrified prime ministers on the Today programme. But, sometimes, they scared him

Confessions of a shy Rottweiler

Ihave James Callaghan to thank for teaching me everything I needed to know about politicians.

He was Foreign Secretary at the time of our encounter and I was the BBC’s man in America. I was a very young man. I had to interview Callaghan for TV news at the United Nations headquarters in New York, and he made it clear that it was not his idea. He was very irritable as we waited to be made up; I confess to having been a bit scared of him.

So I tried to make light conversation. I mentioned that I’d been born in his Cardiff constituency and my parents still lived there.

Remind me of their names… Ah… George and Winnie … of course, of course … do say hello for me!’

Naturally I didn’t mention that my parents would no more have voted Labour than sold their kids to the rag-and-bone man. It probably wouldn’t have mattered if I had.

The transformation was miraculous.

Here was a man who would become the only politician of the 20th century to hold

any rate) is about votes. It’s quite another to exploit it in the real world.

It was Margaret Thatcher who taught me that. She was my first big 8.10am interview when I joined Today some years later, in 1987. In those days, you didn’t get bigger than Thatcher. Plus it was the last big interview of the election campaign.

Once again, I was scared.

I spent many hours devising a cunning plan that would have her begging for mercy. Not for me the obvious opening question about the parlous state of the economy. Too easy by far. She’d been asked it a hundred times before and could have answered it backwards.

No, I would devise a question so unexpected she would be caught entirely off guard. And the brilliance of my strategy was that the question admitted only one answer. That meant I would be able to plot my rejoinder well in advance. My pistol was loaded, and she would have no choice but to pull the trigger.

The question was this: ‘Mrs Thatcher, you have always described yourself as a devout Christian. What is the essence of Christianity?’ She would, of course, say ‘love’ or ‘charity’. She’d have to. Wouldn’t

The Church invariably describes God as the ‘God of

Clockwise from left: Tony Blair at the Labour Party conference, 2003; James Callaghan, 1969; John Humphrys on Today

love’ and charity as the expression of a good Christian’s humanity.

So then I would pounce.

‘Ah! You talk of charity, but underyour leadership the poorest have been plunged even further into poverty … children must go to school with no shoes on their feet’ etc etc.

She would reel under my assault –perhaps even resign on the spot. I would become the hero of a grateful nation, my reputation as the most fearsome interviewer on the airwaves assured. So, yes, I did allow my imagination to run away with me a little.

Thatcher was on the phone, demanding to talk to me immediately

What I did not do was prepare myself for her answer. It consisted of just one word.

‘Choice!’

A minute’s reflection would have been enough to prepare me for that theologically impeccable reply. But you don’t get a minute to reflect in a live interview. By the time I’d realised what she meant, it was too late. I had been humiliated.

Unlike her successors, Thatcher seldom followed a script. Nor did she let her media team tell her what to do.

When my producer told me through my headphones at 6.15 one morning that the Prime Minister was on the phone, demanding to talk to me immediately, I reacted appropriately to what I thought was a rather lame joke on a dull morning. I offered a silent V sign through the glass dividing the studio from the control room.

A few seconds later, I heard her voice: ‘Good morning, Mr Humphrys…’

She had been listening to Today in the Number Ten kitchen and heard me interviewing senior Soviet official Gennady Gerasimov about events in Moscow. So she phoned the Today office and told the (mercifully sober) producer, ‘Put me through to Mr Humphrys.’

She said what she wanted to say fairly briefly, and I said something like ‘Now I’ve got you on the phone, I suppose we could do a proper full-length interview.’

She said, ‘Why not?’ – and we did.

A few weeks later, I bumped into her all-powerful press secretary Bernard Ingham. All-powerful? I thanked him for setting up the interview. He told me, ‘The

first I knew about it was when I heard it on the way into work. I nearly drove off the f***ing road!’

Alastair Campbell changed all that when he moved into Number Ten with Tony Blair. He was the boss and Blair knew it. One of my many interviews with Blair was in the run-up to the 2001 general election. We were sitting around the kitchen table in his constituency home in Sedgefield.

I challenged Blair pretty robustly about a serious sleaze scandal that broke in his first few months in Number Ten.

He had personally intervened to rescue Formula One from a ban on advertising cigarettes on their racing cars. It would have cost them a fortune. Blair met Bernie Ecclestone, the F1 boss, and a few weeks later the ban was dropped. Oh … and Ecclestone had made a whopping donation to the Labour Party. Pure coincidence, obviously. Anyway, I spent most of the interview suggesting to Blair that it was all rather sleazy. Campbell was not best pleased. At the end of it, he slammed his fist on the table and uttered just the one word: ‘W**ker!’

My producer told me later he was never quite sure to whom Campbell had been referring.

Either way, I took it as a compliment. It was to be a very long time before we knew what Campbell really thought of the Formula One ‘nightmare’.

That was his own description of it when he published his diaries ten years later. It was a nightmare that ‘was entirely of our own making and we had badly handled virtually every move to get out of it’.

In the intervening years, I was to conduct many more interviews with Blair. Some memorable, some farcical.

The most memorable was the morning after the devastating Chilcot report into the

Margaret Thatcher during an event on her UK general election campaign, June 1987

disastrous Iraq invasion. It was the longest live interview ever broadcast on Today and, I thought, revealed a lot about Blair’s personal anguish. By then, Campbell had left the scene.

The most farcical? Hard to choose, but possibly a party conference in Brighton, when we used Blair’s hotel suite rather than the studio.

Blair sat on the couch with Campbell next to him, with a great pile of the morning’s papers on his lap.

I asked my first question. Blair began answering. Campbell opened a newspaper, rustled the pages very noisily and threw it on the floor. I asked my next question. Campbell picked up another paper and did the same. And so it continued to the end.

I thanked Blair and, when the microphones were switched off, he turned to Campbell.

‘Why the hell were you doing that?

Campbell: ‘I was trying to put the bugger off.’

Blair: ‘Well, you put me off instead.’ Damned with faint praise. Again.

I was a Penthouse Pet

In 1971, Sarah Brydon was a cocktail waitress in the Penthouse Club

in Mayfair – and she loved it

Iwas once a Penthouse Pet – and had the time of my life.

At 26 years old, with long, dark, curly hair and shapely legs, I wanted to do something exciting and different. My gorgeous, blond, blue-eyed boyfriend was a croupier at Charlie Chester’s club in Soho. We had just returned from a stint of hard work in Scotland running a hotel, and wanted to do something frivolous.

It was 1971, the year of Vietnam War protests, Khrushchev’s death, decimalisation and – says David Hepworth, author of 1971 – Never a Dull Moment: Rock’s Golden Year – ‘the most febrile and creative time in the entire history of popular music’.

And it was the year, for me, of the discovery of how my small waist could be squeezed into a French maid’s costume, and of how much I liked being treated like a goddess by my customers.

I was a cocktail waitress in the Penthouse Club, smack in the middle of Mayfair. It was a glamorous time and place – and the competition was the Playboy Club.

The message was ‘Look but don’t touch’, and any lewd behaviour by the customer was absolutely forbidden. The policy was very strict and upheld vigorously.

Of course, what you got up to outside working hours was up to you, as long as discretion was used, and various kinds of adventures were always possible.

I remember my interview (there must be a better word for it). I was asked to attend the club with a bikini to change into, and to wear full make-up. On arrival, we wore our bikinis. There were twenty of us hopefuls dabbing our make-up and smiling nervously (no pouting in those days).

Then, one by one, we had to walk up and down a catwalk in front of two men, one of whom was Penthouse founder Bob Guccione (1930-2010), medallion and all.

On the way out, we were told whether we were successful, and arrangements were made for fittings of the trademark costumes: satin and lace. If you had small breasts, the bodices soon changed that. I discovered later that girls who were thought suitable for the Penthouse magazine were picked out privately – and followed a very different route.

The money was great, as were the tips. For a night owl like me, the hours were perfect, with a cab paid to take me home at the end of my shift. The training was thorough and we weren’t allowed on the floor until we were Pet-perfect. That meant taking orders accurately, walking perfectly with a full tray of drinks and serving them correctly with a side curtsy or a dip.

Right: Sarah, 1971. Below: Barry Sheen, 750cc European champion, and Penthouse Pets, 1975

And, of course, you had to smile.

The costumes were small (for those times, anyway), tight and impossible to sit down in. The corsets were so constricting that we were given regular ‘leaning’ breaks, when we could stand up and catch our breath. The girls were from a broad mix of backgrounds, with many seeking rich and/or famous husbands. Some, like me, just wanted to do something different for a while and earn a nice lot of money.

The club attracted clientele from the arts and showbusiness – and also businessmen, who considered it just the right place to distract their clients while they signed on the dotted line, as their eyeballs popped out of their sockets.

There was a restaurant and casino, as well as the cocktail bar which attracted regulars as well as visitors. As for celebrities, they were absolutely everywhere – from Oliver Reed to Sean Connery to Richard Harris. The list was inexhaustible.

It was also a popular venue for a late snack and a cocktail after a show with wives and girlfriends – which made for a good balance with the testosteronefilled air.

Looking back now, I find it quite fascinating that I enjoyed the experience so much. I was a supporter of women’s liberation and a big fan of the then-new feminist writer Germaine Greer and her wonderful book The Female Eunuch. At the same time, I was presenting myself as a sexual, provocative, titillating ‘doll’.

I was able to separate my human self from my caricature quite easily. So I enjoyed both worlds for the time I spent there. I suspect I enjoyed those six months all the more for not spending any longer than that.

Seventy-five years after The Third Man came out, Harry Mount retraces the footsteps of Orson Welles through – and under – Vienna

Viennese whirl

Of all the oddities that make The Third Man so compelling, the oddest is that its sublime Vienna setting was an accident. If things had gone differently, the film – released 75 years ago, on 31st August 1949 –would have been set in London.

The original idea came from the screenwriter, Graham Greene, as he cooked up the movie with the director, Carol Reed, and the producer, Alexander Korda.

Greene showed them a few lines he’d jotted on the back of an envelope:

‘I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.’

It was Korda who said the Strand – and London – wouldn’t work; and that the film must be set in postwar Vienna, then in the ‘four men in a jeep’ period, when the city was run by the Americans, British, French and Russians.

Greene went on a recce to Vienna to research his novella, The Third Man, the basis of the film. And he immediately cottoned on to what Korda was on about.

The divisions between the four powers allowed for different nationalities to collide with one another. They allowed for subterfuge, too, with Orson Welles’s Harry Lime slipping, unnoticed, through the occupied zones’ borders via the sewers – and making a fortune from the penicillin black market.

Shattered Vienna also made for a deliciously dramatic film set. Greene was particularly moved by the war-torn city’s rubble. He was worried that it might be cleared away before filming started in 1948.

Greene raced to finish the novella and then the screenplay, saying, ‘The film in

fact is better than the story because it is in this case the finished stage of the story.’

Greene also benefited from deferring to Carol Reed and co-producer David O Selznick. Greene had wanted a happy ending, with Holly Martins kissing Anna Schmidt. Reed and Selznick preferred the tantalisingly sad ending where Schmidt walks down the cemetery avenue for nearly two minutes before passing Martins –and ignoring him.

Greene said, ‘One of the very few major disputes between Carol

Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) and Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli)

Reed and myself concerned the ending, and he has been proved triumphantly right.’

The inspired Anglo-American collaboration behind The Third Man may explain why Austrians don’t really like the film much. It was aimed more at the international market than at the Viennese.

Certainly when I went to watch The Third Man at the Burg Kino cinema in Vienna – where it’s on twice a week – the 15 people in the audience all looked like tourists.

I’ve seen it a dozen times, yet it never dates. For a film that is so literally dated – rooted in the very particular, short-lived spell of Allied-occupied Austria from 1945 to 1955 – it is strangely timeless; modern, even.

The opening lines – spoken by Carol Reed – are knowing, snappy and conspiratorial: ‘I never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm.

Constantinople suited me better.’

Greene himself referred to the film as a ‘comedy thriller’. Comedy can date very quickly, but not the understated, subtle humour of The Third Man. Greene brilliantly plays with thriller clichés by making his main character, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a writer of schlocky Westerns.

Film poster, 1949

It means Greene can mock his own sensationalist lines:

Major Calloway (Trevor Howard): Death’s at the bottom of everything, Martins. Leave death to the professionals.

Holly: Mind if I use that line in my next Western?

Holly (on Harry Lime): Best friend I ever had.

Major Calloway: That sounds like a cheap novelette.

Holly: Well, I write cheap novelettes.

And, in the only example of a book mentioned in a film of the same name that’s also the name of the novella, Martins is asked at a literary talk whether he’s engaged on a new book. He says, ‘Yes. It’s called The Third Man.’ Then, to top off the ingredients for the perfect film, add Orson Welles. Welles is in the movie for only five minutes. And he worked on it for only a week – although he proved difficult even in that short time, refusing to film the sewer scenes in Vienna’s underground canal on hygiene grounds. Instead, his sewer scenes had to be mocked up for him on a Shepperton film set.

Do go on the Third Man tour of the sewers and the River Wien tunnel. You enter the sewers by the same steps Harry Lime takes. Or take a walk through the Stadtpark where you see the River Wien disappear into Lime’s subterranean world. You don’t need much imagination to sense Harry Lime racing out of the darkness towards you.

It’s easy, too, to remember Welles’s

voice as Harry Lime: chatty, chummy and, again, modern. I took a ride on the 1897 Prater Wheel, where Welles delivered his lovely, improvised speech:

‘In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’

Well, in fact, that scene was filmed in a studio – which is recreated in the terrific Third Man Museum, a short walk from central Vienna.

Here, since 2005, charming obsessive Gerhard Strassgschwandtner has built up the greatest collection of Third Man memorabilia in the world. There are 3,000 items, including Trevor Howard’s shooting script, 83 posters and an actual tombstone transported from the cemetery where Harry Lime is buried – twice.

Even if you aren’t an obsessive like Gerhard and me, the museum is gripping. He’s managed to track down a 1940s 35mm projector. As you watch a clip from the film, you hear the pleasing whirrs and clicks of the old projector.

And here you’ll find the holy of holies, Anton Karas’s zither. His Third Man Theme became a huge hit in Britain

His sewer scenes had to be mocked up for Welles on a Shepperton film set

and America, where in 1950 it was number one for 11 weeks.

The theme was another sign of Carol Reed’s inquisitive genius. On location, Reed heard Karas play in a Vienna wine cellar when he was drinking with Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli and Orson Welles. Reed signed him up to do the film’s music, centred around the theme, which Karas had been strumming for 15 years.

Karas, who later opened his own Third Man Restaurant in Vienna, had never thought much of it, saying, ‘This tune takes a lot out of your fingers. I prefer playing Wien, Wien, the sort of thing one can play all night while eating sausages at the same time.’

Retracing Harry Lime’s footsteps through Vienna, I realised quite how original Carol Reed was. The action takes place in unlikely parts of the city: not just the sewers and the sewer entrance on Am Hof square; but also the quiet doorway on Mölker Steig, where you first see Harry Lime’s shiny brogues.

Even the Palais Pallavicini on Josefsplatz square, where Harry Lime is ‘killed’, is an unlikely spot. Yes, it’s grand enough with its splendid caryatids, and it’s right in the centre of the city. But it’s

not on the tourist trail, even though it’s only yards from the Spanish Riding School and the Hofburg.

Reed’s film was so original – and popular – that it became an idiom in its own right. In 1955, Kim Philby gave a press conference where he denied he was ‘the third man’ who’d tipped off the Cambridge spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, prompting their 1951 flit to Moscow.

In another sublime Third Man moment, Graham Greene is said to have based the dastardly Harry Lime on Philby, who had been Greene’s superior in MI6. Has any film ever mixed fact, fiction and premonition to such a sweet degree as The Third Man?

Happy 75th birthday, old man, as Harry Lime might have put it.

Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) and Harry Lime (Orson Welles) on the Prater Wheel

On the run: Lime enters the sewer

Keep on shining

One summer’s day in 1979, I was wandering along Camden Passage, a maze of little antique shops in Islington. There was a stall selling old magazines – and the cover of a Picture Post from 1945 caught my eye.

As Shine on Harvey Moon returns to our screens, Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, the show’s writers, recall how it all began Harvey (Ken Cranham) and Stanley Moon (Lee Whitlock), Shine on Harvey Moon, 1982. It ran from 1982 to 1985

‘How much?’ I asked.

The dealer said that the magazine was one of a bundle, and he wasn’t prepared to split it. I’d have to buy the lot for ‘What shall we say? 35p?’

Even 45 years ago, that wasn’t a great deal of money.

The black-and-white photograph that so enthralled me showed a British soldier coming home from the war.

His wife, daughter and little boy wait outside their flag-draped prefab, arms outstretched, joy on their faces.

I loved that photograph. It made me smile and it made me wonder.

What happened after the man of the prefab returned to Blighty? Did he manage to put his terrifying experiences behind him? Were the family happy? Did they prosper?

Then my comedy writer’s instinct kicked in. While most returning soldiers were hailed as heroes, I couldn’t help wondering, ‘What if this housewife was hoping her old man had been tortured at the hands of the Japanese?’

The thought compelled me to add a line of my own at the bottom of that iconic photo. I’ve still got that old Picture Post. My caption reads, ‘Oh sh*t, he survived!’

My caption didn’t come out of nowhere. The woman in the photograph had put me immediately in mind of my Auntie Miri, a spirited woman from an impoverished background who found the war intoxicatingly liberating.

She could leave her restrictive family home, work in a Piccadilly bar serving Allied soldiers, go dancing, have fun, and sleep in the Underground – if she didn’t get a better offer from an American, Canadian or Free Polish airman.

Not that I was imagining that Auntie Miri harboured murderous thoughts –she was far too kind-hearted – but all the ITV

family knew that the day Miri’s husband returned from the war was the day her life turned from Technicolor back into black and white.

Shine on Harvey Moon was our tribute to Auntie Miri. Laurence Marks

The name Shine on Harvey Moon was inspired by Shine On, Harvest Moon, one of those sentimental ballads that were always being played on the BBC Light Programme when we were growing up.

We were both born a good few years after the war ended – so we can just about remember rationing, which for some items continued into the fifties.

Indeed, the aftermath of the war lasted well into our childhood. There were bombsites to turn into unofficial adventure playgrounds, and ‘pig bins’ on the street, where household food waste – not that there was much – could be left to help feed the nation’s livestock.

We remember horse troughs, too, where the milkman’s horse stopped to quench its thirst. In many ways, the world in which we grew up still shivered in the grey shadow of the war.

The man who commissioned the script was Tony Charles, who worked for a new company, WitzEnd Productions. WitzEnd was founded by our heroes Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, creators of The Likely Lads and Porridge. It was a privilege and an education to work with Dick and Ian on the pilot script. They taught us how always to end a scene on a laugh or a tear, how to make one scene glide into another, and how to ensure the audience always want to know what is going to happen next – especially important at ‘End of Part One’ if the show was going to be on commercial TV, with a break halfway through for ads.

The pilot, now episode one of a new comedy series, was transmitted on a

winter’s night in January 1982. In comedy, timing is everything. Shine on Harvey Moon reached Britain’s TV during a blizzard that locked in the nation. People’s options were BBC1, BBC2 or ITV, and almost 18 million of them tuned into our show.

Maybe television audiences were wearying of feeling depressed and were thirsting for light-hearted patriotic reassurance. Perhaps they were cheered by the knowledge that a previous generation had been far worse off. Whatever the reason, they stayed loyal to Harvey and the Moons for four seasons. Shine on Harvey Moon supercharged our careers in many ways. Because the classically trained cast were uncomfortable at the thought of performing in front of a live audience, the show was recorded without a ‘laughter track’ and was acclaimed as much as a comedy drama as it was as a sitcom.

Our fascination with the Second World War and the fun we had writing about ordinary working-class Londoners led us to write Birds of a Feather and Goodnight Sweetheart, and even the political content of Harvey Moon was a precursor of The New Statesman

Would we have written any of those series if Laurence hadn’t spotted that Picture Post magazine at the bottom of a blue plastic tray in an Islington junk shop?

Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran

Marks and Gran wrote The New Statesman, Birds of a Feather and Goodnight Sweetheart

Shine on Harvey Moon is on Rewind TV, the new vintage TV channel

Thanks for the memories

Nicky Haslam salutes Patrick O’Higgins (1922-80), the lost photographer who captured the golden age of style

Patrick O’Higgins’s birth in Paris has an almost Whartonesque quality: he was Irish on his philandering father’s side, rich French and patrician American on his mother’s ... and born in a mansion off the Avenue Kléber.

While the wave of new art, music, literature and fashion had just broken over an essentially 18th-centuryembalmed France, it was still the Seizième, elderly relations, the Bois, Rumpelmayer’s, summers in Proustian resorts that were the core of Patrick’s childhood.

However, he would soon embrace and inhale, as anyone blessed with an iota of sensibility does, that unique aura, the mix of awareness, chic, scepticism and

Main: Steve McQueen and Robert Vaughn film Bullitt, 1968. Above: Jean Cocteau. Right: Cecil Beaton, 1955

sensuality that hovers in the Parisian air, an intrinsic ‘Frenchness’ which the French themselves call chien

I had heard of him while still at school. Had read about – been told of – the swathe Patrick had cut through the postwar world, ‘insolent’ – as had been said of the earlier dandy Count d’Orsay – in his faultlessly tailored Guards uniform.

His infinite glamour was still on the lips of every aesthete of the time – Cecil Beaton, Michael Duff, Dickie Buckle, Angus Wilson, Fulco Verdura, Jean Cocteau – and his image the lodestar for

many an aspiring one: David Hicks, say, or John Richardson, Francis Bacon, Kenneth Tynan.

There was sadness – and envy – when Patrick left them for the rosier beds of New York. And, before long, there was straightforward jealousy at his editing, for Fleur Cowles, the publishing whirlwind, her iconoclastic magazine Flair

Apart from his being desired by all levels of Manhattan society, there was his

magnum of talents: painting, writing, travelling, decorating, his eye, his looks, his humour, his taste in clothes and food, in rooms and friends. It was the focus of the cultivated of two continents.

The first time I met him, his longlimbed frame was folded into the corner banquette of a dimly-lit, smoke-wreathed restaurant way over on the West Side, his freckled smile half-hidden behind a double Scotch.

There were to be more – both restaurants and Scotches – but during the flow of comment and gossip and reference on that initial evening, I realised what chien was all about.

By then, Patrick had for some years worked for that ‘Byzantine’, as his by now intimate friend Cocteau ironically labelled the Polish empress of cosmetology, Helena Rubinstein, while her staff referred to him as ‘Monsieur Patrick’.

I say ‘worked’ but it’s hardly the mot juste for their relationship. He walked her, talked to her, advised her, arranged her contracts, travelled the world with

Below: Tennessee Williams. Below left: O’Higgins and Brenda Kelly, the Embassy Club, New York, 1960

her, made amends for her brashness. His was the shoulder she cried her lizard tears on, as husbands left and sons died.

In spite of all, he became deeply fond of her, and cushioned her more bizarre whims. When a critic carped at her hanging surrealist masterworks in the trees for a party, Patrick merely murmured, ‘Well, they are her trees.’

On her death, he published the most touching, amused and amusing memoir of his years with ‘Madame’.

As Jane Tippett writes in Monsieur, the new book about O’Higgins, Patrick left few personal papers; but in the book she combines his own proposed biographical notes with engaging material from other sources.

And while, for some enigmatic reason, Patrick decided to destroy much of his photographic archive, all was not lost.

Thanks to his niece Marianne Hinton’s conservation of his letters and albums, we find in Monsieur a fascinating portrait of Patrick O’Higgins, the man, his legacy, his life. And his chien

Monsieur: Patrick O’Higgins – The Lost Photographer (Zuleika) is out now, with a preface by Nicky Haslam

ACalm downsizing

When Charlotte Metcalf moved house, nobody wanted her old books – until she found a magical

re you downsizing?’ asked the estate agent sympathetically, as I squeezed past her to view a potential flat.

As a fellow oldie, she had guessed right. Like thousands before me, I was having to face up to the fact that the time had come (accelerated by the termination of an eye-watering interest-only mortgage) to surrender my family home of 25 years.

I’ve moved several times, but never before have I been forced into a small space that’s precluded most of my books, paintings and treasured possessions.

As a journalist and writer, I found losing my books especially upsetting. I had amassed a hefty collection, augmented by my inheriting many of my father’s first editions from the fifties, when he was a literary reviewer. Racy, lurid dust jackets of novels such as John Braine’s Room at the Top or John Masters’s Nightrunners of Bengal had long held pride of place on my sitting-room shelves. Meanwhile, my study boasted two entire walls of floor-toceiling bookshelves. I’ve always adhered to Anthony Powell’s maxim ‘Books do furnish a room’ and feel a reassuring rapport with anyone whose home I discover to be full of books.

Books are so important to me that I note in them when and where I read them. When it came to deciding which ones to keep, I rediscovered that, in the late eighties, I read Lawrence Durrell’s Clea when living in Peshawar and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South while filming in Cairo. I remembered how comforted I was to immerse myself in A S Byatt’s Possession one lonely, rain-sodden weekend in rural Ethiopia.

I turned to Molly Keane’s Bad Behaviour to stop feeling scared when stranded in a remote, isolated village in

One charity shop asked me to stop bringing books and clogging up their storeroom

the mountains of northern Uganda. Little about my recent move pained me as much as shedding my books, but I had no choice.

I began telephoning second-hand-book dealers, from Hatchards to specialists around Piccadilly.

I was confident they’d be interested in my father’s books – but they all demand pristine dust jackets and most of mine were worn, faded or tattered. My local Red Cross charity shop asked me to stop bringing them sacks of books because they were clogging up their storeroom.

The British Heart Foundation sometimes come and collect boxes, but they texted to tell me their storage facilities were overwhelmed, leaving me with a teetering pile of eight boxes to get rid of. Then I discovered the Ziffit app. Download it for free (it takes about 20 seconds) and it’s ready to use. Moreover, it’s a joy.

‘Urgey’ is a word I made up at school to describe things that give you such pleasure that they urge you to keep using them, and it applies perfectly to Ziffit.

Tap on the app and a scanner appears on your screen. Point the scanner at any book’s barcode (regrettably, my father’s books were all too old for barcodes) and, within a second, Ziffit will identify the book and tell you exactly how much it will pay for it. Or else Ziffit will inform you it’s not accepting that book at the moment, leaving you to discard it with a freer conscience.

A book’s condition does not seem to worry Ziffit. So I happily scanned away, even paperbacks with creased, bent spines. Art, design, photography or coffee-table books are likely to be the most valuable. An enormous, weighty book of David Yarrow’s photographs

fetched me £10.91. Ziffit also values books on film or gardening – it gave me £5.70 for Richard Schickel’s retrospective of Spielberg’s career and £5.96 for Jane Pruden’s book on Capability Brown and Belvoir Castle. Cookbooks average around 50p, though Ziffit pays more for popular chefs such as Ottolenghi. Paperback novels, of which I had thousands, tend to fetch between 20p and 50p.

Once I’d filled three or four boxes with about 100 books, I pressed ‘Complete Sale’ and received an order number and a date for the pick-up.

I did this seven times or so, and earned around £60 a box (ranging from just over £30 to well over £80). Ziffit even takes CDs and DVDs, though Ziffit eschewed most of mine, which tended to be box sets of Mad Men, The Sopranos or The Killing Oldies like me who loathe the idea that books are worthless – and would shudder at the mere thought of burning a book – will find Ziffit alleviates the wrench of parting from them on multiple levels. Knowing that a book will be read by someone else rather than end up in landfill makes it easier to let go. The free pick-up service makes it hassle-free, too, and there’s the added bonus of earning a few quid.

Many oldies inevitably face downsizing. At least Ziffit can soften the brutal moment when harrowing choices have to be made. Still, just when I was finding it unbearable to part with my beloved school copy of T S Eliot’s Collected Poems (complete with battered, sellotaped dust jacket and my earnest pencilled notes in the margins), I remembered I couldn’t scan it. It was too old for a barcode. I had the perfect excuse to hang on to it.

Charlotte Metcalf is The Oldie’s supplements editor

Roman Holiday from Hell

James Pembroke thought he’d found the dream villa – until the bedbugs attacked and the landlady locked the gates on him

After 30 years of office life, I was deluded enough to believe I was owed a sabbatical – in fact, four if I was to be fallow like a field in the seven-year cycle laid down in the Torah.

After the publishing grind of four bibulous lunches and two book launches a week, a sabbatical appeared as a semi-spiritual nirvana in which I would glide through art galleries after a long lunch – only this time, in the sun. All cares and worries would be left securely behind in dreary Blighty with all you benighted workers.

My wife, Josephine, and I had often talked about driving from the top to the bottom of Italy in an open-top car. We decided against this during a rare burst of pre-sabbatical logic, during which we remembered we didn’t own a convertible and weren’t practical enough to open the

roof, even if we had. So we decided to be stationary for six weeks in Rome. I would have Italian lessons in the morning, and we would then meet for that long lunch and visit a church, museum or gallery.

I scanned Airbnb and found lots of poky flats in unsmart areas until I struck gold: the entire piano nobile of the Villa Hapsburg, next to the Porta Metronia, whose garden wall was built by the Emperor Aurelius in 275 AD.

This was exactly the place I deserved after all that toil, and, in Sabbatical World, everything is possible and cheap – just €3,400 for six weeks, including cleaning. So we flew out to Rome in early December to case the joint.

Blindness set in as soon as the gates to the four-acre garden were opened by the

housekeeper, Signor Valori. All Josephine’s pithy observations – that the apartment was unusually cold, the cooker antediluvian and the three beds (and their mattresses) from the thirties – were denied and crushed.

It was an oasis of calm, with views of the baths of Caracalla and the statuegarlanded roof of the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano. We could park a car there and explore Tivoli and the other surrounding towns. It would be our sanctuary. How clever we were.

Above: Villa Hapsburg

Left: garden wall – built by the Emperor Aurelius in 275 AD

The owner, Odile Taliani, who was based in Vienna with the other Hapsburgs, was thrilled that I had worked with Alexander Chancellor, the sainted late Oldie editor, whom she had known in the 1960s when he was a correspondent in Rome. And we even pleased Signora Valori, who Odile said ‘can’t believe her luck’. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

We were greeted on arrival on 4th March, with wine and liquori. The apartment was freezing, but Josephine spoke with the loquacious Odile, who said the pipes ‘were probably cold when you arrived’ but more wine and liquori and two more pillows were on their way.

I couldn’t help thinking as I strode off past the Colosseum to my Italian lesson that we weren’t alone in the bed. And, sure enough, at our first lunch in the Campo dei Fiori, Josephine ostentatiously revealed her arms were covered in bites. She was

Below: failed escape route

Odile’s whole manner then flipped. The first of many mad emails arrived: ‘So we have proved conclusively the insects were another type, probably brought in by you. James will simply have to accept that his wife is a slovenly slut.’

I really was speechless, but, instead of being floored by the comparison with a slattern of easy virtue, Josephine decided to adopt the epithet as a nickname. Odile was helpful enough to give us the OED definition: ‘a woman of dirty, slovenly, or untidy habits or appearance’.

I blocked Odile on our mobiles. This proved to be a mistake because we were then subjected to an avalanche of emails. She even contacted The Oldie office and tracked down poor Uncle Andrew. She then turned off the heating and told her son Niki to turn up the music. Oh, and she threatened to have us beaten up –and claimed to have delivered on this threat before to an elderly English schoolmaster. So on 14th March we blocked her emails, and peace reigned for ten days.

understandably indignant. So, after calling Uncle Andrew, a leading dermatologist, I thought I ought to phone Odile, who we discovered was permanently bed-bound but armed with an overworked laptop.

She was a tad frosty and emailed me later: ‘I have just spoken to Mrs Silvestrini [another housekeeper] – the bedbug chap will be round at the end of the morning 12/12.30h. So far, he has said he does not know how your “expert” could diagnose them from that very inadequate photograph.’

Josephine and I were there when the young man arrived. He had clearly been to the apartment before but could find no bedbugs – just some enormous dust mites.

On Sunday 24th, Josephine’s recently widowed stepmother, Elspeth, and her vicar brother, Stewart, were due to arrive to celebrate her 70th birthday. At 10am, we left the house and walked down to the gate, en route to the Colosseum. Horror struck. We had both forgotten the keys – both to get back into the house and to exit through the gate. We realised that we were trapped and that our only rescuer was Odile, our tormentor. There was no option but to ring her. She laughed loud and strong. She became the full Disney villainess; Cruella de Vil is a pussy in comparison. She was very clear that if we both wrote to her to apologise, she would call the gardener.

We had no choice.

At 10.23, we tapped into our phones, ‘Dear Odile, I would like to say I am sorry for any distress

Josephine’s bites were deemed to be from bugs we had brought in

Horror struck. We had both forgotten the keys to get back into the house

we have caused you over the last three weeks. We would like to apologise (1) for saying in exaggeration it was colder out than in during our first 48 hours, (2) for allegedly being rude to Mrs Silvestrini when showing her the sheets, (3) for suggesting Josephine’s bites might be bedbugs after contacting my uncle.’

Over the next hour I called her five times, but she didn’t answer. I emailed her again at 12 noon, by which time the sun was at its peak. And we had no water. It was all beginning to get a little scary. Elspeth and Stewart were arriving at 2.30pm.

In the garden I found a ladder, which I mounted on the roof of my car to within two feet of a balcony – but, of course, I fell off. Then, at 12.45pm, Josephine saw a police car and waved and screamed at them through the gates. They decided to call the fire brigade.

At 1.34pm, a huge red engine turned up. The firemen thought it was terribly funny that we had been locked out by our landlady; the police less so, because in Italy holding someone against their will is tantamount to kidnap. Within eight minutes, they had jemmied open the gate, driven up to the house and forced open the front door. We were in and serving lunch to our guests 20 minutes later. We couldn’t speak.

The next two weeks passed under a cloud of menace. Just how would she strike next? On 12th April, we drove off to Florence. Before we left, Odile sent us a message that there were keys hidden near the gate all along.

And I realised that her name was a perfect anagram of ITALIAN OLDIE.

Right: Rome’s firemen save us

Alexander Armstrong has dreamt up a plan to revive the joys of classical music in Britain

How to save the land without music

For centuries, Britain was known on the continent as das land ohne musik, the land without music, and – ouch – it was apt.

After our brief purple patch of Tudor brilliance, we tumbled down the European rankings, not re-emerging until the Stanford and Parry era following the founding of the Royal College of Music in the 1880s.

Now, once again, we find ourselves in a grim period of music die-back in the UK. It’s a baffling drought of our own making – particularly dispiriting because you didn’t need to be Joseph to know what the procession of endless lean cows hobbling this way might mean.

I’ve noticed for years, now, how parish churches have been quietly switching over to prerecorded organ music as their supply of actual organists who could turn up and bash out a few hymns has dried up. It’s a pretty small canary in the mine, I grant you, but it was a sign that something was up, and sobering when you think that two generations ago it would have been a rare roomful – let alone village – that couldn’t produce a pianist to play some tunes if the call went up.

What’s happened to music? Why has it retreated to the margins like this?

I’m being slightly disingenuous. Music hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s classical music that is withering. And it’s only in the past year, as some of our best-loved ensembles have felt the wind of the axe swinging uncomfortably close, that everyone is starting to notice.

But how on earth has this happened? Has the music that made Londoners line the streets for Joseph Haydn in the 1790s lost its power to thrill? Has the emotional wringer that squeezed tears out of grown men when they heard Pavarotti singing ‘Vincerò…’ lost its purchase?

Of course it hasn’t; music’s magic still bubbles away as magnificently as ever it did. It’s something else: a malfunction in music’s ecosystem. The disappearing organists and the disappearing funding are both symptoms of the same chronic problem: a disappearing audience.

I found classical music for myself. Being an early riser, I always got bored waiting for everyone else in our household to wake up.

So, at the age of five, I tiptoed downstairs and taught myself how to work my

Alexander Armstrong: man behind the Curved Music campaign

parents’ forbidden record-player and, wanting company in those early hours, I found it in the symphony orchestras of their record collection.

By the age of eight, I had conducted my way through all of Beethoven’s symphonies, all of Mahler’s, Mozart’s 39th, 40th and 41st (we didn’t seem to have any of his others) and most of Verdi’s overtures.

Ever since then, I have loved nothing more than surrounding myself with loud classical music. It moves and excites me like nothing else. So I am a zealot for classical music’s power, and because I stole it for myself and my own imaginary orchestra, there were no unhelpful barriers forbidding me from taking it with both hands and wallowing in it.

One of classical music’s most ridiculous problems is elitism. That’s the word that comes up within seconds whenever it is under discussion, and it’s such a powerful and accepted closerdown of conversations, no one has to explain what they mean by it.

This is spectacularly self-defeating. Creating elites is not just helpful; it’s absolutely vital for aspiration. I don’t mean elites that are self-perpetuating and closed to outsiders, but elites where entry is open to all and prestige is earned by the highest standards of excellence. Excellence is the engine that drives the whole shebang. It’s what inspires young people to work harder so they themselves can perform at the highest level. And, crucially, it is what grasps audiences by the lapels and sends them out to tell their friends.

In sport, this wouldn’t warrant a second thought: our top-level teams and athletes combine natural talent with almost unthinkable levels of self-sacrifice through childhood and beyond. In music, it is exactly the same.

And yet it’s only with music that people tut and mutter about elitism because … well, why? Because it’s apparently more cerebral? Because

Julian Lloyd-Webber: too successful?

people wear posh clothes to perform it? Or perhaps because everyone imagines it is served up only for the enjoyment of a narrow little clique of the soft-handed middle classes?

I suspect it’s all of the above, but it’s that last one that pinches the nerve. And that is classical music’s other big problem: its following is riven with snobbery (something totally absent from the musicians themselves, it’s worth pointing out; they just want to play the music and have an appreciative audience).

But lovers of classical music have played a perpetual game of snippy,

They don’t know it yet but Bach is going to blow their minds

intellectual Top Trumps with one another for centuries.

In the 19th century, it was the followers of Brahms and the followers of Liszt at each other’s throats over where music should go after Beethoven.

In the 20th century, the issue was where music should go after Wagner and woe betide any composer who had the temerity to write hummable tunes: exile to Light Music was the best they could hope for.

Today, that haughtiness lives on in disdain for popularity. You can be serious or you can be popular; you cannot be both. There are certainly enough first-rate musicians, from

Arthur Sullivan to Julian Lloyd-Webber, who have been banished from the pantheon for the unspeakable crime of being commercially successful. This is an attitude classical music can’t afford.

There are countless wonderful outreach programmes for music. I visited Lewisham Urban Opera last month, one of many community music and drama programmes, and was moved to tears by the musical story-telling they performed with great craft and conviction.

There are wonderful foundations such as Nicola Benedetti’s, investing time and energy in the next generation of instrumentalists. The David Ross Education Trust is rolling out a phenomenal music-education programme in 34 state schools that is starting to see promising results.

So there are heartening individual signs of life and thriving creativity in certain corners of our national music –and of course Classic FM’s often under-acknowledged work as a daily on-ramp for the casual listener is a huge force for good. But what we desperately need is to find a new audience for them.

There is a young audience with a voracious appetite for new experiences. Moreover, these young people love nothing more than getting a handle on beautiful, complex matters.

I was in a sell-out audience of 1,800 who sat silent and spellbound as Professor Brian Cox spoke for two hours on astronomy and black holes in March – just one of 140 performances he is doing on his tour.

Just think how Britain, a culinary wasteland 30 years ago, has embraced food; just look at how keen people are to hurl themselves into cold rivers and lakes in order to feel more alive.

Where food, physics and wild swimming have gone, live music can surely follow. It just takes imagination and chutzpah. And not just the safe classics: the real stuff – loud, visceral and lapel-grabbing.

Later this year, I’m launching an immersive live music project that is designed to be everything the current offering is not.

Curved Music is going out to hunt down classical music’s new fans and demonstrate that it belongs to them. They don’t know it yet but Bach is going to blow their minds. The barriers are coming down and the snobs are going to hate it. At least they are if we do it right.

Alexander Armstrong is a presenter on Classic FM. curvedmusic.com

Death by cricket

England’s national game isn’t a gentle pursuit played on idyllic village greens – it’s absolutely lethal, says Nick Newman

As the new cricket season gets under way, the injuries in the England cricket team – Ben Stokes’s knee, Jofra Archer’s elbow, Jack Leach’s back and knee – are a reminder that the game is fraught with danger. Even the kitbag is called a coffin.

Cricket never features in lists of world’s most perilous sports – which are usually topped by base jumping, mountaineering, bull-riding and –surprisingly – cheerleading. But research by Middlesex University in 1998 found that for every 100,000 cricketers, 130 require hospital treatment in the UK every year. This makes cricket the third-most risky sport, after rugby and hockey – and on a par with skiing.

For many years, I’ve illustrated the Chronicle section of the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, compiled by Matthew Engel.

Every year, there are new and more bizarre forms of injury and death on and off the pitch. There are tragedies like Josh Baker, 20, the young Worcestershire spinner who died off the cricket field.

These are of a different strain, and not to do with the game being played. The sad and strange stories recorded by Wisden suggest that cricket should come with a health warning – especially if you play on the subcontinent, where you’re as likely to catch a stump on the head from a disappointed opponent as you are to catch a batsman in the slips.

Many fatalities are the result of acts of God, such as lightning strikes –like the case of David Evans of New South Wales, who in 2004, under a clear sky, was hit with a shock so intense it shattered his bat, leaving a hole in the ground where he’d stood.

More surprising are incidents involving other natural phenomena –such as when a fielder in volcanic New Zealand, fielding at deep fine leg, felt the ground give way, trapping him in a hole full of scalding water.

He was treated for burns, and survived – unlike the unfortunate Australian who expired after wading into the surf to fetch a ball during a game of beach cricket.

Spectators are equally at risk. Heart attacks are always a danger. In 1998, an inquest decided that the Sri Lankan R G Ranasinghe died from ‘a heart attack caused by excessive happiness’, after watching Sri Lanka beat England in the 1998 Oval Test.

A more typical spectator injury is a blow to the head from a cricket ball. In 1993, an elderly woman was taken to hospital after being hit by a six at

A year later, Sharon Scott of Kington, Hertfordshire, was rushed to hospital after being struck on the head by a six struck by her husband, while wheeling their baby round the boundary. ‘She probably cost me a century,’ lamented her husband, Clive. ‘I went into my shell after that.’

The most common cricket death is by bat. Following the Dunblane massacre, Prince Philip controversially said,

Hitler thought the use of protective pads and gloves ‘unmanly and un-German’

‘A gun is no more dangerous than a cricket bat in the hands of a madman.’

Following 9/11, cricket bats joined a list of items banned in American aircraft cabins, along with axes, baseball bats, box cutters, brass knuckles, bull whips, cattle prods, corkscrews, golf clubs and nunchucks.

In 2011, two robbers bearing an axe and Samurai sword were chased off by a Lancashire shopkeeper armed with a cricket bat – prompting my cartoon to illustrate the story: ‘Help! He’s got a Gunn & Moore’.

At a match in Florida, a player wielding a bat was shot dead by an opponent with a handgun. The police accepted that the gunman had acted in self-defence. Said Sergeant Spike Hopkins, ‘For this man to bring a firearm to a sporting event is odd but, then again, he has the right to do so.’

In 2021, a 12-year-old retrieving a ball from a temple compound was tragically impaled on a gate spike. In 2018, a man was hacked to death for refusing to fetch a ball in a friendly match in Bangalore. In 2021, two cricketers in Uttar Pradesh were killed by toxic fumes when retrieving a ball from a sewage tank.

That was a year of living dangerously for cricketers. An 18-year-old was shot dead by a security guard for playing cricket near Lahore airport, while in Sri Lanka two ground staff died in what is believed to have been an elephant attack – a problem since the end of the civil war in 2009, as cities expanded into formerly war-ravaged areas occupied by elephants.

Snakes are also an ever-present threat. In 1993, Dave Cutting was bitten by an adder as he was walking out to bat at Hastings. In 2017, an 18-year-old was bitten by a red-bellied black snake during a club match in Sydney. Happily both survived.

Cricketers are also a danger to themselves. David Frith made a study of cricketer suicides in his 2001 book Silence of the Heart. He found that while the suicide rate among British men is

Cricket fanaticism can indeed prove fatal. In 1997, a 33-year-old Sri Lankan fan hanged himself in a well when Sanath Jayasuriya failed to beat Brian Lara’s record Test score. That same year, a 20-year-old man poisoned himself in southern Sri Lanka after being scolded by his mother for playing too much cricket.

In 2018, a 63-year-old railwayman died after setting himself on fire with kerosene when Virat Kohli was out for five in the Cape Town Test.

In spite of such jeopardy, Adolf Hitler considered cricket insufficiently dangerous for German youth – he thought the use of protective pads and gloves ‘unmanly and un-German’, according to Oliver Locker-Lampson, an extreme right-wing MP.

Hitler did, however, regard the bowler’s action as potentially useful for the lobbing of hand grenades, according to C B Fry, an ex-England player and one-time Hitler apologist.

Hitler was unfamiliar with the hazards recorded in the Wisden Almanack’s Chronicle – and unaware that even the cricket tea is a source of jeopardy.

Fears over who would be held liable if a player suffered an allergic reaction to a lethal sandwich prompted the Chairman of the Eden Valley Cricket League to tell his 42 clubs to scrap teas to protect them from a ‘possible liability situation’.

Not all cricket matches involve tragedy. In 2004, Carlisle Cricket Club held a minute’s silence for their deceased former player and groundsman Leonard Brunton, prompting a call to his home to enquire about flowers. The phone was answered by Mr Brunton.

Nick Newman, a Sunday Times cartoonist, writes for Private Eye

My brief career in apartheid South Africa

My first job was as a clerk to a South African judge during apartheid.

Green as grass, I was outraged when he sentenced Xhosa, who’d raped a white woman, to death, but gave a suspended sentence to man who had raped and beaten his 11-year-old niece who was so traumatised she stopped speaking.

The judge sat his hysterical clerk down to explain: ‘I had no option with the first man. In this benighted country, the death sentence is mandatory for a black man raping a white woman. I had more leeway with the second case, because raping a black child doesn’t carry a mandatory sentence.

‘Yes, it’s an appalling crime. But that man is the sole breadwinner and there’s no state welfare. If I have him executed or imprisoned, 11 people will starve.’

Justice might be fairer in the UK, but the system is a mess.

Error, a memoir by retired judge Charles Harris KC, is a clear indictment of the delays, muddle, inefficiency and lack of leadership in the legal system.

He’s kinder to the judges: ‘It is commonly asserted by the ignorant or hostile that judges are out of touch

or lack contact with ordinary people. This is utterly wrong.’

Harris says circuit judges deal daily with the widest possible variety of individuals, from the homeless and hopeless, with no work and no money, to the rich and famous. He says they deal with human predators and human prey, with the fit and the unwell.

They adjudicate with people whose lives have been ruined by commercial organisations, by breach of contract, or by the fallout from divorce, injury or death.

Harris doesn’t deny that judges might not always know the name of the latest pop star or influencer. But he has dealt

had cases concerning teachers, schoolchildren, soldiers, businessmen, bankers, scholars, students, artists and even litigating barristers.

He says, ‘One sees perpetual permutations of the brilliant and dim, energetic and lazy, astute, and stupid, malign and angelic –from all classes, races, ages and religions, and many different nationalities.

‘Witnesses range from the illiterate to the world’s leading experts. One was not out of touch.’

But even the best judges can do little about the law’s delay. A friend’s life has been ruined by her surgeon, who, in irradiating a small tumour in her gut, managed to burn her womb and bowel.

This led to a hysterectomy and a colostomy bag and a hole in her stomach, which will not heal and needs to be dressed twice a day.

Her lawyer said she had a cast-iron case for medical negligence and should ‘name her price’. But, as this would be a civil case, it wouldn’t be heard for eight years or so.

She’s 83. She dropped the case.

Prue Leith presents The Great British Bake Off

Mary Killen’s

Danger! Avoid bosom-bunching

As summer arrives, oldies should steer clear of bikinis and low necklines

No offence, but many oldies heading for the sun may now be cringing at the thought of exposing themselves.

The beach will force a moment of truth for those whose figures have gone. Whether we let our figures go, or they went of their own accord, is another matter. And of course some of us never had a figure in the first place.

But even if you intend to skip the beach on aesthetic grounds, the reality is that when you get to a hot country, it becomes more unbearable to swelter away in the baking heat than to feel the fear and strip off anyway.

The beach is like an AA meeting. It clears the air to be with others who have admitted themselves powerless.

Still, if you are prepared to shell out £300, there are things you can do to disguise the decay.

First, avoid the bikini. The very nature of a flimsy bikini top means it cannot offer enough support to hoick up even a modestly sized bust without the straps sawing their way into your shoulders and leaving angry marks.

Meanwhile – UTI alert. The very thin, almost ribbon-like gusset of the bikini can act as a wick, transporting the likes of Prevotella and Bacteriodes microbes from the back bottom to the front.

A one-piece swimsuit is key. Too low a neckline should be avoided to avoid bosom-bunching, and your swimsuit should be skirted or boy-shorted; 1950s-style skirted and boy-shorted swimsuits have made a huge comeback this year. The skirts and shorts screen off the top of the inside leg where some of the worst withering and pouching is likely to occur.

Fake tans are common and real tans are dangerous

More importantly, they screen off what is known in fashion-shooting circles as ‘the camel toe’. Those modelling high-legged swimwear for Vogue will be well acquainted with the waterdropshaped camel-toe-concealers that are placed by stylists inside a costume.

As an expert puts it, they ‘disguise the unsightly frontal wedge caused by form-fitting clothing such as swimwear’.

While technically you will not need the camel-toe-concealer in a skirted or boy-shorted costume, you will probably still need one for the lounger.

Have a look online at Venezia, Panos Emporio’s V-neck wraparound skirted

cellulite, bulging veins and thread veins and give a pleasing uniformity and a neat, non-shimmer, matt finish. You can get them from Dancewear Central in suntan or light suntan.

Wear them in the sea or the pool with no problem. They make a dramatic difference. They may make you hotter but it will be worth it.

Should anyone at the pool enquire, ‘Are you wearing tights?’, just say, ‘Yes. They’re support tights.’ No need to elaborate.

But what about the face, arms, neck and shoulders? Fake tans are common and real tans are dangerous. Instead, pay £34 to Jones Road for their Miracle Balm in bronze. You can apply this all over and it lends a completely natural, slightly suntanned look to the whole exposed area.

Bosombunching: Myleene Klass

They screen off

A huge, widebrimmed sunhat is de rigueur. It will make the lower body seem slender by comparison. Fling a featherweight kikoi around your shoulders when lounging and throw it off at the last minute when entering the water. And don’t forget about pebble shoes. They make all the difference on stony beaches and render your progress across them more graceful. You can swim in them as well. I am amazed that in seaside towns pebble shoes are not more widely available. And don’t forget –you are always going to look a hundred times better on a beach than anyone who has had

Oldie Man of Letters

An Uncommon Writer

At 90, Alan Bennett has soared above National Treasure status a n wilson

There was a legendary Oxford don called Bruce McFarlane, who supervised Alan Bennett’s thesis on Richard II’s retinue from 1388 to 1389.

McFarlane used to say Bennett was the best pupil he ever had – ‘before he went off and joined the circus’. This was the donnish way of describing Bennett, then engaged in his medieval research, who was lured into joining Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller in Beyond the Fringe.

Those who watched the TV adaptation of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time will have been struck by how brilliantly Bennett portrayed Sillery, the manipulative old don. He could, of course, have been a don. But that was only one of the roles he has played so successfully –none more so than his own mysterious self.

Beyond the Fringe fans will remember Bennett’s superb sermon: he plays a vicar likening the quest for meaning in life to the opening of a sardine tin with a broken key. Bennett made a completely convincing vicar. Indeed, when he was my neighbour for over 20 years in north London, and I saw him pedalling his bike up Gloucester Crescent, he often seemed like a parish priest on his rounds.

The agnostic Bennett once observed that being a fervent Anglican would be a contradiction in terms.

The paradox of Bennett is that his mild voice and manner conceal fervour – often fury. He once described going to some military parade, perhaps Remembrance Sunday – ‘all the things I love and hate’. His hatred of England and of Englishness is – well, very English.

He was an agreeable neighbour. Indeed, I’d say he honed the art of being a neighbour – and probably the art of being a human being – to a perfect T. He was the soul of friendliness, but there was never the feeling on either side that this might involve ‘social life’.

As it happens, he and his partner Rupert Thomas, who is a friend and colleague of my wife, Ruth, did occasionally come and have supper in our kitchen, but Bennett always – I am sure everyone who knows him would agree –keeps his distance.

The role of being Alan Bennett is perfectly played. He is the opposite of his character Guy Burgess in An Englishman Abroad: ‘No point in having a secret if you make a secret of it.’

He does a good road show, in which he chats to audiences, and has them eating out of his hand. One of the favourite gags is when he tells them that his partner Rupert once compared him to Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Rupert said they are both ‘difficult, northern, and a c**t’.

Another famous Bennett line, which he put into the mouth of Kafka, in his play about the Czech genius, applies just as well to himself: ‘If he did understand me, he’d understand that I don’t want to be understood.’

Like any good writer, Bennett does not extend this courtesy to his characters. He forges them all ruthlessly into the Bennett mould. When you see his two depictions of the late Queen, in her lonely discovery of the library van in An Uncommon Reader, and in her conversations with Anthony Blunt, you realise Her Majesty has been enlisted into the Bennett world of those who both intensely love and intensely hate the England he has described so unforgettably, ever since Forty Years On On 9th May, he turned 90. He has soared beyond the status of National

Treasure. His ‘act’, for want of a better word, is only one of his theatrical masterpieces. When one looks at the work of his contemporary playwrights in Britain, he towers above them.

No one has produced a body of work to compare to it: Talking Heads, The Lady in the Van, The Madness of George III, The History Boys Bennett’s range of characters is enormous; he writes best about outsiders. They seem like victims but, since they insist on living life on their own terms, this perception turns out to be false. Miss Shepherd in her van –nursing the secret that she was once a concert pianist – is at one, in some mysterious way, with poor King George III, held in a straitjacket in his lunacy.

Pat Routledge (A Lady of Letters) sends poison-pen letters so vile that she ends up where she wants to be – in prison, for the first time with friends.

No hint of condemnation is offered of Hector, the pervy schoolmaster who fingers his pupils.

These outsiders exist in a Nietzschean territory ‘beyond Good and Evil’, never more so than in the two highly disturbing plays about spies. In A Question of Attribution, Anthony Blunt realises, while discussing her pictures with Queen Elizabeth II, that he has been rumbled as a Soviet agent. In An Englishman Abroad, Bennett pulls off the feat of making Guy Burgess a sympathetic traitor (well, almost).

Like the spies for whom he has a soft spot, and perhaps like all great writers, Bennett is a subversive.

Just occasionally, he takes self-parody to a level where the mask is obviously a mask – I am thinking of his depiction of Mole in Wind in the Willows

By crudely overdoing Mole’s timorousness, he reminds us how very far he is from being a mild little mole.

Alan Bennett, 1967

Town Mouse

Peaceful London is the place for me

tom hodgkinson

If you’re not one its eight million inhabitants, then you might be forgiven for thinking the capital city has become a sort of lawless no-go zone.

The papers suggest it’s something out of Mad Max, in which armed gangs roam the rubbish-strewn streets, police are nowhere to be seen and milder citizens live in fear.

The wits and commentators of social media make remarks along the lines of ‘London is a sh**hole’, ‘Would never visit’ and ‘London has become Londonistan’. That might be a reference to the fact that the recently re-elected Mayor, Sadiq Khan, is a Muslim, and that London is home to many immigrants.

Recent mayoral candidates played on this fear. Ex-banker Brian Rose claimed on his website: ‘Since the last election in 2021, our city has become a truly terrifying place to live.

‘Crime rates have skyrocketed by over a third, with violent incidents in particular becoming commonplace on London’s streets … and over 1,000 murders during the current Mayor’s tenure.’

As a timid little mouse who sees the mean streets of London Town every day from my bicycle, I might be expected to live in daily fear for my life. But I just don’t recognise this image. Of course there is crime. Recently there was a horrific murder of a 14-year-old with a Samurai sword in Hainault. But such incidents are very rare. And, duh, that’s why they’re front-page news.

Returning to live in London a few years ago, after 12 years as a country mouse, I was struck by the neatness of the city, the harmony, the beautiful parks, its loveliness and its life. It has improved enormously since the seventies and eighties, when the sense of tension on the streets was far more palpable.

Taxi-drivers wave thanks at me if I let them go first when cycling or driving. And the new 20mph speed limit, combined with expanding bike lanes, has calmed the city down. Everyone seems extraordinarily polite.

A walk through Hyde Park, on a Sunday, is paradise. It’s amazingly well-kept and full of picnickers of all

nationalities. A traveller beamed in from 1650 would think they’d been dropped into an Eden-like Utopia.

My own neighbourhood of Shepherd’s Bush is happily multicultural. The QPR stadium is a street away from the mosque. We have a number of Syrian supermarkets, such as Damas Gate and Ayam Zaman. There are Indian, Eritrean, Thai, Jamaican and Polish cafés. There are theatres, libraries, pharmacists and public tennis courts. What’s not to like?

When you look at the statistics, you see there is no truth to the claim that crime, nationally, is out of control. According to the Crime Survey of England and Wales, the opposite is true. Crime rates are going down. There were 4.5 million violent crime offences in 1995, compared with 894,000 in 2023.

The same survey says that London actually fares better than the rest of the country, as far as general hassle on the streets goes. In the year to September 2023, 26.4 per cent of people said they’d witnessed or experienced antisocial behaviour in London, compared with 34.2% across the rest of England and Wales.

The murder rate has been steadily diminishing over the last couple of decades. In 2023 police recorded 104 murders – roughly the same as in 2022.

That’s down from a peak of 153 in 2019, and is also lower than the 120 recorded in 2015. The murder rate in London is far lower than New York City: London’s rate is 12 per million people, while New York’s is 45.4 per million, or 386 per year.

London is, simply put, civilised and cosmopolitan.

And it has always been so. An account written in 1183 by monk William Fitzstephen was very positive about the capital, which then had a population of around 25,000: ‘It is blessed in the wholesomeness of its air, in its reverence for the Christian faith, in the strength of its bulwarks, the nature of its situation, the honour of its citizens, and the chastity of its matrons. It is likewise most merry in its sports and fruitful of noble men.

‘Of these things it is my pleasure to treat, each in its own place. There the mild sky doth soften hearts of men, not that they may be “weak slaves of lust”, but that they may not be savage and like unto beasts, nay, rather, that they may be of a kindly and liberal temper.’

And, today, of its eight million citizens, at least 7.99 million Londoners are indeed of a kindly and liberal temper.

The criminal fraternity or ‘weak slaves of lust’ may exist, but they are decidedly in the minority.

Country Mouse

Our kingdom of horses

brough scott

Consternation comes in many forms.

A hundred and thirty years before those Household Cavalry horses caused mayhem through the streets of London in April, the capital had an equestrian crisis of a very different kind. Welcome to the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894.

Back then, there were not the 300 or so police, ceremonial and military horses that you now see on the streets. There were nearer 300,000 to serve the six million Londoners.

Everything was shifted by horse. There were 11,000 hansom cabs and four-wheelers and 5,000 six-horse omnibuses – not to mention all the phaetons and landaus in those back-ofthe-block Belgravia stables that are today’s coveted mews flats. A horse excretes around 2½ gallons of urine and up to 40lb of manure a day. Do the maths.

The first British four-wheeled petrolengine motor car would not get on the public road until December 1894 when Frederick Bremer puttered down the Connaught Road in Walthamstow, while his mate Tom Bates walked ahead with a red flag. It looked like a four-wheeled children’s buggy and was steered by a tiller. Was this the future?

‘In 50 years,’ thundered the Times, ‘every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.’

But if the motor car solved that problem, the horse had already shaped our history in countless ways. Without a couple of very fit ones, William would never have been the Conqueror.

It was only thanks to two of the very toughest quadrupeds ever foaled that a 20-year-old William escaped would-be assassins in a midnight flit from Valognes and a 100-mile gallop to safety in Falaise.

Today, the Normandy Tourist Board offers it as a trail ride. It sounds best in French – ‘La Chevauchée de Guillaume’.

It’s not just the people but the places,

roads, canal paths, buildings and fashion that had to be shaped around the needs of the horse. Roads had to be contoured so that a cart could get up it. Inns with stables and fresh horses should not be much more than ten miles apart. A town’s water trough was essential. Hay and oats were the petrol of the day.

Horses were part of the dirtiest work, as well as the smartest of parades. Cab-drivers and coachmen could be brutal: in 1894, there would always be dead horses on Primrose Hill.

Over the ages, horses were Britain’s major source of power. They pulled ploughs, hauled wagons and delivered the news, and when the mines came, pit ponies did pitiless duty underground. They carried knights and then cavaliers. They were Henry VIII’s hunters at Hampton Court and Charles II’s racehorses at Newmarket.

The thoroughbred racehorse which derived from this and subsequent royal patronage was Britain’s greatest gift to the animal kingdom. Deep into the 20th century, events at Epsom and Ascot would take on almost global significance.

Shakespeare rode and obviously loved it. ‘When I bestride him, I soar,’ he writes in Henry V. ‘I am a hawk: he trots the air, the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the piper of Hermes.’ Those words may have been in the mouth of the Dauphin but I promise you Mr Shakespeare could not have made them up without experience.

The more mundane is even more striking. My history degree was based on disgracefully little study, but the necessity and often discomfort of riding for figures with no special affinity for the horse has stayed with me.

Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s spymaster-in-chief, criss-crossed the country, despite a stomach and bladder that didn’t always appreciate the trip.

Sir Robert Carey rode 406 miles from Richmond to Edinburgh in 66 hours to announce the death of the Queen to her successor, James I.

William Cobbett was bulky but tireless in fair weather and foul, as he lugged pen and ink and parchment to write up thousands of words a night to compile Rural Rides in the 1820s.

Better remembered – inevitably, in view of my racing background – is relentlessly reckless George Osbaldeston. In 1831, he bet 1,000 guineas (£140,000 today) he could ride 200 miles in under ten hours. He used 28 horses, did it in under nine hours and then rode back to Newmarket to have a bath before dinner.

Statues are often the only horses now. Eleven of our monarchs are honoured in this way, from Richard III, sword aloft outside Parliament, to the late Queen, astride and at ease in Windsor Great Park. There are no fewer than five of William IV: four of them, Julius Caesar-style, stirrupless, in Roman toga; the other, in Belfast, warriored up as for the Battle of the Boyne.

Charles II has only three but, in the third, at Newby Hall, North Yorkshire, gets one back for his dad. His horse gives Oliver Cromwell a kicking.

Many punters will prefer the bronze equestrian statue, which stands proud and brazen in the Broadgate at Coventry. There, side-saddle and starkers, rides Lady Godiva.

Consternation in the buff.

Racing broadcaster Brough Scott rode over 100 winners

Giles Wood is away

‘Who called his mother here?’

Small World

My smallholding hits the big screen

When I went to the doctor about my shrinking assets, why did he have to film them?

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…

Living with elderly parents when you are well into your extremely early fifties is devastating. It gives you an endless look into what fate has in store for you.

Am I really 30 years away from walking with a frame; tripping over my layabout son’s Moomins box set; finding my spectacles in the microwave and the Radio Times in the fridge? I have no progeny, obviously, but everything else will probably come to pass.

It’s a nightmare, as if Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come has dropped me off at some hideous future and forgotten to pick me up at the end of the night.

The one thing I can do – Scrooge-like – is engineer a better third act for myself, and be as healthy as possible for as long as possible. Most people would immediately go to their doctor for a full health MOT and advice. Being a man with health anxiety officially diagnosed, I’ve already done that – fortnightly.

There is one pressing health problem so deeply personal and significant that I have not yet troubled my doctor’s delicate ears with it. I must soon frankly tell the junior GP, ‘We must talk about my shrinking penis.’

I am no boastful, boorish alpha male. I happily confess that, given I’m a 5ft 0in male, my member was never going to be troubling Norris McWhirter’s clipboard.

Still, it was a perfectly proportioned private in the sex war. It equipped itself well in limited sorties across enemy lines, whenever instructed.

But, of late, it has become noticeably … less notable. So much so that, for the first time since Britpop broke, I’ve been measuring it.

The telephone triage receptionist paused, working out whether I was pranking her, before asking carefully, ‘When you say it’s small, do you mean compared with other men’s?’

‘No. I’ve not been comparing it with

other men’s. I mean, compared with mine, last week.’ I added gingerly, ‘I’ve got two columns of results: “At rest” and “At play”.’

A GP was suddenly put on the line and he asked me to come in.

On arrival, I was shocked to find the trainee GP had a camera set up, as he wanted to show it to his mentor.

However, I was glad to be taken seriously – so I wasn’t remotely camera shy. Unfortunately, he had forgotten the extension cord for the camera. He asked that I move closer to the lens. So, trousers round ankles, I had to get off the seat and toddle towards him, proffering my parts forward like a drunken limbo dancer.

He directed me: ‘A little nearer. Now, one step back, one small step forward.’ He concluded, ‘I did what I could, but so hard to get something so small in focus, you know.’

Absolutely charming.

Turning to his computer, he pinged my penis to his mentor, who pinged bit back after – for my money – way too short a time. My practitioner aahed as he read the email, explaining, ‘He says only a microscope will help us diagnose now.’

I gasped, ‘I’m not sure I want to place anything snappable-off in a slide.’

‘No. He meant the pathology department. A biopsy is the best way forward.’

I had to ask delicately if, in the meantime, he had any advice on what I should or shouldn’t do.

‘Find another hobby,’ he said.

When I told Mother where I’d been, she sniffed, ‘I already know. Bernie’s sister-in-law works there, remember? And they’re pig-sick of you going in there, half-cocked.’

I exploded, ‘Oh, that’s a fine way to talk about a patient! If I can’t go to the doctor’s with a shrinking organ, then what did Nye Bevan bother getting out of bed for?’

I suddenly saw mother’s face light up with newly acquired knowledge. I realised she’d been talking about a metaphorical half-cockedness.

She beamed, ‘Well, look who’s played too many tunes on his old fiddle! I knew this would happen one day! It all started with that Lesley Judd poster. And here we are, 72 innocent Blue Peter presenters later, and his string’s finally snapped, I’ll bet!’

‘No one need bet! We all need to calm down!’ I said. I added, in my best radio continuity voice, ‘My privates are under the doctor now.’

Father tittered uncontrollably from behind a vibrating Daily Mail Weekend magazine.

English, the passport to everywhere

A crucial factor in drawing migrants in dinghies to our shores is our language, says Mary Kenny

Like many people, I suspect, I have mixed feelings about the migrants who arrive in Kent on dinghies.

Yes, it’s illegal, dangerous and the numbers are concerning; but wouldn’t you also be sorry for individuals and families who take huge risks to find a better life?

And ‘economic migrants’ aren’t new. Friedrich Engels wrote viciously about the Irish arriving in Britain in the midVictorian age – flooding into English cities at an uncontrollable rate.

The author of the Communist Manifesto condemned these ‘barely civilised’ Hibernian migrants, who slept with their pigs and ate nothing but potatoes: they would have a ‘degrading’ influence on the native English. They should be stopped!

Shouldn’t he have had an element of human sympathy for people who were just poor and looking for work?

Yet here’s an interesting aspect of today’s situation: a ‘pull factor’ in attracting migrants to Britain is part of a success story. The triumph of the English language is a beacon of encouragement.

Many migrants choose this country because they speak some English. English is probably the dominant means of global communication, spoken by nearly one and a half billion people –over 18 per cent of the world population. Ninety per cent of migrants living in England and Wales already speak English ‘without difficulty’ – at least in their own estimation. Migrants from the Sub-Sahara and the Indian subcontinent have some of the best mastery of English (according to the Migration Observatory at Oxford).

The English language is part of the attraction for most immigrants, agrees Robert McNeil of Oxford’s Centre for Migration. ‘English is ubiquitous as an additional language, and working or

studying in English is much easier for a large number of people than in lesscommonly-spoken languages such as German or Swedish – or even French or Spanish.’ Language is only one aspect of migration. Critics claim an absence of national-identity cards and an indulgent welfare system are also draws. But life has taught me that it’s complicated.

In June 1954, my late husband, Richard West, marked the First World War’s 40th anniversary in Sarajevo, where it all began.

This June marks the 110th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand – as John Pollak, great-nephew of the surgeon who tried to save his life, writes on page 54.

Richard visited the Princip Museum (now the Museum of Sarajevo) and noted that Gavrilo Princip, who fired the fatal shot at Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was regarded as a patriotic hero by local people.

Bosnians ‘often added how sorry they were that Princip should have killed the Archduchess with the second shot. But then Princip himself regretted this deeply, not only because she was an innocent woman, but also because he had thereby missed the Governor of Bosnia.’

Richard met one of the survivors of the Black Hand group who had been involved in the attack on the Archduke, which triggered the First World War: one Cvjetko Popović, who, by the 1950s, was a ‘mild, bespectacled and courteous’ museum curator and unlike anyone’s idea of an assassin.

Neither Popovic nor the other 1914 survivor, Vaso Cubrilovic, wanted to speak about their involvement, as young men, with that notorious assassination.

Most of those planning to attack the

Hapsburgs were teenage students, and some were school pupils.

‘Their letters were full of worries about their exams,’ Richard wrote in the New Statesman in 1954. ‘They were also worried about money and obsessed with their own poverty.’ But they had a greater obsession: ‘All their frustration was turned into hatred of Austria.’

As I made my way to the London Library to read the journalistic archive containing his report, I was halted in my tracks at Piccadilly by an angry proPalestinian crowd. All their hatred seemed to be focused on Israel.

As Deal in Kent is often cited as being among the most desirable places to live, I often encounter old pals who are thinking of decamping to this pretty seaside town of ours – and they ask my advice.

Deal has many attractions. A new restaurant appears almost monthly. There’s a theatre, stylish art galleries, a good library and bookshop, excellent food delis and much more.

But, as I learned when I studied translation, where something is gained, something is lost. And what has been lost involves transport connections.

Nearby Ashford International – which used to whizz you to Paris, Lille and Brussels via Eurostar – has closed its ‘international’ services to the Continent. We have a high-speed train service to London – but it’s become more unreliable because of exasperating regular strikes.

The convenient local airport, Manston, similarly shut for business. Where once it was possible to pop over to Calais for lunch from nearby Dover, now the ferry passenger service has shrunk, and Brexit makes everything slower and more inconvenient.

Nothing ever stays the same, anywhere. Things improve and also, as the Irish say, ‘disimprove’. Factor that in plans when contemplating moving anywhere.

Sophia Waugh: School Days

The American way of death arrives

One of our department came into the office at break. As she switched on the kettle, she idly said, ‘There’s a school in lockdown in Wales.’

Another trend has crossed the Atlantic and entrenched itself on this side of the herring pond.

We found it hard to believe at first. Of course we did. We (or at any rate I) had laughed a lot at our practice ‘lockdown’, sneering at any form of fear or hysteria that suggested that all wasn’t for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

The children, too, had found the whole exercise incredibly funny. How often are they instructed to get under desks or into cupboards? It is the sort of prank they would try on us, expecting fury, rather than its being issued as an instruction. (I once lost over a third of my class to a cupboard before I noticed that, one by one, the boys had crawled into it to hide. I opened the door to see 15 boys piled high on shelves and each other’s shoulders. I wasn’t furious; I could not help but laugh.)

During the practice, I (from under my own desk) told them they’d all be found and shot if they made so much noise, but they laughed and I didn’t really care.

The headmistress told me off because I had not locked the door from the inside, and when I pointed out that I couldn’t do so, the whole school had to be fitted with inside locks.

But it was all a waste of time, wasn’t it? This sort of thing does not happen in England – or so we believed.

I was once part of a lockdown at my last school, but it was slightly different. Rather than an intruder storming into the school, it was the farmer at the end of the lane who was shooting at his wife, and it was after school hours. Police told us to stay in, and away from windows, but it never really occurred to us that the farmer would turn his gun on us.

At first, we did not know the cause of the lockdown in Wales. Was it a deranged parent or an overlooked colleague? And then it turned out it was a child. A child

with a knife. And everything shifted. None of us had really believed in the possibility of a mad shooter – Dunblane was a long time ago, and the gun laws had been tightened.

But a child! The enemy coming from within suddenly seemed like an all-toobelievable reality. We have had children turn violent – although not often and none has caused any real harm – and the last thing we want is for them to start copycatting the Welsh stabber. We don’t think children stab, but we know children copycat. We also know they like to posture.

I have had to ask more than once for a boy to be searched when it was thought he had a knife on him. I don’t think this boy is likely to stab any of us, but then I am sure the Welsh teachers

would not have expected the 13-year-old girl to come to school armed. Or the 17-year-old boy in Sheffield to stab with a ‘sharp object’.

We know knife crime is rising, but the realisation that 18 per cent of those cautioned or convicted for carrying a knife or other ‘offensive weaponry’ in the last year were between ten – ten! – and 17 is horrifying. We cannot help but look at our more thuggish element slightly differently when we realise this.

On the other hand, I still can’t help but entertain a Panglossian optimism about our own children, however thuggish they may sometimes seem. We treat them well … and the sun is finally shining … and they know we are all on their side.

Nevertheless I look forward to my interior lock slightly more than I did.

‘A lot of our pupils go into the City’

‘Mary set out at that time and went as quickly as she could to a town in the hill country of Judah. She went into Zechariah’s house and greeted Elizabeth.’ (Luke 1:39)

Often the Gospels fail to provide their readers with the sort of details that would be a help to their understanding and also provide pleasure. Luke’s very brief account of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth is no exception.

We are not told how far Zechariah and Elizabeth’s house was from Mary’s home town of Nazareth. I think that one has to presume they lived nearby.

The journey was obviously undertaken out of love, but it must have been feasible, and not 100 miles away, as some biblical commentaries suggest.

What were Mary’s immediate family’s reactions to this journey? What did Joseph think? Did he accompany her? Did anyone else go with her? I would love to know.

There are many moving paintings of the Visitation, often showing two sister teresa

Virgin Mary’s journey from Judah to Galloway

Renaissance princesses, one young, one old, greeting each other fondly in palaces of varying degrees of grandeur. The reality cannot have been like this.

Joseph Epstein’s The Visitation

In 1926, the sculptor Jacob Epstein made a bronze statue of Mary, which he called The Visitation. He wanted to express in it a profound sense of humility, and said that any visitor who expected his sculpture to have splendour should be ashamed.

One day, my father was having tea with Epstein in his house when there was the sound of something heavy being dragged downstairs. My father asked about the noise and was told that it was a cast of The Visitation on its way to the

Memorial Service

foundry to be melted down. Epstein had no cash, and needed the money that he would thus receive to pay for the casting of a portrait he had just completed and for which he expected a handsome fee.

My father halted the statue’s sad journey and bought it on the spot for the price of the bronze. He then took it to the hill country – not to the barren hill country of Judah, but to the green hills of Galloway in the south of Scotland, where he placed it in a small and isolated grove of Scots pines, surrounded by a low, dry-stone wall – a shelter in bad weather for the semi-wild hill sheep.

And there Mary the mother of God and the mother of the good shepherd stood, in humility and tranquillity, often surrounded by the local sheep, for some 60 years – until vandalism and theft caused the owner (no longer my father) to move her to a much less inspiring place of safety.

One day, the Scottish hill country may be safe once more, and Mary will be able to return there.

Lord Morris of Aberavon KG KC (1931-2023)

Lord Falconer of Thoroton KC, the former Lord Chancellor, gave a tribute for Lord Morris of Aberavon, the last surviving member of Harold Wilson’s Cabinet, at St Margaret’s, Westminster. As John Morris, he was Secretary of State for Wales, 1974-79, and later Attorney General.

Morris had been called to the Bar for five years when first elected as an MP for Aberavon in 1959. Falconer said, ‘For anyone else, that would have been the beginning or the end of one or other of those careers. Not for John. That was the beginning of an extraordinary professional and political life. That year was also the year he married Margaret,

his companion and support through the whole journey.’

Falconer said Wales ran through John Morris’s life. That period as Secretary of State produced the first Welsh devolution bill, rejected by the Welsh in a referendum in 1979.

Falconer said, ‘He was an unbriefing, unleaking, uncomplaining politician. He was also patient. John as Attorney General later played a critical part behind the scenes in shaping the new Devolution Act, which bore a striking resemblance to the first one. It passed the referendum test and now determines the governance of Wales, with John as one of its main architects.’

Morris was one of six brothers. Falconer said, ‘All the other five became farmers in Wales. John would always describe himself as the black sheep of the family.’ Morris was Shadow Attorney General for 19 years, serving Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair.

William Clegg KC, an old friend from Gray’s Inn, also spoke. He told a story of a lady juror who was overheard leaving court. She said the defendant could not be guilty because that nice man John Morris wouldn’t be defending him if he was.

Grandsons Arthur Cross and Harry Cooke read Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

The fickle finger of fate

Why did my childhood friend die at 16 – and not me? dr theodore dalrymple

When you read about a potentially life-saving medical advance, I suppose your pleasure should be unconfined. Here, unequivocally, is progress.

But, occasionally, if you’ve lost a friend or relative to a disease that has since become curable, you’re inclined to rail a little against the injustice of the world and the cruelty of fate.

Why was the advance not made earlier, when it might have saved him or her? You know this is a foolish thought, but you can’t help having it. The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.

There’s a relatively new treatment for severe asthma with monoclonal antibodies – known as biologics because they are produced by and harvested from such living tissue as Chinese hamster ovaries. It offers not merely amelioration or control of symptoms, but virtual elimination of the disease.

A retrospective study of 501 severe asthmatics in Denmark shows that not only can the use of monoclonal antibodies (which have to be injected) prevent exacerbations, which often require hospitalisation; also, they permit the abandonment of corticosteroids (prescribed to control severe asthma) and return breathing completely to normal in 20 per cent of cases.

Great improvement is seen in the majority of the other cases, which allows patients to reduce their usage of corticosteroids. Wonderful as they are, corticosteroids have a list of potential side effects to make strong men tremble.

As with any treatment, there are possible side effects of monoclonal antibodies. Most of them are not severe, but patients who inject themselves at home have to learn to recognise the symptoms of anaphylaxis, which leads to collapse and possibly to death.

Another side effect which caught my eye is an increased chance of infestation with intestinal worms. It is a sign of how far we have come that we are revolted by

the prospect of worm infestation when, for most of human history, it would have been universal.

Reading of the advance in asthma therapy cast my mind back very nearly 60 years, to the first death of any friend of mine.

At 16, he was a year older than me – a brilliant, scholarly boy destined for great things. Unfortunately, he suffered (very stoically) from very severe asthma, accompanied by equally severe eczema, such that his skin seemed to shed very fine fish scales wherever he went.

His chest was deformed by his breathing difficulties. He was understandably addicted to the overuse of his inhaler containing isoprenaline, a bronchodilator.

Used as he used it (though this wasn’t known then), this increased the death rate. Despite his life of suffering – of not being able to take a single breath for granted – I never heard him complain.

I went to his house one day after an absence of some time. His mother answered the door, I asked for him and she said that he was dead. She described

the scene so vividly that it has remained with me ever since, almost as if I had witnessed it myself.

He had had one of his exacerbations, and his mother decided to call an ambulance. While the controller asked for details, such as his date of birth, the medications he was on, and so forth, he was saying, as loudly as he could, ‘I’m dying! I’m dying! Don’t you understand, I’m dying!’ But the controller insisted on answers to his questions.

The ambulance arrived a minute after his death.

Then his mother said something which has also remained with me: ‘I wish it could have been the other one’ –meaning his brother, a handsome, idle, good-for-nothing fellow.

I fled, never to return. Often, ever after, I have thought, ‘Why him and not me?’

Nowadays, quite possibly, he would have been cured or at least able to exercise his brilliant gifts for many years.

There is progress, but for some it comes too late – perhaps for all of us, when you come to think of it.

‘I totally forgot what I came up here for’

The Oldie, 23–31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk

To sign up for our e-newsletter, go to www.theoldie.co.uk

Ladies first with The Oldie

SIR: I’ve never written to a publication before, but I was rather annoyed to read the letter from Richard Langridge (Hands off my Oldie, Spring issue) where he berates his wife for rushing him through his reading of The Oldie. His patronising comments about a suggested supplement ‘aimed at the lady reader’ make the assumption that the lady reader is interested only in subjects relating to ladies.

How wrong can one be? My husband introduced me to the Oldie, where I find articles ranging from the boring to the enlightening and interesting. Might I suggest that Mr Langridge follow my husband’s lead in allowing his wife to read his Oldie first? Then he can relax and devour it at leisure.

Kind regards,

A lady reader, Helen Gerrish, Applebyin-Westmorland, Cumbria

County lines

SIR: Edwin Lutyens brought half of Great Dixter to Sussex from Kent. Now Valerie Grove (Radio, Spring issue) seems to have transferred the whole lot to Suffolk.

Yours faithfully, Nicholas Newell, Cranbrook, Kent

Cat that got the cream

SIR: It is a tribute to The Oldie that my cat Theo will not allow me to read it at any time close to his meals.

Yours sincerely, Richard Heller, London SE1

Remember Kursk

SIR: In ‘The longest day’ (May issue), Giles Milton’s final paragraph suggests [that in June 1944] the liberation from Nazi Germany had just begun.

Might he be reminded that there was a battle at Stalingrad and also what is regarded as the greatest tank battle in history, at Kursk, prior to D-Day? This does not diminish the sacrifices made by British and American forces on the Western Front.

Winston Churchill commented at the time that the Soviet army had torn out the belly of the Nazi forces. Subsequently, King George VI presented the city of Stalingrad with a ceremonial sword in honour of their sacrifices.

James Gibb, Cobham, Surrey

Lutyens’s boozer

SIR: Much as I enjoyed reading Clive Aslet’s article about the life and work of Sir Edwin Lutyens (May issue), I thought it a pity that no mention was made of a unique project of his down here in Devon. I live ten minutes’ walk away from the Drum Inn, in the Domesday village of Cockington in Torquay, which is the only public house ever designed by the great architect.

It was built with 16th-century-style bricks specified by Sir Edwin, which were imported from Belgium, the design of the chimneys paying homage to his London Cenotaph. Costing £7,000 to build, the Drum Inn was

opened on 23rd May 1936, and today bears a blue plaque in his honour. Jack Critchlow, Torquay, Devon

‘OK – now read this text from my ex-wife. I’m scared to’

French fat ladies

SIR: Mary Kenny is right (Postcards from the Edge, May issue): ‘obese’ is too hefty a word for many people who are merely carrying a bit too much weight. In the 1980s in rural France, there were market stalls that catered for large women of a certain age. I remember marvelling at a row of enormous corsets swinging in the breeze with a handwritten label saying, ‘Femmes fortes’. In conversation, the locals always used the word costaud, which means

Oldie-reader: Theo

both strong and well-built and doesn’t have any negative connotations.

The French can be very direct in such matters, though. One of our neighbours had a very overweight daughter to whom they referred as la grosse. When she fell over in the lane, it took four strapping sapeurs-pompiers to get her back on her feet.

David Donaldson, Glasgow G12

Mary’s gripping thighs

SIR: I enjoyed Mary Killen’s ‘Over-use it – and lose it’ piece (March issue), partly because it bolstered my own views on taking exercise (I don’t). But her ‘desuetude’ sent me scurrying to my dictionary for the exact definition and I now look forward to using it at the next appropriate opportunity.

Incidentally, I was wondering if anyone else noted the seemingly unwitting personal revelation, about her being unable to grip with her thighs.

Wilfrid de Freitas, Montreal, Canada

Dupuytren’s contracture

SIR: Thank you to Dr Dalrymple for the informative article about Dupuytren’s contracture (May issue). As a sufferer of the disease, I would like to add two points of clarification.

My own doctor assures me that the link between the contracture and alcohol intake has long since been disproved. The biggest factor is probably genetic, especially when the onset occurs before the age of 50.

Dr Dalrymple does not mention radiotherapy as a method of treatment, even though this is extremely promising if applied in the early stages of the disease (before any finger drops by more than 20 degrees).

Keep up this fine column, Robert Haldimann, Fürigen, Switzerland

Viking blood

SIR: I was interested to read the medical explanation of Dupuytren’s contracture.

(The Doctor’s Surgery, May issue).

Dr Theodore Dalrymple mentions its prevalence among those of Northern European descent, and that could possibly bear out stories I was told as a child. One of my uncles and quite a few other local men I knew firmly believed that their bent fingers were proof of Viking blood, the condition having been passed on by marauding Norsemen to those they conquered. Whether that is myth or reality, I cannot say, but they were quite proud of the fact.

Best regards, Maggie Cobbett, Ripon, North Yorkshire

The unknown commando

SIR: Reading the cover feature ‘The longest day’ (May issue) on D-Day 80 years on presented me with a face that’s haunted me since I first saw him in a cinema newsreels, countless photo features and news items about the Second World War beach landings. The man who dominates the heading photograph has been in my memory ever since I first saw him well over 70 years ago when I was a schoolboy.

Usually featured in a newsreel film, rather than a still photo, this picture has always made me wonder who he was. Did

he survive the landing? Over the years –often prompted by seeing the man on newsreels again and again – I tried to identify him so I could at least honour him, but without success.

Now, thanks to The Oldie, the unknown commando has featured in a leading photo and perhaps someone will identify him for us. He deserves at least to be identified so we can pay full tribute.

Rob Mannion, Bournemouth, Dorset

Dream retirement reading

SIR: I have recently moved to a retirement home and am much appreciating the warm welcome received from the other residents. Magazines and books that have been read and are no longer needed are left for others to enjoy and this is how I came across a copy of The Oldie – what a find!

I much enjoy the intelligent, amusing, informative and sometimes critical articles. I am reminded of characters and events that I can recall and relate to, often sparking memories and happy thoughts. It’s so refreshing to get comments that ignore the woke control we meet so often in current journalism and good to know there are still others of the same opinion as myself – we are not alone!

I very much look forward to receiving my subscription copies and to enjoying reading without shouting out in frustration.

Best wishes,

Barbara Pimblett, Lymington, Hampshire

Absent-minded Chesterton

SIR: I much enjoyed Rev Michael Coren’s piece on G K Chesterton (May issue). He was a reminder that forgetfulness doesn’t necessarily mean the softening of the brain that is so absorbing us and our doctors. Indeed, he was sharp enough to mock his own frequent lapses, writing to a friend, ‘On rising this morning I carefully washed my boots in hot water and blackened my face, poured coffee on my sardines and put my hat on the fire to boil.’ For the chronically absent-minded like me, he was, dare I say, a role model. Benedict Nightingale, London SW6

I Once Met Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s doctor

On 28th June 1914 – 110 years ago –Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated, sparking off the First World War.

My great-uncle Dr Richard Pollak tried to save his life.

In 1951, when I was four, my parents took my older brother Michael and me to Holland. We were to stay with my father’s uncle Richard, whom he had not seen since 1939 when he was living in Czechoslovakia.

In the intervening years, many family members had perished at the hands of the Nazis. So it was an emotional reunion for my father.

Great-Uncle Richard was then 77. Born in Jičín in 1874, he had trained as a doctor in Vienna in the 1890s, specialising in bacteriology within the armed services.

In 1914, having married and now with a daughter of 11, Great-Uncle Richard was stationed in the garrison hospital of Sarajevo as head of the bacteriology laboratory.

So it was that he was there on that hot and fateful day of 28th June 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, on an official visit to Sarajevo, were both assassinated by Gavrilo Princip,

Richard Pollak with wife Jetta and daughter Marianne, c 1905

while being chauffeured in their open-top car. The seriously wounded couple were taken to the castle to await help. As senior doctor, Great-Uncle Richard was summoned immediately to the castle to give medical assistance.

On arrival, he set about looking over the bodies for signs of life, peeled back Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s waistcoat and, using his stethoscope, listened to Ferdinand’s heart.

It was too late. He pronounced both Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie, to be dead, subsequently signing their death certificates.

He then put himself in charge of embalming the couple. June was the hottest time of the year. With the bodies needing to be prepared for lying in state, action had to be swift.

Later that day, Richard learnt that his

own daughter, Majena, had been in the crowds in Sarajevo and had witnessed the assassination. She’d been standing on the pavement directly opposite where the shooting took place.

My wife, Barbara, and I were guests at the opening ceremony on 28th June 2014 of the newly created wing of the Museum of Military History in Vienna, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the First World War. I had my picture taken, holding a photograph of Dr Richard Pollak, as I stood in front of the cabinet displaying Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s bloody tunic – and also in front of the Gräf & Stift open-topped touring car they were travelling in.

Great-Uncle Richard would undoubtedly have left his DNA on the tunic when he peeled it back to gain access to the wounds and heart 100 years earlier – almost to the minute. A chill went down my spine.

I had stayed with Great-Uncle Richard for a week. He held my hand when he took me to the local park.

So I can say, somewhat irreverently, ‘This is the hand that held the hand of the man who “stuffed” Franz Ferdinand!’ And not many people can say that! John M Pollak

Ticking bomb in my Downing Street bin

I worked at 10 Downing Street from 1966 to 1973, first under Harold Wilson and then Ted Heath, as a ‘garden girl’ – one of a dozen or so Civil Service secretaries. We were so called because our large office, situated below the Cabinet Room, overlooked the garden at the back of the building. We worked in shifts, which included nights and weekends, and manned the office at Chequers when the Prime Minister stayed there. Number 10 was a very relaxed environment. When I

worked a weekend shift, my husband, without having to identify himself in any way, could drive our MG Midget up Downing Street, park at the end and come in to share supper with me, and watch Match of the Day on the Prime Minister’s television before driving home.

One of our tasks was to open the daily post. Aside from official correspondence, unsurprisingly we often received unwelcome and unpleasant items, which we just consigned to the copious wastepaper baskets.

My last night shift was in August 1973. Just after 9pm, I was sitting with my feet up on one of the bins, when I had a call from a colleague who had occupied the same desk during the day.

‘I don’t want to alarm you, Meredith, but I have just seen the evening news on TV and apparently a number of letter bombs have been received in government departments.

‘I think I started to open one this morning and, as it was just a black gungy mess, I threw it in the bin.’

I looked down and, sure enough, the bin’s contents included the remains of a sticky package.

I raised the alarm with the security officers and the building was evacuated into Downing Street.

Once the alarm was over, the disposal officers showed us that, luckily, the bomb had failed to detonate owing to faulty construction. Our natural reluctance to open

post thereafter was appeased by the installation of a scanning device.

On my last day at Number 10, I came out of the front door and as the policeman said goodbye to me, he asked a favour – could he see my official pass? I was surprised and told him that in seven years I had never before been asked for it. He told me he just wanted to see what it looked like, as he had never seen one before. Innocent days. No longer, sadly!

By Meredith Christopher, Sherborne, Dorset,

who receives £50

Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

Towering achievements

CLIVE ASLET

Horace Jones: Architect of Tower Bridge

By David Lascelles

Profile Editions £18.99

In 1881, Horace Jones, future architect of Tower Bridge, should have become President of the Royal Academy.

He thought so, at least. As he was the only vice-president in the race (there were two of them, but the other didn’t stand), it ought to have been a foregone conclusion. But a Stop Horace candidate was found in the person of George Edmund Street. Since Street was himself no team player, besides being up to his ears in building the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand, his backers must have been desperate.

Well-fed and humorous, Jones could also be tyrannical and pushing – qualities that had helped make him a fortune.

Worldly success did not, however, stand him in good stead with some of his RIBA colleagues, particularly since nearly all of it had come from the City of London, where he was architect and surveyor to the Corporation. It smacked of commerce. Street saw architecture as an art more than a profession.

As usually happened, Jones won out in the end: Street died of overwork, leaving the field clear for his rival. Horace duly became President and was soon knighted. Even so, the pernicious impression that he was not really an architect so much as a businessman seems to have lingered. Few people today have heard of him.

This excellent volume – all the better for its compact, easy-to-read format –puts matters right. Jones, it turns out, was the architect of many of the most

famous buildings in London. They include many of the great markets, such as Leadenhall, Billingsgate and Smithfield. It says much for Jones’s achievement that they have survived into the altered world of the 21st century, cheerfully serving new uses: Smithfield will soon be converted into the Museum of London’s new home.

But we cannot follow the Times in declaring, after Keats, that ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’, on the completion of Jones’s major alterations to the Guildhall. The joy was timelimited. Not only most of Jones’s work at the Guildhall but nearly all his buildings in London, including a fistful of police stations, disappeared during or after the

Second World War. The Poultry Market at Smithfield was lost to fire in 1958.

A century earlier, the same fate had befallen the Royal Surrey Gardens Music Hall in Kennington. It was an extraordinary stylistic mishmash of a building, with ‘French château, Ottoman exotic and magic castle’ touches, that could accommodate 10,000 people.

Ironically, a mistaken cry of ‘Fire!’ during a Baptist service there had led to the deaths of seven people in the ensuing stampede. When the promoters went bankrupt, Jones not only was owed a large sum in fees but lost the £2,000 he had invested in the project.

In a film of his life, Jones would have to be played by James Robertson Justice. The son of a City solicitor, Jones knew where he was going from the start.

He joined livery companies and the Freemasons. There was luck, too.

While designing a new county hall for the boom town of Cardiff, he met William Crawshay II, the Iron King of Merthyr Tydfil. Crawshay needed a country house, built on an iron frame. This introduced Jones to the material of the age.

Amazingly, he had already designed a house in NW5 for a daughter of Sir Henry Bessemer, whose steel-making process would put Crawshay’s ironworks in the shade.

All of which – along with his summer holidays – prepared Jones for his magnum opus, the last great work of his life: Tower Bridge.

Jones loved the Continent and had visited the Netherlands many times, where he had seen bascule bridges of the kind painted by van Gogh.

He did not allow conflict of interest to dissuade him from championing a solution of this kind – despite the many others available, including the high bridge advocated by the engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette – to the problem of building a bridge east of London Bridge, without disrupting the docks.

Diplomacy, as David Lascelles notes, was not Jones’s strong suit, but he managed to rub along with the engineer Sir John Wolfe Barry.

After the Houses of Parliament and second equal with St Pancras Station, Tower Bridge would be one of the great trio of London’s Victorian buildings.

Within a year of the foundation stone’s being laid, Jones was dead – some said from the impossible demands of the project. If so, it was something he had in common with Street.

Clive Aslet is author of Sir Edwin Lutyens: Britain’s Greatest Architect?

‘Witness protection. And you?’

Double trouble

LUCY LETHBRIDGE

The Quality of Love: Twin Sisters at the Heart of the Century

By Ariane Bankes

Duckworth £18.99

In 1935, Norman Parkinson photographed two lovely twin sisters wearing ruffles and with their beautiful profiles shown to best advantage.

The celebrated Paget sisters, Celia and Mamaine, looked so identical that even friends had difficulty telling them apart.

In Ariane Bankes’s wonderfully readable account of the Pagets’ triumphant progress through literary bohemia in the 1930s and ’40s, there are broken male hearts on every page.

It seems almost impossible not to have been smitten by the Pagets’ beady intelligence, their alluring mixture of gracefully slender physical charms and a very English matter-of-factness and drollery. The men who loved them appear to have fallen without whimper, staunch friends to the last.

They didn’t seem even to mind being deftly played off against one another –among its many delights, Bankes’s book is a masterclass in femme fatalism.

The twins were born in 1916, in Suffolk. Their mother died giving birth to them; their gentle, beloved father 12 years later. The intervening period of rural freedom was later remembered as a childhood Eden. Bankes, who is Celia’s daughter, describes it beautifully. ‘What larks we have had together,’ wrote their father in his last letter.

They went to live with a rich uncle near Richmond Park and grew up beauties with a taste for unconventional men and – though more or less uneducated – with a voracious enthusiasm for intellectual life and ideas.

The uncle was a philistine, a vegetarian and theosophist who, by

measuring his daughter’s skull, concluded she was the reincarnation of William Pitt the Younger. (Bankes has a great knack for filling in the colourful background of walk-on parts.)

Perhaps being a twin gives added ballast against priggish disapproval: ‘My twinnie relationship is such that I can’t go for long without talking to her,’ wrote Celia. At any rate, the Paget sisters sailed fearlessly into adulthood and, because they were beautiful, well-connected and good company, doors opened everywhere. Sacheverell Sitwell wrote to the teenage Celia, ‘I am so very, very fond of you and even nearly adore you.’

Dick Wyndham, a bon viveur and adventurer, introduced the twins to Cyril Connolly and his friends at the magazine Horizon – where Celia then went to work. But it was the exciting, cosmopolitan, Jewish-Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler, scourge of totalitarianism of all kinds, who secured Mamaine’s affections (leaving Edmund Wilson inconsolable).

Meanwhile, Celia had become friends in the late 1940s with recently widowed George Orwell. Bankes paints a poignant picture of the austere and serious writer changing the nappies of his toddler son, Richard, in his uncomfortable flat.

Koestler, who loved the idea of having Orwell as a brother-in-law, suggested she buy him a dinner jacket to ‘pep him up a bit’. Orwell naturally proposed, but Celia had embarked on a tangled affair with A J Ayer – so it wasn’t to be.

The Pagets’ rackety social lives turned out to have at all sorts of connecting epicentres. Austerity and wartime uncertainty didn’t put a stop to the convivial round. Koestler and Mamaine holed up in Wales, where neighbours Bertrand Russell or the novelist Richard Hughes would drop by for dinner.

In Paris after the war, the Koestlers fell in (and later fell out) with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

‘He was always ready, at any hour of the night or day, to talk about any subject under the sun,’ said de Beauvoir of the egotistical and womanising Koestler.

It was tempestuous. Mamaine had an affair with the married Albert Camus, who adored her. When Koestler found out, he gave him a black eye.

Celia went on to work for the postwar department set up in the Cold War to disseminate counter-propaganda. She shared an office with the historian Robert Conquest who wrote her love poems.

She married, in her late 30s, a former swain, Arthur Goodman, a diplomat who became a Lincolnshire farmer.

There is a picture of them in the book, happy in middle age.

But the late 1950s saw many of the golden come to dust. Wyndham was killed by a sniper in 1948 in Palestine. Camus died in a car crash at the age of 48. And Mamaine died at 37 of an asthma attack. Celia did not attend her funeral, having made a pact that neither of them would go to each other’s funerals.

‘You will understand how I feel,’ she wrote to Camus. ‘It’s as if I had died myself and yet were still alive to suffer.’

There are a great many exciting relationships in this delicately written and loving account of the Paget sisters –and the twinnie one is at the centre.

Lucy Lethbridge is author of Tourists: How the British Went Abroad to Find Themselves

Prime Amazons

PAUL CARTLEDGE

The Missing Thread: A New History of the Ancient World Through the Women Who Shaped It

By Daisy Dunn Weidenfeld

& Nicolson £25

She had a dream, of a Greece that might be peaceful and free. She attempted to put it into effect, deploying the unheralded tactic of a conjugal-sex strike. All was well that ended well.

Except that this early example of women power was a fiction, created and dramatised by an Athenian citizen man of the fifth century BC – the comic playwright Aristophanes in his Lysistrata of 411.

The actual power, whether public or private, domestic or political, of real women in the ancient world – here meaning anywhere in and around the Mediterranean from the third millennium BC to the first millennium AD – was entirely a different thing.

More often than not, the female half of the human race in that time and space was disempowered, consciously. Instead of the (mostly) silent women of Greece and Rome, we should talk rather of the silenced women.

This makes the task of writing a history of them, let alone through them, quite exceptionally ticklish. Only last year, Janina Ramirez attempted something of the sort for the so-called medieval world in her Femina.

Daisy Dunn, author, classicist and critic, has taken up the cudgels on behalf of ancient-world women with delicacy

and gusto. The scholarly study of these women began in earnest, following the 1960s wave of feminism, in the 1970s. It was then and has been ever since undertaken prominently by women Classical scholars, who in 2016 were accorded a retrospective and prospective edited volume, ‘unsealing the fountain from the Renaissance to [French Academician] Jacqueline de Romilly’.

Fruits of their labours include Jenifer Neils’s archaeologically focused Women in the Ancient World (2011) and Emily Hauser’s How Women Became Poets, a ‘gender history of [ancient] Greek literature’ (2023). Daisy Dunn’s pioneering volume is their most worthy companion and successor.

For anyone even to undertake a single-authored general ancient history would be bold enough. To do so with the focus on the distaff side and without falling into grave distortion just adds to the complexity of the task.

Dr Dunn poses her challenge as being to write a new history that emphasises women’s roles. She carries it off triumphantly, the outcome of 15 years’ research. Roughly the first half of her book covers the pre-Greek Minoans, prehistoric Greeks, and Greeks from c 800 BC to the second-century-BC Roman conquest. The second half, beginning with another fictional female, Virgil’s Queen Dido of Carthage, takes the reader through early and regal Rome, and then Republican Rome, onward and downward to the inglorious demise in the first century AD of the first imperial dynasty.

Put differently, we are taken from Akkadian priestess Enheduanna, arguably the world’s first recorded woman author, in the later third millennium to imperial poisoner supreme the aptly named Locusta at the start of the first millennium AD.

The organising weaving metaphor is entirely apt: many ancient women’s work included doing just that. Only quite exceptional ancient women, such as Spartan wives, were exempted, thanks to the servile labour they could command.

Throughout The Missing Thread, we are treated to cameos of varying length and depth of individual women, who by definition were more or less exceptional, given that we know not only their names but also something of their deeds.

But female collectivities are by no means overlooked and indeed are given their due as historical actors and shapers, when appropriate. One of the book’s many strengths is its ability to keep in mind – and keep the reader mindful of – the general and normal

(life expectancy, upbringing, birth and death experiences), while dwelling inevitably on the unusual.

Nor does Dr Dunn fail to accentuate the negative: what has struck her forcibly, as it literally struck the women in question, is the ill-treatment of wives at the hands of husbands, fathers, guardians and male politicians. Only some degree of compensation is afforded by the courage shown in resistance.

Europa, an Asiatic princess, ironically, gave her name to our continent. The adulterous career of Helen of Sparta and Troy shaped an enduring East-West bipolarity that has recently been brought into severe question by two women scholars, Naoíse Mac Sweeney and Josephine Quinn.

Disabused male poet Hesiod in the seventh century BC brought us the baleful goddess figure Pandora. Not long after, the serially misogynistic Semonides set the tone for the wearisomely vituperative female abuse that persists dispiritingly to this day.

Dr Dunn fights back tellingly by gracing each of her 19 chapters with epigraphs drawn from ancient women poets, beginning not with Sappho, as might have been predicted, but the far less known Anyte. But Sappho rightly features strongly, and her invocation of sex goddess Aphrodite as ‘weaver of stratagems’ speaks multitudes.

The transition from ‘Greek’ history to ‘Roman’ is managed skilfully by way of the Etruscans and the Carthaginians, and the horrors of late Republican Roman civil-war history are not spared us.

The dizzying intricacies of Roman imperial family intrigues offer just the right counterpoint to disasters further afield, such as those inflicted on its Roman conquerors by Britannia in the formidable shape of Boudica.

If ever there was a true female history-maker, she was it.

Paul Cartledge was Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University

‘I think we should bore other people’

La Misérable

FRANCES WILSON

In

Pursuit of Love: The Search for Victor Hugo’s Daughter

By Mark Bostridge Bloomsbury £20

Mark Bostridge first came across Adèle, the second daughter of Victor Hugo, when he saw François Truffaut’s L’Histoire d’Adèle H in 1975.

The film, starring Isabelle Adjani, tells the story of Adèle Hugo’s unrequited love for an English lieutenant called Albert Andrew Pinson, played by Bruce Robinson, who later wrote Withnail and I.

Travelling under an assumed name, Adèle follows Pinson to Nova Scotia, where she pretends to be his wife. When he is posted to Barbados she goes there too, still posing as Mrs Pinson. ‘If you don’t love me, let me love you,’ she begs him before losing her mind.

When Pinson later finds her wandering Bridgetown in rags, Adèle no longer recognises him. She spends the last half of her life in asylums.

Bostridge, then a 21-year-old undergraduate, watched the film with a friend called Julien, with whom he was involved in his own one-sided love affair. Over supper that night, Julien rested his head on Mark’s shoulder, the most intimate moment they ever shared – and soon afterwards broke all contact.

‘My world,’ Bostridge says, ‘came crashing about my ears.’

His despair affected his finals results and brought to an end the academic career he had been promised.

Why, Bostridge asks in this hypersensitive and utterly immersive book, are biographers drawn to certain stories? In what ways do the historical lives we explore reflect on our own unexamined existences? It is, he explains, the ‘simple pathos’ of Adèle’s plight that has fascinated him for 40 years: a gifted young woman loses everything because of a hopeless love.

So little is known about Lieutenant Pinson that he might, one French writer believed, have been a figment of Adèle’s imagination. Bostridge, who also imagines him vividly, sees Pinson as the dashing Sergeant Troy in Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, or the gold-digging Morris Townsend in Henry James’s Washington Square.

He did, it seems, give Adèle cause for hope by agreeing under pressure to marry her, which leads Bostridge

to compare Pinson to the young lieutenant in Stefan Zweig’s novel Beware of Pity, who is emotionally blackmailed into promising to marry a paralysed girl.

How and when did Adèle and Pinson meet? Bostridge suggests it was on the Isle of Wight in 1861, when she was 31. But even the most basic biographical information is guesswork.

‘Everything touching her is a mystery,’ wrote Remy de Gourmont when Adèle died in 1915, ‘from her birth to her death.’

Most of what has been written about her – that she was kidnapped, or married with children – is wrong, says Bostridge. He has pursued her from her childhood home in France to the Channel Islands, where the Hugo family moved when her father was exiled, and on to Novia Scotia and Barbados.

He has also ‘hoarded’ every scrap of information he can discover about ‘the English Lieutenant’s Frenchwoman’, as his long-suffering partner ‘R’ wittily calls her, while also noting that Bostridge’s pursuit of Adèle is ‘getting to be a bit like a one-sided love affair’.

The fascinating details of her story unfold against the backdrop of Hugo’s work on Les Misérables and the longterm impact of the drowning in 1843 of her 19-year-old sister, Léopoldine.

It was not only Pinson, it transpires, who did not return Adèle’s love: Victor Hugo was so broken by the death of Léopoldine that his surviving daughter, then aged 13, ceased to exist for him. So rarely was Adèle’s later disappearance mentioned by her family it was as if she too had died.

One of Bostridge’s most riveting discoveries is a letter to Adèle dated 1870 from her brother François-Victor. Pinson, Françoise-Victor tells her, has threatened that ‘If the annoyances you have caused him for the past eight years are renewed, he will have no alternative but to challenge me to a duel.’

Adèle would today be cautioned for stalking – and the biographer, who pursues ‘every conceivable aspect of another person’s life’ is himself, Bostridge suggests, a form of stalker.

Every discovery that Bostridge makes about Adèle Hugo is eerily echoed in his own life. In Pursuit of Love is not only a true and honest account of biographical obsession, but a tale of the uncanny in which the pursuer and pursued become one.

Frances Wilson is author of Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence

‘Waiter, there are no flies in my soup’

Moving

pictures

PHILIPPA STOCKLEY

The Giant on the Skyline: On Home, Belonging and Learning to Let Go By Clover Stroud

Doubleday £18.99

In our Instagram world, the real-time memoir, celebrating and ‘sharing’ the smallest detail of daily life, is big business.

Over three previous memoirs, Clover Stroud’s distinctively unbuttoned revelations of her spirited, spiritual life have gained a growing audience.

She has told of her adventurous single life and sexual adventures; of the violent pain of childbirth; of the unbearable, decades-long loss of her mother to brain damage when Stroud was 16, then of adored sister, Nell, suddenly, to cancer.

Now, in The Giant on the Skyline, she explores raising five children by two marriages in historic rural Oxfordshire, along with cats, dogs and horses, under the constant threat of having to leave the artistic home in which she has cocooned herself.

This all-important home might be seen as a legitimate barricade against further traumatic loss: ‘I tethered myself to our home.’ But it can also stifle her, ‘squirrelling pointlessly around with all those piles of crap I carried about’.

Stroud’s writing is assured, visceral, sexy as well as sensuous, richly coloured in every way, and often freshly poetic, whether dealing with a toddler’s tears over the broccoli touching the gravy, or with death and loss.

She paints her way through the book with striking word pictures. While looking for the long-lost village of Snap with eldest child Jimmy before he leaves for university, she describes a ‘black, corrugated barn … packed full of fat straw bales curled together like a pile of cinnamon buns’.

Stroud’s belief in her subject (her life), and her fascination with the area’s

ancient history and identity are so strong that one can forget that this is not fiction.

She paints a compelling picture of the demands of hands-on solo parenting in the idiosyncratic family home beneath the famous chalk Uffington Horse and mesmeric, ancient Ridgeway, which she feels is part of her psyche.

The archaic landscape inspires her: ‘I loved … letting my mind spool around how f**king, f**king massive time is … because feeling big expanses of time is almost orgasmic, if you want it to be.’

But raising five children while in a transatlantic relationship with husband Pete, father of three, is hard. Pete is in Washington and wants the family to move there. She does not.

The absolute importance of ‘home’, and staying there, both to her and to her children, is at the heart of everything. The hovering question – is home a place or a state of mind? – is discursively explored in a tale magically (or curiously) book-ended with a giant who offers spiritual guidance.

The story starts aptly enough with an online argument about moving, where Pete’s words ‘were sitting like land mines all over the thousands of WhatsApp messages we shared’. They talk patchily and often unsatisfactorily (she is ‘red with rage’ at one point) across time zones.

We never learn what shadowy Pete does. He visits, unexpectedly, one weekend – then she briefly joins him for his visa application. Yet she asserts a profound connection: ‘I still want to smell him and lick him or drink him.’

Pete sends prospectuses of Washington houses and schools, yet still she doesn’t believe he’s serious about buying a modern, red-brick house until he gives an ultimatum: ‘“I need to know you are truly on board,” … a note of steel entering through his voice.’

For her, moving would be like being ‘taken out with a scalpel’. Stroud deals in emotional absolutes.

Without spoiling what technically is not a plot but is a narrative arc, her views shift as she talks to locals, listens to her heart, to the children, and above all to the natural world and the supernatural one.

It’s rather like the steps of grief, moving through denial and anger towards bargaining and acceptance.

But how long can anyone continue to write such achingly personal books?

One might think the toll too great – but consider the case of avant-garde novelist Dorothy Richardson (18731957). There’s a generic link between Stroud’s book-by-book life-mapping and Richardson’s 13 autobiographical

novels, the first published more than a century ago, the last posthumously, in her series Pilgrimage

Contemporary criticism was mixed. Richardson’s fourth (1919) book was greeted by reviewer Olive Heseltine as ‘…simply life. Shapeless, trivial, pointless, boring, beautiful, curious, profound. And, above all, absorbing.’

Perceptive words that could in essence apply to The Giant on the Skyline – another form of pilgrimage.

Orgasmic time, druids, gentle giants… The reader swirls like a leaf on a stream, coming out amazed by the richness – and unknownness – of other people’s lives.

Philippa Stockley is author of Restoration Stories: Patina and Paint in Old London Houses

‘Gerald has brought his significant udder’

On the forgotten road

PATRICK BARKHAM

The Lost Paths: A History of How We Walk from Here to There

By Jack Cornish

Michael Joseph £20

‘An old path electrifies weary legs,’ wrote Alfred Barron. That must be one reason for the increasing number of sprightly walkers afoot in Britain. There are 140,000 miles of officially recognised footpaths weaving through England and Wales – and many are far older than our most fêted ancient monuments.

Unlike monuments such as standing stones, these path portals into our past are still used in exactly the same way as they always were, trodden by the feet of people on the move.

The reasons they are walked on, however, are today usually completely different, as Jack Cornish reveals in this fascinating history of path-making and path-taking in England and Wales.

Long-enduring paths have been created by the military, for conquest; by aristocrats and enclosers of land; by

miners, pall-bearers, pilgrims and tramps; by town planners, profit-makers and protesters.

Cornish enjoyed walking from Land’s End to John o’Groats so much that he turned it into a day job. He became paths campaigner for the Ramblers charity. He walks many of these paths, including one of the earliest, the Sweet Track. It’s named after peat-cutter Ray Sweet, who discovered a neolithic walkway across the boggy Somerset Levels, made from staves of hazel, ash and elm. It’s a shame – but understandable – that Cornish couldn’t get to walk the oldest known path, a 6,000-year-old trackway discovered in the grounds of Belmarsh Prison.

Through his many rambles, Cornish tells in themed chapters how many different types of path were walked into being. I would have enjoyed a little more atmosphere from his explorations, but our guide excels at historic story-telling.

Cornish’s account of medieval drove roads is characteristically compelling. These are often our most beautiful green lanes today, because of their ample width and the diversity of life in their verges.

It was not only cows and sheep that were driven miles by skilled drovers who knitted as they walked. Pigs (slow strollers), geese and turkeys (given walking boots by having their feet dipped in tar and covered in sand) were brought to market in astonishing numbers. Daniel Defoe recorded 150,000 turkeys strutting their way from Norfolk to London in 1724.

The building of turnpikes characterised an era of path privatisation, a success in its own terms. In 1700, it took an average of 90 hours to travel from London to Manchester. By the 1780s, this had fallen to 24 hours, thanks to the new turnpikes and the coaches – Quicksilver, Greyhound, Comet – that thundered along them.

Every new kind of route-making has created opportunities for new paths and shut down old ways. Turnpikes deprived locals of traditional paths and free passage. Unrest greeted the new roads, such as the Rebecca Riots in Wales in 1839-43, when protesting men dressed in petticoats and wigs made from ferns and horsehair.

Turnpikes were eventually ‘disturnpiked’ and superseded by rail, which again challenged old paths.

London’s first railway, from London Bridge to Greenwich, actually included a pedestrian boulevard, running alongside the tracks elevated on more than 800 arches through south-east London. Unfortunately, this boon for

pedestrians was soon replaced by a third railway track. More commonly, new railways severed ancient rights of way, and continue to do so. Network Rail has closed more than 1,200 level crossings in the past decade. In many cases, foot crossings are obliterated without footbridges or viable alternatives.

In one sense, we live in a golden age of walking. The government is completing a coastal path around England’s vast coastline. There are one million more recreational walkers than there were five years ago. And 23 million people in England now walk for leisure at least once a month. As farmers know only too well, narrow field-edge paths have become wide droves for dogs since the pandemic lockdowns.

And yet threats to our paths remain. ‘Of all the mean and wicked things a landlord can do,’ John Ruskin declared, ‘shutting up his footpath is the nastiest.’

Cornish is a rambler who has masterminded the charity’s Don’t Lose Your Way campaign. He is seeking to register officially an estimated 49,000 miles of historic footpaths currently not on the map, before the government’s 2031 deadline. So he’s alive to today’s battles for paths.

Apart from motorways, railways, bad landlords and avarice, probably the biggest cause of lost paths is one that Cornish doesn’t make a big deal of. One theme that emerges from his walks is how few people he encounters, especially on strolls beyond National Park honeypots.

It’s obvious: without walkers, paths disappear. Cornish’s celebration of our grand wealth of historic ways, and the different motivations for walking over the centuries, is a worthy clarion call for us to keep treading paths – so we don’t lose our way.

Patrick Barkham is The Oldie’s walking correspondent

‘It’s a bill’

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Irish emigrant’s lament JASPER REES

Long Island Colm Tóibín

Picador £20

If you really squint, the chasm between Colm Tóibín and Simon Bates can shrink to nothing.

Imagine the ardent strings of Radio 1’s Our Tune sawing away under the story of a teenage girl from provincial Ireland sent by ship across the Atlantic to find work in 1950s Brooklyn. There, at a dance, she falls for a lovely Italian boy and is soon welcomed into the bosom of his large, loud family.

They marry in secret, but suddenly her sister dies and she must sail home, where she spends the summer falling for a lovely Irish boy. Desperately torn, will she stay or will she go?

That is the plot of Brooklyn (2009), whose superficial resemblance to an Our Tune weepie perhaps helped it all the way to the Academy Awards. It ends with Eilis Lacey, who is actually a Fiorello, abandoning Enniscorthy when news of her secret union follows her home.

Long Island moves the story 20 years on. Eilis has long lived in an oppressively tight-knit compound, cheek by jowl with her husband Tony’s wider family, in villagey Lindenhurst.

Her two teenage children have nothing Irish about them, and she has gladly recused herself from the ‘pure babble’ of hyper-Neapolitan Sunday lunches from which she feels excluded.

On page one, exclusion threatens to become full-on estrangement. A very angry man arrives to tell Eilis that his wife has been knocked up by her husband, and that the unwanted child will be left on her doorstep just as soon as it’s born.

Eilis’s in-laws insinuate that she must accept the baby’s appearance among them. Adamant that she won’t, she seizes on her mother’s imminent 80th birthday to escape home to Enniscorthy – now reachable by plane – for the first time since she absconded all those years ago. Her kids will follow.

The title is a double entendre. In the Long Island where she has made her new life, Eilis is herself the island, detached from the mainland that is squalling Italo-America. Her in-laws ‘thought it strange for someone to spend her life so far away from her family. In their world, people came to America in groups’.

Likewise, ‘it struck Eilis as strange how little they all knew about her’.

Enniscorthy – innis meaning island – is a different sort of island, where memory is long and egress hard. While Vietnam and Nixon are the current noises off in America, there’s little to suggest Eilis’s Ireland has moved on from the fifties.

Arriving back to a town that has stood still, she is an alien, sleeker and somehow purer, healthier and – thanks to a gift from her brother-in-law – seemingly wealthier than anyone she left behind.

The church and the pub are still where everything and nothing happens. Gossip still seeps through streets as if on a mycorrhizal network. Eilis’s mother, a widow awaiting eternal reunion with her late husband, is coldly incurious about her daughter’s foreign life.

Meanwhile, Jim Farrell, the quiet beau abandoned by Eilis all those years ago, remains unmarried. The complication is that he and Nancy Sheridan, Eilis’s now widowed best friend from yesteryear, are enjoying a furtive dalliance and very quietly plan matrimony. ‘We all have our secrets,’ Nancy tells a nosy old woman.

Enter Eilis, the double exile, and cue up Our Tune

In The Master (on Henry James) and The Magician (Thomas Mann), Tóibín explored the inner lives of gay male monoliths. The men on the home turf of his Irish fiction, dead or drunk or deprived of agency, are made of feebler stuff.

Jim, like Tony, is a creature of female will who ‘had let his life pass him by in a way that Eilis had not; Nancy had not’.

There’s plenty of female will to go round in Enniscorthy, as in Lindenhurst. A dressmaker in Dublin calls the shots for Nancy when her daughter is to wed. Nora Webster bustles in confidently from her own eponymous novel.

That it’s Tóibín’s women who make things happen is axiomatic. Eilis’s selfmade brother does try to force events, but then he’s a self-made émigré. So too is the brother-in-law, a rich closeted lawyer safely resettled in Manhattan.

Tóibín listens in on the dreams and fears of Eilis, Nancy and Jim, holding out for the moment of outright drama when one of them will spurn paralysis and subtext, turning private thought into urgent action.

It’s deeply pleasing to see Eilis reanimated in an immaculate sequel, and it gives nothing away to hope for the completion of a trilogy.

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

Until you’re known in my profession as a monster, you’re not a star.

Bette Davis

The world has lost a comic genius. I’ve lost my best friend.

Stan Laurel on Oliver Hardy’s death in 1957

The body is like a car: the older you become, the more care you have to take care of it – and you don’t leave a Ferrari out in the sun.

Joan Collins

All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment convince me that, in what I have done, I have not prevented a single murder.

Albert Pierrepoint (1905-92), English hangman

We talk about it for 20 minutes and then we decide I was right.

Brian Clough on listening to players’ opinions

The Prime Minister must realise that in this country there is a taunt, on everyone’s lips, that if Rommel had been in the British Army, he would still have been a sergeant.

Nye Bevan

The bagging area

There’s something joyful about the self-checkout. Maybe the lack of gigantic trolleys in the queue. Perhaps the promise of no human interaction.

Ultimately, it offers the ability to whizz straight through. But all this comes with downsides. Serious ones.

Commonplace Corner

Never favour those who flatter you most, but hold rather to those who risk your displeasure for your own good.

E H Gombrich

Discretion is the polite word for hypocrisy.

Christine Keeler

I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.

Alexander the Great

I truly hate the bagging area. It’s an annoying name for starters – complete with an irritating robotic voice – and, to my easily befuddled self, can be hard to distinguish from the basket area. Only basket area isn’t a term. Whatever. I’m always putting my basket on the wrong side and this personal stupidity drives me wild.

Then, directly over the bagging area – on the more modern machines, at least –there’s a tiny little camera and screen showing confused old me. There I am mixing up bags and baskets, struggling to find things like peppers on the menu.

The bagging area has rubbish opinions, too – such as demanding approval for non-alcoholic beers. This

I love the camera and it loves me. Well, not very much sometimes. But we’re good friends.

Dirk Bogarde

Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind and your soul are revealed by your actions.

Agatha Christie

The lack of money is the root of all evil.

Mark Twain

The simple lack of her is more to me than others’ presence.

Edward Thomas

I can’t complain that I’ve had a public all through my writing life, but people don’t quite know what I’ve written. People don’t read you too closely. Perhaps, after I’ve died, they’ll look at my stuff, and read it through, and find there’s more in it. That may be wrong, but that’s what I comfort myself with.

Alan Bennett, who turned 90 on 9th May

Money is like manure. You have to spread it around or it smells.

J Paul Getty

leaves me both fuming and crossly twiddling my thumbs – while the little video spotlights my demented mutterings – and a tutting line of other customers desperate to have their own poor bagging-area experiences lengthens behind me.

The biggest – and most problematic – opinion of the bagging area is its anger at

SMALL DELIGHTS

Putting on dry socks after being caught in a torrential downpour.

DAVID GIBSON, THESSALONIKI, GREECE

Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

my items for simply being there. ‘Unexpected item in the bagging area,’ it squeals in a fit of pique at the recently scanned pepper. ‘Please wait for assistance,’ it adds like a threat. Lift that pepper. Put it back down. Lift it up higher. Put it on the scales. Go back to the bagging area. Cross my fingers that this is enough to mollify a very hard taskmaster. Bingo. With a spot of luck, I’m through. I just have to let the bagging area graciously take my money and kindly allow me to leave.

It’s all such a shame. The self-checkout is such a nifty invention. It must save so much time. But I wish there was a way of getting round that sodding bagging area. It drives me absolutely wild.

KATHRYN CAVE

Star power: Bette Davis, 1932

It was all Greek to Gladstone

Victorian Prime Ministers knew the only way forwards was backwards

david horspool

Recent reports of a boom in primaryschool Latin may be exaggerated.

It turns out that the impressivesounding 400 schools that teach the language make up a less impressive 2.8 per cent of the total. French and Spanish still, quite sensibly, rule OK.

Latin’s revival, however small, could have as much to do with politics as linguistics. The two languages it has overtaken are German and Mandarin.

I was quite surprised that German was taught much to under-13s at all, while Mandarin’s popularity always seemed faddish, a bit of wishful thinking to match George Osborne’s eyelashfluttering at the People’s Republic.

If tots learn their lingo, the idea seemed to be, when they grow up, they’ll be in prime position to take advantage of all those massive business opportunities opened up by Mr Osborne in Wuhan, or something.

Osborne’s prime minister, David Cameron, was nervous about Latin, refusing to attempt a translation of Magna Carta on American TV.

But if we lamented the decline of classical knowledge in our leaders then, we didn’t seem particularly impressed when the blushing Boris Johnson dropped Homeric epithets – or declaimed reams of the Iliad – in public. He was suspected of using his classical knowledge simply to show off.

Other PMs didn’t foist their specialist learning on the electorate. Mrs Thatcher knew better than to treat us to the fruits of her experience as a research chemist.

She did like to tell the story of one of her predecessors, W E Gladstone, meeting Michael Faraday, and asking him whether his work on electricity would be of any use. ‘Yes, sir,’ replied Faraday. ‘One day you will tax it.’

Gladstone himself was a devoted classicist. But, like Johnson, he found his political opponents were not necessarily impressed. When he was reported in

1872 to have told a society that ‘every day must begin for me with my old friend Homer’, unkind people suggested that he was more interested in the Iliad than in his proper job, which, at the time, was as Prime Minister. Gladstone wrote to the Spectator to explain that he spent less than 15 minutes a day on Homer.

We are used to being astonished by the productiveness of our forefathers. All that time not tweeting, doing housework or looking after the kids, I suppose.

Still, the fact that Gladstone could churn out five volumes on his old friend, including the three-volume Homer and the Homeric Age in 1858 (between stints as Chancellor of the Exchequer), leaves you reeling.

He intended that book to ‘avoid Scholarship, on account of inability’. Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, gave his scholarly reaction to Gladstone’s efforts anyway: ‘a mere nonsense’. Lord Tennyson wasn’t much kinder, calling the book ‘hobbyhorsical’. Its three volumes are now generally reduced to his thoughts on the Greeks’ conception of colour, which he speculated was narrower than ours.

Actually, that remains a moot point. Wikipedia will tell you that the Greeks had no word for ‘blue’, though they don’t say what colour they think the serpent on Achilles’s shield was. Homer calls it kyaneos, which my Greek dictionary translates as ‘dark blue’ – from which we get ‘cyan’.

Gladstone made a distinction between his Homeric hobby and his day job. A future Prime Minister to whom he gave his first ministerial role, H H Asquith, though a distinguished fellow classicist, saved his classical learning for his diary, after moving into law and politics.

But other politicians have made more direct use of their classical learning. Let’s leave aside Enoch Powell, who misrepresented Virgil when speechifying about the ‘Roman’ who saw the Tiber

‘foaming with much blood’ (the words are actually spoken by the priestess of Apollo at Cumae, who was Greek). A more palatable – and infinitely more politically successful – case is Lord Derby, the longest-serving party leader in modern British history, and Prime Minister on three occasions.

Derby had a reputation as a sportsman, a good shot who was devoted to the turf – though he never actually owned a horse that won the race named after his grandfather, the 12th Earl, or the one named after his house, the Oaks. When it came to classics of the other kind, however, Derby was a serious contender. While still at Eton, he abridged Herodotus and Livy.

He thought ancient poets and historians provided a ‘pure and crystal fountain’, from which a politician could draw ‘copious diction, high sentiment and masculine thought’. Not, perhaps, a recipe for political success today, but ambrosia to the Victorians.

He was the only Prime Minister with a translation of the Iliad to his name, completed in blank verse, during what he called ‘the intervals of more urgent business’. When resigning from the Cabinet on a point of principle, Derby thought nothing of casually quoting Horace (and obviously expected his colleagues to understand him).

If those Latin-learning primary-school pupils persist, one day we might have another such leader, who hasn’t had to attend Eton to make use of a classical education.

Gladstone’s old friend Homer, by John Tenniel

FEW PLACES LEFT

Founded in 1739, Coram is the first and longest continuing children’s charity. We have evolved from the eighteenth century Foundling Hospital, to a forward thinking, dynamic and modern group of specialist children’s charities, directly supporting over 140,000 children, young people and families every year.

In England, an estimated 2.3 million children are living with risk because of a vulnerable family background. 1

We bring expert knowledge from across the sector to make a difference day-by-day and childby-child and push for systematic change to make a real and lasting positive impact on children’s chances. We fight for justice

OVER 140,000 CHILDREN

through our legal work to improve children’s rights. We bring together loving families through adoption and enable children to shine through our education programmes. Inspired by children and young people’s voices, we galvanise professionals and the Government to improve childhood for all children.

We know that you share our vision to ensure that all children, have the love and opportunity they need to thrive.

Find out more about creating better chances for children by visiting coram.org.uk or by scanning the QR code.

1 The Children’s Commissioner’s 2019 childhood vulnerability report.

Coram Campus, 41 Brunswick Square, London WC1N 1AZ

Phone: 020 7520 0330 fundraising@coram.org.uk The Thomas Coram Foundation for Children (registered charity no. 312278) was established by Royal Charter in 1739.

Join us at the Reid’s Palace hotel for a tour of Madeira

Celebrate the end of a British winter and discover the colour, warmth and tastes of Madeira while based in the famous Reid’s Palace hotel, where Churchill stayed in 1950. Gerald Luckhurst will be showing us around the more famous gardens and sharing his tremendous knowledge of the island.

Wednesday 2nd April – arrival Depart from London to Funchal (flights TBC). Transfer to Reid’s Palace hotel.

Thursday 3rd April – Funchal

Leisurely stroll through the historic centre – taking in the main shopping street and the cathedral – to the Mercado des Lavradores:

Friday 4th April – Boa Vista and Blandy’s Wine Lodge

2nd to 9th April 2025

Right:

Saturday 5th April – Monte

Sunday 6th April – Blandy estate at Palheiro

The extensive subtropical gardens, first acquired by John Blandy in 1885, have been continually developed by the family.

Visit the lush subtropical Monte Palace gardens. Lunch at the Quinta do Monte hotel.

Monday 7th April – island tour, mountains and north coast

A day exploring the island’s rich botanic and geographical diversity.

Tuesday 8th April – lunch by sea at Vila do Peixe, which has fabulous views of pretty Câmara de Lobos

Wednesday 9th April – departure

Full itinerary at www.theoldie. co.uk/courses-tours

HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 or please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Price per person: £3,750, which includes all meals, wine with meals, transport and entrances. You need to book and pay for your own Eurostar tickets. Single supplement: £1,200. A non-refundable deposit of £750 will be required, with the full balance due on 1st January 2025.

Above: Reid’s Palace hotel.

Madeira Botanical Gardens

FILM HARRY MOUNT

MADE IN ENGLAND: THE FILMS OF POWELL AND PRESSBURGER (12A)

It takes an outsider to spot the best – and worst – things about the British.

When that outsider is Martin Scorsese, you’re in for a treat. Scorsese, a Times Literary Supplement subscriber, could have been a terrific film critic if he hadn’t been such a terrific film director.

Because of a strange licensing issue, US films weren’t shown on postwar American TV but British films were. And so Scorsese (b 1942) grew up watching British movies – in particular, the delightful work of Michael Powell (1905-90) and Emeric Pressburger (1902-88).

Scorsese became so obsessed with Powell that when he came to England in the 1970s, he tracked him down to a small Gloucestershire cottage. Powell was in penury, after his films had gone out of fashion. Scorsese befriended him and – though he’s too modest to say it – revived his career.

Powell moved to Hollywood as a consultant and married Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s long-term film editor. He also gave Scorsese informal advice on his films. When Powell saw Mean Streets (1973), he said he got ‘tired of the red’. That’s a bit rich, coming from the director of The Red Shoes (1948).

But Scorsese continued to admire him, as did his fellow Americans Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma. How funny that the charming, hyper-British films of Powell and Pressburger should influence those American bloodbath classics The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Scarface and Carlito’s Way.

The poignant Scorsese-Powell friendship bookends the film – but the movie is really about the marvellous Powell-Pressburger partnership.

Arts

In background, they were chalk and cheese. Powell was a middle-class Kent boy, who went to Dulwich College and King’s School, Canterbury – next to the cathedral that figures so prominently in A Canterbury Tale (1944). Powell learnt his craft in the 1920s with Rex Ingram and Alfred Hitchcock, and churned out quota quickies in the early 1930s.

Pressburger brought to the partnership all the originality of the genius outsider. Jewish, born in Hungary, he wrote scripts in Germany and France, fleeing Berlin and Nazi persecution in 1935. Pressburger said he was ‘born at the age of 33’, when he came to Britain and restarted his career in a different country and a different language.

Thanks to Alexander Korda (producer of The Third Man – see page 18), Pressburger met Powell on their first collaboration, The Spy in Black (1939), about German U-boat sailors in the Orkneys in the First World War.

And so their unique, almost telepathic link was forged. Pressburger wrote the scripts and Powell directed them; they produced them together. In archive footage shot in their old age, Powell speaks in urbane, diffident English; Pressburger with a thick accent. You can sense their strong link, as they smile at each other’s

reminiscences – they never had a cross word in 20 years’ working together.

This is really a film for Powell and Pressburger fans. If you are one, you’ll share Scorsese’s enthusiasms. He was thrilled by their nitrate colour prints, used to produce intense, saturated colours.

Watching The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), the young Scorsese was blown away by the duel between Blimp (Roger Livesey) and Theo KretschmarSchuldorff (Anton Walbrook). The film concentrates on the build-up rather than the duel itself. He used this technique in Raging Bull (1980), focusing on Jake LaMotta’s long walk to the ring.

Scorsese shows how subversive the Powell-Pressburger films were, for all their ultra-Britishness. Powell hated being ‘tied to facts’ – thus the dreariness of their conventional war films, The Battle of the River Plate (1956) and Ill Met by Moonlight (1957). As Pressburger put it, the two of them ‘set traps to capture magic’.

A Matter of Life and Death (1946) is full of magic tricks: the frozen moments where the cast stands still while David Niven is caught in limbo between life and death; filming heaven in bleak black-andwhite, with the joy of real life captured in three-strip Technicolor. The technical side wasn’t easy either: the stairway to heaven took three months to build.

Scorsese takes you through the technical side of film-making without blinding you with science. Take the ‘composed film’ technique, pioneered in Black Narcissus (1947). Ten minutes were devoted just to music, without words, with the movie filmed round the music, rather than the music being fitted to the movie.

‘All art is one,’ Powell said of the combination of his influences. And Scorsese is the ideal guide to the PowellPressburger art of dreamlike, magical film-making.

Heavenly: Powell films David Niven in A Matter of Life and Death, 1946

THEATRE

WILLIAM COOK

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 24th August

Hip hip hooray! After seeing so many Shakespearean productions in modern costume – often daft or dreary – I found it a nice change to see one played as it should be played, in traditional Elizabethan dress.

When it comes to staging Shakespeare, contemporary clothing tends to be the hallmark of a pretentious, experimental production. Period dress is a good indication that the show will remain faithful to the script. In this beautiful replica theatre, built on almost the same spot where Shakespeare’s dramas were first performed, doublet and hose should be obligatory. The Globe should be a refuge from tedious reinterpretations of his plays.

If the actors are wearing Elizabethan garb, you can be fairly sure you’re in for an enjoyable evening. Sure enough, this conventional Much Ado About Nothing is consistently entertaining. If it weren’t for some eccentric casting, I might say it was one of the best versions I’ve seen.

This is the second time in two years that Shakespeare’s Globe has tackled Much Ado. Two years ago, director Lucy Bailey transported this caustic comedy to the 1940s, which spawned some awkward anachronisms. This time, Sean Holmes returns it to the 1590s. Consequently, it plays much better.

Like a lot of Shakespearean comedies, the story is an unlikely muddle. Don Pedro and his victorious troops return from war, intent on merrymaking but, rather than carousing in the bars and brothels, they confine their revels to matchmaking, uniting Benedick with Beatrice and Claudio with Hero.

If Beatrice and Benedick are two of the best-drawn characters in Shakespeare, Hero and Claudio are among the worst. In every Much Ado I’ve seen, when Beatrice and Benedick are onstage, we’re absolutely riveted. When it’s Hero and Claudio’s turn, we’re glancing surreptitiously at our watches.

The reason is simple. Beatrice and Benedick are reluctant lovers, seduced against their better instincts. Hero and Claudio are instantly smitten. So there’s no drama, until Shakespeare introduces one of his more improbable plotlines, conjuring up at the altar a false accusation of bridal infidelity.

It’s always amusing watching liberal directors struggle with this misogynistic

twist. Yes, Claudio is upset when he hears that Hero has died of shock, but he still agrees to marry a total stranger the next day. When he discovers that this stranger is Hero, and that she isn’t a shag-happy strumpet after all, everyone laughs it off, including Hero’s father, Leonato. He didn’t hesitate to denounce his own daughter (on the flimsiest evidence) the day before.

Shakespeare had great sympathy with women, and terrific insight into the female mind, but he was a man of his age, an age when women were the sexual property of their menfolk. In Much Ado, these paradoxical attitudes, incompatible to the modern mind, co-exist within the same play.

Lydia Fleming and Adam Wadsworth do their best as Hero and Claudio, but any Much Ado stands or falls on its Beatrice and Benedick. This, I’m sad to say, is this show’s Achilles’ heel. Amalia Vitale and Ekow Quartey find laughs in almost every line, but their squabbles seem like sibling rivalry. I sensed no sexual chemistry between them; no erotic tension in the air.

While Vitale’s scatty Beatrice

convinced me, to my mind Quartey’s Benedick simply doesn’t look the part. He’s a fine Shakespearean actor, and his verse-speaking is superb, but he’s a big, broad bloke, towering over Vitale. Surely not even his biggest fan would say he’s an obvious romantic lead.

Lovers come in all shapes and sizes but if Shakespeare had written this part for a character actor, it’d be a different part and a different play.

Why are Beatrice and Benedick so loath to wed? Because they’ve both been around the block a few times. So they’re smart enough to know that love is usually a fool’s errand. Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh did it best in the brilliant 1993 movie. I found this Benedick too shy and bashful.

Although in another rendition such a flaw might be fatal, this cast’s unbridled bonhomie carries all before them. All the supporting parts – so often cardboard cut-outs – come alive. Even the songs and dances (typically the most boring bits of Shakespeare) are delightful.

If it’s in doublet and hose, whatever its faults, it’ll probably turn out OK.

A skirmish of wit: Benedick (Ekow Quartey) and Beatrice (Amalia Vitale)

RADIO VALERIE GROVE

Now that the old Roberts radio has been replaced by BBC Sounds and podcasts, how very odd the Edwardian tones of Beatrice Harrison seem.

‘I used to wander about the garden at night, you know, with a cello. And, one night, when I’d been playing for hours, I suddenly heard the note of the most heavenly bird I’d ever heard. Next day, a dear old gardener said in great excitement, “The nightingale is back again”.’

This is how Beatrice became the lady of Radio 3’s The Cello and the Nightingale exactly 100 years ago.

She was one of four musically gifted sisters who lived in Sussex, with a 13th-century barn in the garden and a bluebell wood where the bird seemed to echo the notes of the cello – a rich litany of sounds. The resulting outside broadcast became the first-ever radio hit. They say no work was done on the Stock Exchange next day, as everyone was talking about it. Miss Harrison reprised it for 10 years – once accompanied by Lancaster bombers – and no, the BBC did not have to hire a siffleur, a birdimitator, as was once alleged.

Reith called this broadcast an ‘instrument of national uplift and enlightenment’. This year, the cellist Kate Kennedy successfully repeated the experiment. In the dark, in deep woodland, the rapturous song arrives.

The breezy Radio 4 feature Am I Home? about life in a dementia village confronted a current tragedy. So did Catherine Carr’s series for Radio 4, About the Boys. I’d just watched three small grandsons scampering about – inventing fun, performing sweet acts of kindness.

Must they morph into teenage boys one day and become a puzzle and a threat to civilised life? Remember the shepherd in A Winter’s Tale – ‘I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty … for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.’ ’Twas ever thus. An enormous and complex topic.

Carr, an excellent interviewer (particularly in the series Where Are You Going?), is accustomed to stopping strangers. The mother of two teenage sons, she talked to boys in deprived neighbourhoods – ‘Druggies, stabbings and stuff round here,’ they said.

There were also sweet boys, who wondered exactly how they get to have sex. It’s so ‘scary’ to negotiate sex-andconsent – ‘If you get accused of rape, it’s awful.’ And the girls chorus, ‘Kill all men,’

at least five times a day. They have to ‘be kind’ and ‘know about periods’.

I wish Quentin Blake’s Zagazoo could be given to all new parents of baby boys: the baby turns into a rampaging, hairy monster before suddenly one day coming home with a charming smile and a girl on his arm. Fanciful, but often true.

Radio 3’s Words and Music offered a wildly varied compendium of Betjemania 40 years after the poet’s death. It included a letter from Harold Wilson’s Secretary for Appointments about the new Poet Laureate in 1967, advising the PM that JB’s ‘aroma of lavender and faint musk’ made him ‘much too nostalgic and backward-looking’ to be the right choice.

But how strong was that voice, reading his own prophetic words: ‘We spray the seeds and scatter/ the poison on the ground’. He pinpointed in caricature a young executive who sneaks planning deals into ‘quiet market towns’.

He is brilliant on the murder of railway branch lines, inspiring Flanders and Swann’s Slow Train. When he sent Jock Murray his last poems, he wrote, ‘Sixteen are concerned with death and self-pity. I expect soon to be unfashionable and forgotten.’

Not quite yet, dear JB.

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON

For light relief, turn to Baby Reindeer (Netflix), the psychological horror show dominating the British news.

Written by and starring Richard Gadd, the events described are not, we are told, based on a true story. They are a true story, which Gadd is reliving.

Martha starts stalking Donny (Gadd) after he offered her a cup of tea in the Camden pub where he worked. Donny, an unsuccessful stand-up comedian, is initially flattered by her attention but he also identifies with her. Martha is lonely and damaged and so, we realise, is he.

Martha turns up at Donny’s shows, attacks his girlfriend, throws a glass in

his face, camps outside his house, besieges his parents and sends him 41,071 emails, 744 tweets and 350 hours’ worth of voicemails. At the same time that his life is being ruined by Martha, Donny grows dependent on her, missing her when she’s not there.

He catalogues and replays her voicemails, and masturbates over a naked photo she leaves in his bedroom. He turns Martha’s harassment of him into the comedy routine that evolved into this Netflix show. Donnie and Martha, currently the most famous couple on the planet, will be yoked together for the rest of time, like Pablo and Francesca in the wind tunnel of Dante’s Inferno.

Baby Reindeer is agonising to watch and brilliantly written, with a crackingly good Martha, played by Jessica Gunning; no wonder Stephen King is one of Richard Gadd’s biggest fans.

The fact that the show has turned its viewers into stalkers themselves is hardly surprising. Martha’s real identity was quickly uncovered as Fiona Harvey, a Scottish lawyer. She was then invited onto Piers Morgan Uncensored, where she denied Gadd’s version of events. She sent maybe ten emails; she did not, as Gadd claims, go to prison.

‘I think he always wanted this to come out,’ Harvey told Morgan, ‘to persecute someone…’ Either Gadd’s lying or Harvey’s lying, but there’s no doubt about who is now harassing whom.

Gadd, says Fiona Harvey, has ‘extreme psychiatric problems’, which we already know because they are the subject of Baby Reindeer, which Harvey apparently hasn’t seen.

‘Leave me alone, please,’ she says when Piers Morgan asks her to speak directly to Gadd. ‘Get a life. Get a proper job.’

The next time we see her, Fiona Harvey will doubtless be eating monkey’s testicles on I’m a C elebrity…

Storyville’s The Gullspång Miracle: A Nordic Mystery (BBC4), set in Sweden, begins with two devout sisters, Kari and May.

No longer young, they whizz and bounce down a water slide in a plastic whale. May damages her coccyx and is unable to travel back to Norway. So they decide to find an apartment in the municipality of Gullspång.

Hanging on the kitchen wall of a flat they are viewing is a painting of fruit exactly like the one May has been looking for in flea markets. On either side of it are two other pictures.

‘It’s the fact that there were three,’ says Kari, her brown eyes shining down

Donny (Richard Gadd) in Baby Reindeer

the barrel of the camera. ‘It was a blessing. Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’

Taking it as a sign that they should buy the flat, they then discover that the seller, Olaug, is the spitting image of their third sister, Lita, who killed herself 30 years ago. A DNA test proves that Olaug, who has a rocker’s hairstyle from the 1970s and wears one long feather earring, is in fact Lita’s identical twin –separated from her at birth, because the Nazis were then experimenting on twins.

As far as May and Kari are concerned, it’s a miracle: Lita has come back to them. Her own life, Olaug realises, has so far been a lie, and she starts to believe that Lita’s suicide is also a lie. Kari now sees a snake, which she takes as a sign that Olaug is ‘a snake person’.

So she and May recruit the director Maria Fredriksson to make this grim and grindingly slow film.

Every scene is reconstructed to within an inch of its life. Kari and May return to the fatal plastic whale, climb back inside it and once again go screaming down the water slide. We are shown half a dozen takes, in which they walk into the kitchen of the new apartment and see ‘for the first time’ the fruit picture, which looks like needlepoint covered in varnish.

We are given a close-up of Lita’s eye, which is presumably identical to Olaug’s eye, while phone conversations between May and Kari about Olaug being a snake person are recreated.

The events described are certainly freaky, but not as freaky as the weird sisters themselves or Fredriksson’s style of film-making. May and Kari are like people left behind in a deserted village.

Is everyone in rural Scandinavia a religious maniac? Was the Gullspång ‘miracle’ a news story in Sweden?

Are we watching the Scandi equivalent of Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell’s Long Lost Family, or a Nordic noir?

MUSIC REVIEWER

THE ART OF THE PRODUCER

JOHN CULSHAW

One of the 20th century’s most innovative record producers, John Culshaw, was born 100 years ago this May into a modest family in coastal Merseyside. Like several historically important record producers, he was not a trained musician. He was, however, a shining example of what composer Aaron Copland called ‘the gifted listener’ – the person who marries ‘the preparation of the trained professional with the

‘Don’t you just hate it when the English are in the circus with lions’

innocence of the intuitive amateur’, without whom the work of composers and performers has no true audience.

Self-teaching was commonplace in those days, but Culshaw’s, like that of his great contemporary Walter Legge, must have been something other. An avid listener to anything he could find, he’d spent his teenage years agonising over such questions as why a Mozart piano concerto meant so much more to him than one by Liszt.

Had his father prevailed, he’d have gone on agonising as a cashier in Midland Bank. But after his call-up papers arrived in 1942, he found himself in the Fleet Air Arm, hunting German E-boats (armed motorboats) from the navy’s torpedo-laden open biplane, the Swordfish bomber.

To soothe his nerves, the young lad played complete concertos in his mind. When his Swordfish was hit near Zeebrugge, he limped home with no radio or compass, and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 23 in A going round and round in his head. It would never sound quite the same again.

No one who knew Culshaw doubted

that his wartime training contributed hugely to his skills as a record producer. These included his genius as a teambuilder, and that hard-won sense of calm with which he was famously able to deal with technical crises and the anxieties of world-famous musicians.

In March 1945, the 20-year-old aviator had an article accepted by The Gramophone on Sergei Rachmaninoff, who’d died in 1943. His byline was ‘S/Lieut (A) John R Culshaw, RNVR’ and, my goodness, it was – still is! – a terrific piece of writing. No wonder the paper’s London editor, Cecil Pollard, moved heaven and earth to rescue John from banking. In the end, he landed a £5-a-week editorial position with Decca Records, whose revolutionary high-fidelity ffrr (full frequency range recording) technique had itself been developed to track wartime submarines.

It was a job he nearly lost on day one. Told, in error, to contact Vera Lynn, he was subjected to a torrent of abuse from the National Treasure, who then tried, unsuccessfully, to get him sacked for having the temerity to telephone her. By 1948, Culshaw was working as

a producer. And it’s the recordings he oversaw in his apprentice years, 1948-56, that Decca’s Dominic Fyfe has brought together in a superbly documented 12-CD centenary box, John Culshaw: The Art of the Producer

The set throws important light on why Culshaw achieved what he did – not least his revolutionising the art of opera-recording in the stereophonic age. Disc 4, Bayreuth 1951 & 1953, charts the highs and lows of live opera recording, a medium Culshaw instinctively loathed. As someone who learned from other people’s mistakes, he dreamt up the idea of elaborate studio recordings which delivered the operatic stage directly to the listener’s living room.

Most of the recordings were made in Vienna, including the Karajan Aida (1959) and the famous Wagner Ring cycle (1958-65) conducted by George Solti, whose long-standing debt to Culshaw is charted here.

There are the seeds, too, of Culshaw’s vast legacy of Britten recordings, in particular the brilliantly multilayered 1963 recording of the War Requiem. That was made in London’s Kingsway Hall, where Culshaw would also stage thrilling accounts with George Szell and the LSO of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and Brahms’s First Piano Concerto with Clifford Curzon as soloist. Early recordings with both Curzon and Szell are included here, as are such gems as Haydn symphonies directed by the Danish master Mogens Wöldike, and Carl Nielsen’s ‘playing with dynamite’ First Symphony in a famous recording under Thomas Jensen.

But it’s the rarities and oddball recordings that may most appeal to older collectors. I think of Grace Williams’s delightful Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes, recorded in 1948 by the LSO under Mansel Thomas, a celebrated composer-conductor in his day. Or

composer, conductor and senior NBC radio producer Don Gillis’s sensationally recorded 1940 tone poem Portrait of a Frontier Town.

Among now largely forgotten singers, there’s Ellabelle Davis, a trailblazer for Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price, singing spirituals like few others.

And if you’ve never heard a singer attempt a B flat three octaves above middle C, go to Mado Robin’s disc of mad scenes from operas by Donizetti and Ambroise Thomas. (‘Mado Goes Mad’ was the American billing.) It’s a stunt. And who doesn’t love a stunt?

GOLDEN OLDIES

MARK ELLEN

HOLLYWOOD MEN

Forty years ago, something happened that hadn’t since the ascent of the Beatles.

One group – also Liverpudlians –dominated Britain’s radio, charts and pop and national press coverage for 12 months solid. They sold eye-watering quantities of singles, with three Number Ones in succession. They were never off the telly. They shipped tons of merchandise and Katharine Hamnettfashioned T-shirts. And then, a little less like the Beatles, they almost completely disappeared.

Everything about Frankie Goes to Hollywood epitomised the mid-’80s, a decade of flamboyance, controversy, experiment, big gestures and revolutionary recordings.

Their second single – 40 years ago – was the anti-war protest Two Tribes, featuring an extract from a ’70s public-information film about nuclear attack, a video with Reagan and Chernenko lookalikes in a boxing ring and Margaret Thatcher on its original sleeve.

Their first single, Relax, packaged in homoerotic artwork, was so flagrantly about adventurous gay sex that Radio 1’s Mike Read tore it off his turntable mid-play, declaring it ‘obscene’.

After this, the BBC banned it and the publicity naturally

Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Holly Johnson, 1984

propelled it to the top, its eventual sales reaching almost two million.

Even their line-up was radically different. It included one member whose principal role was purely ornamental: Paul Rutherford occasionally sang a backing vocal but he mostly just danced.

He and singer Holly Johnson were openly gay – extremely courageous at the time. The three other members (‘Nasher’ Nash, Pedro Gill and Mark O’Toole) were blokeish, beer-swilling heterosexuals in expensively styled clothing, and the band were at the sharp end of the new British pop, as far from the hairy old rock dinosaurs of the early ’70s as you could imagine.

Their producer, Trevor Horn, having heard the potential in their early ‘punkmeet-disco’ tracks, entirely rebuilt the songs using machine-driven beats, synthesisers and session musicians. One of them, Steve Howe, was the guitar wizard from the profoundly unfashionable prog-rock giants Yes.

And did it bother them? It did not. In 1985, I spent three days with Frankie at the Sanremo Music Festival and rather admired their unprecious attitude as they mimed music to which they’d barely contributed for a European TV audience of 57 million. As long as Holly appeared to lip-synch the words in time, the illusion was apparently complete. The guitarist and bass-player drunkenly strummed the wrong instruments and the drummer didn’t even turn up. They cared so little that they asked me – I can’t play the drums –to replace him, but tragically the unions wouldn’t allow it.

Still, their strategy made sense in the brave new world where far fewer singles were sold through live performance than via MTV and video. Horn made the music; they merely promoted it. Such colossal over-exposure meant the public suddenly grew tired of them and moved on, but one sublime revelation about Relax seems symbolic of the way records were now being constructed.

Holly had sung it, of course, but you’d have to listen hard to detect the others: they appeared solely as a two-second sound sample of the four of them jumping into a swimming pool.

Culshaw: revolutionised opera-recording

EXHIBITIONS

HUON MALLALIEU

FINE LINE IN MODERN DESIGN

Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, to 4th August

YOSHIDA: THREE GENERATIONS OF JAPANESE PRINTMAKING

Dulwich Picture Gallery, 19th June to 3rd November

Pitzhanger Manor was Sir John Soane’s country house, now long engulfed by Ealing in West London. The architect frequently walked there from Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He built Dulwich Gallery just after Pitzhanger. It’s interesting to compare them.

The Pitzhanger show has been curated by the leading contemporary ceramics- and glass-dealer Joanna Bird as an adjunct to London Craft Week earlier in May. She has selected 11 artists and displayed their work to make links to Soane and his life. One is Emmanuel Boos. His multinational and multicultural training included the Royal College of Art and three years as artistin-residence for the Cité de la céramique at Sèvres. His liking for glazed brick-like forms gives a nod to Soane’s background as the son of a bricklayer.

Another of Joanna Bird’s choices is Prue Cooper, whose work I love, and not just because she has been a chum since her days as a drawings dealer. Her slip-decorated, press-moulded earthenware dishes, generally inscribed with witty and wise quotations, are a delight. Another exhibitor is not only inspired by poetry, but himself a prize-

winning poet. Gregory Warren Wilson works with hand-cut layers of glass or Murano tesserae. Although they are displayed as wall pictures, they are rendered three-dimensional and sculptural by the play of light.

While making a tour of the US and Europe in 1900, Yoshida Hiroshi (1876-1950) signed the visitors’ book at Dulwich. So the gallery is an apt setting for the first British exhibition of work by his family. He was a leading proponent of the shin-hanga (new prints) movement

Clockwise from top left: Yoshida Hiroshi, Kumoi Cherry Trees, 1926; Yoshida Fujio, Yellow Iris, 1954; Hanne Heuch, Another Blue, 2023; Emmanuel Boos, Sextet, 2024

that developed out of the old ukiyo-e woodcut tradition by incorporating Western features such as the impression of light.

Hiroshi’s mother and adoptive father were also artists. Over the generations, the family has produced six more, both men and women, allowing the exhibition effectively to trace the course of Japanese printmaking through two centuries.

His granddaughter Yoshida Ayomi (born 1958) was a printmaker for 20 years before turning to room-sized installations that use traditional printmaking techniques, including prints, blocks and organic materials such as woodchip. The exhibition concludes with her new, site-specific cherry-blossom installation.

The Oldie June 2024

GARDENING

DAVID WHEELER

DREAMY MIDSUMMER

I was amused by the Oldie drinks correspondent Bill Knott’s description of a low-alcohol Vinho Verde in the Spring issue as a ‘perfect gardening wine’. So I began to think about other essentials for outdoors enjoyment in these all-too-few midsummer weeks.

Tea, supremely. Frequently. Having been successfully weaned almost 80 years ago, I forgo milk. A hefty mug of none-too-strong ‘black’ Assam suits me fine. Coffee might well dangerously inflate my blood pressure (worries about the decaff procedure steer me away from those blends) and, anyway, a flood of scented roses in full bloom right now rivals any amount of caffeine.

shade, for being out of the wind or rain or to appreciate a special view. In a bit of wild wood I’m slowly taming, I’ve left some fallen trees where, when they’re around, a mob of chums can gather while the kettle boils.

Years ago, when I was fit and 40, and my garden was measured not in acres but in feet and inches, a well-placed pew was equally essential. Where better to reflect on your day’s labour?

Where else to salute the dying day?

Perfectly sharp secateurs and shears are godsends. Nay, essential. It is Mr Knott’s use of the word ‘perfect’ that has provoked these thoughts. Let me therefore run a few roses past you, which to my eye (and nose) share that accolade:

cultivation reputation tests our horticultural skills.

David Austin has bred many newbies for his English Shrub Rose series. Three I cannot live without. ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ is rich pink and powerfully scented.

‘Munstead Wood’ (named for Jekyll’s Surrey home; sadly ‘retired’ by Austin) has a delicious fruity perfume.

‘Winchester Cathedral’ (dammit, also pensioned off – get cuttings from friends who have it) is a trouble-free whiteflowerer with good, dark, glossy foliage.

And let me put a word in for the rugosa roses. Easy, and in a good range of colours.

Now, what about a glass of Mr Knott’s ‘perfect gardening wine’? I trust his recommendation but can’t vouch for it –the Oldie office can give him my address.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

Daniel, my Man Friday, a strapping 30-year-old, knocks back several litres of water in a working day, although I like to send him home on a hot afternoon with a long slug of home-made, iced lemonade. Man Monday, on the other hand, likes an hourly cuppa and has not been known to refuse a slice of Prue Leith at any hour.

I’m an early riser, having usually dispensed with breakfast long before the seven-o’clock news – so a couple of mid-morning biscuits are much anticipated. Cake? One modest slice per day – no later than 4pm, as we now sit down to supper earlier than we used to, in the hope of better nocturnal digestion.

But that’s enough about the inner man. The physical me also has needs.

Seats. Benches. Resting places of various kinds scattered about the place. Ideally, these are situated for sun or

Double-flowered ‘Souvenir du Docteur Jamain’, a sumptuous dark crimson hybrid perpetual climber, is indispensable. Best out of direct sun, so, yes, perfect for that shady bower where you can enjoy Mr K’s glug of the Portuguese, intoxicating yourself too by the good doctor’s powerful scent. Flowers all summer long.

Rosa complicata, a wildling with large, pale pink, single flowers, covering a perfectly arching 5ft-wide shrub. Alas, not a repeat bloomer, but she’ll reward you with copious glossy hips, come those shorter autumn days.

‘Empereur du Maroc’ (I prefer its French name) is trumpeted by David Austin Roses – although they no longer stock it – as having ‘very beautiful, dark, velvety, maroon-crimson flowers [that] are fully petalled, flat and quartered with a strong fragrance’. A tricky-in-

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD LOVAGE

In the Czech Republic, it is said that a young woman going out on a date may hang a little bag of lovage round her neck – though whether as an aphrodisiac or a deodorant, I am not sure.

In Germany, lovage is called Liebstöckel, or little love stick. In Old English, an alternative word for the herb was smellage, which doesn’t sound quite so romantic. Medieval travellers would put the smellage in their shoes to take away the odour of their unwashed feet.

The smell and flavour of lovage, with leaves rather like those of celery or flat-leaved parsley, have more of a spice than celery. It can be grown from seed, but I would recommend buying a plant; once established, it will continue to thrive for years.

'Empereur du Maroc'

The leaves are at their pungent best in May and June. When the stems have reached their full height (six to eight feet), they should be cut down and will then produce another crop of fresh leaves into the autumn. The plant will die down in November, and new growth will have appeared before the clocks change at the end of March.

Until recently, lovage was rarely used in cooking in this country. It has been more popular in northern Europe and in Italy, where the dried seeds are included in bread and biscuits. But I have noticed lovage creeping into recipes in cookery books and on television. My own favourite is a cold summer soup made with finely chopped lovage leaves, stock, plenty of peas and cream. In winter, the soup can be puréed and served hot with potatoes. Lovage also goes well in a potato salad, and with Jerusalem artichokes. The herb makes a very acceptable pesto, and it has plenty of scope when used with fish. It can be stuffed inside the body of a fish, and branches of lovage will release a good aroma if placed under a fish on the barbecue. The herb goes well with strongerflavoured fish such as mackerel. In a restaurant, I once had a successful combination of lovage fritters and skate.

COOKERY

ELISABETH LUARD GATHER YE WILDFLOWERS

Silver linings, anyone?

Our unusually wet spring and straitened national circumstances might combine to preserve this year’s roadsides from the municipal lawnmower. So our native wildflowers can set seed, go forth and multiply for the benefit of those who appreciate the vigorous flavours of the wild.

Lady’s smock, ragged robin and field sorrel are all excellent in soups and salads, says Fiona Bird in The Forager’s Kitchen Handbook, the only guide you’ll ever need on a bracing holiday in the Hebrides or a damp weekend on the Sussex Downs. No need to remind Oldie-readers to forage with care and take only as much as you need. For a new-potato salad, the perfect foil for wild gatherings, choose young leaves of beech, hawthorn, hazel, birch, hedge garlic (just the leaves), nasturtium, dandelion, sorrel and pennyroyal (sparingly).

For a classic sorrel soup, potage Germiny, wilt a handful of sorrel leaves in a roomy pan with a scrap of butter, add a litre of chicken or vegetable stock and a few thin slices of potato, simmer till soft, and process or sieve till smooth.

Reheat till it’s just below boiling; then thicken with three egg yolks, whisked with half a litre of double cream. Heat gently, whisking throughout, as for a custard – don’t let it scramble. Serve chilled, with a sprinkle of fresh sorrel leaves and hot croûtons crisped in butter.

Strawberry tart with lemon curd I know, I know – a home-made tart takes time, but the combination of buttery crispness and lemony sharpness with the joyful sweetness of field-grown strawberries is irresistible. Makes a 25cm tart (or a dozen tartlets).

About 750g fresh strawberries, wiped and hulled.

175g plain flour

Pinch salt

100g very cold butter

1 tbsp caster sugar

Lemon curd

3 egg yolks and 1 whole egg

Grated zest of 4 large lemons, juice of 5

300g sugar

150g unsalted butter, diced

To finish

Thick, strained yoghurt

Berry jam or jelly

Pick over the strawberries and set aside.

Sieve the flour and salt into a cool bowl. Grate or chop in the cold butter and rub in lightly with your fingertips until it looks like fine breadcrumbs. Mix in the sugar. Working with the fingers of one hand only, add enough cold water to form a firm ball. Pat out with a floured rolling pin to fit a 25cm tart tin with a removable base. Lay the pastry in the tin without stretching it, leaving a generous lip to allow for shrinkage. Prick the base with a fork, line with foil and chill for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/Gas 5. Sprinkle a fistful of dried beans or rice on the foil. Bake the tart case for 15

minutes, remove the weighted foil, and bake for another 25 minutes or so, till the pastry is crisp and golden. Leave to cool in the tin.

Meanwhile, prepare the lemon curd: sieve the eggs into a bowl, then fork up to blend. Mix in the lemon zest and juice, butter and sugar. Place in the top of a double boiler or in a bowl over a pan of simmering water. Heat gently, stirring constantly till the mixture thickens and goes glossy. Allow to cool.

To assemble the tart: mix half the lemon curd (save the rest for breakfast) with a couple of tablespoonfuls of thick strained yoghurt, spread it over the pastry and arrange the strawberries on top, halved and with cut side down, in concentric circles. Finish with a shiny gloss of jam or jelly melted with a splash of water. Happiness!

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE MANHATTAN IN MAYFAIR

My son, Leo, is working at Arlington (formerly the Caprice).

He’s ‘front of house’. I don’t think you’re allowed to call him or any of his colleagues ‘a waiter’ any longer because that comes with the negative connotations of service, tantamount to the sort of subservience experienced by the oarsmen on Roman galleys.

And don’t even think about the French ‘ g’ word that translates as ‘boy’. I was teasing him about this, just days before he announced he was being moved to the front desk to meet and greet the likes of you. And Jeffrey Archer.

So thrilled was I about this glamorous promotion that I took him out to dinner at the Dover, named after its street in Mayfair – as opposed to the way Garrick Street is named after the multi-gender club.

It styles itself as a New York Italian bar and restaurant. Which will do very nicely. There’s an almost speakeasy-like entrance, in which a huge curtain is drawn back to reveal a long bar with young Italian men in white coats serving perfect martinis. Bogart and Bacall would approve.

After a surfeit of bar-side popcorn, we were led into the twilight dining room, which can seat only about 40 punters – 20 if they are large Americans in search of home-town delights such as mini hot dogs, spaghetti meatballs and Italian sausage pie.

We over-ordered: the bill, including bottles of Fiano (£40) and Montepulciano d’Abruzzo (£44), came to over £300. Praise be that the service

charge was only 15 per cent and not 28 per cent, as in the Big Apple.

That said, it was worth it because I am now privy to a cunning ploy. My son was moaning to the charming person at the Dover front desk that none of his young muckers can ever seem to get a table at Arlington; only the old succeed in bagging one.

And here’s why. She told us that oldies still like to telephone a restaurant, even on the day, whereas the ‘youf’ are capable of ordering only online. And the robotic reservation programme doesn’t make allowances for the fact that Mr and Mrs A-list only ever stay for 50 minutes and Ms B-list never turns up. Take that, AI!

Summer is up and we should all hurry to the Wells Tavern in Hampstead for an alfresco supper. The hostess is Oldie trip-frequenter Beth Coventry, who in her 80s manages this temple of joy. The beautiful, mid-19th-century building, which Beth restored, stands on the site of the Green Man. This tavern was the epicentre of a six-acre spa which, in 1698, Susannah Noel granted to a local board of trustees ‘for the sole use and benefit of the poor’. The land became known as the Wells Charity, taking its name from the Chalybeate Well, which boasted such strong medicinal values that, just as in Bath, everyone over-indulged to compensate.

Six of us who had been to Tuscany in October had a reunion dinner there a month later. Beth kindly treated us but she was keen to show us the menu prices, which she keeps right down, ‘so that people can afford to come’.

We feasted on starters such as lamb and coriander Scotch egg for a tenner, and mains such as onglet steak and delicious corn-fed chicken for a score. Yes, in Hampstead. Book ahead. By phone.

DRINK

BILL KNOTT

ITALY’S PEAK WINES

Twenty or so years ago, I had a splendid lunch at La Famiglia in Chelsea with the late Alvaro Maccioni. The restaurant’s illustrious owner, since the 1960s he had counted A-list celebrities not just as customers, but as friends.

While Alvaro was a proud Tuscan, his wife Letizia was from Sicily, and the couple took an annual holiday there to visit family. ‘I love it,’ he told me, ‘but the wines, especially the whites, they give me such a headache.’

He clutched his temples and took a consoling sip from an irreproachably northern glass of Gavi di Gavi.

Back then, there were some wellbalanced whites from the sunny south, but you had to look hard for them. More often, they were heady, oxidised and unbalanced, the kind of wines to match with arancini and a couple of paracetamol.

Nowadays, many winemakers, not just in Sicily but across the whole of the south of Italy, are concentrating on quality, not quantity, and standards are rising.

There are the excellent Carricantebased whites from Etna, for example, where altitude compensates for latitude, and a long ripening season leads to fresh, complex, well-structured wines with plenty of acidity. Unlike the whites that gave Alvaro a headache, they are better with a couple of years under their belts.

Altitude is also a help to winemakers in Campania, as Antonio Capaldo, president of the family-run Feudi di San Gregorio, told me. Feudi are based in mountainous Irpinia, working more than 800 vineyard plots that total around 300 hectares and rise up to 2,000 feet.

Their focus is on local varieties – the white grapes Greco di Tufo and Fiano di Avellino, as well as the black grape Aglianico – and the climate is anything but scorching. ‘It snowed four times this year,’ Capaldo told me, ‘and the annual rainfall is more than 150cm.’

He and his director of production, Pierpaolo Sirch, are strong believers in celebrating the local terroirs – though this was not always the case. ‘In the 1980s,’ he says, ‘it was a disaster here: fertilisers; vine density that was far too high. It was worse than France.’

We tasted Dubl Brut Edition II NV (greatwinesdirect.co.uk, £28.67), a terrifically fresh and peachy fizz made entirely from Greco di Tufo; Cutizzi 2022, a still Greco di Tufo with apricot and pear fruit and a squeeze of Amalfi lemon; and Pietra Calda 2022, 100-per-cent Fiano di Avellino, a little more exotic and creamy, but still with a citrussy backbone. Both the latter are widely available, for around £20 and £18 respectively.

I think Alvaro would have approved; indeed, the wine list at La Famiglia now offers both a Greco di Tufo and an Etna Bianco. At our lunch, however, he stuck to his Piemontese white as he toyed with a plate of thoroughly Tuscan spiedini – skewers of liver and bay leaf – pausing only to salute the black-suited gentleman who had installed himself at a table near the door.

‘Ciao, Terry!’ he said, raising a glass.

I looked round: it was Terence Stamp. Of course it was.

This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines, all chosen in the hope of a long, warm summer: a crisp, dry Picpoul de Pinet from France’s deep south; an easy-drinking, Provence-style rosé; and a terrific Portuguese red from a grape variety that deserves to be much better known. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Picpoul de Pinet, Terre d’Eole, France 2023, offer price

£11.50, case price

£138.00

Classic, lip-smacking Picpoul with more complexity than usual. Great with grilled seafood.

Rosé ‘Palm par l’Escarelle’, France 2023, offer price

£11.95, case price

£143.40

Pale and interesting, with hints of red fruit: the perfect rosé for the summertime fridge door.

Alfrocheiro ‘Alf’, Terra d’Alter, Portugal 2022, offer price

£13.95, case price

£167.40

Deliciously savoury, fruity red from Australian winemaker Peter Bright. Best served slightly chilled.

Mixed case price £149.60 – a saving of £35.99 (including free delivery)

HOW TO ORDER Call 0117 370 9930 Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk

Quote OLDIE to get your special price. Free delivery to UK mainland. For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 23rd July 2024

The Oldie

SPORT

JIM WHITE

CRICKET ACROSS THE POND

One sunny Monday morning in May, something unexpected happened in downtown Manhattan.

The Empire State Building, the proud architectural symbol of American life, was lit up with, of all things, an ad for a cricket tournament. Flicking the switch to crank up the illumination was Chris Gayle, the former West Indies international, a cricketer renowned for his ferocious six-hitting.

‘The Big Apple, take a bite,’ Gayle said as he sparked the lights. ‘Cricket is coming. America: are you ready?’

If it seems the most unlikely piece of sporting evangelism, Gayle is not being wholly fanciful in his insistence that the USA is the new frontier of cricket.

The New York light show was there to celebrate the fact that on 9th June India will play Pakistan in a men’s T20 World Cup match. It will be held in the Nassau County International Cricket Stadium, a new, purpose-built facility just 20 miles from where Gayle was standing, designed by Populous, the architects behind Tottenham Hotspur’s magnificent stadium.

All 34,000 tickets for the game have long since been sold – as they have for the other five T20 World Cup games to be staged there. The rest of the competition will take place in the more familiar cricketing environs of the Caribbean. In the USA, cricket is pitching itself as the next big thing.

For well over a century, America ignored the game. If it was thought about at all, it was reckoned to be an eccentric oddity of the old world, a game that lasts for days without any requirement for a conclusion to be reached. But times – and demographics – have changed.

In the past decade, tens of thousands of young immigrants have come to the US from South Asia, to work in the medical and IT industries. And they have brought with them a love of the game. In cities such as Houston, Texas, on any weekend in any municipal park, there will be dozens of matches going on, as hundreds of incomers from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh socialise around the sport.

Such is the developing market, last summer saw the inaugural season of Major League Cricket, America’s own competition, featuring established stars of the game. Sponsored by tech companies, it was watched largely by their employees.

But this wasn’t the long form of the game, which had confused the American sporting mindset. This was the flash bang wallop of foreshortened 20-over thrashathons. These were matches over and done with

in three hours, requiring a far shorter investment of time than an evening at the baseball. They were raucous and fun. The locals began to see what their newly arrived neighbours saw in it. And many fancied they might join in.

And the tech bros knew how to market their new baby. Sixes, improbable run-outs and diving catches became social-media reels, a viral infection of athleticism and skill. So when the organisers decided to stage some of the matches in their latest international tournament in the USA, they found they were tapping at an open door.

For cricket, looking to exploit its newest – and potentially most lucrative – territory, this is only the start. The next Olympics, to be staged in Los Angeles in 2028, will for the first time feature T20 cricket as one of its sports. The aim of those behind the rapid development of the game in the USA is to have an American Olympic team then capable of properly competing.

A gold for America in the cricket? As an ambition, it may seem bonkers. But then 70 years ago that’s what they said about Roger Bannister’s attempt to run a mile in under four minutes.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD POTHOLE NUMBERS

I heard recently of an Austin 7 driver who was pottering happily along on his four-inch-wide tyres when he came to a puddle covering almost the entire road.

Sensibly, he pulled into the centre, but he was then forced by an oncoming Mr Toad to swerve back into the side. Next thing he knew, he had a broken wheel and axle and his beloved 7 was comatose in the road, upended. He had hit a pothole.

Motorways and main roads apart – they are maintained by Highways England – it seems our entire local government-maintained road network is pitted by an epidemic of tarmac smallpox. How has it got this bad?

Principally it’s because we don’t spend enough on road maintenance. We haven’t for decades. But, in 2020, the government was shamed into creating the Potholes Fund, which awarded councils £500m a year until 2025 to fix an estimated 500m holes.

The money wasn’t ring-fenced. The result was that last year English and Welsh councils spent only £143.5m on filling holes, and the rest on other aspects of highway maintenance.

Contrast this with the Pothole Action Fund of 2015, which ring-fenced £296m

and reduced the number of potholes by 44 per cent. It is now estimated that over half of our local road network has less than 15 years of structural life left.

Contributory reasons include more rain, blocked drains, more traffic and the increasing weight of vehicles – the average new car is 60-per-cent heavier than 20 years ago. But it’s down in the ditch at local level that so much is left undone.

My own local highways authority contracts civil engineers for the work, which is supposed to be inspected by – you guessed it – employees of the contractors. So they mark their own homework.

Most local drains are cleared only once every three years, with only two lorries to cover the entire county. If blockages require them to clear a stretch of road more frequently, they use an incomplete digital record of where the drains are. No one – except parish council volunteers –walks the road to count them.

A pothole has to reach a specified depth and width before it hits the highways authority’s level for intervention, following which the contractor is supposed to repair it. It is often one of a rash of holes within feet of one another. But if the others don’t reach the required specification, they are ignored, even when it’s clear they will reach it within weeks –and each will then require a separate expensive outing by the contractor.

Most such repairs are categorised as safety measures funded from the authority’s ‘reactive maintenance’ budget; they are known to be temporary. Larger, long-lasting repairs covering a stretch of road come out of the capital expenditure budget, for which there can be a two-year waiting list.

Our highways authority used to hold twice-yearly meetings with our parish council until they were pressured to hold them every six weeks. But often the highways representative – sometimes ‘working from home’ – doesn’t turn up. Or we are sent a ‘customer relations manager’, usually a mute who subsequently goes on sick leave (stress, presumably) before moving to another post. There is high staff turnover.

Meanwhile, if our Austin 7 owner tries to claim compensation, he may find it more difficult than before.

Last year, Surrey County Council paid out £452,000 in compensation. It now quotes Section 58 of the 1980 Highways Act as evidence that it has a reasonable maintenance regime overall and therefore is not in breach of its statutory duty with regard to a particular hole. It will take time and money to prove they were.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life Search-engine trouble

I bet that if you’re reading this column, you’ve used Google in the last 24 hours – probably even in the last hour. Such is its prominence in the web search market that it has become a verb (to ‘Google’), just like Hoover or Sellotape.

This distinction has been achieved astonishingly quickly, as it’s only 26 years since two Californian PhD students founded Google on a shoestring. Now it is worth eight times the value of Shell, the largest UK company.

Despite this bewildering growth, you’ve never had to pay a penny to use their search engine. That may be its

Webwatch

For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

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A live stream from a nesting box used by barn owls. Watch the chicks grow.

Chelsea Flower Show britishpathe.com

Newsreels, video, archive, film, footage, stills – British Pathé newsreels from the Chelsea Flower Show, 1914 onwards.

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

undoing, as the caravan moves on and technology advances. Google may well be forced to start charging, before long, at least for its best service.

You’ve never had to pay because of the advertising that appears on the page alongside, above or below the search results you actually want. Those results are often manipulated to some extent by payment. You’ll see the euphemism ‘sponsored’ appear above some results, meaning money has changed hands. The more that’s paid, the higher up the page the entry will appear.

It’s an undeniably successful technique for Google, generating revenues of $175 billion last year alone. It’s an old saying that if a service costs you nothing, it’s because you are the product, and it’s you that’s being sold to the advertisers. It’s a system as old as time.

However, Google’s tidal wave of income is looking a little vulnerable, because of, you’ve guessed it, Artificial Intelligence (AI), which we simply can’t escape. Everywhere you look, there are companies droning on and on about how they’re using AI to provide ‘mouldbreaking’ services or similar.

It reminds me of the extraordinary gold-rush fever in the early days of the internet, after which hundreds of companies failed. Who now recalls AOL – in the 1990s, the dominant provider of dial-up internet to millions of people worldwide? Once worth $226 billion, it was eventually sold for $4 billion. Or MySpace, an early rival to Facebook. Rupert Murdoch paid

$585 million for it in 2005 and sold it for $35 million six years later.

Nothing lasts for ever unless it grows and adapts. What’s troubling Google is that for the first time it thinks it may have a genuine rival for the premier search spot, because of the dramatic rise of AI robots such as ChatGPT, not yet two years old, and others like it. They’re not as good as Google yet, but they are improving very fast, and are clearly worrying Google.

ChatGPT provides complete, wellwritten answers to your question, unlike Google’s list of links, where it thinks you might find your answer. This new approach is attractive, if we can rely on the accuracy of the answers; more like asking a knowledgeable friend than visiting a library.

The threat to Google’s advertising revenue is real. Better initial answers will significantly reduce the need for users to click on the advertising sites, and so advertisers will run away.

ChatGPT doesn’t sell advertising (yet), but it does charge a subscription to use its premium survive ($20 per month), which many happily pay.

Of course, Google is working on a solution, and the rumour is that it is looking at including AI-powered features in a new premium service, for which you’d have to pay.

While the threat to Google may be no closer than the middle distance, it’s still there. It took Google only two or three years to wipe the floor with its rivals. Who’s to say the wheel is not turning again? Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Neil Collins: Money Matters

Do you have a smart meter?

Of course you do. You’ve been badgered to convert to one by your energy company, and by all those pictures of smiling happy people with miraculously lowered fuel bills, until you gave in. It’s free, after all. That is, ‘free’ in the modern sense of that word, in that you are not paying the individual cost, but it is spread between all consumers – including you.

It’s quite a spread. Estimates of the cost of converting us all range from an official £13.5bn in 2019 to as much as £20bn today, a number leaked from inside the energy companies. That translates to between £200 and £300 per household, which is disguised in your energy bills, whether you convert or not.

The saving is officially estimated at £6bn by 2034 – that’s a total of £6bn,

not £6bn a year. It’s more like a guess than an estimate, since it assumes we will use less juice simply from seeing how much we are consuming.

Either way, the programme is in serious trouble. The deadline for 80-per-cent conversion has been extended, and those of us happy with Economy 7 radio metering will not be forced to convert until the end of next March at the earliest. There are about

900,000 holdouts, and the number is not falling.

It’s easy to see why. Between five and ten per cent of smart meters don’t work properly, and even the name is a typical example of government spin over substance. The meters are not smart enough to tell you when the price is low, or when to run the washing machine.

As with so much associated expensive

greenery, we have Ed Miliband to thank for starting a programme that is turning into another public-sector procurement disaster. When last in power, he launched what a University of Cambridge study a decade ago found was a more expensive and complex programme than in any other country.

You may not think you are paying for this latest fashionable folly, but you are.

Lap up the gardens and villas of Lake Como

with Kirsty Fergusson 24th to 30th April 2025

The mountains that fringe the crystal waters of Lake Como provide a dramatic backdrop to elegant villas and some of the world’s finest gardens. Based in the wonderfully charming lakeside town of Varenna, we’ll explore much of the lake by ferry and hydrofoil, including the pristine villas built over the centuries by wealthy Milanese families, and the superb gardens surrounding many of them. Led by expert horticulturalist and Oldie tour veteran Kirsty Fergusson, our spring visit to Lake Como promises to be a highlight of the calendar for 2025.

We will be staying at the delightful Royal Victoria Hotel on Varenna’s main square, a two-minute walk from both Villa Monastero and Villa Cipressi. A former textile mill, it was converted into a hotel in the 1830s. Furnishings are simple and traditional. There are 43 bedrooms overlooking the lake or the town square, a terrace with a swimming pool and outstanding lake views. There are two restaurants; one in a glass-fronted annexe on the town square, and one with a lake-facing veranda. The Spa Suite is available for private hire and has a sauna, steam room and multi-sensory showers.

Above: Royal Victoria Hotel, Varenna, overlooking Lake Como Left: Varenna, Italy

of Varenna, where we stay at the four-star Royal Victoria Hotel for the duration of the tour.

DAY 2 This morning we cross the lake by hydrofoil to Bellagio, known as the Pearl of the Lake. At the Villa Melzi, exotic species thrive in the warm climate – the garden is renowned in springtime for its riotous display of azaleas. We will have lunch on the lakefront before a private visit to the Villa Serbelloni gardens.

botanical gardens at the nearby Villa Monastero.

DAY 4 We will be collected by a private boat this morning, for a cruise first to Villa Carlotta, which was built in the 17th century and spreads over 14 acres which tumble down to the water’s edge. We then continue to Villa Balbianello, which sits on a promontory in an impossibly romantic setting.

DAY 5 We will take the ferry to the town of Como, the largest on the lake, where we will visit the cathedral and enjoy a walking tour of the town centre. Continuing on the brief ferry over to Cernobbio, we’ll enjoy an exquisite lunch at the fabulous Villa D’Este, one of the finest hotels in Italy, after which we’ll visit the villa’s exceptional gardens.

DAY 1 Depart Heathrow with BA at 10.15, arriving Milan (Linate) at 13.15, before transferring to the lakeside town

DAY 3 Today we will visit two gardens in Varenna on foot, starting at the supremely elegant Villa Cipressi garden. After lunch at the villa we will continue to the spectacular

DAY 6 The morning is free to explore independently before we take the ferry north to Gravedona ed Uniti, just a couple of miles from the Swiss border on the north-west shore of the lake. We will visit a 15th-century wine cellar for a tasting of regional wines, followed by lunch.

DAY 7 We depart for Milan Linate after breakfast; depart on BA flight at 14.00, arrive Heathrow at 15.00.

HOW TO BOOK: Call Kirker Holidays on 020 7593 2284, or email oldie@kirkerholidays.com. Price per person: £3,974, which includes return flights, six nights' accommodation with breakfast, six dinners at local resturants, six lunches including one at Villa d'Este, all sightseeing, entrance fees and gratuities. Single supplement: £890. Deluxe lake-view room supplement: £600

‘Don’t fall for it, Tharg – it’s the newest trick in the book'

with

Ringed Plover

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

Waders (Charadriiformes) tend to be more splendidly and identifiably plumaged in summer. For that very reason, many nest out of harm’s way in remote places.

Contrarily, in winter, when migration dramatically increases most of their populations, they assume drabber plumage. Mixed flocks further confound their identity, to the gratification of gear-laden all-weather birders.

Among the exceptions which do dare to nest on beaches is the dainty ringed plover (Charadrius hiaticula). At 6-7 inches long, it’s one of the smallest waders. This preference for sand – bare or shingled – suits their pebble-disguised eggs. It accounts for the nicknames in some of their breeding grounds: sandy lo (Shetland), sandy laverock (Orkney) and sand tripper (County Down).

It is a sign of the times that, within living memory, they were common in Cornwall, whereas in the latest population map they barely register –perhaps the result of the south coast’s current status as the English Riviera.

One might think the dramatic black and white markings which ring its head and neck would stand out. But, in the midst of glint and glimmer, these are barely more noticeable than its pebble eggs, whether they’re laid on bare sand or cushioned amid shell and shingle.

And the chicks are no easier to see, as the bird artist Charles Tunnicliffe (1901-79) found in a June encounter on Anglesey (Shorelands Summer Diary). He and his wife watched ‘a pair of worried Ringed Plover running about among the stones on the beach’. Slowly they became aware ‘of other tiny forms moving among the stones’ –the chicks.

He dashed to catch one for a drawing: ‘The old birds called, the chicks disappeared completely among the grey mottled stones and my search was fruitless.’

Later, he caught one as it crouched against a stone, ‘the offspring of the stone itself’. He also described the female’s wader habit of feigning injury to distract attention away from a threatened clutch, as if ‘she was a very sick bird, almost expiring in fact… The pantomime ended only when the Ringed Plover saw that her efforts to attract us were not effective. Then she became a smart, taut bird again and made an end to her posturing.’

Shetland, Orkney, the Outer Hebrides and north-west Scotland are the ringed plover’s stronghold. It is a bird more of the shoreline than inland – although it also nests on marshes, heaths, moors and, thanks to demands of the growing

human population, reservoirs and gravel pits. In winter, 5,400 breeding pairs are quadrupled by winter migrants, notably from Iceland.

There is also the slightly smaller, very similar, little ringed plover (Charadrius dubius), a summer migrant from Africa, which first bred in Britain in 1938. Its numbers have grown inexorably, though it didn’t reach Ireland until 2008. It is more inland-inclined and England-based. Its 1,250 pairs are particularly concentrated in the northwest Midlands but also infiltrate Wales and Scotland. Both ringed plovers tend to have second broods, extending the breeding season from March to August.

Travel

My Maldives pin-up

Anne Robinson went on a girls’ trip to the islands –and fell for the endangered local turtle

My daughter is a very annoying climate fanatic. She arrives at my barn, heads for the kitchen, opens the rubbish drawer and huffs and puffs as she rearranges the garbage.

Quite often, there is the telling of one particularly sad tale. A lobster is swimming along, minding its own business, when a nasty string of plastic arrives, wraps itself round the lobster’s neck and Emma, with tears in her eyes, tells me that is the end of the lobster.

It’s all very tiresome. Well, obviously, for the lobster, and for Emma – but also for me, because I’m forever waiting to be admonished.

We will return to the threat to our climate. And Emma’s obsession with it. First, let me tell you that this winter I had a chance to spend a week in the Maldives on a girls’ holiday with a fellow hack.

The Maldives, along with Mauritius and the Seychelles, is where those with a great deal of money to spare jet off to avoid our Arctic weather.

‘We’re off to the Maldives,’ people say, suggesting you must be a bit thick if you are not also escaping the chance of frostbite.

Except, this year in the Maldives, for ten days post-Christmas, there was nothing but rain. It obliged the most expensive hotels in the world to turn themselves into Center Parcs.

I caught the very last days’ wetness.

After a nine-hour plane journey, we waited at Male airport while winds of more than 30 miles an hour died down. Only then were we able to board a seaplane and finally a little boat to the island of Landaa Giraavaru.

Until the early 1970s, the Maldives were just a string of islands where

fishermen fished. But an enterprising Italian saw the potential, and now the islands’ major industry is tourism.

Landaa is a 44-acre island owned

Below: a Maldives turtle.

Far right: the Four Seasons private island of Landaa Giraavaru

entirely by the Four Seasons hotel group. It seems corny to have to use the word paradise, but nothing else will suffice. White, sandy little lanes with twinkling lights and beautifully maintained greenery line the routes to the restaurants, the spa, the library and all the other facilities the very rich require. There are 55 gardeners. More than 300 staff.

There are more than a hundred bungalows, spaced wide apart. Each has its own 11-metre swimming pool; outside dining and sitting room; a vast bedroom and countless gleaming white towels for use in the shower and huge circular bath; and air-con, of course. Plus, your room is beautifully lit, even round the base of the bed. Prices per night for this luxury start at around 3,000 dollars. The ocean is just through a tiny hedge at the end of your pool.

exquisitely polite staff, who service your room or drive you in a buggy wherever you want to go.

The ten days of continuous rain this season means that even Jeremy Clarkson – and, trust me, I am a Clarkson girl through and through, who giggles unashamedly when he says of Greta Thunberg, ‘It will take more than one snot-nosed Swedish kid to end our love affair with the car’ – would have to utter the dreaded phrase ‘climate change’ and concede that the ozone layer is heating up.

of their dogs’ legs worked because plastic is an environmental nightmare, they might have to rethink putting climate change in the same dismissive category as political correctness.

The Four Seasons has created the turtle hospital through its environmental arm. In total, there are four turtle vets in the Maldives; yet only one – yes, one – domestic vet.

And how do Dr Kat and blond, delightful Ed square the fact that their selfless endeavours are made possible by a hotel group that survives thanks to visitors flying thousands and thousands of miles, enjoying the dozens of instantly replaceable white towels in the bedroom, the burning light illuminating the sandy lanes, the non-stop air-conditioning and the rest?

Dr Kat calls it ‘a trade-off’ and says if people go home and think about buying vegetables and fruit in season, then that is a small victory.

There are four restaurants, serving endless varieties of superb food. A simple white bike with your initials on it awaits if you want to cycle to the jetty to go snorkelling or scuba diving or to visit a shipwreck. You can hire a yacht at a thousand dollars an hour. There’s even an island to rent for 50,000 dollars a night. Justin Bieber took his mum there.

If you don’t like people, the island is perfect because you can just call room service and meet no one except the

And here’s the other fact to bother your conscience. The Four Seasons has built a turtle hospital. It’s a dinky wooden building next to the jetty where the snorkellers set off. This enterprise takes your breath away. It’s run by two young, dedicated graduates: Dr Kat, a qualified turtle vet from a tiny village on the west coast of Scotland, and Ed from Kent, a marine biologist.

The hospital has two small tanks, not much bigger than the very large bath in my bungalow. And this is where I meet Artemis, a beautiful hawksbill turtle who can only half-float because his front right flipper has had to be amputated.

As so often with sick turtles, he has inhaled poisonous gas which makes him unable to fight off predators. There’s Hameedha, an olive ridley turtle with such severe damage to his shell he is on permanent medication. And, most distressing, Imala, another olive ridley, has a deep groove in her neck because she’s been caught in nylon rope.

The turtles are brought in by fishermen or hotel guests, who name them. On a wall, there’s a plaque identifying nearly 100 turtles who have been christened, treated and returned to the sea. Of course, sailors throwing rubbish over the side must take some blame. But the heat in the ocean means turtles, fish, whales, sharks and the rest are all at risk.

So it’s problematic to go home, chuck plastic into any old bin and say, ‘Well, what’s the point?’ And I think if my neighbours in the Cotswolds who own Labradors suddenly found that only two

Ed says ‘it’s tricky’ to consider the vast pollution any hotel produces. He

points out that as the Maldives are only 16 metres above sea level, they could be wiped out within decades. Yes, a Davidand-Goliath battle it most certainly is.

This shocks me enough to ponder whether if Jeremy found one of his cows at Diddly Squat Farm suddenly had its stomach filled with poisonous gas, might he too be complaining about my careless recycling?

Of course, the beautiful simplicity of Landaa is possible only because out-ofsight electricity is whirring non-stop. And guests have flown tens of thousands of miles to be there.

But since I returned, I confess, to Emma’s delight, I have two extra bins in my kitchen. I am trying not to buy anything wrapped in plastic and to stick to seasonal veg.

Then again, would I use my airmiles and my grandchildren’s nest eggs to return to the paradise that is Landaa Giraavaru. You bet!

Four Seasons Resort, Landaa Giraavaru: www.fourseasons.com/maldiveslg

Hanging out: Anne Robinson at her hotel

Overlooked Britain

In an English country garden

At Rousham House, Oxfordshire, William Kent created a picturesque setting for obelisks, sham ruins – and famous cows

lucinda lambton

Rousham in Oxfordshire is renowned as one of the greatest gardens in the country. It’s famed worldwide for its pioneering planning and planting, by the great master of the softening craft William Kent.

Venus Vale comes first; a long and gentle valley laid out from 1738, which amazingly remains unchanged to this day. It is framed by trees, flanking water coursing through ponds and two arched and rusticated cascades on to the River Cherwell.

A lead Venus stands atop the higher of these arches. Beneath her, we find a

white marble plaque inscribed to ‘RINGWOOD AN OTTER-HOUND OF EXTRAORDINARY SAGACITY’.

Lower down, the inscription continues in similarly laudatory tones: ‘TYRANT OF THE CHERWELL’S FLOOD, COME NOT NEAR THIS SACRED GLOOM, NOR WITH THY INSULTING BROOD, DARE POLLUTE MY RINGWOOD’S TOMB.’

In other words, joy of joys, here is the

work of one of the most famous masters of English garden design commemorating a dog! Here we have a prime example of the picturesque movement that in the mid-18th century swept through England’s gardens. It created compositions more akin to the artist’s canvas than to works wrought by the hand of the horticulturalist – and William Kent (1685-1748) was at the helm of this gentle revolution.

Above: Longhorn cattle graze at Rousham. Below: Il Kentino: William Kent (1685-1748)

Artist, architect and landscaper supremo, Kent exercised his sublime powers at Rousham after ten years in Rome – where he was known as Il Kentino – with the architect Lord Burlington. He returned to England triumphantly sure of establishing the new and great picturesque movement he had evolved. The gardens at Rousham are one of the earliest embodiments of the style surviving in England.

Another memorial honours a cow. It was designed to commemorate one of the renowned herd of longhorn cattle at Rousham.

Blow me down, she has a name, inscribed on the stone memorial: ‘FAUSTINA GWYNNE A COW DIED 1882, AGED 22’.

Faustina was a shorthorn bought to Rousham from Northamptonshire in 1873.

To this day, she is a proud feature of the place, thanks to a painting of her hanging in the house. A huge and handsome brilliant chestnut with white speckles and a table-flat back, she was the terror of local life, who would chase anyone she could around the estate.

I have known and loved this memorial stone for years, so it was with shrieks of EUREKA! that I discovered Faustina’s pedigree in the Reverend William Holt Beever’s exceedingly obscure book of the leading shorthorn ‘tribes’ of her day.

I learnt that Faustina’s mother was Flora Gwynne and her father was May Duke. Her grandmother was Fanny Gwynne. Faustina’s daughter was called Florence Gwynne and her granddaughter, with the best name of all, was called Fluffy Gwynne.

Faustina’s horns are still at Rousham, where beautiful longhorn cattle are bred to this day.

On the very edge of these Elysian Fields, there is a stone Gothic seat. Walk around it and, lo and behold, on the other side it becomes a castle for cows. Its inmates are the ancient and magnificent longhorn cattle, among England’s oldest breeds.

Despite their fearsome appearance, they are exceptionally docile and easy to handle. According to the Longhorn Cattle Society, they are beyond equal as suckler cows, owing to their abundance of milk and ease of calving. The high butterfat

over the River Cherwell. In fact, this is now a car-ridden road, rendered invisible by judicious planning.

content of the milk is also said to give a ‘bloom’ to their calves.

Longhorns were bred at Rousham between 1910 and 1927 and the herd was re-established in early 1970s. With this castle for cows, never let it be said that architecture for animals was beneath the art of the great architect.

Kent’s landscaping genius is captured by Alexander Pope’s epistle to his fellow architect, Lord Burlington:

‘He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds, Surprises, varies and conceals the bounds. Consult the genius of the place in all; That tells the waters or to rise, or fall.’

At Rousham, Kent added obelisks, sham ruins and eye-catchers on distant hills, which planting revealed. One finely developed view is of a medieval bridge

William Townsend created a neoclassical Temple of Echo, in which

you find a Roman tombstone – you come upon it out of the blue after following the Watery Walk beside a winding stream. Kent’s Pyramid House was also built so as to be suddenly in your way at close quarters.

Standing big and bold in the grounds are two statues by the famed Peter Scheemakers – The Dying Gaul and the alarming Lion Attacking a Horse.

There are statues of fauns by John Van Nost, also responsible for statues of Mercury, Bacchus and Ceres.

A large Apollo stands at the end of the Long Walk, which culminates with a view of Praeneste – a most remarkable building which is often enticingly visible through clearings. It has seven pedimented arches, filled alternately with seats and busts, flanked by urns.

It is a rare sight indeed.

Memorial to a cow (Faustina, 1860-82)

Above: the upper cascade with a statue of Venus in the Venus Vale. Bottom: Praeneste, Kent’s seven-arch arcade

Lion Attacking a Horse by Peter Scheemakers, 1740

On the Road

Holy rock’n’roller

The Reverend Richard Coles tells Louise Flind about his journey from pop songs to evensong

Is there anything you can’t leave home without?

A travelling knife and fork.

Is there something you really miss?

The dogs. I’d love to take the dogs on tour, like Maria Callas.

Do you travel light?

After touring from my 20s to my 60s, it’s now a fine art. I was with my partner in Padstow last week – flying there, he checks a bag and I make it a point never to check a bag for a trip of that duration. So there’s always a little airport tension.

Which band was your favourite, Bronski Beat or the Communards?

The Communards. In Bronski Beat, I was just a hired hand. Jimmy and I started the Communards in about 1985.

What was the ’80s music scene like?

You’ve been a musician, a vicar, a radio presenter and a writer. What do you see yourself as? What’s been your favourite? Being a vicar is my favourite.

Would you go back to being a vicar? I don’t think I could now. I often think about my parishioners.

Where did you go on your honeymoon?

What’s your favourite destination? Kintyre.

Earliest childhood holiday memories?

I grew up in Kettering in Northamptonshire, and my family had a holiday cottage in Ringstead in Norfolk and a beach hut in Hunstanton – so we used to spend the whole summer there. All I remember is complaining that we didn’t go to Majorca.

Did you write as a child?

I wrote a short story about spies on a Russian nuclear submarine, which torpedoed a German warship called the Übsteck. The last line was ‘The Übsteck was no more.’

Were your parents regular churchgoers?

Regular in that they went in a predictable pattern, but it would have been twice a year – so Easter and Christmas.

Did you train as a classical musician?

That gives it rather an exalted sense. I started out playing classical music and did grades.

What did you play?

Keyboard. I used to play the violin when I was young, and I did a bit of saxophone, and the organ at school.

Punk had stirred everything up at the end of the ’70s – so music had a sort of punchy potency to it then, which gets lost in glossier decades from the 1970s. But also new tech happened – so there were keyboard instrument synthesisers in particular that came within reach of people, and home recording began to take off.

Were there lots of drugs around?

Not when I was busy in the band – but later, when I was enjoying the ill-gotten fruits of pop music, I did indulge hugely in all sorts of drugs.

Why did you go into the church?

I was a chorister from the age of eight. Although I was a confirmed atheist by nine, I was formed by that, and when I needed it, I found my way back in.

Was it complicated being a gay vicar? For me, in terms of what it’s like being gay, and what God makes of that, I’ve never found that complicated at all.

Do you miss being a vicar?

I loved being a vicar, and the things I liked about it I miss very much.

How do you decide your topics for your history podcast with Charles Spencer? It’s Charles and Cat Jarman, and either we pick something from the sprouted tree of history, or listeners send in suggestions.

Were you sad to leave Saturday Live when it moved to Cardiff?

I loved doing Saturday Live.

We had a very quiet ceremony, in a register office. It was snowing. I crashed [his late husband] David’s car the night before, gently. And then we went to London and had dinner in the Ivy. And, quite a long time after that, we went to Barbados.

Are you brave with different food?

I eat everything. In Padstow, I ate everything from Cornish pasties to beluga caviar.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

Hákarl. It’s an Icelandic delicacy, which is shark that’s left to putrefy in its own urine.

Do you have a go at the local language? I can get by in French, restaurant Italian, German, but that’s it really. Academically, Koine Greek [the language of the New Testament] is my field – first century Palestine. And I can read road signs in Greece.

What’s the strangest place you’ve ever slept while being away?

In a yurt on the Mongolian steppe.

Do you like coming home?

Having just finished a seven-month tour, I find trying to stay at home is a big thing.

What are your top travelling tips?

Rail-replacement services are actually good. One, they get you there and, two, you can look into people’s houses.

Murder at the Monastery by Rev Richard Coles is out on 6th June. He will address the Oldie Literary Lunch in Salisbury on 11th June

Taking a Walk

Big thrills by the Little Ouse

patrick barkham

Every day, those of us fortunate enough to be mobile walk short distances because we have to. Usually to a car door, bus stop or railway station. But I rarely take a substantial walk out of necessity.

This month, I did. My car was broken and my local train unexpectedly cancelled – so a straightforward trip to a work meeting 45 miles away became complicated.

Eventually, I found a bus and a train that was running, and pitched up in the Breckland town of Brandon, three miles from my meeting. I could’ve phoned for a taxi, but it was a gloriously sunny spring day.

Spring brings a thrill to the air rather in the same way as falling in love. Occasionally we mistake this excitement for love, or do something equally momentous and impulsive, such as buy a house. On this day, my rash decision was to arrive even later for my meeting – and take a walk.

There are fewer public footpaths in Breckland than in any other part of East Anglia because this eerie landscape of sandy heaths and pine plantations is dominated by military training areas. To my surprise, the path beside the Little Ouse river was well-signposted from the main road, and soon dived into a wet woodland bursting with lime-green leaves.

The growl of traffic subsided and the air was filled with the peep of little tits flitting from branch to branch. Siskins sang with frantic twills beneath a chorus of chiffchaffs, the first of the summer migrants to arrive and declare ‘springspring’ in their chiming, two-tone calls.

Oh, the joy of a bright spring day after six months of rain! I felt I was in the opening pages of Finn Family Moomintroll, where the first cuckoo calls and befuddled small creatures awake from winter hibernation and poke about, rediscovering old haunts and turning their faces towards the sun.

Bumblebees were afoot, a peacock butterfly sunned itself on the peaty path, and a pigeon whacked its wings against a poplar as it plucked spring-fresh leaves from the bough. A wren perched,

quick and clever, shaking its upturned tail adorably.

The nettles at my feet were young and luxuriant, and celandines and dandelions blazed yellow amidst the bright green.

On my right, the Little Ouse, the boundary between Suffolk and Norfolk, glittered in the sunshine. The writer Roger Deakin – whose biography I’ve just written – swam here 25 years ago and described ‘silky, crystalline and sparkling’ water, filled with water crowfoot trembling in the current and a sandy, gravelly bed where chub swam.

Today it was brown, awash with sediment, nitrates and phosphates, but it was still a pleasing width and the water flowed as silently as a luxury car. Dimples broke out on the surface occasionally, as if it was smiling.

The path traced the curve of the river, passing through a woodland of towering poplars. Peep-peep! A kingfisher called as it dashed downriver – but it moved too quickly for my eyes.

Further on, the current carried away a flotilla of plump blooms from waterside

willows, little cargoes of fluffy white and yellow pollen bouncing on the water.

After an hour’s brisk walk, I reached the old foresters’ village of Santon Downham. The previous settlement had been engulfed by the great sand ‘flood’ of 1688 when storms pushed the Brecks’ highly mobile sand dunes in unexpected directions. That stopped after the open heaths were planted with millions of pines by the newly-founded Forestry Commission in 1919.

The pines were tall, but everything else in this forest village seemed tiny, including the pretty little metal bridge, on which I crossed the Ouse into Suffolk.

I reached my meeting, a mere 90 minutes late, but glowing, alert and ready for various tasks. In my mind’s eye, for the rest of the day, I saw the river flow and heard the song of spring.

Turn left out of Brandon Station and left onto the Little Ouse path on the north bank of the river. The walk to Santon Downham can be turned into a round trip: return on St Edmund’s Way

X stands for the same word in all cases

1 Crush top x - possibly good enough (2,2,7)

10 X may see row about golf (5)

11 Course of stewed tripe that’s a breeding ground for bacteria.... (5,4)

12 .... a form of listeria for acrobatic performer (9)

13 Gallons must go missing from kitchen passage (5)

14 Tries English, for example, on board ship (6)

16 Innocent answer that provides flavour (8)

18 Suggest music genre to absorb x (8)

20 Surprised x eating - that’s horrible (6)

23 Concede that most of hunger is to the east of area (5)

24 Authorities plan a development encompassing recreational area by sea (9)

26 Lines from clichés lacking power (9)

27 Obama cautioned about territory subsumed by China (5)

28 Attractive but terrible critic, a shame - almost (11)

Down

Genius crossword 440 EL SERENO

2 Electronic device that sees golf caddie finally breaking par (5)

3 Madonna advert breaking every hour on the radio (3,4)

4 Smart girl keeping quiet for game (3,3)

5 At home confined by a condition (8)

6 Mood left one partner under cloud initially (7)

7 Cry a little and sag wretchedly as part of plan (13)

8 Satirist’s one aspect of cricket? (8)

9 Henry’s chat upset mother finding one in bed (13)

15 Bone-tired islander returning loaded with mineral (8)

17 Server may be sensitive after a time (8)

19 X thanks hotel after endless comfort (7)

21 First-class average raised, subject to advanced condition (7)

22 Eastender’s aspirations to keep American works (6)

25 When 101 + 1 is code for computer (5)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk Deadline: 26th June 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.

Call on (5)

Public speaker (6)

Nimble, agile (4)

One of four equal areas (8)

Bit of bacon (6)

Volcanic bowl (6)

Fatherly (8)

An arm or a leg (4)

Procedure; solar ___ (6)

Dutch earthenware (5) 23 Stallion (4) 24 Conned; was unfaithful (7)

1 Listens secretly to (10)

Makes certain (7)

Pledge, swearword (4)

Departure; book of the Old Testament (6)

Dilemma (8)

Smell, fragrance (5)

Ascribed (to) (10)

Stashed away out

(8)

of three born

(7)

(6)

(5)

Moron 4XX answers: Across: 1 Freeze, 4 Peach (Free speech), 8 Steam, 9 Lenient, 10 Emanate, 11 Sake, 12 Yes, 14 Stow, 15 Urge, 18 Eve, 21 Told, 23 Respond, 25 Posters, 26 Adder, 27 Evoke, 28 Recess. Down: 1 Fasted, 2 Elegant, 3 Zimbabwe, 4 Pong, 5 Arena, 6 Hatred, 7 Alley, 13 Sunshade, 16 Geordie, 17 Staple, 19 Erase, 20 Adorns, 22 Lasso, 24 Cede.

Winner: Celia Richardson, Chandler’s Ford, Hampshire

Runners-up: Christine Skeldon, North Leigh, Oxfordshire; Philip Berridge, Spalding, Lincolnshire

‘Unlucky,’ said dummy. ‘I’d have got the hearts wrong, too.’

‘Thanks,’ said declarer. He then turned to Mrs Voyant, a shrewd player who’d been kibitzing. ‘Claire,’ he asked, ‘Should I have got that right?’

East Both Vunerable

The bidding South West North East 2 ♦ (1) Pass 3 ♦ (2) Dbl (3) Pass 4 ♥ (4) End (1) Weak two, showing 5-10 points and a decent six-card suit. (2) Often, one would have three cards, bidding to the (ninecard) level of fit. But it pays not to be too predictable. (3) Flat hand but expects partner to have a singleton diamond. (4) Three hearts could be four poor hearts and a near-Yarborough. West had led the king of diamonds, East overtaking with the ace (no cost). East cashed the queen (West following with the knave) and led the ten. How to declare?

Reasonably, declarer placed the non-pre-emptor with the queen of hearts. He therefore ruffed with the ace and ran the ten. Disappointingly, East won the queen and, although declarer could make three club tricks via a finesse, he had to lose a spade at the end. One down. Declarer could have succeeded by ruffing the third diamond with the ten (or seven) of hearts, but that is an anti-percentage guess.

Here’s the point. You must assume the club finesse succeeds. So you have ten tricks (assuming you make six heart tricks). Simply discard a spade on East’s winning third diamond (key play), preserving those ten winners. You can win East’s (say) spade return (best), beating West’s king with the ace, and cross to the ace of hearts (West is more likely to have all three missing trumps). You now draw the last trump and pick up the three club tricks via running the queen, then lead to the knave and cash the ace, shedding your remaining spade. Game made. ANDREW ROBSON

Competition TESSA CASTRO

FOR COMPETITION No 306 it was time for the annual, ever popular challenge of bouts-rimés, writing a poem with specified rhyme words in order. The rhyme scheme was based on a poem beginning ‘Set me whereas the sun doth parch the green’ by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-47), though I substituted ‘bought’ for ‘nought’ to head off archaic diction.

Ann Drysdale spotted the source and ended her entry: ‘This poem,’ muttered Surrey, ‘isn’t going where I thought,/ And my intellectual property has been too cheaply bought.’

I liked Alan Ravenscroft’s first line: ‘His used pound notes were dirty green.’ Philip Wilson also began enticingly with: ‘They hanged some witches on our village green./ Today I buy my wife a chocolate ice.’

Commiserations to them and to Alan Clarke, David Silverman, Erika Fairhead, David Dixon, Sarah Rosser, G M Southgate, Julie Wigley, David Llewellyn and Simon Spero, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Sue Small.

The trees in the park have leaves of green.

Behind me in Waitrose a man buys ice. Just that, the biggest bag of ice I’ve seen. He says ‘All right darlin’ ’ to the cashier twice.

Outside the shops stands a plane tree, Bark, leaves, roots; here’s another hot day.

And here the tree will always be When skies are China blue or grey. And even when it rains like hell And rivers burst their banks and flood And everything has got that smell, The tree will still be there in bud. I wonder what the cashier thought Of all that ice that ‘darlin’ ’ bought.

Sue May

The winter garden isn’t green, But can be white with snow and ice; And migrant fieldfares may be seen; This year I know I saw them twice. And then there’s Kathleen’s myrtle tree And I recall the very day She told me where it had to be Dark green against a wall of grey; And now she’s gone, but life’s not hell As memories stretch like a flood.

The myrtle tree has little smell

But when in spring I see it bud It makes me glad I had the thought

And for Kathleen the tree was bought.

Roger Farrance

I stole a dress. A dazzling emerald green

Edged with a silver thread that gleamed like ice.

Heart thumping, fearful that I might be seen

I brazenly walked out. No one looked twice.

I danced in it, swayed like a willow tree

Once I got home.

It wasn’t every day

That I could be who I was meant to be, Not trapped inside a grinding life so grey, Wishing my teenage world would go to hell.

I told Mum in the end, amidst a flood Of guilty tears, a guilt that you could smell;

A criminal career nipped in the bud.

So long ago, yet still I love the thought

Of stolen dreams I knew could not be bought.

Con Connell

My hair is red, my eyes are green, My temper’s hot, my anger ice. My heart is cold at what I’ve seen. (No one-off case, it happened twice.) I shuddered, hard behind the tree That first, most interesting day, And pondered, could it really be

My life was shot, my future grey? But at a beat I’m mad as hell And vicious fury starts to flood My veins: and in my mind I smell The scent of vengeance in the bud.

It didn’t take a lot of thought, And hacksaw, bags and spade are bought.

Heather Uebel

COMPETITION No 308 A knee has been giving me trouble. Knees play a big part, in bending, proposing, dandling and fighting. A poem, please, called The Knee, in any sense. 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 postal address), marked ‘Competition No 308’, by Thursday 28th June.

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Gay cousins on family tree

QI’ve been asked to sketch out a family tree from the 1800s to put up at my aunt’s 80th birthday.

I’ve had quite a bit of experience with genealogy and, as we are a very fertile family, there’s a lot of work to do. My problem is that one of my cousins is gay, and married to his partner, and another, female, has been with her female partner for ten years. How do I express this on the family tree – which will be huge, postersize? I so want it to be acceptable to the ancient, the middle-aged and the young! Alan, by email

AThe married couple is easy. Just put ‘m’ or ‘=’ or whatever format you’ve used for other marriages.

As your female cousin isn’t married, I’d simply leave her partner out, just as you would in the case of a heterosexual unmarried couple. If you want to make extra certain, simply mention it to her and see if she’s OK with it. Describe yourself as an old fogey. Explain that you don’t want to cause any upset and would love to include her partner somehow, because she feels to you like part of the family.

Say there’s no protocol – unless she’d like to invent one, in which case you’d be delighted to include her. Then, whatever happens, no one can accuse you of not trying to do the best by everyone.

Rising cost of stairlifts

QMy mother is finding the four floors of stairs in her house so difficult that we’ve decided to put in a stairlift. But so many different ones are on sale that we’re confused. Do you or your readers have any ideas before we spend so much money? They’re not cheap.

Barry G, Perth

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

AAs I’ve become more crippled with arthritis, I’ve had to put in a couple of stairlifts and only wish I’d asked around about making that vast outlay. Decide first whether you want to buy or rent, and be aware that some companies sell cheaper secondhand chairs. Next, if your staircase is wide enough, see whether it’s possible to have a rail on the stairlift side, as well as the chair. Your mother – or her friends – may occasionally find themselves full of beans and prefer to climb the stairs normally.

As she gets older, it’ll be much easier to go upstairs with rails both sides of the steps. Finally, find out in advance how much the service charge is. It can be around £400 a year per stairlift – which, for a four-storey house, would mean a huge outlay. And does she really need a lift that goes all the way up to the top floor?

Brothers grim

QMy brothers were dreadful about looking after our mother when she had a stroke. They did their share, but clearly resented it and became quite unkind and intolerant. I think my mother became afraid of them. Since she died, my father has developed dementia and we’re now in the same position, having to share the caring. I’m dreading history repeating itself. It upsets me so much. Is there anything I can do? Name and address supplied

ASome men find it really hard to see their mothers, in particular, collapse into dependency. It gets them at some subconscious level, and it often becomes almost impossible for them to suppress their anger.

But your father is not your mother, and your brothers may treat him with more respect and kindness because they can

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identify with him more. If things start to go wrong again, why not talk to them and – without criticising them – suggest that, as it’s clearly hard for them, perhaps they could each pay for a carer to do the work instead, at least for part of the time.

That would remove some of the stress from them – and from you. And, most importantly, from your father.

He won’t bring me flowers

QI’ve often said, when my husband asks me what I want for my birthday, ‘Flowers would be lovely.’ But he’ll never buy them for me. I’ve asked him why not and he can’t explain, except he says they’re ‘silly’.

I’ve explained that that’s got nothing to do with it. I like them. But he’s clearly got a prejudice against buying them – so I have to buy my own! Can any of your male readers explain why they’re sometimes so prejudiced against flowers? J Hudson, by email

AYour husband, when he says ‘silly’, might mean ‘soppy’ or effeminate.

As he clutches that bunch of tulips, he fears he’ll be mistaken for Molesworth’s Basil Fotheringon-Tomas, who skips around, saying, ‘Hullo clouds, hullo sky’. He wants to give you something useful and blokeish – something that will last. He doesn’t see that the frivolous, ephemeral quality of flowers is part of their charm.

What about asking him, instead, for a pot plant or something for your garden, if you have one? This might make him feel man-of-the-soilish, rather than a wimp.

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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