The Oldie May 2024

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

The Sweeney at 50

by Andrew Roberts

Do mention the war – John Cleese on the return of Fawlty Towers Diary of a disastrous farmer – Prue Leith

80 years on – D-Day by Giles Milton and Laura Grenfell

Farewell to posh fatties page 17

The Old Un’s Notes

Joan Morecambe, who died on 26th March, on her 97th birthday, was a perfect exponent of that crucial yet underrated role, the showbiz wife.

From the 1950s, when Morecambe and Wise were just jobbing comics, to the 1980s, when they’d become Britain’s biggest stars, her love and wisdom sustained and nurtured Britain’s greatest entertainer.

She met Eric Morecambe at the Edinburgh Empire in 1952. For Eric, it was love at first sight. For Joan, it took a little longer.

Eric was doing his double act with Ernie Wise. Joan was appearing as a soubrette.

A beauty queen and an accomplished singer, dancer and comic feed, she might have become a star. Instead, she devoted herself to Eric, as a mother, homemaker and lifelong companion. Her support and influence were central to his success.

Their early married life wasn’t easy. Eric and Ernie weren’t short of work, but TV stardom was a distant dream. Their working life was an endless round of variety shows – a different town, a different boarding house, every week.

Joan and Eric’s first child, Gail, was born in 1953, and it was no joke weaning her in a string of provincial B&Bs.

After their son Gary was born in 1956, Joan made a home for them in Harpenden. As Eric became the most

famous comic in the country, this cosy family refuge evolved into an essential retreat.

So many showbiz marriages crash and burn, torn apart by fame, absence and temptation, but Joan and Eric were inseparable.

Indeed, when The Oldie’s William Cook visited Joan in Harpenden, in the smart, understated house where Joan and Eric raised their three children, she said her only regret was that they hadn’t had more time together.

Throughout their marriage, Eric was always busy. When he died, of a heart attack, Morecambe and Morecambe: Eric and Joan

Among this month’s contributors

Candida Crewe (p17) has written six novels and one non-fiction book. For nearly 50 years, she’s written articles and columns for the Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Spectator and many more.

John Sergeant (p24) was the BBC’s Chief Political Correspondent, 1992-2000, and Political Editor of ITN, 2000-2002. He interviewed Mrs Thatcher in Paris in her last days in office in 1990.

Clive Aslet (p31) is Visiting Professor of Architecture at Cambridge University.

Sir Edwin Lutyens: Britain’s Greatest Architect? is his latest book. He wrote The Story of the Country House.

Mary Killen (p36 and p57), our Beauty Correspondent, is married to fellow Oldie columnist Giles Wood. They wrote Country Life: A Story of Peaks and Troughs and The Diary of Two Nobodies

in 1984, aged just 58, he was planning to slow down.

She outlived him by almost 40 years, a gracious guardian of his legacy. But there was always a hint of sadness that their happy marriage hadn’t lasted twice as long.

The news that water companies have been discharging raw sewage into our rivers for years reminded the Old Un of a visit Queen Victoria made to Cambridge.

It was when the city lacked proper drains and all its excrement went into the Cam.

Standing on Trinity Bridge, the Queen asked the Master ‘what all those pieces of papers’ were on the river.

Diplomatically, he replied, ‘Those, Ma’am, are notices that bathing is forbidden.’

Important

stories you may have missed

Grandmother lifted into air as jacket caught on shutters

Daily Telegraph

‘True gentleman’ TV presenter Andi Peters spotted in Conwy North Wales Chronicle

Café to reopen today amid bollard works

The Press (York)

£15 for published contributions

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:

The Oldie salutes the memory of Brian Rix (1924-2016), the frequently trouserless stage and film farceur, who would have turned 100 this year.

Best known for his en déshabille roles at London’s Whitehall Theatre, Rix was a man of many parts.

As a teenager, he harboured well-founded hopes to play cricket for his native Yorkshire. But then the war broke out and he joined the RAF. While waiting to be called up for duty, he wangled a temporary job with the actor-manager Donald Wolfit’s touring Shakespeare Company.

In 1947, Rix returned to the theatre and formed his own company. There were puns and double entendres aplenty over the next 30 years.

Trouserless: Brian Rix

Rix frequently played a naïve innocent somehow caught in a compromising position with a chesty blonde. He later calculated he had

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Carry On Escaping: POW card of Carry On actor Peter Butterworth (1915-79), imprisoned in Stalag Luft III in 1941. From Captives: Prisoners of War and Internees, 1939-45

shed his trousers on stage around 12,000 times.

Rix was also a tireless campaigner for people with learning disabilities, for the last 18 years of his life serving as President of Mencap.

In 1989, he made a brief return to the stage with a revival of the classic 1950s farce Dry Rot, but he tore a muscle on the opening night and received mixed notices.

Rix was created a life peer in 1992, and later voted against an Assisted Dying Bill because he feared people with disabilities might become the unwilling victims of euthanasia. However, in 2016, he revealed he was suffering from a terminal condition, and called for a change to the law.

‘I’m not looking for something that helps me only,’ Rix said. ‘I’m thinking of all the other people who are in the same straits.’

‘For my birthday, I asked my wife for experiences instead of gifts. She booked me for a colonoscopy’

‘Never, never, never, never give up. Leave that to management’

The Times obituary of Michael Tanner, Corbynista opera critic of the Spectator, reported that he thought it ‘absurd’ for audiences to stand during Messiah’s Hallelujah chorus. Tanner refused to do so.

And yet the custom persists, some concertgoers glancing askance at those who fail to rise.

The tradition began after George II stood during the London première in 1743. Beliefs vary as to why His late Majesty did so. Some say it was because he was tone-deaf and mistook it for the national anthem. Others aver that he had pins and needles (Messiah is not short) or, to use rhyming slang, ‘trouble with his Chalfonts’.

Maybe he simply wanted to start a tradition that would alternately delight and infuriate future generations.

Still, the last time the Old Un attended a performance of the oratorio, the first notes of the Hallelujah were pretty much lost amid the clatter of grabbed walking sticks.

Iris Love’s dachsund fights

Brooke Astor’s for canapés, 1990, in Dafydd Jones’s New York: High Life/Low Life

Hallelujah! Peers have acted to reduce their own windbaggery.

The House of Lords procedure committee has published new advice on the length of speeches. Peers putting amendments will now be expected to speak for no longer than ten minutes, a reduction from the current 15.

Will the more garrulous walruses heed this rule?

Labour’s Lord Griffiths of Burry Port recently asked a parliamentary question that was 434 words long, thought to be a record.

‘For God’s sake, George! It’s an endangered species!’

Griffiths is a Methodist minister. He possibly forgot he wasn’t in the pulpit.

Vintage Yes Ministerstyle waffle from the Cabinet Secretary Simon Case when asked by Tory MP Sir Bernard Jenkin to explain the difference between policy, strategy, planning and implementation.

Case: ‘Implementation is clear: it means to make things happen. Planning describes an exercise that is often incredibly valuable. Policy can be part of an implementation plan. Too often, you see strategy and policy used

‘I thought we were going to watch porn tonight’

interchangeably but policy is part of implementation, along with the delivery of real-world outcomes.’

And he’s supposedly the brightest chap in Whitehall.

under 200 Ha Ha, and in good shape, my routine here is Morning Yard, I mean the amusement Yard, Baseball, Horseshoes Courts, and Hand-ball courts, Checkers and Dominoes, I and a friend of mine keep all items in perfect shape, and work all morning, and afternoons yard

Even monsters have feelings. That’s the impression you get from a new book, Behind Bars: Letters from History’s Most Famous Prisoners, edited by James Drake and Edward Smyth.

In 1938, mobster Al Capone wrote a charming letter to his son from Alcatraz Penitentiary, where he joined the jail band – the Rock Islanders – and played the banjo and the mandola.

Doing 11 years for tax evasion, he wrote of his daily routine, with distinctly dodgy grammar, ‘I am 7½ pounds

if its sunny otherwise I play my music, until 3pm, and from 3pm I write songs. Your Dear Dad, Alphonse Capone.’

It sounds a pretty idyllic life – more enjoyable than his old day job as a crime boss, shooting fellow mobsters in Chicago, notably in the 1929 St Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Love from Alcatraz: Al Capone

I’m half Joe Biden and half Michael Flatley

How do I stop looking old and doddery? Irish dancing is the answer

I know I have come a bit late to the party – I have only just begun to discover the joys of mindfulness.

To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what the word meant until my physiotherapist, Finola, 34, explained it to me.

Mindfulness means living in the present moment. More than that, it means being deliberately more aware and awake to each moment and being fully engaged in what is happening in one’s surroundings – with acceptance and without judgement.

Sounds a bit fey, I agree, but there’s something in it.

These days, I am literally smelling the roses. Finola has me starting my day with a walk around the garden, sensing the dew, sniffing the flowers, listening to the birdsong (carefully, so I can tell the difference between the sparrows and the starlings) and looking up at the sky.

She has me eating more slowly, so that I actually taste what I am eating instead of just wolfing it down. (Incidentally, this has worked wonders on the acid reflux.)

She has even got me painting by numbers. I am loving it.

Finola came into my life a couple of years ago when I fell over and broke my arm. She has stayed to work on the rest of me.

And there is work to be done. On a visit to Cork last year, a stranger started calling out to me from across the road. ‘Good to see you, Joe! Great to have you here, Joe! Thanks for coming to Ireland.’ The stranger had mistaken me for the President of the United States.

My wife was appalled. ‘That’ll teach you, you silly old fool – shuffling along the street like a dotard. Stand up straight. Pull yourself together.’

I am trying. Finola the physio

happens also to be an ex-professional Irish dancer – so she is getting me moving by showing me the steps.

If you come to see my stage show, you may catch me doing my impression of Joe Biden as Michael Flatley. There are forward kicks, side kicks, back kicks – the full Irish.

The audiences seem quite impressed. My wife less so.

‘You are so bad at it, Gyles,’ she says, ‘there is no risk of you being accused of cultural misappropriation.’

I still enjoy going to the cinema, despite the people sitting near me slurping wine and eating popcorn.

My wife takes earplugs to the movies these days, both to cut out the noise from fellow audience members and to reduce the impact of the state-of-the-art Dolby sound blasting from the screen. She also takes an eye mask in case the film turns out to feature excessive violence. Sometimes, she emerges from the cinema not having seen or heard a thing.

We’ve just seen the acclaimed Japanese-German film Perfect Days. It’s a delight. Directed by Wim Wenders, it stars Kōji Yakusho (Japan’s latter-day Omar Sharif) as a toilet-cleaner in Tokyo. (The toilets, incidentally, are a wonder to behold. Why can’t we have public lavatories like them in London?)

The film is in its way a hymn to mindfulness. The toilet-cleaner is truly committed to his work and committed to living in the moment. The clouds in the sky, the trees in the park, the sandwich in his lunch box … he savours them all. The

film is a charmer – though, possibly, at 124 minutes, half an hour too long.

Actually, I find most things are half an hour too long. Long Day’s Journey into Night, Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece, currently at Wyndham’s Theatre in London, starring the great Brian Cox, is at least an hour too long at three hours (plus a 20-minute interval).

It’s a fine play, but we get the gist quite quickly; two and half hours would do the trick. When another of O’Neill’s marathons, The Iceman Cometh, opened in New York in 1946, the critic Sterling North concluded, ‘Action draggeth, dialogue reeketh, play stinketh.’

Long Day’s Journey stinketh not, but it lasteth too long. When we reached the interval, there was a kind of relieved hysteria in the air.

I got overexcited meeting Toby Jones in the stalls. The star of Mr Bates vs The Post Office was wearing his new-found super-fame lightly.

Emerging from the crowded gents, I smiled at another face I knew well (and knew I liked a lot) and was gratified when the face smiled back. I spent the second half of the play not focusing on the on-stage drama, but trying to work out whose friendly crumpled face I’d recognised.

I did my usual trick of running through the alphabet to see if that might prompt the name to come to mind and – bingo! – when I got to J, it did. It was none other than Inspector Japp from television’s long-running Poirot series.

When I got home, I looked up the actor’s name. It was Philip Jackson, who first played Japp way back in 1989.

Thirty-five years on, he looks much the same. Let’s raise a glass to all those character actors whose names we can’t quite bring to mind, but whose work has given so much joy over so many years.

Gyles’s podcast, Rosebud, is out now

Gyles flexes his muscles: with physiotherapist Finola

Haunted by Michael Winner’s ghost

‘Calm down, dear,’ he said – after my home insurance soared matthew norman

Long mislaid in my chaotic west-London house – which exists, as we will see, in a microclimate of its own – is a gift from the late Michael Winner.

He and I were enemies for years, and then friends. It was once a fact of journalistic life that persistent feuding with the highly sensitive would end either in the High Court or at lunch. In our case, after many flirtations with the former, we settled on lunch.

We hit it off, as portly, irascible Jews tend to do. So it was that the mannerly old boy presented me with a box of stress balls. Squeeze one of these white spheres, and ‘Calm down, dear!’ would emerge in those memorable dulcets.

What necessitated the hunt for the box was a cordial email from the very firm on whose behalf Michael made that catchphrase so beloved that the noble Lord Cameron, then a mere commoner, deployed it at PMQs to patronise a female Labour MP with the full charm of Old Etonian swagger.

Esure had shown the kindness to email me. ‘Hello, Matthew,’ the communiqué chummily began. ‘Here’s your home insurance renewal reminder.’

A cracking start. Given the state of my memory, a reminder about anything is welcome. And this missive only improved.

‘The good news is that your Defaqto 5 star rated esure Home Insurance will renew automatically…’

Good news? Could there be better news than needing to do absolutely nothing to retain an important service, when doing absolutely nothing is literally the only thing one does well?

‘Cost to insure last year,’ a little box related, ‘£431.82.’

‘Cost to insure this year,’ read another, this figure against a calming, sky-blue background, ‘£1,519.66.’

Before we go on, permit me to interject an apology of the sort that

graces this column too often. There is nothing remotely original in bemoaning melodramatic hikes in insurance premiums. You will be familiar, wearily so in the case of motor vehicles, with the practice.

However, anyone idiotic enough to turn to this page in expectation of original thinking automatically forfeits the right to any consideration whatever. For heaven’s sake, grow up.

And, in my defence, the point here, should there be one, concerns less the bare fact that esure applied a multiplier of 3.5 to the price of my policy than its compelling rationale for doing so.

‘Following changes to weather patterns we have reviewed the risk associated with your policy and your renewal reflects this,’ the email continued (if there’s one thing esure appears to hate more than competitive pricing, it’s the comma).

Now this did strike me as original. Weather patterns plainly are changing all over the globe. No one with a doublefigure IQ disputes this.

Yet if the weather patterns associated specifically with my policy had changed that radically in a year, I had somehow failed to notice.

It should be stated, for fairness, that esure’s climatological expertise is beyond question. For the whole of 2008, it was the official sponsor of ITV National Weather bulletins. It then yielded that honour to confused.com.

But, in that lone year, it learned so much about weather patterns that it retains unique insights into changes affecting specific postcodes to this day.

Michael Winner presented me with a box of stress balls

Indefatigable researcher that I am, I have made multiple attempts to discuss these changes with the firm’s outsourced press office. Initially, I did have a nice chat with Eleanor, who promised to come back with details of any revised actuarial calculations following the combination of tornadoes, droughts, monsoons, wildfires and tropical cyclones that devastated my manor in the relevant period, yet somehow evaded my notice.

But two subsequent phone-message reminders have gone unanswered. When we spoke, Eleanor did mention living not far from me – so she may have succumbed to a typhoon.

The curiosity – and here I worry that esure is remiss in not keeping the rest of the industry in the loop – is that no one else has noticed either.

Two minutes on a price-comparison website elicited a host of quotes for a pretty much identical policy, all of them collectively pointing toward staggering industry-wide ignorance of these weather-pattern changes. The one I accepted, from M&S Home Insurance, cost £400.77, some £30 cheaper than the previous policy with esure.

Frankly, I feel guilty about this. It may not technically qualify as fraud, but was there not a crystal-clear moral obligation to alert M&S Home, and its underwriter Aviva, to the changing weather patterns that obliged the climatological savants at esure to hoick my premium by 250 per cent?

Then again, maybe I’m being as hypersensitive as my late friend. For guidance about what to do when fretting grievously over taking advantage of an insurer’s naivety about the threat from changing weather patterns, I finally located a little white ball, and gave it a squeeze.

‘Calm down, dear,’ spake the plastic oracle in a voice that brought a nostalgic grin to the face.

And, for now at least, I believe I will.

who was Bruce Montgomery?

Bruce Montgomery (1921-78) was a composer and author. If you’ve watched films of the 1950s and 1960s, including the early Carry Ons and the series started by Doctor in the House, you will have heard his music, and aficionados of classic crime fiction still enjoy the witty novels and short stories of Edmund Crispin, his pseudonym.

Montgomery read Modern Languages at Oxford, where friendships began with Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. Initially terrified by his apparent sophistication (whereas they went to the pub for beer, Montgomery stomped off to the bar of the Randolph Hotel to drink spirits), Larkin soon found that ‘Beneath this formidable exterior … Bruce had unsuspected depths of frivolity, and we were soon spending most of our time together swaying about with laughter on bar-stools.’

Montgomery’s career took off quickly. At Oxford, he wrote The Case of the Gilded Fly, published in 1944, as was his first music. The next decade saw most of his concert works and all but one of his novels. His music is distinctive, the largest-scale piece being An Oxford

Requiem, performed by the Oxford Bach Choir and the LSO in 1951.

The novels are equally distinctive, full of humour, chases and memorable characters. His detective, Professor Gervase Fen, is donnish, eccentric and waspish. The Moving Toyshop is generally considered his best.

Soon Montgomery found that film scores paid ‘better than books and consequently appeal to my innate instinct for getting relatively large sums of money in return for absolutely small amounts of work’. Montgomery composed scores for 40 films. Carry On Sergeant (1958) had a title tune ‘a not very intelligent Army bandmaster might have written round about 1900’. His zenith was writing the story, screenplay and score for Raising the Wind (1961), a music-college version of Doctor in the House

Heavy drinking led to Montgomery’s being dropped by the film world. Becoming a financially strapped semirecluse at his Devon bungalow, he

what is a Swedish death clean?

Döstädning, literally death clean in Swedish, means reducing your possessions to save your loved ones a huge task when you’re gone.

Decluttering, then? Yeh, but no, but… A lovely lady called Margareta Magnusson makes it more of a philosophy in her warm-hearted book The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. Sorting your stuff becomes a feelgood way of life that she advocates starting in your 50s – she is aged between 80 and 100, she says.

She speaks from sad experience, having cleared out the homes of friends and relatives, as well as downsizing from house to flat after her husband’s death.

If you pre-empt the worst by organising and clearing some of the crap, life will become more manageable.

The process can be emotional: all our yesterdays are contained in our homes and belongings. Memories can be good and bad. Old letters and photos, which Magnusson suggests leaving till last, have undeniable bittersweetness, but won’t mean much to our descendants. You can always keep a box for special mementos, she says, but be sure to destroy anything you don’t want others to find!

Döstädning is also a way of facing mortality. You may not feel like designing your funeral yet, but you can start death cleaning and enjoy the benefits now

An anti-materialistic tide is sweeping the land. I enjoy picking up tips from TV shows where stressed young families empty their homes into a huge warehouse and reduce the contents by half – emerging cleansed and ready for a new way of living.

Like most people, I’ve spent half my life acquiring things, instinctively holding onto them, whether or not I need or even

smoked heavily and developed osteoporosis (‘the bonelessness of the short-distance funner’), leading to frequent stays in hospital. During these years, he edited influential anthologies of science fiction and was crime-fiction reviewer for the Sunday Times.

His first novel since 1951, The Glimpses of the Moon, appeared in 1977. Detection takes second place to comedy, a host of ridiculous characters and bizarre events; it was welcomed by those who had missed his literary high spirits.

Montgomery died in 1978, at 56.

The official cause of death was heart failure, but he had long been cirrhotic.

In 1956, Montgomery wrote to Larkin, ‘What with Kingsley becoming a prominent literary figure, and now you, I feel like an ageing hare overtaken by squads of implacable tortoises.’ This erudite man harboured doubts about the worth of the fields he worked in. In cricketing terms he was a gentleman and amateur. He fell into his careers as composer and author, and when they became too much like hard work, he resorted to the bottle.

Rather than dwelling on the sad end to his life, though, we should celebrate the pleasure he left behind.

David Whittle

like them any more. So I’m letting some go, selling, or giving away books, clothes, handbags, cushions, gadgets, my adult children’s cuddly toys … not to mention the contents of the attic, the snickarbod (toolshed) and the mansdagis or ‘man cave ’ – literally ‘male nursery’ in Swedish.

Of course I’ll buy more – I’m a confessed shopaholic – but I’m trying to buy more selectively these days.

My mother at 92 used to look around guiltily, saying, ‘Whoever has to sort this lot will have a job.’

‘That’ll be me, then!’ I’d reply jokily. Actually the house wasn’t a tip, but there was a lot of stuff my mum had wanted to sort through before running out of steam.

So start a cathartic death clean now, while you can – it could be lucrative, too. You can help those in need and the planet. Don’t get stuck in the past like poor Miss Havisham. It’s not a good way to live.

Pamela Howarth

Montgomery, alias Edmund Crispin

The Sweeney began 50 years ago. Andrew Roberts salutes the fine acting, inspired script – and brilliant theme tune

‘You’re nicked!’

Mary Whitehouse regarded The Sweeney as gratuitously violent and disrespectful to the forces of law and order. Meanwhile, the Observer thought Detective Inspector Regan ‘knocks Barlow, Dixon, PC Plod and even baldy Kojak into a cocked helmet’.

The programme began with Regan, an edition of ITV’s Armchair Cinema, broadcast on 4th June 1974. John ‘Jack’ Regan informs a suspect, ‘Get your trousers on – you’re nicked.’

Two years earlier, in 1972, the Sunday People had reported the pornographer James Humphreys annually paying Commander Kenneth Drury of the Flying Squad £5,000 in bribes.

Shortly afterwards, Robert Mark was appointed Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police. He later wrote, ‘I had never experienced institutionalised wrongdoing, blindness, arrogance and prejudice on anything like the scale accepted as routine in the Met.’

Reforms were set in place, but a detective-inspector contact of the series writer, Ian Kennedy Martin, told him the Mark regime made it impossible to carry out his duties. The CID officer complained, ‘We gather information by meeting villains.’

Kennedy Martin believed the scenario of ‘a guy who was being hounded and trying to do his job’ would make an excellent television series. He approached the Euston Films division of Thames Television in 1973.

Euston needed a replacement for their current police series, Special Branch, dismissed by Kennedy Martin as ‘ghastly, middle-class rubbish’.

Euston commissioned an entire series before the transmission of the Regan pilot. To ensure authenticity, CID officers assisted with the storylines. The first episode aired on 2nd January 1975, and Euston sold The Sweeney to 51 countries.

By October 1975, it topped the UK television ratings. For younger viewers, there were spin-off annuals and a cartoon strip, The Teeny Sweeney in Jackpot comic.

From the outset, Kennedy Martin envisaged John Thaw as Detective Inspector Regan, with Dennis Waterman as Detective Sergeant George Carter.

Euston allotted The Sweeney a limited budget with a ten-day shooting schedule. The producer, Ted Childs, advised writers there was no money to bring Oxford Street to a halt ‘by wrecking three police cars in Selfridges front window’. Consequently, locations tended to be within a few miles of the company’s Hammersmith offices at Colet Court.

Harry South composed the memorable theme tune. Childs cited The French Connection as an influence on The Sweeney – ‘We all agreed we needed to be doing something like that.’

Peter Brayham, one of British cinema and television’s foremost stunt professionals, devised chases. The opening pursuit in Stoppo Driver is on a par with chase sequences in many films of ten times the budget. Ford provided the production with a fleet of cars, most famously a bronze three-litre Consul GT, and were

keen that no villainous characters drive their products.

For the getaways, The Sweeney employed a pool of Jaguar S-Types in various stages of dilapidation. One caught fire during the making of the Faces episode.

The Sweeney also looked different from other crime dramas, as it was the first British police series to be shot entirely on location, on 16mm film. Childs had the strong belief that ‘we ought to pioneer a film technique rather

than a tape studio production technique’.

One of the production’s unofficial mottos was ‘Shoot the rehearsal!’ and the directors used the restricted budgets to their advantage. The Sweeney captured a grey London of rusting Morris Oxfords, gimcrack cafés and public bars last cleaned when Shane Fenton was in the hit parade.

The Sweeney differed from its predecessors in that the plain-clothes officers frequently looked and acted in the same manner as the hoods they pursued.

‘We’re the Sweeney, son, and we haven’t had any dinner – so, unless you want a kicking…’ said Regan.

The lines were glorious: ‘If you weren’t who you are, I’d kick your arse up to your shoulderblades’; ‘Cor, that Sheila has got some lunch on her!’; ‘I want the glove compartment filled with Mars bars, wine gums and jelly babies, and ham sandwiches, the sort that come in cellophane packets, and sausage rolls – but no potato crisps. They interfere with transmission.’

Actors who play police officers are often the best purveyors of screen villainy. Thaw’s first film starring role was as a confidence trickster in the 1963 second feature Five to One.

Regan and his squad were also a logical development of changing depictions of the police since the 1950 Ealing drama The Blue Lamp, which introduced PC George Dixon.

Only a decade later, Stanley Baker’s troubled Detective Inspector Martineau, in Hell Is a City, could have been a template for DI Regan.

On television, the 1962-65 editions of Z-Cars, created by Kennedy Martin’s brother, Troy, evoked a bleak vision of policing. Nor were all ‘traditional’ crime shows guaranteed to reassure viewers. Dixon of Dock Green (which ran until 1976) could be far grimmer than its popular image: the 1967 episode The Team has deeply unpleasant villains.

Not every episode worked. Hearts and Minds, guest-starring Morecambe and Wise, resembled an end-of-term romp.

In the first series, Abduction, where Regan’s daughter is kidnapped, serves as a showcase for John Thaw’s relentless intensity.

Throughout The Sweeney, Regan displayed a loathing for the various blaggers, grasses, wide boys and ‘slags’ who crossed his path. Mark stated that ‘a good police force arrests more criminals

‘We’re the Sweeney, son, and we haven’t had any dinner –so, unless you want a kicking…’

than it employs’, and Regan believed in upholding the law as much as Dixon of Dock Green did.

Still, The Sweeney maintained an extremely high standard of scripts, focusing on three multi-faceted central characters. Waterman’s performance in Hit and Run, in which Carter’s wife is murdered, is a career highlight.

Garfield Morgan’s DCI Frank Haskins came to be seen as less the embodiment of the Mark regime and more a middleaged professional with his own issues.

Shut it! DS George Carter and DI Jack Regan (Dennis Waterman and John Thaw), 1978

He was the tarnished knight in a Consul GT, wearily reflecting, ‘Try and protect the public, and all they do is call you a “fascist”.’

Thaw was only 32 when the pilot episode aired but looked 47, and many of the villains appeared prematurely aged. It’s difficult to believe Ian Hendry’s Dickensian mobster in Ringer was 43.

The show benefited from guest stars such as Lee Montague, Norman Eshley, George Cole, David Lodge, John Hurt, Maureen Lipman and Ronald Fraser. Money, Money, Money had Glyn Owen as Regan’s former mentor now reduced to alcoholic despair. In Night Out, T P McKenna’s superintendent sacrifices his subordinates in the name of publicity. A special mention should be made of Diana Dors channelling the spirit of Peggy Mount in Messenger of the Gods

The Sweeney’s finest moment? When Regan wryly orders his driver, ‘Back to the big bad world of bent bog rolls!’

The final episode, Jack or Knave, aired in 1978 after more than 50 episodes and two spin-off films. By the fourth series, Regan looked 55. The conclusion has him leaving the force after a false accusation of corruption.

At that time, two other crime shows were a tribute to the show’s impact: The Professionals, apparently aimed at ten-year-olds, and the BBC’s Target, best described as Regan and Carter as reimagined by Alan Partridge.

The Sweeney was far more than the popular image of actors with flared trousers and menacing sideburns shouting ‘Guv’nor’ or ‘Shut it!’ as they pursued a silver Jaguar through Battersea.

RIP the posh fatty

Tubby Sloanes were celebrated by everyone, from the Two Fat Ladies to French and Saunders. Now they’ve disappeared.

By Candida Crewe

When I was in my twenties, Jennifer Paterson regularly used to invite me to her flat in a mansion block in Victoria. My God, she was a good cook, and I struggled to resist her magnificent dishes, even though at the time I had an eating disorder.

Sitting in her signatwure, primary-coloured artist’s overalls, she ate, drank and smoked so extravagantly, and laughed so throatily, I worried she might keel over before pudding.

She was one Fat Lady, Clarissa Dickson-Wright the other in their 1990s TV series, Two Fat Ladies. They are now both dead, alas, and they were the last of the great posh ladies of girth.

A friend was in the country recently and returned to London flabbergasted that he had not come across a single middle-aged woman who wasn’t waferthin. This is normal in London – but in the Home Counties? He’d been in Oxfordshire, but he might have been anywhere from Cornwall to Cumbria.

French and Saunders nailed the type in their classic ‘two ladies’ sketches. The rustic pair wore tremendous fat suits, with bosoms as large as 1970s pouffes, and lolloped around braying about disasters with which they had no truck: falling down stairs, gashing their heads open, gangrene, a husband’s death – all of which were dismissed as ‘fuss and bloody nonsense!’.

They played these characters almost 20 years ago, yet they are memorable because they were so brilliantly and hilariously accurate.

Where have all the posh fat ladies gone? They are perilously thin on the ground these days or, even, as my man-about-town friend observed when he ventured into the shires, non-existent.

If you find yourself at, say, Soho Farmhouse aka Butlins for c**ts, in Oxfordshire – which I have been known to visit – most of the women there are of startlingly tiny proportions. It makes you wonder if the membership committee

weeds out all applicants of a luxuriant silhouette. On second thoughts, probably no need, because the BMI-challenged have left the demographic entirely.

The obligation to be thin is not new. My mother, born in 1938, went on a diet at 16, had a 22-inch waist when, aged 22, she married my father, and has been – how shall I put this? – mindful of her weight, mine and every woman’s ever since. She has dementia now, but two of her stronger instincts remain as acute as they ever were: an alertness to my marital status; and an awareness of every mouthful she and others around her eat, every pound in her orbit gained or lost.

My friends say their mothers are just the same. These women are in their eighties and nineties. But at least in their day, and to some extent in mine, a few fell through the net and – dread phrase – let themselves go. They either ‘unfortunately’ didn’t have ‘the requisite willpower’ to rein in their appetites or, like the Two Fat Ladies, defiantly, inimitably, recklessly and gloriously defied the pressure to look like linguine.

These days, women no longer acquire an old-age, let alone a middle-age, spread. One friend went to a gaudy at his Oxford college recently and said all the men had turned up in fat suits. Not one woman got the memo.

Today, women feel there is no excuse for fleshly spillage. Everywhere they look, they are bombarded with fear of fat and endless pointers to avoid that

unimaginable fate. They read the features pages of the posh – and not so posh – papers, and ogle at outlandish social-media feeds and their expensive Fitbits. All these combine hourly to peddle the obligation to take to exercise bikes, marathon-running and superfoods, and to know the calorific expenditure of vigorous sex (which they rarely have).

They acquire often spurious food allergies.

Lactose-intolerant? I’ll take that, they reckon, because, at one fell swoop, it conveniently cuts out milk, butter, cream, cheese and yoghurt. And that’s just all women from a higher demographic. The ones with the added extra of a rich husband are ‘next-level’, as Jamie Oliver says when extolling the virtues of a pie which they wouldn’t be seen dead eating for fear of fatal expansion and existential meltdown.

Victoria Beckham is their standardbearer. She lives on steamed spinach, even when she goes to the River Café, apparently. David was unfaithful but she kept him, some conclude – with their living-in-a-bubble logic and undernourished view of the world – because she never got fat. So nor must they, ever, otherwise their husband will run off with a younger and, crucially, thinner, brand.

Diet and exercise are how they fill their days, with nothing else to do, because of hot- and cold-running staff, who take care of all the usual grot, the children and the admin.

So: cardio, pilates, yoga, kettlebells, the gym, lettuce ‘lunch’, psychotherapy (for the anorexia?) and retail therapy, you name it. No matter that this lot takes all day. It doggedly deflects doughnuts and keeps the pounds at bay.

Sadly, it also renders these ultra-thin women as bland as their identikit paint colours. And meantime, the extinction of such f**k-it, all-you-can-eat, larger-thanlife, funny, messy, overweight women as the late, great Jennifer P and Clarissa D-W hails a less colourful world.

Fat suits: French and Saunders

The longest day

On the 80th anniversary of D-Day, Giles Milton tells the moving tale of individual soldiers – and the piper – who landed on the beaches

Dawn was breaking in the English Channel when a young infantryman named Lionel Roebuck struggled onto the deck of his landing craft. It was Tuesday 6th June 1944, and he and his comrades had been pitched and tossed through the waves for the past 12 hours. Roebuck had been feeling queasy ever since gorging his ration of army chocolate. Now, as he caught the smell of powdered eggs being cooked in the ship’s galley, he was violently seasick. In common with his comrades, he was wondering how on earth he was going to fight his way onto the Normandy beaches in such a nauseous state.

June 6th marks the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the greatest seaborne invasion in the history of warfare. The Allied assault on Nazi-occupied Europe involved 7,000 ships and landing craft, 11,000 planes and 15,000 airborne troops. There were also 156,000 troops due to storm the beaches of Normandy on D-Day itself, with 2.5 million soldiers,

sailors and airmen awaiting the call to action in bases across the British Isles.

The stories of the officers in charge of D-Day have often been told, but the voices of the young lads who stormed the beaches are much less well-known. Many of those in the front line of battle were gunned down within seconds of landing. Many more have been airbrushed from history.

But some of those who landed in the first wave survived to tell the tale, recording their experiences in unpublished diaries and letters. These reveal the full horror of their sufferings as they sought to liberate occupied France.

Among the young men due to land that morning was that seasick young soldier, Lionel Roebuck. He was leading the assault on Sword Beach, one of the five Normandy beaches chosen for the Allied landings: Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha and Juno.

Sword had been assigned to British forces. It was essential for them to knock out the German coastal defences and

Commandos on a landing craft approach Sword Beach, 6th June 1944

capture the beach. Once this was done, they were to march inland to support the airborne forces dropped into Normandy during the night.

But the beach landing was far from easy. The heavy seas were proving a particular challenge for the amphibious tanks that were meant to ‘swim’ ashore – unnoticed by the Germans – and provide vital support for the infantry.

They were equipped with a special flotation system, but it was not designed for such choppy water.

Corporal John Barnes was terrified as he coaxed his tank off the landing craft and into the sea. ‘You’re seeing explosions; there’s smokescreens being put up,’ he later recalled. He kept repeating the same six words – ‘I must get to the beach’ – aware that if the tank’s engine was swamped by seawater, they would sink like a stone.

The ride to the shore was even worse for Ronald Mole and his crew. Mole’s co-driver stuck his head above the turret to get a view of the coastline, only to receive a bullet between the eyes.

‘He sagged and his knees hit me in the kidneys,’ recalled Mole, ‘and when I turned I could just see blood running. It wasn’t splashing, just a gentle run and there it was on the bottom of the tank, just coagulating in a small pool and getting thicker and thicker.’

Private Roebuck’s landing craft was still some distance from the shore, but

bullets were already zipping through the air. ‘The noise was terrific with all the explosions and shells landing in the sea around us. They hit the sea and there was a mushroom of water and you could hear splinters of shells splattering against the side of the boat.’

One shell exploded on the metal ramp of an assault craft carrying a young marine named Harry Wicks. Red-hot shrapnel was flung across the open deck.

‘Old Joe Wright, the stoker, he had his arm almost severed. Lofty Crawford had a piece in the stomach. I got a piece in the arm, the back and the leg.’

In another landing craft, Tommy Treacher found himself knee-deep in blood. ‘Blood everywhere. Thick blood. And when the navy blokes was going to push the ramps down, another shell hit us and it killed all four. They were decapitated. As I was going to get off the boat, I spoke to one of my friends and I said, “How are you, Jasper?”

‘And he says, “How am I? How am I? I reckon I’ve broken both my legs.”’

Roebuck felt his assault craft shudder to a halt as it wedged into the sandy foreshore. Roebuck ran up the beach under a hail of fire before finding a shelter of sorts behind a burned-out tank. When he looked around, he saw carnage.

‘Wrecked boats – sometimes side-on, sometimes upside down. Bodies floating face down in the sea. Men halfway up the beach who were in really peculiar positions, legs all over the place, really grotesque positions. And there were shells landing all around in the sea and on the beach.’

Roebuck had been one of the first men to land on Sword Beach. An hour or so later, Lord Lovat’s commandos stormed the beach. These troops were highly trained and motivated, having spent months preparing for the landings.

Among them was Cliff Morris, who wrote a vivid diary of his experiences of coming ashore on D-Day. ‘Bodies lay sprawled all over the beach. Some with legs, arms and heads missing, the blood clotting in the sand. The moans and screams of those in agony blended with the shrieks of bullets and whining of shells.’

Morris realised that the first wave to land that morning – which included Roebuck’s East Yorkshire Regiment –had been decimated. Roebuck himself was incredibly fortunate to have survived.

The commandos’ leader, Lord Lovat, led his men up Sword Beach in a hail of fire. They stormed the German strongholds, forcing Hitler’s defenders onto the defensive.

There was to be an incongruous sight on the beach that morning – one later immortalised in the Hollywood film The Longest Day. Lovat had brought with him his personal bagpiper, Bill Millin, and he now ordered him to march up and down the beach playing music. Bill Millin did just that, earning himself a new nickname: the ‘mad bastard’.

The commandos fought heroically that morning. By 9.30am, most German guns

had been silenced and seven of the eight beach exits cleared. Now, the commandos had to fight their way inland.

A similar story unfolded on each of the five beaches. The men in the first wave were mercilessly gunned down, leaving those in the second and third waves to knock out the German defences.

Some beaches proved relatively easy to capture: the Americans landing on Utah Beach suffered just 197 casualties. But on Omaha Beach, a staggering 2,400 men were gunned down in the early stages of the landing – a scene immortalised in the opening scenes of Steven Spielberg’s film Saving Private Ryan.

Looking back after 80 years, one might be tempted to conclude victory was inevitable on D-Day. After all, the soldiers were supported by formidable firepower, from both the sea and the air. But it did not seem like that to the young men storming the beaches. They faced absolute terror that morning, and it is testament to their courage that by the end of the day all five beaches were in Allied hands.

Despite victory on D-Day itself, the battle to liberate Nazi-occupied Europe had only just begun. There were to be another 335 days of intense fighting before Germany’s unconditional surrender on 7th May 1945.

D-Day had made victory possible – at a cost of 4,414 Allied lives.

Giles

British commandos, 1st Special Service Brigade, land on Sword Beach, D-Day

Lord Lovat (centre) and piper, Bill Millin (rt foreground), Sword Beach, on D-Day

Milton’s book D-Day: The Soldiers’ Story (John Murray) is out now

In wartime letters from London, Laura Grenfell wrote about D-Day, VE Day and Joyce Grenfell, her dazzling sister-in-law

D-Day on the Home Front

25th June 1944.

37 Chesham Place, London SW1 Darlings [Laura’s six siblings],

My life seems to go on very much the same. I broke my record by having a tummy upset the day before D-Day.

D-Day sent my temperature up. [They] plugged M&B [antibiotic] down me, which made me feel like a damp piece of fawn-coloured blotting paper!

So I missed D-Day and Lady R [Lady Reading, Laura’s boss in the WVS] celebrating her CBE, and got back to the office when all the excitement was over, and when everyone decided they hadn’t time to communicate with us, so there really wasn’t much to do, and I nearly chewed my typewriter into shreds, longing to be a WRN driving a picket boat, or something of the sort.

I now find that everyone felt the same, so feel more reconciled.

Reg Grenfell [Laura’s half-brother, serving in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, married to Joyce Grenfell] is standing by and may go ‘over’ soon, but not for a month or so. And Joyce [Grenfell, the actress and Laura’s sister-in-law, married to Reg] is just starting broadcasts and concerts again. She has made a very

Joyce

is so beautifully dressed, although on the same coupon ration. Incredible definite mark by her tour, and the ENSA people say it was quite outstanding, and not only that but she sent back very good criticisms and suggestions for entertainments in hospitals, all of which they are going to adopt. So she’s very much their blue-eyed boy.

Reg and Joyce and I went to see Nicholas Phipps in Blithe Spirit yesterday. The theatre was only about a

quarter full, which must have been rather depressing, but as it has had a four-year run, hardly surprising.

He went round after and saw him, Joyce Carey [actress who played the supercilious buffet manageress in Brief Encounter] and Penelope Dudley Ward [actress, married to director Carol Reed] (who looks quite lovely in it) and I was very amused with the tactics of one actress to another! Just like in books.

Two days earlier, Reg and I went to watch Joyce record a broadcast with Stinker Murdoch [the entertainer Richard Murdoch (1907-90)], which was very amusing and a good programme too. I must say Joyce looks an absolute vision standing on a platform, singing into a microphone! She is so beautifully dressed and turned out, although on the same coupon ration; it’s quite incredible.

Not that I have ever thought of competing, but I certainly wouldn’t dream of it now; I might just as well aspire to be the same shape as Goering!

Christmas Day 1944.

37 Chesham Place, SW1

Darling V [Vera Grenfell, Laura’s sister], I am absolutely miserable at not

having written to you sooner and at length about Harry [Grenfell (1905-85), Laura’s half-brother, who had lost both legs, serving with the Royal Artillery at Kohima in May 1944]. Now we’ve got him back here and it’s lovely. He came on Saturday morning, sitting in the front seat of a utility van. Canning & I lifted him out, his arms around our necks & us supporting him just behind his knee.

I was rather scared he might be too heavy, but was horrified to find him as light as a feather. We’ve put one of the beds with blue backs & a gold rim into what is now Mummy’s sitting room, & was the board room. It has worked out most successfully & I really do think Harry is happy. We’ve got out the wheelchair Grandmums used to have, which is beautifully sprung, & Harry is wonderfully agile at lifting himself, on his arms, off the bed, over the arm & into the chair & he can sit at the dining-room table & we push him about easily.

He heaves himself into an armchair or onto the sofa and so gets a bit of change.

He is extraordinarily well considering everything & he’s been eating quite well here & I think might soon fatten up a bit.

It’s quite incredible the sheer courage which he, & all the others at Roehampton [Hospital], have. It’s not a flamboyant window dressing, it’s a perfectly normal,

The Queen Mother & Frances CampbellPreston, Laura’s sister, Wells, 1986

Laura Grenfell (1920-79) in her Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) uniform

come down this week, when Willa is to see the Queen, thanks to you???

April 1945

matter-of-fact acceptance & they seem to concentrate entirely on putting all their energy into getting on to the next stage…

17th February 1945.

37 Chesham Place, SW1

Darling V, Frances [Campbell-Preston (1918-2022), Laura’s sister, whose husband Patrick was a POW; she was later lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, dying at 103] is up at Ardchattan at the moment, & Willa [Walker, a friend of Frances] has joined her there. They measure on maps, & work themselves into a tizzy. They both

Harry goes from strength to strength, and the delay now comes from the slowness of getting the final legs. It takes about five years to train someone to hand-make the legs – why, I don’t quite know – so that it’s not a process that can be stepped up suddenly. They are quite honest about not raising his hopes by giving a false date, which is just as well.

There’s quite a lot of talk about VE Day etc but I think it will taper off rather soberly really. It will obviously be a bit dragged out, till Norway, the Channel Islands etc, etc. are quite clear – then with the Burma fighting still on.

That takes the edge off things a good

deal. Still – the sooner it all comes, the better! The publicity about Buchenwald & the other camps has sobered up people’s imaginations very considerably.

It’s awful how much is hanging in the balance just now, for everyone individually, & for the world in general. It is maddening for you not knowing more clearly what is going to happen your way, for one thing!

Thank you again, darling, for your lovely parcel & the marvellous stream of letters you manage to keep up to us all.

All love, Lolly

31st May 1945. 37 Chesham Place, SW1

Darling V,

You will have heard all about our VE Day activities. We certainly benefited from being hidebound Cockneys and we managed to see everything there was to see. Everything piled up most appropriately to make us feel the war really was over. Patrick [CampbellPreston, Laura’s brother-in-law and a POW] was back, Pat L-P [Laura’s brother-in-law] back on leave and with the DSO, Harry and Daddy going off to Lord’s, where Harry made the classic catch in the Pavilion [he caught a six hit by an Australian while in his wheelchair, in a match between the MCC and Australian forces], all beautifully peace-time excitement.

Then, last week, while he was up at Howick, we heard of his MC too. That really was perfect and I’m thrilled for him. He will now have the Dunkirk ribbon, the Burma Star and his MC!

I had a thrilling afternoon, working on an aerodrome where prisoners of war were arriving, plane after plane.

It was most moving – not for being highly emotional, but because of the absolute simplicity of it all. A huge hangar was given over. The men arrived one end, were deloused, moved on to tables where we gave them tea and sandwiches and talked. Then on by truck to the reception camps, where they stay 48 hours, get new uniforms, ration cards, medical etc.

It has been awfully well handled.

In 1950, Laura Grenfell married Sir Bernard Fergusson, Governor-General of New Zealand (1962-67)

‘An absolute vision, singing into a microphone’ – Joyce Grenfell (1910-79)

Right: her husband, Lt Col Reg Grenfell, King’s Royal Rifle Corps, 1944

G K Chesterton, saint and sinner

On the writer’s 150th anniversary, Rev Michael Coren salutes a genius – with a nasty side

Gilbert Keith Chesterton – born 150 years ago, on 29th May 1874 – never quite goes away.

He’s still widely read and quoted by people who rely on speechwriters rather than books. He’s a major voice in conservative circles, in particular. The Father Brown stories (even if twisted beyond recognition) are always on television. He speaks to modernity as though he were an especially brilliant and informed neighbour.

He wrote the novels The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and biographies of St Francis, Thomas Aquinas and Charles Dickens. His analyses of history include Orthodoxy, Heretics and The Everlasting Man. He poured out oceans of journalism. There was poetry too, including The Ballad of The White Horse, The Rolling English Road and Lepanto.

Born in 1874 in London, Chesterton grew up with his brother, Cecil, in a secure, happy home. The gangly, awkward yet gifted schoolboy chose art school rather than university, and didn’t plan a career in journalism. He drifted into the craft, mingling an emerging Christianity with a delightful refusal to be bound by conventional party labels or accepted political wisdom.

On nationalism, he wrote, ‘“My country, right or wrong” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober”.’ On literature, he said, ‘A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.’ On being controversial, he wrote, ‘I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.’

‘If you look at a thing 999 times, you are perfectly safe,’ he wrote. ‘If you look at it the 1,000th time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.’

Books came early: Greybeards at Play in 1900, Twelve Types in 1902 and a biography of Robert Browning the following year. The Napoleon of Notting Hill was in 1904.

He married Frances Blogg in 1901 and they had an intensely happy, childless life together. She was an essential steadying influence on his notorious untidiness and lack of organisation.

‘Am at Market Harborough,’ he once wrote to her. ‘Where ought I to be?’

Her reply? ‘Home.’

The other central aspect to Chesterton was faith, and the pull of Roman Catholicism. He would join the church in 1922: ‘The fight for the family and the free citizen and everything decent must now be waged by the one fighting form of Christianity.’

He had a thrusting ability to hold up a mirror to the addled society around him and show its absurd reflection. ‘Journalism largely consists of saying, “Lord Jones is dead” to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.’ And, ‘The Bible tells us to love our neighbours and also to love our enemies, probably because they are generally the same people.’

But as well as the undoubted brilliance, there’s the accusation of anti-Semitism. It’s a subject on which I’ve vacillated. In my 1989 biography, I acknowledged his comments but still came down on his side. I later saw that as insufficient. Now, in all honesty, I’m just not certain.

His younger brother, Cecil, was obsessed with what he saw as negative Jewish influences and led a vitriolic campaign against the handful of Jewish figures who were involved in the 1912 Marconi Scandal – an early form of insider trading, mostly involving non-Jews. Cecil died at the end of the First World War, through illness rather than combat, and Gilbert wrote an open letter to Lord Reading, the Jewish Lord Chief Justice of England. It’s soaked in anti-Semitism, ‘the Jewish international’ and ‘alien psychology’.

He could be just crude and cruel. ‘I am fond of Jews/Jews are fond of money/ Never mind of whose. I am fond of Jews/ Oh, but when they lose/Damn in all, it’s funny.’ And ‘Oh I knew a Doctor Gluck/ And his nose it had a hook/And his attitudes were anything but Aryan/ So I gave him all the pork that I had, upon a fork/Because I am myself a Vegetarian.’

He was, however, an early anti-Nazi and spoke of Jewish people being ‘rabbled or ruined or driven from their homes’ by the Nazis, who ‘beat and bully

I wish that a man of such foresight hadn’t dipped into rancid anti-Semitism

poor Jews in concentration camps’, and how ‘I do indeed despise the Hitlerites’. Compare that with the silence or even ambivalence of many alleged progressives at the time.

I am an Anglican vicar, even though three of my four grandparents were Jewish. I wish that a man of such foresight and perception hadn’t dipped his toes into the rancid waters of antiSemitism, but he did. It doesn’t dent his brilliance – but it does sting.

Oh, how it stings.

Rev

Michael Coren is an Anglican vicar in Ontario

G K Chesterton (1874-1936): ‘I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean’

My Odessa family

John Sergeant is horrified by Russian attacks on the great city, home to his mother and grandmother

When we conjure up visions of the great Black Sea port of Odessa today, we aren’t likely to see the elegant French-style boulevards, the grand, honey-coloured buildings and the proud Russian Orthodox churches. We see dead bodies, twisted metal, piles of rubble and wanton destruction.

The battle for Odessa, which the Russians would dearly like to win, is far from over. But were he catastrophically to win, Vladimir Putin might feel justified in claiming victory in his terrible war with Ukraine.

For most people in Britain, Odessa is a faraway place, of which they know little. I have known about it all my life.

We shared our home in Oxfordshire with my Russian grandmother, who had escaped with her family from Odessa just before the October Revolution of 1917. My mother was born in Odessa four years earlier.

My father was vicar of the small parish of Great Tew and also an expert linguist. Our large Georgian vicarage would often echo with the sound of Russian being spoken.

I was the youngest of three children and we assumed – correctly – that the grown-ups might well be talking about us. Even in later life, we never managed to learn Russian.

Ukraine, with its vast wheatfields, used to be described as the breadbasket of Russia. On the British side, my mother’s family came from Lincolnshire, where the wheatfields were early to benefit from the farm machinery that emerged from the Industrial Revolution.

My family were so successful in exporting these machines to Ukraine that once, when my great-grandfather returned from a business trip to Odessa, his carriage horses were uncoupled and he was pulled though Lincoln by cheering crowds.

The family business established a base in Odessa with dockside buildings and offices. My grandfather settled there and married the daughter of a local Orthodox priest but, before long, this booming, cosmopolitan city was caught up in the

revolution of 1905. Demonstrations encouraged by mutineers from the battleship Potemkin were savagely put down by Tsarist forces.

Many protestors were caught and killed near the giant stone stairway in what became known as the massacre on the Odessa Steps.

It was made famous across the world in Battleship Potemkin, the silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein in 1925.

The great outdoor staircase, constructed by a British engineer, was designed to provide a dramatic route from the upper level of the city to the harbour below.

From the family jetty, my grandfather had a clear view of the historic event. To his relief, the revolution was short-lived, and he decided to stay on.

It was not until the summer of 1917 that the family made their move, travelling to St Petersburg before leaving for Britain by boat. My grandmother was told that the man they saw addressing vast crowds was Lenin, soon to become the first leader of Bolshevik Russia.

In my childhood, Odessa was transformed by the descriptions of my mother, who longed to go back, into a mystical presence, a shimmering city on a hill, shrouded in mystery.

She eventually made brief visits as a tourist guide for rich Americans. But my grandmother never returned. She spoke about it when I saw her for the last time in a care home near Berkhamsted. At least, I think she did. She insisted on speaking to me entirely in Russian.

Twenty years ago, after I left the BBC, I was contacted by an agency which supplied speakers to go to Ukraine from funds provided in Brussels by the EEC.

We could talk generally about current affairs, and I jumped at the chance to go

to Odessa, to see for myself. The agency had not known of my family connection. I went with my wife, Mary, and was primed by my mother. I had details of how my grandfather had fully integrated into his adopted city and had even provided funds to build the second largest church.

I imagined I might be greeted as a prodigal son, a welcome reminder of a long-lost family link. But it did not turn out that way.

My speech, mostly a gentle stroll down memory lane with words added in favour of Europe and democracy, was interrupted by a small group of proMoscow agitators. They protested at what they saw as Western interference.

Fortunately, we managed to leave the meeting hall without difficulty and had a couple of days enjoying what remained of the charm and old-fashioned style of Odessa.

We phoned my mother to say it was a thrill to be there. But the more I learned about local history, the more I was grateful for their move to Britain. Civil war, famine, the Nazi occupation, the mass killing of Jews … Odessa suffered a complete breakdown.

Only in recent years was some of the old glory restored. Now that is under threat from Russian missile attacks. Uncertainty and fear haunt the city.

The once great port is in danger of losing for ever the title bestowed on her in the past: Odessa, the Pearl of the Sea.

And part of my family history would be buried with it.

John

correspondent of the BBC and political editor of ITV

Sergeant was chief political

Massacre on the Odessa Steps, 16th July 1905

As Fawlty Towers hits the West End, John Cleese tells Mark Palmer how it all began – and how Germans love the sublime comedy

Do mention the war

Never go back. Or, then again, cast aside any such thinking and, like a famous rock star, book the venues, load up the vans and hit the road one more time.

John Cleese isn’t a rock star and isn’t exactly hitting the road. But he’s certainly reaching deep into his back catalogue – with a London West End stage production of Fawlty Towers, exactly 50 years after it was first recorded at BBC Television Centre.

He seems remarkably upbeat about it all. And now he’s 84, there’s no slowing down (a stage version of Monty Python is planned for next year in London); no moaning about the travails of advancing age and, thank goodness, no mincing of words.

‘The reason Fawlty Towers got made was that there were executives at the BBC in those days who had worked their way up and had come into contact with brilliantly funny characters like Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett,’ says Cleese.

‘They were creative; they had production experience. Now, it’s a group calling themselves commissioning editors, who think more about money than about the script and everything then goes through some ghastly committee.’

Warming to his theme, Cleese says that ‘the BBC

used to be a middle-class organisation and now it’s a tabloid organisation with highlypaid “stars”, who are not especially talented’. Fawlty Towers – of which there were only 12 half-hour episodes spread over two series – was in 2019 named the greatest British TV sitcom of all time by Radio Times, and in 2000 was ranked top of the best-100 TV programmes by the British Film Institute.

‘It will be interesting to see how it’s received all these years later,’ says Cleese. ‘The reason for its success was that it was essentially about the lower middle class, of which my father was a leading member.

‘So I knew a lot about the importance of reputation and keeping up appearances.

‘In those days, anger was almost a forbidden emotion. People would say

Clockwise from left: Polly (Connie Booth), Basil (John Cleese), Sybil (Prunella Scales) and Manuel

that someone had “lost their temper” and yet you can be angry and still control your behaviour. Poor Basil got himself into such situations that even though he was appalling, you started to feel sorry for him and ended up thinking what a poor old sod.’

The two-hour stage version at the Apollo Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue is based on three of Cleese’s favourite TV episodes – The Hotel Inspector and The Germans from series one, and Communication Problems from series two – and ends with what Cleese calls a ‘huge grand finale’.

‘The actors are all astonishingly good [Basil is played by Adam JacksonSmith, Sybil by Anna-Jane Casey] and remind me what a wealth of talent we have in Britain.’

Cleese wrote the original TV series with Connie Booth, who also played the maid, Polly. They were married at the time. There have since been three other Mrs Cleeses, including the current one, Jennifer Wade, 32 years his junior.

The sitcom was largely based on their experience staying at Donald Sinclair’s Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, which ‘was so spectacularly awful that it was really rather wonderful’.

It was the hotel where the whole Monty Python gang used to stay while filming in the area but, whereas the others quickly moved out and found somewhere more convivial, Cleese stayed put and soaked it all in.

‘I was just too lazy – but the place stayed with me. I could never forget it’.

A few years later, Cleese had lunch with Jimmy Gilbert, who was head of comedy at the BBC in the 1970s.

‘He said, “What would you like to do?” and I said we were keen to write a script for a comedy based on a hotel in Torquay. And that was it. He just said, “Let’s do it.” Cleese and Booth spent some six weeks working on each episode.

‘Connie was better than me on character and I was better than her on plot, but the more we worked together, the better I got on dialogue and the better she got on plot. We would just sit in a room and throw up ideas and see where they landed.’

‘Never in my entire life have I met a German who has complained about that scene’

Has the 2024 stage version been changed so as not to disturb modern sensibilities – for example, the famous line ‘Don’t mention the war’ after a group of Germans check in, culminating in Basil marching through the dining room dressed as a Hitler lookalike, complete with moustache and arm outstretched in a Nazi salute?

‘Never in my entire life have I met a German who has complained about that scene. Not once. The only thing we have taken out is the Major using the N-word to describe those who live in the West Indies – even though at the time it was all about making fun of prejudice.’

Cleese currently spends a lot of time in America. He has a home on the outskirts of LA, another in Nevis and a house in London.

Supported by his daughter Camilla, 40, a comedian in her own right, he’s been performing a one-man show in US cities and, by his own admission, feels

The stage show is based on Cleese’s favourite episodes. Left, from top: The Germans, The Hotel Inspector Communication Problems

out of touch with the peculiarities of Britain, although that didn’t stop him tweeting that ‘London is not an English city any more.’

‘That was not a racist remark,’ he says. ‘Race doesn’t matter, but culture does. I think that some cultures are superior to others, and we should not be frightened to say so. A society that goes in for female genital mutilation is abhorrent and I happen to think that if people come to live in Britain, they should accept and adhere to our values.

‘I understand that some 20 per cent of Muslims in the UK would like to see Sharia law and I believe that’s wrong.’

Cleese enjoyed his stint last year on GB News, even though he says the TV company’s political views aren’t his own. He made ten programmes called The Dinosaur Hour, with guests including Stephen Fry, Caitlyn Jenner, Sir Tim Rice and Chris Tarrant.

‘I was allowed to say what I wanted and enjoyed that. On one programme, we had three academics and discussed this whole woke business. What annoys me is how some people think they have invented kindness, but kindness has always been there. Kindness is everywhere, and much of my comedy is about teasing people with affection.’

There’s a residual affection for Cleese in Britain, even if he might not always feel it. Let’s face it, he can come across as grumpy. Perhaps in that respect he shares something with Basil Fawlty.

‘I am not Basil and never was – but I can feel for him when I am under a lot of stress. When Connie and I were writing the script, we used to think that Basil actually existed. He became such an important part of our lives.’

Clearly, he still is – as the London show proves. There is no official end date to the run, and bookings are looking strong.

‘I think it will get better as it goes on, because in comedy the audience becomes part of the show. There could be a pause while people are laughing and then the actors might have to ad-lib. It’s those extra messages that can be devastatingly funny. I just hope it works, because it’s been a joy pulling it together.’

Fawlty Towers: The Play is at the Apollo Theatre, London, from 4th May

Mark Palmer is travel editor of the Daily Mail

Edwin Lutyens built houses, churches, a viceroy’s palace – and the Cenotaph. Clive Aslet says he deserves the highest accolade…

Our greatest architect

One afternoon in the 1880s, the Indian civil servant and translator Forster Arbuthnot drove his coach and four horses into the Surrey village of Thursley.

He had come to commission a painting from a former infantry captain turned artist, the increasingly eccentric Charles Lutyens, whose family lived ‘like gypsies’ on the wild heath.

A ‘shock-haired boy’, dressed in ill-fitting hand-me-downs from his many brothers, proved to be Edwin Landseer Lutyens, named after the famous animal painter whom his father attempted – not very successfully – to emulate.

Born in 1869, Ned, as he was universally known, never learnt to dress smartly and persisted in cutting his own hair, even when he had lost most of it. But he would grow up to be an extraordinary architect – perhaps the best Britain has ever had.

Why so highly rated? Partly because of the sheer volume of his oeuvre: no other architect has been so various.

He designed country houses, town houses, institutional buildings, churches, offices, a cathedral of epic proportions in Liverpool (only the crypt was built), the fountains in Trafalgar Square, a palace for the British Viceroy in India, the plan of New Delhi, as well as a plethora of ingenious small structures – a village shelter at Mells to remember a dead child, a belvedere for Gertrude Jekyll to watch thunderstorms sweep over the South Downs, a reservoir head on Dartmoor known as the Pimple. All three of the last examples are triangular, testament to his love of geometry.

Marrying the demanding daughter of an earl, he could never turn down work – and never wanted to. He hated holidays and although he adored the woman he married, he did not understand her and was often away, making site visits or drumming up work.

Lonely and hating housework, his wife found a spiritual home in the new religion of theosophy, falling head over

heels for its beautiful young World Teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Lutyens opened his first office in 1889 when he was 19 – a precocious age, given that many architects do not find their feet before they are 40. Putting his bicycle in the guard’s van of the train from London, he would pedal to sites around Surrey, full of energy, lyricism and jokes.

His many country houses, often in the Home Counties, were a rhapsody to the English landscape amidst which he had grown up. Under the tutelage of the craftswoman and gardener Gertrude Jekyll, he thrilled to the old, handmade culture of the country people whose way of life was fast disappearing, while at the same time finding fun in its quaintness.

Card-carrying members of the Arts and Crafts Movement strove to be ostentatiously dull: Lutyens was irrepressible, a master of form and a poet of materials. This was expensive architecture for rich people, which gave him an unhelpful reputation for extravagance.

King of all he surveys: Sir Edwin Lutyens, 1942

Viceroy’s House, New Delhi, built in 1929

As his thirties wore on, he sought a bigger canvas. Hampstead Garden Suburb gave him two churches to design and, from there, with little other public architecture or planning experience under his belt, he made the leap to the Viceroy’s House and New Delhi. They came in 1912.

It was, however, the First World War that enabled – indeed, forced on him – a shift in gear. The country-house practice dried up. In its place arose an aching need for monuments that would pay respect to the fallen. Thousands were erected across Britain, the Empire and the battlefields of France and Flanders.

Unusually, Lutyens believed that the most appropriate form they could take would be abstract, a matter of geometrical proportion and little else: an architecture stripped of most ornament and devoid of overt symbolism.

This was remarkable in an age habituated to great military parades and the pomp of Edwardian Baroque. But it was immediately understood by the millions of people in the country who had lost sons, husbands and brothers. It was for his unpaid work for the Imperial War Graves Commission, and the design of New Delhi, that he was knighted in 1918.

This year sees the 100th anniversary of another product of those years, Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, created to provide work for unemployed craftsmen and as a record of the pre-war life that seemed to have been lost for ever. Now in Windsor Castle, it has just been restored.

In the early works, we can glimpse Lutyens’s love of the abstract in his insistence on an exact angle for roofs – 54 degrees and 45 minutes (54.75 degrees): the beauty of this pitch was that it created a hip or corner of 45 degrees, which made the job of carpenters easier on site.

Despite a lack of formal education in mathematics, he was fascinated – to an almost occult extent – by numbers. Ratios and proportions are the stuff of Classicism, the ‘high game’ which enthralled him after 1905.

But, in a plastic form, we can feel the aesthetic excitement of geometry even more thrillingly in – of all things – the after-its-time castle on Dartmoor which Lutyens reluctantly built for Julius Drewe: Castle Drogo is better understood as a gigantic piece of sculpture than as a country house, let alone a family home.

After the First World War, Lutyens’s greatest works transcend the conventions of Classicism to become works of mathematics – pure form of the most inventive and cerebral kind.

His magnum opus of the 1930s, the unbuilt Roman Catholic Cathedral at Liverpool, revisits previous themes –such as the triumphal arch motif which he used in a bravely original way at Thiepval – which were then developed with the complexity of a Bach fugue.

Although never completed, his titanic vision continues to amaze visitors to the 17-foot-long model that exists in the Museum of Liverpool.

Not a conventionally religious man, Lutyens was, at the end of his life, happy in the company of the Jesuits for whom he designed the monastic Campion Hall in Oxford. He said it was his best building. Aspects of Campion Hall reprise of the Surrey style with which Lutyens started his long career. In 1942, he became the first architect to be awarded the Order of Merit. Two years later, he died.

After the Second World War, the doctrinaire architects of the Modern Movement made Lutyens into a hate figure. He had seen himself as a Humanist, not a product of the Machine Age. A major exhibition in 1981-82, which turned the concrete bunker of the Hayward Gallery into a series of delicious Lutyensesque spaces, restored his reputation, and now the National Trust owns three of his country houses.

They include Castle Drogo, now sparkling after an epic restoration, and Lindisfarne Castle, converted from an ancient artillery fort which surges above a conical outcrop of rock on Holy Island, off the Northumbrian coast.

Lindisfarne’s client was Edward Hudson, founder of Country Life: he and Lutyens loved the remoteness and romance. Last year, the National Trust acquired Munstead Wood, outside Godalming in Surrey, home of the gardener Gertrude Jekyll, a mentor of the young Ned in his early days. They became informal partners in the creation of more than 100 gardens.

At Munstead Wood, Lutyens saw a marble bench one of Jekyll’s guests likened to the Cenotaph of Sigismunda. When asked by Lloyd George to design a catafalque that soldiers returning from the First World War could salute, his mind returned to that moment. Not a catafalque, he said, but a cenotaph.

The result was the Cenotaph on Whitehall, a work of complex geometry, without a hint of religious symbolism – and yet the public immediately took it to its sorrowing heart as the natural focus for people’s feelings of grief and loss.

It was, above all his contemporaries, Lutyens who expressed the big ideas of his time – another reason he is called great.

Sir Edwin Lutyens: Britain’s Greatest Architect? by Clive Aslet is published by Triglyph Books

Clive Aslet is Visiting Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge

Campion Hall, Oxford University, built by Lutyens in 1936

Modern classical: the Cenotaph, built in 1920, in 1953

Farming today?

A complete nightmare

Did you know that queen bees can suddenly start laying eggs that make drones instead of worker bees?

So instead of a colony of industrious females busily making honey to feed the hive, you have nothing but useless drones. All the bees starve to death. That was our first lesson in organic farming.

Then, full of self-righteous zeal, we planted an apple orchard with trees in danger of extinction because no one plants them any more. Now I know why.

No one in their right mind would plant trees bearing fruit too small to peel, scabby (no pesticides allowed), misshapen and too sour to eat. Good only for apple jelly. And how much of that can you foist on your friends?

Next, a wildflower meadow. Easy. You just chuck the seeds about and up they come like the picture on the packet. No? Definitely no.

First you have to get rid of the grass, which is not easy without herbicides. So you do your best with chain harrow and rake. Then you scatter the seeds and roll them lightly to stop the birds eating

them. When the grass comes up (which it will, believe me), you mow it as short as you can to give the flowers a chance.

We did all that, and nothing appeared but thistles, docks and rape, blown in from a neighbour’s farm. Now in year three, we are once again hoping for a glorious field of colour, alive with bees and butterflies.

There are over 500 grants to encourage sustainable farming practices such as relaying hedges, mending gates and fences, ensuring wide strips of uncultivated field margin, leaving stubble unploughed and providing wetland for waders.

But it’s mad. You have to apply for one grant for the fence, another for the gate and a third for the hard standing under the gate.

Grants might amount to half the cost of buying the material, but don’t cover the labour.

confusing: you can get grants for forests of trees, but not for small copses. There’s a grant for fruit trees such as elder, but not for native walnuts. The bureaucracy defeated us, so we hired someone to cope with it. Her fees wipe out the grants.

The Cotswolds probably has a greater density of organic farms than anywhere because it’s where the rich, who can afford to go organic, live. It takes at least two years to convert. During that time, you cannot use chemicals to boost crop growth and the soil is not yet good enough to produce a profitable crop. You plant nothing but clover (to fix nitrogen) and borrow sheep to eat it and to manure your fields. You cannot sell anything you raise or grow as organic.

And it’s impossibly

So, right now, the only farmers converting to sustainable farming are huge landowners or rich hobby ones. Small family farmers (the majority) cannot afford what’s good for the planet and good for the soul.

Prue Leith presents The Great British Bake Off

Arms and the woman

Twenty-five years ago, I accompanied a colleague to a shop in Bond Street, where a dress was being held for her to try on. She wanted me to give my ‘honest opinion’.

The dress was presented. It was a thing of beauty which fitted perfectly. The woman in question was a top-ofthe-range stunner and bursting with personal charisma.

So why did I advise against purchase? Because it was a sleeveless dress and the sleeves were scooped low to allow a side view of the armpit.

No problem with the outside of her arms – these were smooth and taut. It was the crinkly, testicle-like excrescence of bunching crêpe, spilling out from the armpit area, that was the swing factor.

I remember being shocked by the implacability of nature which had clearly decreed that a sleeveless dress could not be worn even by a goddess, then only 49 years old.

Needless to say, men don’t have this problem with arms and armpits. The deterioration is due to the decline in oestrogen levels.

By the way, women’s arms were much stronger in the past. The average woman’s arm strength, in the first 6,000 years of farming, was far greater than that of even a professional woman rower today.

Although our grandmothers thought nothing of washing woollen blankets by hand, the arm strength of a woman of today who doesn’t work in farming, or train with weights at the gym, is so increasingly feeble that we even risk developing carpal tunnel syndrome just from carrying heavy shopping.

Who, over the age of 50, can wear a sleeveless dress? Michelle Obama, Halle Berry (pictured, right), Viola Davis, Robin Givens and Angela Bassett can. But these women are cut from a different cloth from my former colleague.

Black skin ages more slowly than white for the simple reason that melanin is a built-in sunscreen.

Fine lines and wrinkles are far less common for darker skin tones, especially those with a high melanin content.

These melanocyte cells can be thanked for slowing down the visible ageing process that lighter skin tones face, owing to the protection they provide against collagen-damaging UV light and an extra four layers of epidermis to guard against elastin breakdown.

But what is the alternative for oldies who are not black and who really want to wear a sleeveless dress in a claustrophobically hot climate? There are tedious exercises you can perform at home and which can be downloaded free online. You can also buy weights and lift them at home. They will improve upper-arm muscle tone – but you will still be left with armpit overspill.

By the way, don’t think tennisplaying is going to make a difference. ‘You are using only one arm,’ points out tennis-playing correspondent Rachel Johnson.

A cardigan is no good – ‘Why does a woman age by 20 years as soon as she puts a cardigan on?’ a rather bitchy man I know once asked. I had to agree that it’s strange but true.

What about a ‘cobweb shrug’? No, the name itself is off-putting enough. A lightweight pashmina will do. Pashmina yarn is as light as a feather. A large (100-200cm) pashmina shawl (plain) weighs just a few hundred grams. The yarn diameter is just 12-16 microns. Buy one in ‘baby cashmere’

Men don’t have this problem with arms and armpits

and it will disguise all defects in an unobtrusive manner. Expect to pay more than £200 for this all-concealing strip of nothingness.

There is a hideous operation called a brachioplasty for those who have time and money on their hands. Or, to be fair, for those who have lost masses of weight and are left with dangling folds of deflated flesh. Or for those whose upper arms have become as thick as thighs.

Brachioplasty takes two hours under general anaesthetic and involves the fat being sucked out by a liposuction canula. An incision is made into the armpit and goes right down to the midpoint of the lower arm. The fat is sucked out and the loose skin stitched back together as the arm is recontoured.

A brachioplasty leaves visible scars, which cannot be concealed, unlike those in other types of surgery, such as facelift. In Hollywood, men are having to grow beards up towards the midpoint of their ears to cover facelift scars.

Well-armed: Halle Berry at the Oscars, 2023

After brachioplasty, you have to wear a compression garment for a year. And you will still be left with a ‘frilly’ armpit.

My advice is don’t bother trying. Nature doesn’t want you to be that sensually desirable over a certain age.

Just mask off the area with a baby-cashmere pashmina. Remember that no one is looking at you, except to see whether your facial expression is friendly towards them and whether you appear them.

My vote? None of the above

Why vote for politicians who’ve handed control to the markets? a n wilson

I thought about voting in the local elections, but in the end I decided against it.

I belonged to that very large number of people – millions – who never wanted the embarrassment and expense of a London mayor in the first place.

We are comparable to the millions and millions of Welsh who never wanted a national assembly – the majority of Welsh people. Millions of Scots – not a majority, but nonetheless a sizeable proportion of the population – did not want a Scottish parliament.

Voting in a mayoral election would only encourage whatever fool got chosen. London was much better organised by the old GLC. The mayors have all been inefficient show-offs who, in so far as they’ve had any control over things, have made life in London noticeably worse – less efficient public transport, more ugly buildings which mysteriously sidestep the (actually quite strict and sensible) regulations, worse schools, higher council tax.

The coming and going of the local elections enables us to limber up for the general election, which will be on us before long. It’s years since I voted in one of those. This is partly because I so much enjoy Evelyn Waugh’s joke answer when he was asked how he would be voting: ‘I do not aspire to advise my sovereign in her choice of servants.’

Joke answer? Well, semi-joke. Waugh probably believed – as I do, more and more – that voting makes very little difference. In so far as it makes a difference, it makes things worse by encouraging the obvious falsehood that government by parties, to which very few people belong, is the most ‘democratic’ form of government.

Most of us loathe the parties, and despise them for drawing up ‘manifestos’ of what they pretend they believe. Such an exercise made sense for Marx and Engels writing The Communist

Manifesto, which in its way is a rather splendid document. But this was a dream-aspiration, not a lying blueprint for government.

Most sane people who are not political fanatics simply want to live quiet lives. Even if they have not read the last lines of Middlemarch, they would agree with them. ‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’

I would go further, and question the kindly humanist George Eliot’s view that the world was moving in a direction of ‘growing good’ or improvement.

Is life for the average person necessarily better as a result of the last 50 or 100 years of parliamentary legislation? If you answer ‘Yes’ to this question, many of the ‘improvements’ on your list will turn out to be merely the scrapping of injustices that had themselves been enacted by parliament – such as the judicial persecution of homosexuals, or the enforcement of child labour.

People who live in prosperous Western countries speak scornfully of the ‘rigged’ elections in the brigand states, such as Putin’s Russia. All elections in the so-called democracies of the world are ‘rigged’, in the sense that you are not going to change very much by voting for any of the supposedly mainstream parties.

Look what happened to Kwasi Kwarteng and Liz Truss when they ignored the Thatcherite mantra that ‘you can’t buck the markets’. The illusion, believed

‘I do not aspire to advise my sovereign in her choice of servants’

by these two Brexiteers, was that an independent Britain was now in charge of its own destiny and that the government could raise or lower tax as it pleased.

The ‘markets’ lost no time in reminding them that it is they, and not the politicians, who exercise supreme control. The world is divided between countries which gladly accept this – the so-called liberal democracies – and those who still have governments in the old-fashioned sense.

Both alternatives are pretty horrible but, because we are programmed to think in a certain way, ‘we’ – people who live in the West – believe it is preferable to live in a ‘democratic’ country, rather than in one of the countries that tries to defy the ‘markets’.

The countries with old-fashioned governments, such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, are depicted by the liberal democracies as monstrous, brigand states. They are the ones with ‘rigged’ elections.

We, by contrast, have governments that are totally subservient to the ‘markets’, leaving our political classes to decide minor local matters, such as how much planning permission you need for new housing, how much or how little we should control carbon emissions, and the esoteric questions of gender identity.

The economic and foreign policies of the two major parties in Britain – parties to which only a tiny fraction of Britons belong – are identical. Voting could not alter that fact. The only vote worth casting might be the so-called wasted vote, the vote that registered your anger at the way things were mismanaged.

The Greens offer the most attractive possibility for wasting your vote. If they had the smallest chance of returning us to Mr Pickwick’s England – pre-railways, -aeroplanes and -cars – they might win my vote, were it not for their candidates’ almost invariably priggish demeanour.

Town Mouse

The strange death of British culture

tom hodgkinson

Every week brings another story of the decline of merrymaking and culture in Britain.

According to the beautifully named Night-Time Industries Association, over 2,679 clubs and bars closed between March 2020 and December 2023.

More than a thousand of those were in London, where this mouse has his nest.

One potential casualty is my own local gig venue, Bush Hall, at the end of my road in west London.

Following a precipitous decline in business, the owners were recently forced to raise £42,000 via crowdfunding for bank loans and repairs.

ever since. It has a fantastic collection of books on the Spanish Civil War and great revolutionary posters. Forthcoming events include ‘Reds on the Green: A Walk through Radical Clerkenwell’ and ‘Stories of Solidarity: the Tolpuddle Martyrs’.

It’s not just night-time culture that’s suffering. A depressingly large number of crowdfunding emails for all sorts of brilliant institutions arrive in my inbox.

There’s the excellent Marx Memorial Library on Clerkenwell Green. Housed in a Grade II-listed 1738 building, it was originally a Welsh school. It later become a pub, and then housed the Twentieth Century Press, a socialist publishing venture funded by William Morris. There’s a banner in the library reading ‘Hammersmith Socialist League’, made by Morris himself.

In 1902, an exiled Lenin somehow ended up there, using the building as the office for his magazine, Iskra (The Spark). In 1933 it was renamed the Marx Memorial Library, and it has struggled on

The library’s newspaper is called Theory and Struggle, and I suspect it does not fly off the shelves of W H Smith.

The MML supports itself through donations, subscriptions and investments.

Because it’s a left-wing organisation, the memberships are very cheap – £25 a year or £15 for concessions – and event tickets are priced affordably. This is very laudable, but it means the MML has little money. The staff are currently running a fundraiser to get together £3,000 for urgent repairs to Lenin’s leather coat, which is housed in the building.

Another intellectual institution starved of funds is Freedom Press, an anarchist bookshop and publisher down an alley in Whitechapel. The building was acquired by the press in 1968 thanks to the efforts of an Italian-born London anarchist called Vernon Richards. It has survived attacks from right-wing thugs, who smashed up the printing presses in the 1970s, and an influx of hippies who tried to turn it into a commune. It’s now asking for £15,000 for urgent repairs.

Then there is the sad tale of the

Bishopsgate Institute. This once-great school for grown-ups opened in 1895. It’s housed in a lovely Arts and Crafts building opposite Liverpool Street Station. It has a library of literature, relating to the co-operative movement, a grand hall and various meeting spaces.

A few months ago, it published a very depressing blog on its website from its long-standing CEO, Francesca Canty. It says, ‘Our financial situation remains very difficult and we have made the decision to pause most of our events programme from September 2023.’

Compared with the Marx Library and with Freedom Press, though, they’re rolling in it. According to the Charities Commission website, last year Bishopsgate’s annual income – which derives mainly from property investments – was £1,600,000 and they had 52 staff. But they spent £3,700,000 (with one staff member earning over £100,000) and so lost over £2,000,000. The CEO writes, ‘In an ideal world, a grant or lump sum would solve our current problems.’ Er, yes, a lump sum would solve my problems, too.

Some events and shows on the Bishopsgate Institute calendar remain. ‘Queer Tango’ and ‘Fetish Archive’ have escaped the axe – but I doubt they create much revenue. Where are the debates, panel events, discussions and lectures?

Where are the classes on Socrates, Sappho, Shakespeare, Milton and Virginia Woolf? After all, it was intended ‘for the benefit of the public to promote lectures, exhibitions and otherwise the advancement of literature, science and the fine arts’.

When I asked to come and have a look round and maybe talk to the CEO, with a view to publicising their plight and garnering some support, I was politely told to bugger off by the marketing and communications manager, who wrote, ‘Due to our recent restructure … our bandwidth for taking on these kinds of proposals is severely limited. This means that we are, unfortunately, unable to facilitate this request.’

I sent two follow-up emails asking for a quote or comment, but received no reply. A weird bunker mentality seems to have taken over.

Should cultural institutions grab the grants and handouts? Embrace the market and survive on ticket sales? Or wait for a saviour in the form of a benefactor who has made a lot of money in something boring such as oil, property or hedge funds – a modern version of Henry Tate – and now wants to go in for a bit of culture?

Do your bit, oldies. Join the clubs and libraries, and buy concert tickets before it’s too late.

Country Mouse

I’m the neighbour from Hell – in Lisbon and Wales

giles wood

Mary holds that there’s no point in my trying to find greener grass by relocating to a corrugated former Wesleyan chapel perched on a Shropshire hill.

Forget the tragedy that Shropshire has become fashionable. No, Mary believes I am a ‘dyed-in-the-wool troublemaker’. No matter where I was, as sure as night follows day, I would start to grumble about the neighbours and develop obsessions about their behaviour.

For example, why, I have kept asking her this week, does one of our neighbours have uneaten Easter eggs still in their original boxes clearly visible on his kitchen windowsill when they are an obvious invitation to theft? Should I ask him if there is some sort of problem?

Wherever I hung my hat, she insists, I would polarise small-scale local difficulties, and accentuate the negative.

Even our short tenure of a holiday property in Lisbon was not free of troubles. From our bedroom eyrie, I had a bird’s-eye view of cavalcades of backpackers trudging up the cobbled streets towards a nearby tourist attraction, an overpriced and overrated castle. ‘Should I warn them not to bother?’ I kept asking her.

In the evening, once the day-trippers had receded, a knot of shifty-looking dog-owners came out of the woodwork and, at the risk of being indelicate, I witnessed all too few stooping actions.

It takes only a few selfish individuals to spoil life for the rest of us. There was even more inconsiderate behaviour near our Lisbon Airbnb. It concerned a collection of recycling bins nearby. In the spirit of zero tolerance, I took it upon myself to tidy the area of stray bottles. It didn’t take me long to notice an anomaly regarding this facility and to discern why the bins were always overflowing. Too many cars were screeching to a halt outside our front door to offload their detritus.

Were they locals? Or opportunists? I don’t speak Portuguese – so, despite ostentatiously tutting as they hurled their recycling in, I never got to the bottom of it.

Last night, I paid a visit to my nonagenarian mother in her markettown bungalow in Wales. As we had the dog in tow, I suggested a pleasant stroll around the ancient footpaths encircling the borough. No sooner had our pace got up than we came across a man tackling some overgrown ivy in his garden with an electric hedge-trimmer.

‘Tut tut,’ I whispered loudly. ‘Too early in the year, Mum. Holly blue butterflies are just emerging. Should I point out that, as a member of Butterfly Conservation, I like to act as the eyes and ears of this environmental group and politely but firmly point out the error of his ways?’

Mother was hissing apoplectically as she chivvied me onwards. ‘Shut it, Giles! I walk here every day. Live and let live.’

But we looked back and were both saddened to see the offender now using his hedge-trimmer as a scythe to mow the anarchic and glorious stands of jack-by-the-hedge and foaming cow parsley on the footpath. We both knew this was a crime against nature and against the spirit of the season.

A) It was not his land to maintain. B) These coarse herbs are useful species for invertebrates, which have evolved unmolested alongside them for centuries. C) His behaviour erodes the distinction between town and country. The British mania for tidiness is making life very hard for Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, in particular.

My mother said it reminded her of the scene from the classic Mike Leigh comedy Nuts in May. Town yobs on motorbikes threaten to disturb the ancient peace of a campsite and a quiet

couple who are keen to obey every letter of the Countryside Code.

Spring was previously the season when all dedicated countrymen would take it on themselves to patrol their lanes to lecture and discourage dog-owners not to unleash their pets, for fear that they might worry sheep. Retired colonels would rouse themselves from their firesides and, armed with a billhook, defend their property’s riparian rights from the likes of kayakers and postmenopausal wild swimmers.

But times have changed. Along with the rise of socialism, I detect a new spirit of rebellion among countryside-visiting townies. With the decline of deference towards the better-informed land-owning classes and a disinclination to obey the diktat ‘Please shut the gate’, protest is in the air again after March’s mass trespass at Cirencester Park. Paternalistic conservatism is so over. No one is going to tell them where they can and can’t go.

Moreover, any do-gooder who has watched Ben Wheatley’s seminal black comedy Sightseers – Nuts in May with axes – would think twice about having a go. Is it worth the bovver?

The film features an altercation between a National Trust member and an amorous pair of caravan enthusiasts over a dog-fouling incident. It ends in tragedy for the minor-public-school-educated National Trust member.

‘I’m sorry, but if you don’t pick up this excrement immediately, then I’m going to have to inform the National Trust,’ he says.

‘Actually, do you know what? I don’t think you are. Sorry, mate.’

The responsible citizen then gets clubbed to death by the caravan-owner, wielding a crudely fashioned walking stick.

‘I prefer dating older men’

Mother’s fall – and the descent of man

When she took a tumble, a paramedic turned up and started behaving like Benny Hill

jem clarke

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

Mother fell. She ended up sitting, back against the wall, like a weary-looking soft toy on a slow edition of The Repair Shop

I called the emergency services. While I was on to them, I told them my underactive thyroid medication had recently delivered me a massive dose of adrenalin.

You hear about adrenalin allowing people temporary uncanny feats of strength – a child lifting the end of a tractor to free a trapped lamb. As I waited for the ambulance, I wondered whether I should attempt some equally impressive act with my mother’s monster-truck-esque undercarriage.

I didn’t bother them with this. Instead, as I reported back to Mother, ‘They said I should simply stay with you and just keep talking to you.’

Mother said, ‘Tell them I say, “Haven’t I suffered enough?”’

‘They’ve also asked me to cover you with a blanket, so you don’t get cold.’

With perfect timing Father, in a Corporal Jones-style hurried march, ran into the room and threw a blanket roughly over her.

‘Not over her face!’ I exclaimed, folding it down. ‘She’s not dead yet!’

‘Oh, so you’re a doctor now,’ Mother moaned.

I put the blanket back over her face.

Unperturbed, I positively spun things: ‘Ooh, look, the new vicar’s first editorial!’

withering despair than the house was invaded by two noisy men.

Announcing themselves as ‘the fall team’, they explained that when ambulances are scarce and the senior faller has maintained consciousness throughout the fall, they are dispatched in something equating to an ambulance, in a far quicker time.

We were impressed – until Karl, the lead para-maybe-medic, roared, ‘I’ve never been down the bottom of this road. It’s well pretty, innit? Unlike the other end which – of course – is a sh**hole.’

I took umbrage at a man’s swearing near my prone mother, who once made me have tea in the shed for a week after I told her the original Poldark was ‘crap’.

Being a coward, I could not directly confront Karl, but I gently said, ‘Careful there. I don’t think you should be running down my street.’

‘Why? You jealous, just ’cos you can’t, jelly legs?’

Just for fun, he transferred my stick from one hand to the other and ruffled my hair. Ever since Benny Hill, the pate of a short man’s head seems to be in public ownership.

Using her lollipop-stick arms, she unveiled herself and said, ‘Get me something to read. My back’s broken, not my mind.’

In an adrenalised panic, I walked twice round the living room past two generous bookshelves, before grabbing a magazine from the rack.

Triumphantly returning to Mother’s side, I announced, ‘I shall read from the parish magazine!’

‘The church magazine!’ Father made the sign of the cross – but not in a way the editors were probably hoping for. ‘It brings you nearer to God, ’cos you’ll top yourself by page seven.’

Some time after Dibley, Cleethorpes has finally got a lady vicar. Any vicar is exciting, while a lady one is as exciting as a new version of the Lord’s Prayer – the first thing she forced on the up-for-it congregation.

Reading from her piece, I quoted the biblical verse at the beginning: ‘I will make a pathway through the wilderness. I will create rivers in the dry wasteland.’

Mother’s eyes brightened, ‘Oh. Someone’s finally tackling the churchyard, then! River might be a bit too much, though. Corpses don’t care for water features.’

I snapped, ‘She’s not bloody doing the churchyard. It’s Isaiah, isn’t it.’

‘Well, whoever she gets in,’ Father chipped in, ‘I’d like to shake his hand.’

No sooner had I let the church magazine drop onto the floor in

It was impressive, though, the ease with which he and his pal righted my difficult-shaped mother. It would have made the world’s strongest man spontaneously break out into clapping. I could have hugged him when they got her moving up and down the room – more quickly than pre-fall.

I loved the way they effortlessly ignored all her complaining, saying, ‘That’s right, duchess. Keep those pins going. You’ll be in Grimsby by next month.’

It’s funny how you warm to people different from you. That very afternoon, Mother fell over again (another simple mechanical fall and nothing sinister or symptomatic, thankfully).

As my equally tiny father ushered Karl and me back inside, he roared, ‘When base sent the call to us, I said to Brian, “It’s that bloody dolls’ house, with all them little folk again!”’

And we all laughed.

I’m dying to cure the cost-of-living crisis

The longer we live, the more we waste our children’s inheritance, says Mary Kenny

I’m too much of a Catholic convent girl to be persuaded by the arguments favouring euthanasia – now called ‘assisted dying’. But if I were to be tempted by the campaign advanced so successfully by Esther Rantzen, the point that might lure me is money.

Before you go on holiday, it seems sensible to revise your will, in case you snuff it on some foreign shore. I duly revised mine recently. It occurred to me that the longer we live, the more likely we are to use up the little pot of deposits that might have gone to our heirs and successors.

end and letting posterity take care of itself.

That’s unless we have been prudent and planned properly for the last years of life – a description that doesn’t fit those of us who have spent our youth in reckless abandon.

Andrew Carnegie, the magnate and benefactor, said that to die rich is to die disgraced – he thought good people should give everything to charity before they drop off the perch. I think the opposite: to die having emptied the bank account of the last spondulicks is surely mortifyingly embarrassing.

But if euthanasia gets going – as it has in Canada, Belgium and Oregon – the notion that dying saves money could be an incentive to have oneself bumped off.

The cost-of-living crisis can be solved by summarily dying. Were the option easily available, I bet some oldies, if they’re feeling a bit depressed about mounting bills, might take it.

Of course there are the spirited oldies who merrily advocate spending the kids’ inheritance, enjoying life to the

Incidentally, there is an ‘assisted dying’ traditionally permitted by the Catholic church. The doc can pump you chock-full of morphine as you move towards the departure lounge, just as long as the intention is to alleviate suffering –even if the outcome is curtains.

It’s 70 years since the publication of one of the most famous French novels of our time, Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse.

Written when the author was 17, it won the French Prix des Critiques in May 1954. It was denounced by Le Monde as ‘an immoral book’ and a portrait of a ‘monster’ unsuitable for the general public. It immediately became a bestseller, and is now seen as a classic.

Feminist critics regard it as an advance herald of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. It portrayed a young woman who has the audacity to sleep with her boyfriend ‘without ending up pregnant or punished’.

The novel is written in a certain elegiac, literary style, and it catches the narcissism and intensity of adolescent self-introspection.

Fast cars, whisky, gambling at Cannes casinos, and the heat and sand of the Côte d’Azur are the background to a sybaritic way of life. The sex scenes are detached and decorous – their cerebral formality would never pass the saucy Jilly Cooper test.

The characters – the teenage Cécile, her boyfriend Cyril, her father and his two mistresses – swap partners in a somewhat performative manner.

They strike me as selfish, selfregarding Parisians, for whom insouciance is a studied pose. One of them is bound to end up in a fatal car accident on the Corniche.

What seems rather creepy by today’s standards is the relationship between the 17-year-old Cécile and her shallow, playboy father. There’s a suggestion it’s inherently incestuous; he likes to dress up his adolescent daughter as a femme fatale

Françoise Sagan became a huge literary celebrity, known for her love of fast cars and alcohol, drug addiction (as a result of a car smash) and gambling. She made millions, lost most of it and died in 2004, aged 69, tormented by arthritis. To her credit, she had continued writing.

Bonjour Tristesse is on the curriculum for this year’s baccalauréat exam.

Two thirds of the world is now overweight or obese, a fact much deplored by the World Health Organisation.

There is some dispute over the word ‘obese’. Mr Motivator, the BritishJamaican fitness instructor, 71, thinks we should just use the unvarnished epithet ‘fat’. He says fat people should be shamed into losing some of their flab.

I prefer the word commonly used in Ireland for those of us carrying avoirdupois – ‘stout’. There’s a certain reliable sturdiness about being ‘stout’.

The French equivalent is the equally dependable fort – doubling as ‘strong’. The stout of body may also be stout of heart and of steadfastness.

I wrote earlier in the spring that I had acquired an app, which counts my daily steps. Averaging between 3,000 and 5,000 steps a day, I have lost around a pound a month in weight.

So I can claim a small diminution of the stout situation.

Sophia Waugh: School Days

If only we could expel the parents

Children need to be more frightened of their parents – frightened enough, at any rate, to get out of bed and go to school.

What happens when the staff are frightened of the parents?

I am not pusillanimous by nature. When it comes to the old fight-or-flight instinct, I am fight every time. I pull myself up to my full 5’3” and look the aggressor in the eye. This did not work last month when I was savaged by a dog, nor does it always work with maddened adults, but (on the whole) it achieves results. Unfortunately, an enraged parent often has as little logical thought process as a rabid dog, and that is when we are in trouble.

The number of parents abusing teachers is on the rise. Reports of verbal abuse have risen from 28 per cent of teachers in 2020 to 36 per cent last year, while 10 per cent of teachers say they have experienced physical abuse. We all have tales of parents who threaten us and parents whom we will not see without another adult present.

The real sorrow is that what usually sets off the abuse is something totally mundane: a parent disputes a child’s detention, or denies that the child has done anything at all wrong, even when all the evidence is stacked against the little darling.

Once, when I was head of house, I was in the office I shared with another head of house, when something about his telephone call alerted me that there was trouble afoot.

‘I do understand that you want to come into school and sort me out,’ he was saying, ‘but I do think there are better ways to deal with this. I’m sorry, Mr X, but I don’t think physical violence will help the situation.’

By now, I had put my own work aside and was listening intently.

‘Did you get that?’ my colleague asked, hanging up the phone and leaning back in his chair. ‘I wanted a witness to his threats in case…’ and he tailed off.

Not long after, he resigned as head of house and went back to the calmer world of classroom teaching.

I was once on the receiving end of similar threats, again when I was head of house. (The higher up the ladder you go, the more likely you are to be threatened – 75 per cent of threats are to head teachers.)

I had confiscated a mobile phone from a pupil and was keeping it, as per school rules, until the end of the day. Via another mobile, the child had communicated with her father, who had forced his way into the school and roamed around until he found me.

He came up close and personal, spitting in my face in anger and threatening me with prison. ‘I know about the law,’ he shouted.

I knew better than to wonder aloud which side of the law he was familiar with.

‘I know my rights and my kid’s rights. I’ll have you banged up for this.’

I assured him in my calmest and most mellifluous tones (which can, I know, be very irritating) that theft meant intent permanently to deprive and that the child would have her phone back at the end of the day.

I did not give in. Neither did he. His language became more and more ‘direct’ and children gathered in a huddle, staring.

How did it end? I regret to say a passing teacher (male) saw what was going on and stepped in. The minute he was addressed by a man, the father caved in and quietly left.

The head wrote a letter forbidding him from the premises without an appointment and we changed our signing-in procedures. The girl came to my office and picked up her phone at the end of the day. That, in effect, was that.

Or was it? What did that girl learn by standing by and watching her father threaten her teacher? My worry is that the lessons she had already learned from her father were not undone by one instance of watching a woman stand up to him.

Interestingly, the father was not on the child’s official contact list; we were meant to communicate only with the mild and inoffensive (possibly cowed) single mother. Yet she had chosen her brutish father rather than her mellow mother to stand up for her.

The child knew what she was doing when she called her father. She wanted a confrontation. She wanted to watch me squirm and step back and give in. She’d seen it all before. Just not this time.

An early morning scene:

sister teresa

I long to be a lazybones

Father (from the bottom of the stairs): ‘Come on, Tommy – time you were up and off to school.’

Tommy (from upstairs): ‘I’m not going to school today.’

Father: ‘Why not?’

Tommy: ‘Because the teachers ignore me, the children bully me and I hate the place. So why should I go to school?’

Father: ‘Because you’re the headmaster.’

I wonder how on earth the school governors ever came to appoint Tommy as headmaster. Unfortunately, I know I have something of Tommy in me.

It is possible for all of us to be in a muddle about responsibilities and relationships with the people with whom we work and live. We are under an obligation to be at the disposal of others, irrespective of what their attitudes towards us may be. Easier said than observed, this basic Christian value shows signs of being underrated these days.

We can be after a life of slothful ease, free from all forms of controversy and

disagreement. This is hardly a life as lived by the average responsible adult, but it is incredibly tempting to some of us, me included.

Fortunately, the Carmelite lifestyle, which I follow, never allows this to happen. A Carmelite never retires and is kept at work doing seemingly insignificant but essential jobs such as sorting the clean laundry and the lighter forms of washing-up, more or less until her last gasp.

To take the easy option of wriggling out of ever doing things that one doesn’t want to do leads ultimately to misery, and to the danger of becoming what my

Memorial Service

old novice mistress used to call ‘a half-person’, by whom God is most certainly not glorified. Nor is it in line with the taming of the ego, which is one of the objectives of any life, including the contemplative life.

A prominent Old Testament value is also a thoroughly modern concept. It consists in placing teachers under the obligation to educate and form those under their care in a full and rounded way. This will include intellectual and emotional development as well as –equally importantly – the capacity for recreation: ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ (James Howell’s Proverbs, 1659).

In the New Testament, Jesus’s teaching includes some very practical tasks: rowing a boat, handing out food, getting hold of a donkey. These go side by side with his more profound demands for love of God and love of neighbour.

In the Christian life, everything is worth doing well and thoughtfully. There is no waste, and there is nothing trivial about any of it – even drying the teacups.

Baroness (Shreela) Flather (1934-2024)

Paul Flather, Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford, laid on a fine memorial service for his mother, Shreela Flather, the first Asian woman to become a member of the House of Lords, at Easthampstead Park, near Bracknell, Berkshire.

Among the distinguished speakers were Sir Michael Palin, who read from Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore, and Sir Ben Okri, who read an extract from his poem Mental Flight. Sir Trevor Phillips and Lord Bilimoria spoke.

Theresa May paid tribute to Lady Flather, Mayor of Windsor and Maidenhead – where she got on like a house on fire with Prince Philip. She once joked that he and the Queen should pay rates to help with the borough’s budget problems.

Her obit in the Times reported that when she joined the Lords in 1990, the only other peer from an ethnic minority was Lord Pitt of Hampstead. She said, ‘It was the first institution I had entered in this country where I was treated as a person, a friend and a colleague.’

Earl Howe, deputy Leader of the Lords, said, ‘As the first-ever Asian female peer, Shreela soon made the most of her unique status in the House, enriching its debates with insights gained from her Indian heritage and experience.

‘And then, one day in 1996, she had an inspired idea ... to organise a group visit to India coinciding with the celebrations to mark the country’s 50th anniversary of independence planned for the following

year. The group would consist solely of hereditary peers who were the descendants of former Viceroys of India.

‘Members of the nobility plus wives and partners, including Lord Ridley, Lord Elgin, Countess Mountbatten, the Earl of Lytton, Lord Lawrence, the Marquess of Reading and Lady Darcy de Knayth duly signed up.

‘To her great amusement, a collective noun in Urdu was settled upon for the group – the word Laat-Sahib – which means first “Governor General” and secondly “one who swaggers”.’

Jasmine Flather read from Christina Rossetti’s Let Me Go. Marcus Flather read from the Bhagavad Gita. Pandit Jasraj played raga Hamsadhvani. M S Subbulakshmi performed a song of prayer to Hanuman, the Indian monkey god.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

Pillow by Clark Walter Appleton, 1905

Sometimes – for example, when I try to find out the prevalence of Dupuytren’s contracture – I wonder whether Pontius Pilate wasn’t on to something when he asked what truth was.

A search into Dupuytren’s contracture – a thickening of tissues in the palm of the hand – gave me figures that ranged from a third of one per cent of the population to 20 per cent. It depends on the age group, and also on what stage of the contracture counts as a case.

One estimate for Britain was 0.69 per cent of the adult population, which sounds at least plausible. Apparently, the incidence has doubled in the last 15 years or so, for reasons that are not understood.

Dupuytren’s contracture is caused by an overgrowth of the connective tissue of the palm of the hand which can lead to a permanent bending of the fingers, most commonly the ring and little fingers, and an inability to straighten them. Naturally, this can interfere with what are now called the activities of daily living.

The disease is named – at least until someone discovers that he once did something very bad – after the French anatomist and surgeon Guillaume Dupuytren (1777-1835), who first described it. There is a rue Dupuytren in Paris’s 6th arrondissement.

The Doctor’s Surgery

Mrs Thatcher suffered from the condition, though it is far more common in men. It is rare before the age of 40 and more than twice as common in people who have used vibrating machinery in their work. Northern Europeans are particularly susceptible.

There is a hereditary predisposition to it, and both diabetics and alcoholics are more likely to develop it. For some reason, the association between alcoholism and Dupuytren’s contracture sticks at once in every medical student’s mind and is never forgotten, unlike so much of what he or she is taught.

Epileptics who take phenytoin often develop Dupuytren’s contracture. There is also an association with smoking – I presume independently of drinking.

When it’s stated in medical literature that smokers are more susceptible to something or other, one detects almost a satisfaction, as though it served them right; that they only had themselves to blame. In a sense, I suppose, this is right.

What is the best treatment for this annoying and sometimes incapacitating condition? Traditionally, the treatment has been surgical, though it is not entirely satisfactory: the condition often returns.

Other treatments now exist, including collagenase injection or needle fasciotomy. The former is the injection of an enzyme

that dissolves the tissue in the palm that’s causing the contracture. The latter is a simplified surgical outpatient procedure lasting about 30 minutes, in which a needle is inserted and the fibrous bands cut in a kind of sawing movement.

But which is best? A study from Finland compared the results of all three treatments – surgery, enzyme injection and needle fasciotomy – with nearly 100 patients in each group. After three months, the results were very similar, with just over 70 per cent of patients being markedly improved.

At two years, however, there was a difference: surgery was better than enzyme injection and much better than needle fasciotomy. Only a quarter of the surgery group had had a recurrence, compared with half of the needle fasciotomy group.

This illustrates a general point: that it may be necessary to wait for some time before differences in the results of treatments manifest themselves. Immediate results may be deceptive.

When I look at and feel the palms of my hands, I see thickening of bands of palmar fascia, and I can feel nodules also. I have had this for years without further deterioration.

Will I get full-blown Dupuytren’s contracture? Luckily, it’s not difficult for me to refrain from using vibrating machinery.

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

Rose Dugdale’s rebellion

SIR: The Old Un asked readers to send suggestions as to about why terrorist Rose Dugdale rebelled (March blog).

I can perhaps own up to what changed her. It could have been the night in 1963 when I was ordered to sleep with her.

I met her at a party when I was doing a summer school at Stanford and she was at Berkeley. We used to meet up at weekends and drive to local sights, eg Hollywood, Big Sur and Yosemite. It was there that on a Saturday night we tried to book two rooms and were told to ‘shape up’ and share a room.

Fortunately, when we came back at midnight a second room was available and so I never had to ‘sleep with a terrorist’.

I never saw her again and was greatly surprised to learn of her activities.

Yours sincerely,

Rev John Wates OBE JP, Chipstead, Surrey

Armed with this evidence, the unworldly Buxton was about to ring the authorities when his family told him that the names he’d been given were all famous Liverpool football players. Robert Bathurst, East Sussex

Bare, ruined choir

SIR: Fortunate to live just down the road from Studley Royal, I enjoyed Lucinda Lambton’s illustrated feature (Spring issue) and hope that it may attract even more visitors to this much-loved historical site.

Lucinda mentioned the small group of Benedictine monks from St Mary’s Abbey in York who founded Fountains Abbey.

Wishing to adopt the more austere way of life led by the Cistercian order, they are said to have spent Christmas Day in Ripon and then walked another four miles to what was then a completely deserted valley by the River Skell to begin their great work.

‘I’m taking you off fats, sugar, meat, booze... What else do you enjoy?’

Birdman of Norfolk

SIR: John McEwen’s delightful account (April issue) of the breeding cranes at Horsey in Norfolk and the part played in their establishment by John Buxton is a reminder of the battles fought by Buxton to protect the birds from egg-stealers.

One day in the early ’80s, Buxton challenged a gang of men he was sure were after the eggs. He made a note of their names and saw them off the land, telling them that they would be reported.

Hundreds of local people and visitors, led by members of the clergy, now retrace their route each Boxing Day from the steps of Ripon Cathedral. The pilgrimage culminates in a short carol service under the vaulted ceiling of the cellarium, where the acoustics are such that singers at the back are generally at least a line behind those near the band at the front – but the atmosphere is second to none.

Best regards,

Maggie Cobbett, Ripon, North Yorkshire

‘Mint?! This isn't a mint! It's all that's left of my natural habitat!’

Fleet Street education

SIR: In the early 1960s the Express sent an old recruiting hack to visit our awardwinning student newspaper in Nottingham, and he invited us to visit the Fleet Street temple (ref Old Un’s Notes, Spring issue).

I was awed by Atkinson’s wonderful soul of art deco, yet more impressive was the vast banner hung high in the hallowed hall of the hard-bitten, harddrinking typewriter-bashers.

It commanded, ‘IMPACT – Get it into your headings, Get it into your intros, Get it into your captions’, or words to that effect.

Chris Dodd (Editor of Nottingham University Gongster in nineteen-sixtysomething; later features hack and rowing correspondent at the Guardian; now blogger for heartheboatsing.com), London SE21

‘This is Dorothy, my own personal “named storm” ’

‘What’s

Teddy Boys’ picnic

SIR: The review of Max Décharné’s book about Teddy Boys (Review of Books supplement, Spring issue) reminded me that, on a recent visit to Blackpool, on a tram that stopped at the Norbreck Hydro, the tram was invaded by a group of what are now known as Teds. More than 850 of them were attending their annual conference.

I asked one very smartly and authentically dressed Ted what happened at the conference. Was there, for example, the debating of composite motions? No, he said, they just visit pubs and drink beer.

Those I met were very civilised and far removed from the rather threatening Teddy Boys with whom anybody with any sense would avoid an on-street confrontation. The same applied to me, a devout coward.

Best wishes, David Holme, Accrington, Lancashire

‘She’s playing with her doll’s rental property’

Play School lessons

SIR: Kath Garner’s article about BBC’s Play School (Spring issue) triggered delightful nostalgic memories. As a young primary teacher in 1981, I had three stories accepted by Play School, and was invited to the London studios to meet Martin Fisher, the director at the time.

I was treated to lunch, was plied with souvenirs, visited the cutting room and

‘After you retired, I thought you’d be staying home more’

toured the studios, including the Top of the Pops one, where Legs & Co happened to be rehearsing. I met presenters Stuart McGugan and Elizabeth Millbank, who was to read my story at a later date.

They were busy recording another episode, and under the famous clock was a model robot. Stuart, narrating, said, ‘What’s under the clock today?’ The clock started revolving and the robot fell awkwardly to one side.

Without a beat, Stuart continued, ‘It’s an inebriated robot.’ A unique experience – but in those days it never occurred to me to take a camera with me.

In 2020, my children’s novel Thread and Thrum was published. It all started with that first encouragement from Play School.

Jane Bower, Girton, Cambridge

Murder on two coasts

SIR: I sympathise with Bruce Beresford and his struggles with Hollywood executive whims (Spring issue). In 1979, I was commissioned to write a major TV movie called Murder on the Metroliner

The Metroliner was in those days a high-speed train running between New York’s Penn Station and Washington DC. I came up with a script – about two trains on a collision course – that everyone was happy with, and they decided to go ahead.

However, I couldn’t resist saying to my producer, ‘Look, why don’t we stop pretending we’re going to shoot this on the East Coast? You know that’s going to be so expensive the network’s going to want to switch it to the West Coast. Why don’t I just set it between Los Angeles and San Francisco?’ He agreed.

‘Impossible,’ said the network. ‘There

are no direct trains between LA and San Francisco, never mind high-speed ones.’

A few days after I’d delivered my script, I got a call from the producer. ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘The network wants to re-locate everything to the West Coast.’

‘But I thought there were no direct trains between…’

‘Invent one.’

So I invented the Coastliner, changed a few place names and other references, and everyone was happy. Briefly.

The only stretches of track suitable for our main action sequences were on the East Coast.

The production wound up having West Coast-type billboards and other bits of décor constructed alongside the East Coast track to ‘cheat’ for the West. Connecticut cop cars and police helicopters were repainted to look like Californian ones.

It added a completely unnecessary fortune to the budget. But, as a director friend of mine said, sometimes Hollywood executive thinking is so off-the-scale nuts that all you can do is stand there and gawk. David Ambrose, London SW7

‘No, no, no! Two bangs, a thump, a bang, then you come in with the F# minor 7th flat 5!’

the Wi-Fi code?’

April 1979 was wet. The week leading up to Easter was especially dismal.

I had been in Berry Brothers, the wine shop, for just over a year, building up a group of regular customers: people living in London with a love of wine, who would drop on a weekly basis.

Valerie Eliot, T S Eliot’s widow, was one of my favourites. Every Tuesday, she would appear to collect her regular bottle of Berrys’ London Dry Gin.

The first time I looked after her, I asked for her name. ‘Mrs T S Eliot,’ she said, very deliberately, as I wrote it down in my notebook. She was impressed that I spelt the surname correctly – not too many ls or ts. I hoped she thought this was entirely due to my extensive knowledge of literature. I didn’t mention that my father had taught me that T S Eliot was an anagram of ‘toilets’.

I’d read The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock at school, and my mother had an old gramophone record of Eliot himself reading The Waste Land. But he had a weird, annoying voice, and I never got past the first lines. And as for Four Quartets – well, there were four of them, for heaven’s sake. Life was short. I could have spent our time asking the old boy’s widow about it, but

I Once Met Valerie Eliot

Mrs T S Eliot didn’t seem to want to discuss literature. She seemed like a sweet, inoffensive old dear – although I now discover that she was younger than I am now, which is often the way.

I knew that she had been Eliot’s secretary at Faber & Faber when she was in her very early twenties. I knew that Eliot had died in the mid-1960s, when he was 75 and she still in her thirties. I imagined that she had been less of a muse to Eliot and more of a comfort – she once described their evenings at home as ‘playing Scrabble and eating cheese’. But I liked to think that there was more to their relationship – that, at the very least, she understood what the poems were all about.

Mrs Eliot had already granted the rights in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats to a certain Andrew Lloyd Webber, who was busy setting the poems to some of his catchy ditties. And we all know what happened next.

On this particular Tuesday, the rain was bucketing down. We finished our chat and I handed over Mrs Eliot’s bottle of gin in a string-handled paper bag. She stood up, and we made for the door.

‘Charge it to my account,’ she said.

‘Of course, Mrs Eliot.’

The weather had taken a turn for the worse. The rain was bouncing off the paving stones of St James’s Street. I held the door open. Mrs Eliot buttoned her raincoat, prepared her umbrella, and took the bag.

‘What horrible weather!’ remarked Mrs Eliot.

The opportunity was too good to resist.

‘Well, April is the cruellest month, Mrs Eliot.’

She stared at me blankly. ‘Do you think so?’ she asked. ‘I’ve always disliked February, myself.’

Simon Berry

Dad’s saviour – a naked lady in a pub

in Melbourne, he met the local police and, after a secret handshake, was offered an even better deal to join the Melbourne force.

I was born in Edinburgh in 1955, joining an older brother and sister, my mum and my dad in a typical upstairs-downstairs tenement block.

Dad, a bobby on the beat (and a mason), discovered there was a need for police in New Zealand, with promise of your own quarteracre and good pay.

Dad jumped at it and hopped on the first ship, with a view to setting up home with Mum and us kids to follow. So far, so good.

As the ship had a layover

He promptly sent a telegram to Mum, asking whether he should carry on to NZ or stay and set up in Melbourne.

A week later, no reply. The ship was leaving for NZ the next day. As any good Scot would do, he popped in to a Melbourne pub for a wee dram to contemplate his dilemma.

Nursing his whisky, he looked up and couldn’t help but notice a full-frontal painting of a fetching young female staring back at him (pictured, below, with me).

The pub is Young and Jackson’s, opposite Flinders Street Station.

‘Chloé’ is written in fine lettering under the picture, painted by Jules Joseph Lefebvre in 1875. Rather than toss a coin, he decided to ask Chloé, ‘Should I stay here and set up the house or stick to the original plan?’

Chloé replied, ‘You’d better get on that boat –your wife and family are expecting you, you silly

drunken bugger.’ So he did, and set up a lovely threebedroom home on a quarteracre in a suburb of Auckland.

Meanwhile, back in Scotland, Mum received the telegram and, not knowing Australia from Japan, said, ‘Well, you might as well stay there if it’s closer.’

So it was a close call. Every time I visit Melbourne, I call into that pub and raise a Scotch to Chloé, as do my grateful, now grown children. Crikey, I was nearly an Aussie!

By Robbie Blair, Auckland, New Zealand, who receives £50

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

Poetry in motion: TS and Valerie Eliot, 1961

The 80-year-old Superwoman

In her four score years, Liz Hodgkinson has never been ill or had a check-up

In 1948, Dr Goodenough published a book about a fictional family, the Neverwells. Their many complaints were diagnosed and treated by the wise, all-knowing doctor.

The Neverwells were the forerunners of today’s health columns. The list of illnesses, diseases and treatments covered grows and grows. Week after week, sufferers and survivors of illnesses relate their ‘journey’.

Allow me, then, to introduce Miss Neverill – myself. Whether by luck, good genes or mind over matter, I have never been ill in my life.

My continuing good health at 80 has nothing to do with the ministrations of the medical profession. I haven’t been to a doctor for years, and it’s more than half a century since I was a patient in an NHS hospital.

Although this may sound irresponsible, I have never had a health test or medical check-up. I have never had a mammogram, cervical-smear test, cholesterol test or anything else, nor have I ever taken any

prescription medicine, apart from an occasional course of antibiotics. Why go looking for illness? If I feel perfectly well, I probably am.

Living alone helps. I am not in danger of picking up infections from people in the same house.

Although there can be no guarantees, I am certain that lifestyle has a lot to do with keeping healthy. I have been a vegetarian for over 40 years and rarely eat sugary foods such as cakes or biscuits. Over the same time span, I have taken regular, tough exercise.

and wake up seven or eight hours later, completely refreshed.

The Neverwells, 1948

I get lots of fresh air and walk a lot. I got rid of my last car four years ago. I gave up smoking (with great difficulty). Much as I miss it, I would never dare start again.

I am firmly convinced that obesity is the most serious health problem facing us today.

A good night’s sleep preserves health and I have no difficulty at all. I fall asleep as soon as my head touches the pillow,

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Early rising is another health-giver. The old saying ‘Early to bed, early to rise’ has a lot of truth to it. Much illness is caused by stress; I try not to let it accumulate and take hold. Going for constant, so-called health checks can actually make you ill – with worry. ‘White-coat syndrome’ is well known –so do all you can to avoid the white coats! Drinking plenty of water is also vital.

Do I have any vices? Yes. For many years, I have drunk several glasses of white wine every evening, far exceeding the 14 units a week recommended for women. So far, there have been no ill effects. I have never taken any recreational drugs.

Now that I have laid all my health cards on the table, I hope I don’t suddenly turn from a Neverill into a Neverwell.

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Knife crime

JASPER REES

Knife

By Salman Rushdie

Jonathan Cape £20

Knife is Salman Rushdie’s shortest book. The novels, those great free-form temples of imagination, balloon beyond 400 pages. The Satanic Verses, with its cameo for the prophet, exceeds 500. This latest book runs to only 224.

For more than 30 years, the fatwa triggered by The Stanic Verses found its author imagining the approach of an assassin. The last place Rushdie expected

to encounter such a bogeyman was in a sleepy hollow in upstate New York called Chautauqua (pop 4,000).

Yet there this figure was on 12th August 2022, with a sackful of knives –but fortunately no lethal knowledge of how to wield one.

‘Really?’ Rushdie remembers thinking as his would-be killer bore down. ‘It’s been so long. Why now, after all these years?’

Knife is a heroic, unflinching and immersive account of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of an attempted murder. Not to resist as the blows land. Not to lose consciousness at the very final frontier.

‘My body was dying and it was taking me with it,’ Rushdie found himself

thinking, as blood pooled around him, while first responders chopped up his nice Ralph Lauren suit to inspect the damage.

‘Red Rum is murder backward,’ his brain involuntarily told him as he lay dying.

According to reports, the attack lasted precisely 27 seconds – enough time, he says, to recite an intimate love sonnet –and left wounds all over Rushdie’s upper body. In hospital, these would call for multiple specialists. He mordantly dubs them – like figures from a Restoration farce – Dr Hand, Dr Stabbings, Dr Liver, Dr Tongue, Dr Pain and Dr Staples, not forgetting Nurse Bladder.

The treatments of Dr Eye provoke

dreams of Gloucester’s blinding. ‘Gentle reader, if you can avoid having your eyelid sewn shut,’ he recommends, ‘avoid it. It really, really hurts.’ While he’s at it, he warns against catheters, too. Nor is he a fan of rectal inspection.

In his hospital bed, Rushdie resisted his agent Andrew Wylie’s prediction that he would write all about it. Then, when he had recovered enough to address the blank first page of his next novel, ‘There was a f**king enormous mastodon in my workroom, waving its trunk and snorting and stinking quite a bit.’

Rationally, the reader wishes there had been no blood or blinding, and thus no book. But that the attack has prompted this passionate defence of free speech, and a paean to the imperishable necessity of art, is literature’s ulterior gain.

It is also a short book about love. Rushdie seizes the opportunity to lionise Rachel Eliza Griffiths, the fifth wife who has made a gushingly happy man of him. If his happiness writes quite white on the page, it serves as a defiantly bright contrast to the black hole of religious hatred.

Rushdie refuses to name the radicalised incel who, interviewed from behind bars by the New York Post, said he was moved to murder because he found the author ‘disingenuous’. Rushdie calls him ‘the A’ – an abbreviation that could denote anything from Assassin to Ass.

His fantasy to meet and confront the A remains just that. Instead, he conjures up a putative dialogue, in which he is honest enough not to award himself an easy win.

This is a crowded story. Alongside all the medics, his sons and his sister swim into focus. Among the many writers who move through the pages, there is a deeply-felt valediction to Martin Amis: ‘Death was showing up at the wrong addresses.’

Alas, Knife went to press too soon for Rushdie to confront the craven Royal Society of Literature, which slowly issued a supportive tweet, ‘sending strength’, but omitted to condemn the attack on freedom of expression.

Eighteen months on, its president, Bernardine Evaristo, clarified that the RSL ‘cannot take sides in writers’ controversies and issues, but must remain impartial’. ‘Just wondering if the Royal Society of Literature is ‘impartial’ about attempted murder?’ Rushdie tweeted. ‘(Asking for a friend.)’ A longer response to this buffoonery is the one thing missing.

In the course of recovery, his latest novel was published. The day a book

takes its bow is ‘a bit like undressing in public’, he says. Rushdie has never undressed himself more than now, not even in his memoir Joseph Anton, even unto the most private of cavities and recesses.

The result is a victory for reason, morality and language – language that Rushdie likens to a knife. ‘It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths.’

This is not just Rushdie’s shortest book. It is also his sharpest.

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

The art of the steal

NICHOLAS LEZARD

All That Glitters

By Orlando Whitfield Profile £20

About halfway through this telling of the story of Inigo Philbrick, the young art dealer imprisoned for seven years for fraud in 2022, I was reminded of a childhood memory.

It was of the millionaire (he’d now be a billionaire) Laszlo Carreidas in Hergé’s Tintin adventure Flight 714. In one frame, we see Carreidas having a phone conversation with an art dealer about an upcoming sale. ‘Three Picassos, two Braques and a Renoir? … Junk!’ he says. ‘Anyway, I haven’t an inch of space to hang them.’

But in the next frame he says. ‘What’s that? … Onassis after them? … Then buy! Get them all! … What? … I don’t care how much, buy!’ And that is as good an introduction to the shady world of art-dealing as you can get in cartoon form.

Carreidas is a collector, not a dealer. After reading Orlando Whitfield’s book – in fact, a long way before you finish it – you will get the impression that supremely wealthy collectors are pussy cats and noble philanthropists when compared with art dealers, who seem to run purely on mendacity and bluff, if we assume that bluff isn’t simply another word for the same thing.

They are either absolutely rotten or holding on to morality by their fingertips. But Orlando Philbrick was outstanding in his field. The details of his fraud are complex, mind-boggling and arcane.

‘No fraud is constructed to be understood,’ as Whitfield says in one of the many piercing insights he comes up with in the course of his tale. But, if I understand it correctly, Philbrick’s crimes

included selling the same painting/work of art to different people at the same time, hoping that the price at auction would be high enough for him to pay everyone off and still have plenty left over for himself.

In a world where deals are no more formal than handshakes between – ha! – gentlemen, and where it is customary for payments not to be made immediately, and where a Jeff Koons balloon animal can sell for $91 million –yes, you read that right – it was quite easy to pull this off, if you had the sheer nerve.

Until, of course, it wasn’t. Philbrick became unstuck when a painting of Picasso by Rudolf Stingel failed to sell for as much as he’d hoped. Philbrick shuttered his galleries and flew off to Vanuatu, which he’d heard didn’t have an extradition treaty with the USA. But it did, if you were travelling on a tourist visa, which Philbrick was.

Of course, I might not know a lot about the art world, but at least I would have been suspicious of Philbrick from the start. His surname is the same as that of the conman and fantasist in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. And as for ‘Inigo’, well, that’s a red flag right there.

But Whitfield has not read Waugh, clearly. And Philbrick was, by Whitfield’s plausible account, extremely charismatic; especially in the surroundings of Goldsmith’s, where they met when they were students. Early on, they team up to become art-dealers. and at first they are, despite some early setbacks. They discover a Banksy on a door in East London – but it is taken off to be sold by someone else before they can get to it. If I have a small gripe with this book, it is that Whitfield never adequately explains to me how Banksy makes his money.

Philbrick becomes shifty, evasive and absorbed by the trappings of success. Mixing with the super-rich, he starts adopting their habits: the wildly expensive meals, the limos, the vintage champagne. But it is not something he can keep up for long. ‘Too Much Too Young?’ was a 2011 headline from The Art Newspaper, nearly a decade before Philbrick’s arrest.

I cannot conceive of a better book about the grisly nature of the art world than this. Whitfield (‘Orlando’ being surely as much of a warning signal as ‘Inigo’ and ‘Philbrick’ – and Whitfield acknowledges their ‘silly names’) is aware of how corrupt it all is. There’s an interlude in the book where he leaves the art world to apprentice as an art-restorer, and it comes as a blissful respite from all the chicanery that has come before.

The book begins with Whitfield in a psychiatric ward on suicide watch: you can see why he ended up there.

Hugely entertaining though the book is, you have to put it down from time to time, just to shake off the grubby feeling you get from it. Art here is now nothing more than money, and as Whitfield says, ‘Liquidity is always the core concern of the mega-rich and you’d do well to remember it.’

Oh, I will.

Nicholas Lezard is author of It Gets Worse: Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury

‘What’s the matter, Steve? Our bad marriage getting you down?’

Bored in the USA

MARY KILLEN Away Weekend

By Lesley Fernández-Armesto Quadrant Books £10

There are not enough female participants in the genre of comic fiction. Entering the ring for the first time, aged 67, comes Lesley Fernández-Armesto, who has delivered a perfect comedy of English vs American manners.

No racism is permitted these days, of course, but if you happen to have any bugbears about hearty Americans with gleaming rows of teeth set into rictus smiles, yet with senses of humour contrasting with our own, you will enjoy this gentle ridicule by proxy.

Geraldine is a 55-year-old, comfortably-off divorcée, living alone in a bijou mews in St John’s Wood with only a toy poodle for company. Her ex-army officer husband, Jonty, now at a desk job in Whitehall, has inexplicably left her for a ‘slightly dumpy blonde’ he met on the Tube.

Although mystified by her husband’s apparent unhappiness with their marriage, which produced two healthy,

now grown-up children, beautifully groomed Geraldine was nevertheless dignified when he broke the news. She likes to retain her composure, feeling it is ‘one of her few accomplishments’.

Although her ego has taken a punching, the reader sees that, for the financially cushioned, being dumped by one’s partner is not necessarily all bad:

‘Everything was neat and tidy. Even after two years, she still took pleasure in the perfection of her surroundings. She would come downstairs each morning and just gaze at the little drawing room overlooking the mews, with its thick silk curtains and its pretty antique furniture.’

The pages proceed, and we learn about Geraldine’s new modus vivendi: her (platonic) interactions with other amiable residents of the mews, attending Pilates classes, opera, theatre and ballet outings. Then there’s shopping for things like flowers and prime cuts from the butcher, punctuated by lots of ‘restorative’ glasses of white wine.

Despite the perks of being single, beautifully groomed women with Pilates-toned bodies do still tend to crave admirers of the hands-on – rather than platonic – variety. Geraldine knows, however, that unattached, heterosexual, civilised and solvent men of her own age are all but non-existent.

Enter 56-year-old Ellis Cater, an American singleton, ‘well over six feet tall, greying at the temples with full wavy hair’, who has moved to London to run a bank. Ellis and Geraldine meet at the Christmas party thrown by their neighbour, 90-year-old Mrs Mankowitz.

Ellis is charmingly suave, ‘like Cary Grant in a black and white movie’. He is far richer than Geraldine and even better dressed. More significantly, having moved into the mews himself, he has been fancying Geraldine from afar; indeed, he asked Mrs Mankowitz to introduce them.

‘My company has a box at the Opera House in Covent Garden,’ says Ellis. ‘Perhaps you’d join me there one evening?’

Sporadic expensive dinners ensue, mainly involving champagne, lobsters and soufflés. Still, late-flowering lust has its share of horrors, not least being in the nude in front of – and sharing a bathroom with – a new partner.

And then Ellis invites her to go with him – by private jet– to East Cork, Indiana, for the weekend to attend an American football match.

The weekend? By private jet? ‘This is the life,’ thinks Geraldine. What could possibly go wrong?

A lot, when you remember that England and America are two countries divided by a shared language, as quipped George Bernard Shaw. But Geraldine undergoes the ordeal for us, so we don’t have to.

For Ellis, the American football match, the centrepiece of a three-day annual get-together for the alumni of All Saints College in East Cork, Indiana, is the highlight of the year.

His fellow alumni seem equally enthralled by their scholastic legacy. Geraldine’s English manners are impeccable, despite the sepulchral chill of the air-conditioning in the hotel, the catfish burgers, moose burgers and bison burgers in the restaurant, the cheerleaders, the hell of the unending match, the thousands of alumni jumping in the stadium all at once and their unnerving excitement.

‘No alcohol in the stadium?’ asks Geraldine, incredulously thinking of Lord’s, Goodwood or Twickenham.

We despair at how Geraldine is wasted on them. But she is not wasted on us.

Sometimes you just want a straightforward belly laugh rather than a cynical one. Away Weekend had that sort of laugh for me on almost every page, making it the perfect lightweight read for your poolside lounger this summer.

Mary Killen is The Oldie’s beauty correspondent. She is married to Giles Wood, a fellow Oldie columnist

Teacher’s reading list

SOPHIA WAUGH

Reading Lessons

By Carol Atherton

Fig Tree £18.99

Carol Atherton is an English teacher working in a boys’ grammar school, which accepts girls in the sixth form. She has written a thoughtful book about the texts chosen to be read in schools and the reasons they are chosen.

She cleverly links each book or play with issues the students might be facing in their daily lives, as they face forward into the world outside education.

‘This book has been, in part, a love letter to English teaching,’ she writes in her afterword, and it is indeed as much about teaching as about the texts taught.

It is a hymn to English literature, the dedication of English teachers, her pupils and even, by extension, all pupils. She is saying not just that she ‘sees’ the books, but that she ‘sees’ the children.

We know many pupils will leave school and never pick up a book again. Many have given up reading long before they even leave school. Therefore, she argues (and any fule kno this is the case) that the few texts they read in school need to be relevant to their experiences in the world, now and later.

The books she has chosen will be familiar to any reader, teacher and indeed anyone who has sat a public English-literature exam in the last 20 or so years: Macbeth, An Inspector Calls, My Last Duchess and Lord of the Flies.

She also considers the reasons for reading some of the books taught lower down the school: Noughts & Crosses; Coram Boy.

A small quibble I have with Atherton is the level of plot detail she goes into for each book. We already know that Macbeth kills Duncan and Lady Macbeth sleepwalks. We know that the boys in Lord of the Flies degenerate into chaos and Piggy’s body is washed out to sea; that Pip loves cruel Estella.

But where Atherton excels is in pinpointing the debates these basic plot facts open out to the students. She dismisses subjects such as geography and the sciences as ‘safer’ than English because of the level of certainty and factual content these subjects offer. English literature, she argues, is all about debate, not fact.

She recognises the way children like writing down clear definitions of techniques, but also points out that these are not what lie at the heart of an enjoyment of literature. The current craze for recall testing is all very well, but knowledge does not equate to understanding. Nevertheless, how can you understand something you don’t know?

The links she makes between the worlds of the children she teaches and those presented in the books they study are argument enough for the importance of literature. Would Dickens have believed, when he wrote of the starving children Ignorance and Want, or J B Priestley, when writing of Mrs Birling’s high-handed refusal to give help to Eva Smith, that years later people would still be queueing at food banks?

These are links that children living now can understand, as they can the issues of Coram Boy (family secrets) and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (not fitting in). Atherton also speaks against those who argue that children should not be taught texts that don’t resonate with them, such as Death of a Salesman: ‘The fact that a subject doesn’t immediately

appeal to teenagers should never be a reason to avoid teaching it.’

This book is in many ways autobiographical. This effectively illustrates her point about the importance of books in reflecting all our lives and issues, whoever we are. Her reading of Macbeth as a play about infertility is probably taking this slightly too far – although she does (finally) admit this reading would not be helpful to a GCSE student expecting a question on ambition or the supernatural.

The book ends with an overt plea for an improvement in teachers’ conditions of work. Without better funding and a greater awareness of the ‘importance and difficulty of what teachers do’, we will lose more and more of the staff who are so vital to future generations.

She refutes the idea that studying English is a useless ‘indulgence’, noting the undeniable advantages, not just of reading, but of thinking about reading.

All in all, this is a thoughtful, well-rounded contribution to the educational debate.

Sophia Waugh, an English teacher, writes The Oldie’s School Days column

How your garden grows

DAVID WHEELER

Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life

By Jason Roberts riverrun £25

The year is 1707. Separated by some 700 miles (as the Corvus comix flies), two naturalists are born, destined for world fame.

Social climbing (sorry, mobility) saw their names elevated in search of greater status. Carl Linné’s father had already Latinised the family’s Swedish name to Linnaeus. George-Louis Leclerc, a salt-taxcollector’s son, in later life appended ‘de Buffon’ to his handle, echoing his origin in the ‘minuscule settlement’ in the rural Burgundy village of his birth – which he eventually bought lock, stock and barrel.

Both penned colossal works in an attempt to name and classify the every living thing of the book’s title. Their rivalry stemmed from Linnaeus’s seeing all species as created à la Genesis, while Buffon viewed them in ‘a swirl of constant change’.

Aged ten, the diminutive (no more than 5ft tall) Linnaeus was schooled in the three subjects of ‘classic academic trivium’: grammar, rhetoric and dialectic.

He began a lifetime’s writing in ‘workmanlike’, rather than ‘elegant’, Latin. Later, at Uppsala University, botany professor Olaf Celsius (uncle of Anders, inventor of our adopted temperature scale) found the student Carl in the botanic garden, drawing from life. He was able, ‘in an accent thick enough to mark him of peasant stock’, to give all the plants their (then) scientific name, in accordance with the ‘notoriously difficult’ Tournefort system of identification.

Meanwhile, the young Leclerc, ‘neither failing nor excelling in his schoolwork’, inherited a vast fortune. Fortuitously for us, he chose a scholar’s rather than a playboy’s life, graduating as a young adult from Dijon’s Jesuit academy, ‘moving confidently within a circle of well-born friends’.

Linnaeus published the first part of his magnum opus in 1735. His Systema Naturae introduced us to Linnaean taxonomy (his ‘sexual system’, as it came to be known), which gave each animal and plant a unique two-word (binominal) tag, consisting of genus and species.

The Systema grew to over ten volumes and, despite first being considered as nothing more than a ‘minor curiosity’, remains a foundational text.

While congratulating himself on his considerable achievement, he nevertheless confessed to being exhausted and depressed at the age of 50, saying in a letter to a friend:

‘My hand is too weary to hold a pen… I am a child of misfortune. Had I a rope and English courage, I would long since have hanged myself… I am old and grey and worn out.’

Meanwhile, Buffon (‘He carries himself marvellously,’ quipped Voltaire), at a similar age, ‘remained vigorous and seemingly at the height of his powers, a fact he attributed to his continued regimen of sparse diet, physical exercise and regular hours’. In 1739, he had been appointed head of the Jardin du Roi in Paris, a position he held until his death half a century later. In that time, he published his 36-volume, 1,600-page Histoire naturelle – considered stylistically ornate and long-winded by modern-day readers – in which opportunities were taken to side-swipe at Linnaeus and his opposing theories.

The two great men never met. However, in 1782, ‘the formidably busy Buffon’ was stopped in his tracks at the Jardin du Roi by the appearance of Carl von Linné the younger, Linnaeus’s 42-year-old son and successor. He was welcomed effusively, taken on a

personal tour of the garden, providing Buffon with ‘an unprecedented opportunity to defuse the old perceptions that had been the father’s nemesis and perhaps forge a form of peace’.

Buffon similarly appointed his son Buffonet as his ‘successor’, appealing to Louis XV to promise that the nine-yearold would eventually inherit his position.

Linnaeus, fond of writing in the third person, said of himself, ‘He can hardly walk, talks confusedly, can scarcely write.’ In the spring of 1776, he was barely able to speak, prompting one of his students to observe that he managed only a few steps ‘with extreme difficulty’.

He dwelt in ‘private twilight’ for another 18 months. Two former students were sitting beside his bed when he died at 8am on 10th January 1778.

In his time at the king’s garden, Buffon increased its stock considerably, taking the number of plants grown there from a mere 2,000 to more than 60,000. Nearing death, ten years after Linnaeus’s, he asked to make one last tour of the garden, ‘in as solitary a fashion as possible’. Supported by two servants, he was seen on an April afternoon, wrapped in warm furs – a gift from Catherine the Great of Russia – among the trees when a warm sun was gilding new shoots.

On 14th April 1788, hallucinating, and after confessing to an imaginary bedside cleric, he ‘drank three teaspoons of Alicante wine, closed his eyes, and died at 40 minutes past midnight’.

Jason Roberts, an American (as are the book’s spelling and punctuation), has given us a remarkable insight into the lives of two extraordinary men in extraordinary times. Having laid our two protagonists to rest, he brings the history of botanical science slap up to date in a further 100 pages, adding Darwin, the Huxleys, William Stearn and other notables to a cast of outstanding characters and discoveries.

David Wheeler is The Oldie’s gardening correspondent

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Twain again

PAUL BAILEY

James

By Percival Everett Mantle £20

The title of Percival Everett’s typically inventive and thoughtful new novel alerts the reader to its bold intentions.

James, the narrator and principal character in James, has been known since the 1880s as Jim. He’s the slave owned by the God-fearing Miss Watson who befriends Huck Finn in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – probably the best-loved of Mark Twain’s books.

Twain’s Jim is superstitious and uneducated; Everett’s James is neither, for reasons that are made clear in the opening pages of his story. Everett and Twain are as one in their affection for, and admiration of, Huck. The boy’s innate decency and inquisitive spirit are preserved here, as they should be.

In Huckleberry Finn, it’s Huck who attempts to teach Jim about King Solermun (sic) and other facts he’s picked up from Bible lessons. In James, Huck overhears Jim talking in his sleep, not knowing that the slave is having a serious conversation about the meaning of liberty with Voltaire.

‘You sho’ talk funny in yer sleep,’ Huck says. It’s not until the last of their adventures together that Huck learns that Jim, who will prefer to be addressed as James in the future, has a hard-earned knowledge of the ‘funny’ English white folks talk – like Judge Thatcher, for instance.

Judges are learned men, and Judge Thatcher is no exception. He has a grand house with an impressive library. It’s in that library that Jim, as he’s called, discovers the power of the written word. When the judge is in court, Jim – in his capacity of man-of-all-work – goes there as often as he can.

Everett merely hints at the long process of dedicated application the enslaved man has undergone in order to understand the writings of John Locke, the pioneering thinker who influenced generations of philosophers, but those hints are enough.

Locke is another argumentative phantom with whom James converses in his dreams. At this point in the narrative, ghosts are the only people to whom James, in his role as Jim, can dare to express his deepest feelings.

He cannot afford to forget that he’s still a slave, since everyone he meets on his travels with or without Huck treats him as such. In James there are passages of sheer horror, such as those that describe what happens to a slave called Young George, who steals a pencil that’s little more than a stub.

‘Human beings can be awful cruel to one another,’ observes Huck in

Twain’s masterpiece, after witnessing the tarring and feathering of the two rogues posing as the English aristocrat Lord Bridgewater and the ‘disappeared’ French Dauphin ‘Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette’.

The artful pair are resurrected by Everett. He dispenses with Twain’s laboured Shakespearean parodies and an entire subplot, where they assume the identities of an English clergyman from Sheffield and his deformed brother, heirs to a fortune left by a recently dead man called Peter Wilks.

Cutting out this thread was a wise decision, since it threatens to take over the original book. The pair are even more sinister in Everett’s hands, like those fundamentalist preachers who trick the gullible out of their money on American television channels devoted to Holy Truth.

Percival Everett is at his boldest with the arrival into the hectic proceedings of Daniel Decatur Emmett and his Virginia Minstrels, the very first Black and White Minstrel Show.

The fictional Emmett saves Jim from even yet more servitude when he overhears him singing. He pays Jim’s new master for the slave’s release. Jim, the reader learns, is light-skinned enough to be blacked up, and there is much grim humour in the pages concerned with his brief career as a minstrel.

On the run again, James is in possession of Emmett’s notebook, which contains several blank pages for him to fill with the story of his life.

How James avoids being sold to a slave master in New Orleans, how he is reunited with his beloved wife and daughter, and how he and Huck become even greater friends, after many hair-raising adventures on land and on the Mississippi, are at the heart of this deeply humane and captivatinglywritten novel.

No scene is more impressive than the one in which James confronts Judge Thatcher, the owner of the books by Voltaire and John Locke, from which he has learned nothing in his daily dealings with his black servants.

James and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn make distinguished company. The great literary mischiefmaker Percival Everett has honoured Mark Twain, the first great mischiefmaker in American literature, with this dazzling tribute in disguise.

Paul Bailey was The Oldie’s theatre critic

Map of British drunks

A new book shows how Victorian ‘drink maps’ fought rampant alcohol consumption, from London to Edinburgh.

By Kris Butler

This is the story of drink maps. It’s not about pub crawls or plotted ale trails. Instead, these are maps with an agenda that was hostile to drinking alcohol, made by the Temperance Movement.

The logic at the time of the maps’ creation went: if people are shown how many places there are to buy alcohol, they will be so appalled that they will join the effort to end drinking. In

hindsight, this logic is obviously flawed.

Drink maps of cities were published to fight increasingly rampant consumption, from Edinburgh and Liverpool to Oxford and London. Featuring red symbols to indicate where alcohol was served, these special street maps were posted prominently in public places, submitted as evidence, sent to MPs and published in newspapers to show how inebriated a neighbourhood could be.

They promoted the message that having fewer places to buy alcohol was the answer to reducing widespread crime, poverty and sickness.

And they worked – at first. After consulting a drink map in one town, judges decided to close half the licensed shops because, even then, no one had to walk more than two minutes for a beer.

Drink Maps in Victorian Britain by Kris Butler is out on 9th May (Bodleian, £25)

George Cruikshank’s The Drunkard’s Children, 1848

The Modern Plague of London, an 1886 map by the National Temperance Publication Depot. Each red dot is a London pub

Red dots show Edinburgh pubs, 1923

London’s dynamic duo

George IV and John Nash gave the capital a glorious facelift, 200 years ago david horspool

About 200 years ago, central London began a transformation without equal in its history.

Over two decades or so, many of the buildings, vistas and streetscapes were built that still define the city, from Regent’s Park to the National Gallery, having survived the attentions of the Luftwaffe and town planners, just about.

How did this happen? The Regency and the reign of George IV are usually associated with conspicuous consumption, post-Napoleonic War deprivation and oppression, and the selfishness of an aristocratic class yet to be shamed into the public philanthropy of the Victorians.

In some ways, the London this ruling class produced – grand, upscale, austerely classical – would seem to justify such a reputation. But this was also the time when London’s centre was being deliberately thrown open to Londoners themselves. Buckingham House may have been remodelled into the much showier palace we know today, but even this was done to make the monarch more of a national figure, rather than just another very rich man in the capital.

A signature event in this transformation was the death of a marine insurance broker, John Julius Angerstein, in 1823. A year later, in May 1824, the National Gallery was founded.

The connection? The core of the Gallery’s collection was Angerstein’s 38 paintings. They were bought by the government at his death, along with the lease on his Pall Mall townhouse, where the paintings were displayed to the public until the construction of a new building in an equally new address – the National Gallery in what became Trafalgar Square.

Angerstein was a self-made man, who braved the snobbery of better-educated, aesthetically more sophisticated contemporaries to amass a collection which still sits at the centre of the National Gallery today. It includes works by Claude, Rubens, Raphael, Titian,

Correggio, van Dyck, Rembrandt and Velázquez. Closer to home, he loved Hogarth. He bought Marriage À-laMode and the famous self-portrait with a pug, now shuffled to the Tate.

Angerstein is a good representative of the class of men emerging in the early19th century, less dependent on position and inherited wealth than formerly. The team of architects who contributed to these developments were an equally varied bunch.

Towards the end of this period, there was Charles Barry, who from 1840 remodelled Trafalgar Square. The middle-class son of a Westminster stationer, he claimed to be mostly self-taught. He flourished as an architect after extensive travels through not only France, Italy and Greece, but Egypt and the Middle East too. The monumental scale of ancient Egypt seems to have inspired him to think big in his own public projects.

Decimus Burton, the man with a Roman name and a passion for Greek architecture, designed the magnificent Athenaeum, a stone’s throw from the future Trafalgar Square, in 1824.

He had a far more comfortable upbringing than Barry, his path smoothed by his father, a successful builder and developer. Burton – bettereducated and worse-travelled than Barry – seems to have been able to rely more on connections for his commissions.

Two rather more controversial figures were the real presiding deities of London’s renewal: John Nash and his patron George IV. We tend to think of our capital’s development in piecemeal terms, the result of a burst of enthusiasm or a response to disaster. But the duo of George IV and Nash managed to achieve a rare sustained piece of project management, which combined usefully with an open-handed Parliament and a creative attitude to obstacles.

I said they were controversial. Nash, the son of a Welsh millwright in Lambeth, was hardly the sort of man who could have expected to have the ear first of a prince regent, then of a king.

Though he’d built a successful career as a country-house builder, it was as architect to the decidedly un-urbansounding Office of Woods and Forests that he came to George’s attention.

His proposals to develop Regent’s Park and Regent Street all the way to Charing Cross impressed both the Treasury and the Prince, who thought Nash’s plan ‘will quite eclipse Napoleon’.

In that remark lies some of the ambition behind the whole scheme: to create a capital to outdo that of the French, just as Welllington had outdone Napoleon in the field.

But Nash had to reconcile the ambitions of his patron and the purse strings of the Treasury. Inevitably, he overspent, which led to trouble with the paymasters. He was willing to gamble with his own stakes, too.

When one part of his development looked as if it would be held up indefinitely for lack of investors, he simply bought all the house lots in his own name.

Nash and his extravagant patron’s vision for the capital transformed its West End just as Wren transformed the City of London 150 years before.

Looking back on their achievement two centuries on, can we honestly say it has ever been improved on?

Regent’s Park Crescent, designed by John Nash, 1806

Showbusiness is like sex. When it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful. But when it isn’t very good, it’s still all right.

Max Wall

Women, even more than the working class, is the great unknown quantity of the race.

Keir Hardie

Will she kiss him under the nose, or underneath the archway where her sweet William grows?

George Formby

I have one aim – the grotesque. If I am not grotesque, I am nothing.

Aubrey Beardsley

A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.

Germaine Greer

One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.

Marie Curie

I was a halfway-decent-looking English boy who looked nice in a drawing-room standing by a piano.

Peter Lawford

Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?

James Thurber

I am my own secretary; I dictate, I compose, I copy all myself. The Venerable Bede

Surely it is much more generous to forgive and remember than to forgive and forget.

Maria Edgeworth

There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no ruined stones.

Hugh MacDiarmid

Money can’t buy love, but it improves your bargaining position.

Christopher Marlowe

Jealousy is the lifelong noose hanging about the neck of love.

Caitlin Thomas

The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have Is yours.

The love that I have Of the life that I have Is yours and yours and yours.

Leo Marks (1920-2001)

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Franz Kafka

We’re gonna be fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists.

Armistead Maupin

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

George Eliot

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

Alexander Pope

People don’t yell nasty things at actors – they let them continue.

Larry David

Dining rooms

We were invited to a kitchen supper the other night. It’s an outdated phrase – where else do you entertain these days?

The occupants of every single household near us in London have smashed down walls to create an open-plan eat-in kitchen with a vast island. It’s called modern living: you want to cook, eat

and relax in the same space – which is all very well until you have guests over and you have no choice but to perform in front of them as if you’re on a cooking show. Then you have to dine in a war zone of splattered recipe books and washing-up.  I find it all a bit much. When our own version of the kitchen-living-dining space arrived last year, my husband and five children settled straight in – but I felt exposed. The nightmare of open plan is that there is nowhere to hide. The kitchen can serve as a reception room only if it’s spotlessly tidy – impossible when your children leave their things all over the island.

When, as a child, I had lunch with my great-aunt

Eleanor, she’d pass a perfect roast through the serving hatch. We weren’t exposed to the process. Now, though, guests are part of it. For a shy cook, this can be terrifying. I cower behind the island, dreading the moment someone peers over my shoulder to look in my pan. ‘Can I help?’ they ask,

SMALL DELIGHTS

Removing copies from the photocopier to find they are warm.

SCOTT BANKS, GLASGOW

Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

meaning, ‘I’m starving – how long until we get fed?’

Guests, too, are sick of kitchen suppers. It was all jolly to begin with – the drinks at the island sports bar; helping yourself from the stove. But who wants to spend the evening watching their host incinerate the steaks?

I teased my parents mercilessly when they downsized and planned to have both their kitchen table and their dining table in their new open-plan kitchen, assuring them it would look like a restaurant. At least their generation understands, though, that dining is an art that can’t be pulled off at the kitchen table.

Bring back the dining room now.

Blackpool rock: George Formby (1945)

FILM HARRY MOUNT BACK TO BLACK (15)

At one point in this biopic about Amy Winehouse, she’s sitting, dejected, in Soho Square when she spots a lone fox.

Uh-oh! Ever since that stag kept popping up in The Queen (2006), we know that hunted animals stand in for hunted humans on the big screen.

And poor Amy was hunted. I saw her several times in Camden, being goaded by paparazzi into lashing out to conjure up a good photo. And that hunted, tragic life, Camden paparazzi included, is well-caught in this moving – if sometimes a bit creaky – film.

You’d have to know the Amy Winehouse story – meteoric rise to pop fame; dead from an alcoholic overdose at 27 – to enjoy the film.

But it’s best not to watch it if you’re an obsessive fan. For some mysterious reason – presumably financial – Winehouse’s songs are sung by Marisa Abela, the actress who plays her, rather than by Winehouse herself.

The same happened with Renée Zellweger singing Judy Garland’s songs in Judy (2019). Zellweger has an impressive voice but, in a film about a brilliant singer, surely it’s best to use the original voice.

Still, Abela has a pretty lovely voice,

Arts

too. She captures Winehouse’s charm and emulates the scarily thin ragdoll – a beehive on a lollipop stick – she became in her last months. She also nails down Winehouse’s elusive, contrary character: the old-fashioned Jewish girl who doted on her grandmother but was fatally attracted to bad boy Blake Fielder-Civil.

Star-crossed lovers: Amy (Marisa Abela) and Blake (Jack O’Connell)

Jack O’Connell is gifted at oozing the paper-thin charm of Amy’s Cockney cheeky chappie. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh have done a professional job. But, in a way, the

film writes itself – the real story is so like a fairy tale gone wrong that it makes an ideal plot. Suburban girl becomes megastar; megastar meets bad boy; bad boy dumps megastar; megastar joins the 27 Club of pop stars who die at that tragically early age.

It helps, too, that Winehouse’s most famous songs are autobiographical. Lots of pop musicals, not least Mamma Mia!, have to retrofit a group’s songs onto a flimsy story. In Winehouse’s case, her songs tell her gripping, melancholy life story with eerie prescience.

Back to Black is about Fielder-Civil going back to his old girlfriend: ‘I died a hundred times/You go back to her.’

And Rehab is about her catastrophic attempts to clean up her drink and drug habits: ‘They tried to make me go to rehab/But I said no, no, no.’

The film is honest about the literally bloody horrors of her addiction and Fielder-Civil’s. But it papers over some of the agony in her life, not least the divorce of her parents and her tricky relationship with her father, Mitch Winehouse.

He is played movingly as a charming, witty dad by Eddie Marsan. But, as the 2015 documentary Amy showed, Mitch, an aspiring crooner, wasn’t averse to the limelight himself. In that documentary, while she was in rehab in St Lucia, he suddenly cropped up, filming his own documentary, to her deep consternation.

It’s almost always the case that a documentary is better than a biopic at telling the truth. And so it is with Amy Winehouse: her genius and tragedy are inevitably more palpable in the documentary Amy

Her life, character and talent were so enormously compelling that they brought her the fame that killed her. They also mean that, in its new incarnation as a biopic, her tragedy draws you in, transfixed once more.

THEATRE

WILLIAM COOK

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

Wyndham’s Theatre, London, until 8th June

Brian Cox was born to play James Tyrone, the angry patriarch in Eugene O’Neill’s greatest play. Like Logan Roy, whom Cox played so well in the hit TV series Succession, Tyrone is a geriatric tyrant, furious that his feckless children haven’t inherited his will to win.

In Succession, Cox played a wealthy tycoon, ruling over a vast media empire. Here he plays a washed-up actor, stuck in a creaky old house in Connecticut. Yet, despite their contrasting fortunes, these characters are kindred spirits – modern King Lears, both raging against the dying of the light.

Cox is a stage actor of tremendous power and subtlety. How good to see him back where he belongs, in the West End, in a classic play.

O’Neill wrote Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1941 – ‘A play of old sorrow,’ as he described it, ‘written in tears and blood.’

He then put it aside, and decreed that it shouldn’t be performed until 25 years after his death. In spite of this, in 1956, three years after he died, his widow permitted a world première in Stockholm, where it was an instant hit, earning comparisons to O’Neill’s Scandinavian idols, Strindberg and Ibsen.

Why didn’t O’Neill want his peerless masterpiece to be performed during his lifetime, or for a generation after? Because its intimate, painful subject matter was almost entirely autobiographical.

Like James Tyrone, O’Neill’s own father (also called James) was a gifted actor who succumbed to drink and traded his talent for commercial success.

Like Tyrone’s wife, Mary, O’Neill’s mother (also called Mary) became hooked on morphine. Like the Tyrones’ eldest son, Jamie, O’Neill’s elder brother (also called Jamie) was an alcoholic. And, like the Tyrones’ younger son, Edmund, Eugene was stricken with tuberculosis.

Knowing that O’Neill’s script mirrors his early life so closely adds an extra layer of interest to this intense, traumatic play. Still, Long Day’s Journey into Night is such a heartfelt, heart-rending piece of theatre that you could watch it without knowing anything about O’Neill or the background to his magnum opus, and still be transfixed.

As the title of the play implies, the action takes place on a single day – the day Edmund learns he has TB and must enter a sanatorium (the year is 1912, the

A Scot in New England: Brian Cox in Long Day’s Journey into Night

year that O’Neill contracted TB). For O’Neill, TB was an epiphany, a brush with death after years of drifting, which gave him his vocation. He started writing plays in the sanatorium and never looked back.

Yet for the characters in this play, there’s no such consolation or salvation. Edmund has a 50-50 chance of dying, and his family all know it. This dreadful revelation unlocks their own shameful secrets: the manic dipsomania of the men and Mary’s opium addiction.

Watching these miserable addicts trading accusations and recriminations sounds like a bleak way to spend an evening but, like all great theatrical tragedies, this is an exhilarating play.

Emboldened by booze, these characters tell one other exactly what they think of each other. It’s like eavesdropping on a violent domestic quarrel. You can’t tear your eyes away.

It’s a shame this rendition is hobbled by some peculiar casting and directing, depriving Cox of the premier-league production his towering performance deserves. Daryl McCormack and Laurie Kynaston are fine actors, but I found them far too hale and hearty for

these roles. I struggled to believe that McCormack’s lithe, athletic Jamie was a hopeless soak, or that Kynaston’s boyish, fresh-faced Edmund was suffering from a deadly disease.

Patricia Clarkson is suitably spacedout as their helpless, haunted mother, lurching between inertia and hysteria, ‘as lonely as a dirty room in a one-nightstand hotel’. Her considered interpretation is rather undermined by Jeremy Herrin’s direction, which is lively, but frequently too light and jolly.

Actors are inclined to look for laughs, but there’s really nothing remotely funny about these trapped and tortured characters. Grim stuff? Of course. But that’s the play O’Neill wrote and there’s no other way it should be played.

There’s an eerie coda to this drama. O’Neill wrote it about his own past, but it turned out to be a premonition. Like the elder son in his secret play, his eldest son, Eugene junior, became an alcoholic. He killed himself in 1950, three years before his father died.

As O’Neill observes in this ruthless, timeless tragedy, the past is never passed. It’s the present, and the future, too.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE

Our tennis club asks members to refrain from foul language on court – ‘even if, as is almost always the case, it is directed at yourself’.

I appreciate that amused, schoolmasterly rebuke. No such humorous attitude was ever detected in the foul-mouthed WhatsApp messages that flew about Number 10 in Covid days, as revealed in the inquiry. The dislikeable Dominic Cummings had to be told, ‘We are going to have to coarsen our language somewhat, Mr Cummings, in order to hear the evidence.’

This insight into how we are governed by lazy, humourless WhatsAppers came in Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat (Radio 4). The New Statesman journalist has been online since her schooldays; she can now look back and make fun of its hellishness.

Oh, how glad I am to belong to the generation who still communicate in considered speech, instead of constantly tapping away. How ghastly to be a parent today using the school-gates WhatsApp –a Pandora’s box from which a venomous fellow mother might spring out and chide you for being ‘rude’ or swank about a World Book Day costume made at midnight.

WhatsApp is now available to foolish and susceptible 13-year-olds – and why should adults care, when they too behave like 13-year-olds? My only quibble with Helen’s programme is the background muzak plinking and plonking away with banal ominousness – is it a xylophone? Could it be a steel band? We don’t need it. The words say it all.

For those who still listen to drama on Radio 4, do not miss the novels of Richard Ford, the great American novelist, starting with The Sportswriter All four have been brilliantly adapted for Radio 4 by Robin Brooks.

And please listen to the Book of the Week, with Salman Rushdie reading

Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder. In Knife (reviewed on page 54), he talks candidly about life since the day death – a masked man in black – scuttled towards him on stage at the Chautauqua Symposium (on free speech) in New York.

Salman had sometimes imagined his assassin rising up in some public forum. ‘So it’s you. Here you are,’ he thought.

Woman’s Hour’s Emma Barnett, who daringly gave us men talking about porn, and challenged trans men in women’s sports, promises to carry on trumpeting the feminist cause in her new berth on Today. The day before she left Woman’s Hour, O J Simpson died. Anita Rani’s

recall of his acquittal on the show was the best argument for a programme taking the female viewpoint.

On the next day, the equally pugnacious Esther Rantzen featured in The Reunion with ‘Esther’s boys’ from That’s Life (including Peter Bazalgette, begetter of Big Brother). They paid tribute to her famous triumphs – from getting Nicholas Winton together with the children he saved from the Nazis to the dog that growled ‘Sausages’.

Rachel Johnson’s Difficult Women podcast with Daisy Goodwin was one of her best, aided by Daisy’s willingness to rail about her Madame Bovary mother, Jocasta Innes, a bolter who ran off with a Geordie, Joe, leaving little Daisy aged five and her brother, three. Among much else, Daisy told of the liberation that came of her house’s burning down. Shrieks of laughter erupted. You can’t beat two women on a podcast on a good day.

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON

One of the keenest viewers of the six-part Emmy-winning The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, when it aired in February 2015, was the star himself, Bob ‘killed them all’ Durst.

The docuseries, written and directed by Andrew Jarecki, investigated the disappearance of Durst’s first wife, Kathie McCormack, in 1982, the Mafia-style assassination in 2000 of his best friend, Susan Berman (who provided Durst’s alibi after Kathie’s disappearance), and the murder and dismemberment of his neighbour Morris Black, 71, in Texas, 2001.

The only death for which Durst stood trial was that of Morris Black, whom he killed while in hiding disguised as a mute woman. Pleading self-defence, Durst was acquitted by a redneck jury. They thought he had every right, as the heir to a $100m real-estate fortune, to kill anyone he liked before carving them up and dumping their body parts in Galveston Bay.

It was ‘untouchable’ Bob who then approached Jarecki with the idea of making The Jinx, nobody having told him that he burped every time he told a lie. Belching his way through six hours of interviews, he eventually made his bizarre confession in the lavatory, not knowing that he was still wired up: ‘There it is. You’re caught. Killed them all, of course.’ Burpy Bob was immediately arrested, which you would think was the end of the story, but not a bit of it. In The Jinx: Part Two we learn that, by episode five of The Jinx (part one), Durst realised he had made an error in assuming the show

would prove not only his innocence but also his genius.

He therefore went on the run with a latex Halloween mask and thousands of dollar bills, aided by one of the jurors in the Morris Black trial who had since become his lackey.

Apprehended by the FBI in a New Orleans hotel, Durst was arrested for the murder of Susan Berman. In prison awaiting trial, he continued ‘a non-stop talkfest’, in the words of the investigator who listened in to his phone calls.

Durst talks strategy with his stonecold wife, Debrah Lee Charatan, who minds not one jot that he cut up the body of an innocent man. She draws the line at the subject of his girlfriend, with whom he fantasises about getting a love nest once this is all over. ‘I know Jarecki is planning on doing a sequel,’ Durst tells Debrah. ‘The trial’s gonna be a zoo.’

Patricia Highsmith, fascinated by what she calls in her journals the murderer’s ‘terrible world of hell’, would have admired Bob Durst from an aesthetic point of view. In her manual Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, she stresses the importance of making the ‘heropsychopath one-hundred-per-cent sick and revolting and fascinating for his very blackness and all-round depravity’.

When we first met Durst, he had the glamour of the premier-league psycho killer. Now that the king has left his kingdom and we are left with the freak-show courtiers, all hoping some of his millions might come their way, it all looks a bit squalid. Chief courtier is Nick ‘Chinga’ Chavin, founder of a brand of rock music known as Country Porn. Songs include Cum Stains on the Pillow and Dry Humping in the Back of a ’55 Ford. Chinga (which means f**k in Mexican Spanish) was also best friends with Susan Berman – so he’s torn in two. Should he lie in court out of loyalty to Bob, or seek justice for Susan? Decisions, decisions.

The Jinx: Part Two, while not the rollercoaster ride of the first series, is still better than anything else on TV – except

Talented: Andrew Scott as Ripley

McLachlan

Ripley, that is (Netflix). Steven Zaillian’s bleak adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley, with Andrew Scott as the loner sent to Italy to bring Dickie Greenleaf home to New York, is a different beast entirely from the showy Anthony Minghella film of 1999.

While Scott’s unreadable antihero has more internal hell than Matt Damon’s toothy try-hard, Johnny Flynn, unable to compete with Jude Law, plays Greenleaf as a man without qualities. In the Netflix series, shot in noirish black-and-white with a bellowing soundtrack, even the staircases have more character than Flynn’s Greenleaf.

Graham Greene described Highsmith as a ‘poet of apprehension’, but she was also a poet of paralysis. For Bruno in Strangers on a Train, ‘hate had begun to paralyse his thinking’, while Guy, with whom Bruno swaps murders, compares killing to ‘a nightmare when one is paralysed’.

In the later Ripley novels, Tom will become a dandy assassin like Bob Durst in his prime. But, for now, Andrew Scott plays him as a grifter paralysed by his poverty, paralysed by his hatreds and paralysed by a plot that moves forward with glacial slowness. Which is exactly as Highsmith would have wanted it.

‘Oh no! It’s a Bonksy’

MUSIC

RICHARD OSBORNE

MADAMA BUTTERFLY

‘And this? Can he forget this as well?’ cries Cio-Cio-San, as she presents the US consul in Nagasaki with her three-yearold son, love child of the naval lieutenant she fondly believed to be her husband.

It’s one of the most arresting moments in all opera. It’s also a cri de cœur on behalf of all women who’ve been abandoned by feckless men.

Lieutenant Pinkerton does return, albeit with his American wife. We all remember the moment at the end of Mozart’s Figaro when the Countess sweeps in to confer forgiveness on her errant husband. But Butterfly’s reply to Kate Pinkerton – ‘Under the great dome of heaven, there isn’t a happier woman than you, and may you always be so’ – is of a similar order of memorability.

Hear it if you can in the recording made by Maria Callas in Milan in 1955, Karajan conducting. It would be a two-handkerchief moment were it not, in Callas’s performance, an act of forgiveness that lies too deep for tears.

The centenary of Puccini’s death falls in November. So it’s good that Covent Garden began this year with a revival of their 2003 staging of Madama Butterfly, and did so with one of the most remarkable sopranos of our time, Asmik Grigorian, in the title role.

I don’t know how Grigorian’s Butterfly would fare in the intimacy of the recording studio, but her theatre performance is a thing of wonder. Even on a blank stage bereft of all decoration, she embodies Butterfly in all her sadness and soul-stirring complexity.

Madama Butterfly is Puccini’s masterpiece, but it’s had a rough ride these past 60 years, first from left-wing theatre directors determined to rub our noses in the evils of American imperialism, and more recently from politically motivated ‘advocacy groups’.

I think of Australian director Lindy Hume’s 2021 Welsh National Opera staging. It attempted to remake the story as an agitprop diatribe against child sex-trafficking in the age of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein.

Designed to last by the simple expedient of avoiding political makeovers and restoring the opera to itself,

Covent Garden’s production is by the skilled and trusted duo of Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier.

Not that even this escapes scot-free in an age when some proponents of ‘inclusivity’ would happily see the opera excluded altogether.

Covent Garden spent an entire year before its 2022 revival working with expensively retained consultants seeking solutions to what Director of Opera, Oliver Mears, describes as ‘the ethical and practical complexities of staging an opera such as Madama Butterfly in a changed geopolitical climate’.

What claptrap. Not the least of the achievements of Madama Butterfly is the vast array of historically informed source materials on which Puccini and his librettist drew, and the even-handed way in which they treat the tensions within these two conflicting and internally conflicted ‘geopolitical’ cultures.

Mind you, Mr Mears has played a blinder elsewhere – reviving the opera twice in two years, refusing to cover the Covent Garden website with infantilising trigger warnings, and dumping all the exculpatory Japanese stuff into the £10 programme book.

The opera’s quality is proven by its popularity with audiences and the series of great recordings it has inspired. If the Callas is hors concours, a later recording conducted by Karajan featuring Mirella Freni as Butterfly is also widely admired. More importantly, it provides the basis of the soundtrack for Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s celebrated 1974 film of Madama Butterfly – a classic of the genre, now on DVD.

And then there’s the unforgettable 1966 Barbirolli recording, unmatched in the tragic blaze of sound unleashed by the Rome orchestra, as Butterfly –the great Renata Scotto – confronts the

well-meaning consul with his compatriot’s love child.

Barbirolli first conducted Butterfly in 1926, a performance greeted by the Manchester Guardian’s Samuel Langford with the rarest of accolades: ‘What Mr Barbirolli will do with other masters remains to be proved. In Puccini at least he is an absolute master.’

It helped that Barbirolli had played under Puccini at Covent Garden in the early 1920s. He loved the man, and loved dining out on stories of Puccini’s love of English society – turning up at rehearsal wearing an MCC tie one day, an Old Etonian tie the next.

Puccini owed a huge debt to London. Covent Garden always did his operas proud, and it was in London in July 1900 that he was taken to see David Belasco’s adaptation of John Luther Long’s Madame Butterfly, a short story based on his sister’s time as a missionary in Japan.

Puccini was fascinated by the story, bewitched by Belasco’s innovative staging, and enchanted by Evelyn Millard – Oscar Wilde’s first Cecily Cardew – who played Butterfly.

GOLDEN OLDIES

MARK ELLEN

STEVE HARLEY’S REVENGE

Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me) was back on the radio a few weeks ago. I fell through a wormhole in time and found myself in 1975 when it was part of the glorious soundtrack of college life.

We dialled it up non-stop on our pub jukebox, assuming it was an optimistic love song written after a rough patch –an impression backed by its brisk, freewheeling pace and almost jaunty, gut-stringed guitar solo. It seemed to belong beneath cloudless skies playing in cafés in the Algarve.

But, as I found out later, this masked its dark heart and dour, rather Gothic inception – one of those fascinating tracks that would never have been on the radio in the first place without a magical transformation in the studio.

about betrayal and desertion. Steve Harley, who wrote it – and sadly died in March, hence its reappearance amid affectionate tributes – had fallen out catastrophically with his band, Cockney Rebel.

He felt he’d given them a generous break by hiring them to back him; they resented his press attention and thought they should be writing songs too and getting a hefty whack of the royalties. When he refused, they mutinied and walked out en masse, a move reflected in various lines of the lyric – ‘You’ve broken every code’, ‘You spoiled the game’ –most of which was bitterly dashed off in a cab on the way to the recording.

Harley played his dreary, pedestrian lament to producer Alan Parsons, who politely suggested he ramp up the speed and shift its emphasis from the caustic mid-section to the line ‘Come up and see me, make me smile’. This went down well. He then brought in four top-end singers (Linda Lewis and Tina Charles among them) to add the relentlessly breezy and propulsive backing vocals –another huge commercial draw.

‘Suddenly it was swinging and ooh-la-la,’ Harley remembered. ‘We saw a hit record being built here.’

Instead of the intended sax break, Parsons opted for an exotic Spanish guitar, painstakingly piecing the solo together note by note from three separate takes. He then added a string section and five crucial moments of heart-stopping silence by cutting in precisely measured lengths of blank tape – now a few seconds’ work on a computer – and the alchemy was complete.

It would galvanise dance floors. Packed concert halls would swell its uplifting chorus. Radio DJs would find its stop-starts irresistible, either leaving them as thrilling ‘dead air’ or filling them with irksome waffle.

And, most of all, the song – which belonged alongside such vicious take-downs as Bob Dylan’s Positively 4th Street and John Lennon’s How Do You Sleep?, a direct message to the rebels who’d doubted his capacity to write hits and insisted he let them do it for him – went on to sell over a million copies, largely to people who hadn’t the faintest idea it wasn’t a charming romantic invitation.

It arrived at Abbey Road in the winter of 1974 as a vengeful, finger-pointing dirge

How sweet that must have felt for Steve Harley. Revenge is a dish best served by 50 years of radio playlists.

Call me Madama: Asmik Grigorian as CioCio-San (Butterfly), Covent Garden, 2024

Rebel song

The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up, 1838, J M W Turner. On show at the Laing

EXHIBITIONS

HUON MALLALIEU

NATIONAL TREASURES

Around the UK from 10th May

The National Gallery will be celebrating the 200th anniversary of its founding with various exhibitions throughout the year. They include a promising Van Gogh in Provence in October.

Also, throughout the year to May 2025, the National Gallery’s Art Road Trip will visit 18 places across the UK. It will work with local arts organisations on community-led projects intended for people with the least access to creative opportunities. The mobile art studio will host some 200 public events and work with thousands of people to bring art and ideas inspired by the National Gallery Collection to where they live.

First, though, comes not one show but a dozen – and not in Trafalgar Square. Twelve of the collection’s greatest treasures are being sent out, apostle-like; one each to the same number of major public galleries around the country.

This not only is an unusually intelligent, if only temporary, example of levelling up, but serves as a reminder that the National is indeed national. As the advertising has it, ‘More than half the UK population will be within half an hour’s journey of a National Gallery masterpiece.’ All open on 10th May and most run until early or mid-September.

The lucky outstations are: the National Library Wales, Aberystwyth, with Canaletto’s Stonemason’s Yard; the Ulster Museum, Belfast (Caravaggio’s Christ at Emmaus); the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as St Catherine); Brighton Museum & Art Gallery (Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait at the Age of 34); Bristol Museum & Art Gallery (Constable’s Hay Wain); Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (Botticelli’s Venus and Mars); the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (Vermeer’s Young Woman at a Virginal); Leicester Museum & Art Gallery (Renoir’s Umbrellas); Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus); Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle (Turner’s Fighting Temeraire); Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (the Wilton Diptych); and York Art Gallery (Monet’s Water-Lily Pond).

Self-Portrait at the Age of 34, Rembrandt, 1640. On show at the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery

Above: the Wilton Diptych (c 1395-99). On show at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

As is currently fashionable, some of these centres have commissioned contemporary responses to their masterworks. Others have made their loan the centrepiece of a show from their permanent collections.

Among the former, the response to Artemisia, at Birmingham, by Dublinbased Jesse Jones, ‘whose practice crosses film, sound, performance, sculpture and installation’, is promising.

Among the latter, I single out the Laing’s Turner: Art, Industry & Nostalgia, which explores themes in Temeraire that connect it with Tyneside.

Inter alia, it will remind us that, in the 2012 Bond film, Skyfall, 007 met the new Q in front of this painting.

GARDENING DAVID WHEELER GROUND FORCE

Some gardeners, against Dame Nature’s better judgement, prefer a clean swathe of tilled earth between their plants. ‘There’s tidy,’ they say around here.

The Dame was occupying the ground long before we humans set foot on it; better, then, to do it her way.

And choice ground-hugging plants have an arguably better aesthetic than thickets of couch grass, creeping buttercup and invasive thistles – however beneficial their seeds might be to insects, birds and small mammals. Hark, though: cultivated weed-suppressing plants, if that’s our alternative, can also fill the critters’ store cupboard.

discovered or ‘improved’ plants, prompting younger gardeners to go online where they’ll find websites listing hundreds of delectable, diverse weed-smotherers.

The periwinkles (Vinca) bestow fresh-looking year-round leafage and a throng of white or blue, single or double flowers. I coax the small-leafed V minor and its kin around small plants, saving the thuggish, larger-leafed V major to inhabit ground under macho shrubs and trees. All are good in shade, although I’ve seen them under hot sun, alongside rosemary and other heat-lovers in several Moroccan gardens.

In one of the few books on the subject (now there’s an opportunity for a horti-scribe looking for a new project), the late Graham Stuart Thomas, former head of gardens for the National Trust, stresses the value of leaves. In his Plants for GroundCover (1970), he invites readers to follow him down a ‘realisable dream-path’. He asks us to consider that foliage is more important than flowers, and that green in its many variations ‘is a colour that deserves the closest attention and appraisal’.

That said, foliage can extend delightfully beyond the fabled 40 verdant shades, and most ground-covering plants are also floriferous. Think such old familiars as aubrieta and alyssum and that ubiquitous, award-winning herbaceous geranium ‘Rozanne’ with its untiring mid-blue saucershaped flowers from June to October.

Of course, a 50-plus-year-old book will not include the many newly

The ajugas do much the same job – some introducing purple foliage and flowers to the scene.

Briefly, wearing my partypooper hat, I must warn against some rampant spreaders that are too rampant, especially for confined quarters. A few are outlawed. The beguiling cream-flowered but all too invasive Allium paradoxum is one, but seek out the similar A paradoxum var normale and you’ll have added a small gem to your garden.

A skull-and-crossbones sign ought to accompany the unspeakably beautiful three-cornered leek, A triquetrum. She’s a villain. ‘An absolute menace … worse than Japanese knotweed,’ says one Instagram digger. They add that it is an offence in the UK to plant it in the wild and, like asbestos, should only be disposed of by a licensed waste-carrier.

But it’s Chelsea Flower Show month – let’s gladsome be.

Epimediums mostly keep themselves ankle-high. Best, though, to scissor their evergreen foliage to ground level in early spring, the better to reveal a galaxy of yellow or pinky mauve stars a little later.

Persicarias need careful research. A

garden centre’s tiny pot might well harbour a brute. Some are low and mat-forming, others chest-high, with hooligan tendencies.

Many a geranium other than ‘Rozanne’ will oblige. ‘Johnson’s Blue’ and ‘Buxton’s Variety’ remain stalwarts and are easily sourced.

Euphorbia robbiae can run amok, but is invaluable in shade. The two different greens of its leaves and flowers triumphantly enhance neighbouring blue-flowered plants. Like most of the above, Mrs Robb’s bonnet, to give her the vernacular, spreads by underground runners. Astrantias, on the other hand, like those pesky wild geums, form seed-raised colonies.

Nor should we forget the groundhugging woody plants – prostrate rosemary, willow, juniper, cotoneaster. Another day…

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD RUNNER BEANS

The Tradescants, father and son, travelled widely in central America in the 17th century. They brought back, among many other plants, a scarlet-flowering climber which was initially grown for decoration. Then someone discovered that the long pods growing from the plants and replacing the flowers were delicious to eat. And so began people’s long-lasting affair with England’s favourite bean.

I have never come across runner beans elsewhere in Europe, which is not so surprising; other countries do not recognise them in their own languages.

Haricots verts are what we call French beans, whereas runner beans

Herbaceous geranium ‘Rozanne'

are translated by the French as haricots d’Espagne.

The only possible link between runners and ‘Spanish’ beans is their origin in what was Spanish Mexico. The term haricots d’Espagne in fact refers to climbing French beans or so-called flat beans: as far as I can discover, runner beans are unknown in France. The Spanish call them judias verdes, and the Italians fagiolini, but this is also their word for French or green beans.

This puzzle being not quite solved, it is important to grow runner beans so that they can climb freely, though they may be difficult to pick above two metres.

A wall or tree is suitable, while I erect a sort of wigwam with about ten hazel sticks and one or two beans at the base of each one. If the young plants are loosely tied, they will twine up the sticks more easily (always anticlockwise).

The term ‘scarlet runners’ is rather outdated; many varieties nowadays are white-flowered. I am trying White Lady this year, with edible flowers which can decorate a salad.

The tender plants should not be grown outside until mid-May, when they will need plenty of water to get established. But, once in flower, they should take off.

When the beans start to form in midsummer, they will continue producing long runners for up to three months. Having runner beans with every meal may become a bit repetitive, but they freeze well, and a dish of these beans with onions, garlic, tomatoes and mashed chickpeas makes a welcome change.

COOKERY

ELISABETH LUARD

FIT FOR A QUEEN MOTHER

This spring, try Regional Cooking of England (edited by Carol Wilson).

It’s a hefty, encyclopedia-sized 650-pager, with 280 updated recipes set out on double-page spreads with numbered steps and elegant, updated photographs. All the old favourites are present and correct – braised oxtail, steak-and-kidney pud, mackerel with gooseberries, angels on horseback, syrup sponge, elderflower cordial – and not a pomegranate seed in sight.

The only olde-worlde element is a scattering of sheep safely grazing, dreamy Cotswold villages and misty woodlands in spring – lovely.

Recipes lean towards the family size (six) – suitable for May Day picnics. Forgive the need to curtail the recipes –the full glorious book is a bargain at £25. Every kitchen should have one.

Devilled eggs

This is a grander version of the Queen Mother’s favourite dinner-party starter. Her late Majesty’s secret ingredient, I have it on good authority, was a teaspoonful of English mustard. Serves 6 (good for a May Day picnic).

9 eggs, hard-boiled

50g finely chopped ham

6 walnut halves, finely chopped

1 tbsp finely chopped spring onion

1 tbsp mayonnaise

2 tsps white-wine vinegar

Salt, ground black pepper, cayenne

To finish (optional): paprika, dill pickles

Cut each egg in half lengthways. Place the yolks in a bowl; set the white halves aside.

Mash the yolks with a fork and push them through a sieve or strainer. Add the remaining ingredients, mix well, and season with salt, pepper and cayenne.

Spoon the filling into the halved egg whites, or use a piping bag, and decorate, if you please, with a dusting of paprika and slices of dill pickle.

Beef Wellington

Boeuf en croûte was renamed in honour of the victor of Waterloo and is still the nation’s favourite centrepiece at weddings. Serves 6.

1 kg fillet of beef

100g mushrooms, chopped

2 garlic cloves, crushed

125g smooth liver pâté

2 tbsps chopped parsley

Salt and black pepper

500g puff pastry

A little flour for dusting

Beaten egg to glaze

Preheat the oven to 220ºC/425ºF. Tie the beef with string at short intervals so it doesn’t fall apart. Heat 2 tbsps of the oil in a heavy pan and brown the meat on all sides at a high heat. Transfer to the oven and roast for 20 minutes. Leave to cool.

Heat the remaining oil in the pan and cook the mushrooms and garlic for

5 minutes. Beat in the liver pâté and parsley, and leave to cool.

Roll out the pastry on a lightly floured board into a rectangle large enough to enclose the beef. Spread the pâté mix down the middle of the pastry, untie the beef and lay it over the pâté.

Brush the pastry’s edges with the beaten egg and fold it over the meat. Place it seam side down on a baking tray. Chill for 10 minutes. Bake till golden and crisp: allow 20-25 minutes for mediumrare, 30 for medium, 40-50 for well done.

Allow to rest for 10 minutes before serving in thick slices. Horseradish stirred into whipped cream would not come amiss.

Syllabub

Nothing to it, really. To serve 6: grate the zest and squeeze the juice of 1 orange and place in a large bowl. Add 65m caster sugar and 4 tbsps of medium dry sherry and stir till the sugar dissolves. Stir in 300ml double cream and whisk until thick enough to form soft peaks. Serve with summer fruits and a crisp biscuit.

RESTAURANTS

JAMES PEMBROKE

SPRING CHICKEN

Reggie St Cloud, Brenda Last’s brother in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, ranks highest in my gastronomic pantheon.

To describe him as omnivorous would damn him with faint praise. ‘He ate in a ruthless manner, champing his food (it was his habit, often, without noticing it, to consume things that others usually left on their plates, the heads and tails of whiting, whole mouthfuls of chicken bone, peach stones and apple cores, cheese rinds and the fibrous parts of the artichoke).’

Well, Reggie and all who sail with him, I have found just the place for you: Fowl, a beak-to-feet restaurant in St James’s. They use every part of the feathered beast in their burgers.

Until recently, their chicken-leg corn dog came complete with claw on the plate, albeit after its nails had been trimmed. And, of course, they had their very own version of stargazy pie, with a deep-fried chicken head poking through the pastry.

Both items are sadly off the menu now; the gastro-wokes have cancelled them. The great British public are still squeamish and ignorant. When Hugh FearnleyWhittingstall launched his Chicken Out! campaign back in 2007, a Devonian lady asked with not a little astonishment, ‘What? You can eat the legs as well?’

But, fear not, chicken is the new burger. Such a relief – all that earnest debate about the size of the hamburger grind.

ELISABETH LUARD

Both Fowl and Bébé Bob in Golden Square are spin-offs of grand eateries, Fallow and Bob Bob Ricard respectively, and they both offer bargain set menus, using 80-day-old birds. And not just any birds: the Debrett’s of poultry.

Whenever I drive to France, I fill my car boot with the most yellow poulet de Bresse. It fills me with memories of that rich fatty meat of my seventies childhood when roast chicken (and salmon) were the greatest treats. But these birds are another level: dukes rather than earls.

Bébé Bob makes the challenge ‘any main course the customer wants, as long as it is chicken or chicken.’ Heaven.

I took ‘Chairman’ Jim, whose life is now devoted to charging young businesses large fees for chairing their boards. He’s the Reggie St Cloud of the corporate world, unhampered by embarrassment when his companies collapse but joyous when they are acquired. In spite of him.

He was going through a lean patch, owing to a few closures up north. So I opted for the Vendée chicken at £19 a head from Pays de la Loire over the Landais chicken from Gascony at £39. We could also have had chicken nuggets, fries and salad for £19. What a lovely restaurant, chic with its brass railings and banquettes. Ideal for lunch or pre-theatre.

But canteen-like Fowl has even richer pickings; the Food Guru and I tried everything. We shared the best-ever chicken schnitzel and triple crisp chicken fillet burger. And we couldn’t resist their chickenfat tarte Tatin. I’d go back for that alone. You can have the last two dishes for just £18.

The FG raved about their ‘slaw’, a dish dear to his East Coast heart. (What branding loony decided to drop the ‘cole’ prefix? Were they worried about the association with the Heinz tinned versions?)

Well, there’s no chickening out for me, and given there are 30 chickens for every ten humans in the world, my supply is guaranteed.

DRINK BILL KNOTT SCOTTISH POWER

My Scottish friend Paul, with whom I regularly watch rugby and partake of more single-malt Scotch than perhaps is wise, doesn't exactly defy the perfidious Sassenachs’ stereotyping of his countryfolk. He has a keen eye for a bargain.

He recently alerted me to a special offer at Waitrose: Glen Scotia Campbeltown Harbour single malt, ‘a lovely dram, and a steal at £25’. He was right: it’s delicious. Honeyed but not sweet, with a gentle waft of peat, it would

have been decent value even at the regular price of £38.50.

Three of Scotland’s five whisky regions are well known. The Highlands region encompasses a huge geographical area (including many of the islands) and an equally vast range of styles, from the island whiskies of Jura, Talisker and Highland Park to Glenmorangie, on the east coast, at the northern end of the Great Glen.

On the southern side of the Moray Firth, Speyside – where The Glenlivet, Macallan and Glenfiddich are among the 50 or so distilleries – is, technically, also part of the Highland region. But it boasts its own appellation as well, and pulls in £150m worth of tourism each year, much of it whisky-related. And there is Islay, famous for its heavily peated malts that sing of seaweed and iodine: Laphroaig, Lagavulin, Ardbeg, Bowmore and a handful of others.

South-east of Islay, and just about clinging to the mainland, is the Kintyre peninsula. On its east coast is Campbeltown, only 50 miles or so from Glasgow as the crow flies – but a circuitous (if beautiful) three-hour drive.

In the 19th century, Campbeltown claimed to be ‘the whisky capital of the world’, but its decline was precipitous, fuelled by poor quality control, a shortage of coal and – eventually, as elsewhere in Scotland – by Prohibition in the US.

Now only Glen Scotia, Glengyle and Springbank remain, but three new distilleries are being built, and the town may yet see its fortunes return.

Finally, there is the Lowland region, which produces a huge volume of whisky, much of it grain whisky intended for blends. Sadly, like Campbeltown, many of its malt distilleries are now defunct.

A few survive, however. Should you take that three-hour drive to Campbeltown, you will pass the Auchentoshan distillery before you even leave Glasgow. Their whiskies are still triple-distilled, as was once traditional in the Lowlands, and they share a light, spicy, nutty, slightly waxy character. The American Oak has hints of caramel and coconut (£33.50, tesco.com); the 12-Year-Old is long and honeyed, and the Three Wood has notes of vanilla and cinnamon (£33.99 and £44.99 respectively, thewhiskyreserve.co.uk).

There is now a seemingly insatiable demand for single-malt Scotch, and not just from Paul and me. Exports last year topped £2bn for the first time, and new distilleries continue to be built, even in the Lowlands and Campbeltown.

It is an industry in very good health, or, as they say in Scottish Gaelic, slàinte.

Wine

This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a Muscadet that has profited from a few years in bottle; a white Burgundy that is a step up from Mâcon-Villages; and a pleasingly rich and rounded, Merlot-dominated red from the Graves. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Muscadet Sur Lie Grand d’Or, Guilbaud Frères, Loire 2020, offer price £12.00, case price £144.00

Good Muscadet develops complexity as it ages: this example has kept its freshness but develops nicely on the palate.

Mâcon-Chardonnay, Mallory & Benjamin Talmard, Burgundy 2022, offer price £14.95, case price £179.40

Chardonnay, in this case, means not just the grape, but the village after which it was named: classy, goodvalue white Burgundy.

Château Trebiac, Graves Rouge, Bordeaux 2019, offer price £13.95, case price £167.40

Lovely, black cherryedged fruit and rounded tannins: classic claret, well priced and from a great vintage.

Mixed case price £163.60

– a saving of £29.99 (including free delivery)

SPORT JIM WHITE

THE CHEATING GAMES

Back in the 1980s, an American academic called Bob Goldman conducted research among some of the best young college athletes in the States.

He asked them a simple question: if there was a drug available that would guarantee you an Olympic gold medal, world championship success and total dominance of your sport and which was completely undetectable, would you take it?

To a man, woman and somewhere in between, they all said yes. Where could they sign up? He added a caveat: what if the drug did all that but also resulted in death by the age of 30? Would you still be up for it? Astonishingly, more than half his sample group said they would. They were in it for the glory. Never mind how short-lived.

humanity is properly to embrace the potential benefits of scientific advancement, sport is the ideal Petri dish. Try stuff out round the track and test what science can do to speed up the 100 metres. Then we can see how close we are to reforming the human constitution. No better place to conduct such an experiment than in a grand sporting event.

Updates can be delivered wirelessly to range-topping Extreme models, while cheaper models have a smartphone app that can access popular services.

Next year, the Goldman dilemma, as it came to be known, will have a full-on, practical demonstration. The Enhanced Games are a new sporting concept in which there will be no drug testing and no restriction on what you stick in your arm or shove up your nose.

Participants can dose themselves up on whatever they think will give them an edge. No need for Lance Armstrong-style deception, or Russian chemists fiddling with urine samples. This will be an event in which the participants can just get on with it. And be open about it.

As the Australian Olympic swimmer James Magnusson, the first of what the event claims will be a host of established performers to sign up, puts it, he will ‘juice up to the gills’ to win one of the $1m prizes on offer. Not so much the Olympic motto of Faster, Higher, Stronger, then. Simply Higher, Higher, Higher.

Despite being condemned by every sporting body around, the idea has some serious money behind it. And there is a reason for that. Much of the cash comes from Peter Thiel, the American venture capitalist who was one of the first backers of Facebook and PayPal. A libertarian, Thiel has said he believes the current restrictions on pharmaceutical enhancement in sport are an infringement of liberty.

The Enhanced Games, he insists, will be a celebration of personal freedom.

But this is more than political. Thiel is one of those Silicon Valley billionaires obsessed with the prospect of living for ever. He is fascinated by what science can do to assist that cause. He believes that if

There’s nothing new in that. As it happens, through surreptitious cheating, we have plenty of evidence over the years of what science can do to athletes. And it’s not exactly edifying. It’s stoked-up Tour de France riders dying suddenly in the middle of the night. It’s Florence Griffith Joyner having a fatal heart attack at the age of just 38 because of the damage done by longterm steroid use. It’s a generation of East German female shot-putters, wired on testosterone, unwittingly transitioning in later life.

You wonder – with no restriction whatsoever placed on those about to take part – how many will succumb to the second part of the Goldman dilemma and be gone within five years of banking their million-dollar prize?

MOTORING ALAN JUDD MANUALS VS AUTOMATICS

Renault’s adopted Romanian orphan, Dacia (pronounced datcha), are rightly renowned for their range of cheap, reliable, no-frills vehicles. They do exactly what they say on the tin.

Now, courtesy of Dacia, within months we’ll be able to buy something that has so far eluded the UK market – an affordable electric vehicle (EV).

It’s called the Dacia Spring, and they’ve already sold 140,000 on the Continent. They delayed marketing it here because, in the words of designer David Durand, ‘It was lacking a bit of modernity.’

It will start at a touch above £17,000, significantly undercutting the £26,000 Chinese BYD Dolphin. For that money, you get an electric motor of either 44bhp or 64bhp with a small 26.8kWh battery, delivering a claimed range of 137 miles.

It has four doors and weighs under a ton. It conforms to EU safety regulations: including driver-assistance systems such as lane-keeping, emergency braking and driver-attention monitoring. However, in keeping with Dacia tradition, you can disable these at the press of a single button.

This is a smart move by Dacia. Some 93 per cent of their European sales were to buyers new to EVs and that’s likely to be the case here. Even more than range anxiety and inadequate charging infrastructure, the high cost of EVs is the major inhibitor of widespread take-up.

Focus by governments and motorindustry leaders on new car production blinds them to the fact that most people will never be able to afford a new car.

Last year, 1,903,054 new cars were sold in the UK, of which 817,673 were to private buyers. In the same period, sales of used cars totalled 7,242,692, of which EVs accounted for only 118,973.

The used-car market is where most of us live. If we’re ever to get anywhere near government targets for EV use, that’s where most of us will buy them. If we’re to afford them, they’ll have to be cheaper when new, which means more manufacturers doing what Dacia does.

And what Ford may be doing. Having realised that most buyers won’t pay over the odds for EVs, they’ve been working secretly for two years on designing affordable ones. If they bring it off, it would be a welcome return to their roots, when the Model T began the process of bringing motoring to the majority.

Increasing EV adoption has other consequences, however: driving tests. EVs are like automatics, except that they don’t have gearboxes. If you take your test in an EV or automatic, you qualify to drive only automatics.

In 2019, fewer than 50 per cent of new car registrations were automatics. Last year, it was 71 per cent, and about 20 per cent of driving tests were taken in automatics. The more EVs and autos, the more tests will be taken in them. But about threequarters of the 41.3 million cars on UK roads are manuals. They’ll be with us for years. And so increasing numbers of new drivers will be disqualified from driving most cars. What’s to be done?

Change the test, surely, so that automatic qualifiers qualify for manuals, just as manual qualifiers qualify for automatics.

The current rules were introduced when automatics were far less common. In practice, most auto-only drivers hate manipulating clutches and gears, and very few would venture onto public roads without practice. Even if they did, they wouldn’t prove much of a safety hazard because they’d be stalled or stuck in first until they got the hang of it.

So why not change the test?

Matthew Webster: Digital Life Who guards the digital guards?

This is a bumper year for elections.

The electoral stars have aligned so that there will be well over 60 national elections in 2024. About half the world’s population will be able to have some sort of say in who governs them this year.

That’s a lot of votes, and Google is in the thick of it. I hope they get it right.

I’ve written here before about why electronic voting, especially internetbased voting, is a terrible idea, destroying, as it does, the elegant simplicity and security of a secret paper ballot. Happily, most countries have so far spurned the idea, but that certainly doesn’t mean that the internet (and therefore the ubiquitous

Webwatch

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https://venn.lib.cam.ac.uk/ Alumni Cantabrigienses – All graduates up to 1900. Search out your ancestors.

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Google) is not deeply embedded in the election process.

Election-related online advertising, for example, is rampant, much of it through Google and its subsidiaries, especially YouTube. It’s big money; in the UK, the Labour Party alone spent over £225,000 with Google in the first three months this year, with no certain election date. In India, where voting in that country’s general election is already under way, the ruling party has spent well over £1m with Google in 2024, and no doubt other parties are also digging deep.

I was intrigued by Google’s recent announcement that in India it is trying out new technology to manage the search results whenever anyone there looks for election-related information on Google.

They will now be directed only towards what Google determines are the more authoritative news-providers, and will be given, unbidden, relevant extra information such as the funding sources of parties and candidates, correcting common misinformation and the like.

The scale of the task is daunting. There is some automation involved in Google’s monitoring, but it seems that a team of humans does much of the work, and it’s a Herculean task.

As well as making sure the information provided is accurate, there is a whole range of online abuse to be countered. This can take the form of manipulative content, incitement to violence or electoral fraud, harassment or just old-fashioned bullying.

Google can’t remove this stuff from the internet, unless it’s on one of its own

sites, but it can remove links to it from search results and post warnings about it on its own, much looked-at pages.

It is, however, a huge undertaking, especially when you consider that there are almost a billion electors in India (even the USA can claim only about 120 million) and several different languages. But help is at hand. Google tells us that recent advances in artificial intelligence, especially its language abilities, make spotting the nasty stuff much quicker.

This all sounds fine, on the face of it. If it is seen to work in India, the technique will be deployed in all those other elections brewing around the world, including in the UK.

It’s undeniably praiseworthy that Google is trying to help make an election a clean fight, rather than just sitting on its hands and raking in the advertising income.

This is, however, something of a test of Google’s independence – or possible lack of it. While I applaud the desire to combat misinformation and bring clarity to the election process, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that Google itself regularly makes political donations.

That might call into question the neutrality of their fact-filtering process and their judgement of what constitutes an ‘authoritative’ source.

I’m prepared to give Google the benefit of the doubt, for the moment. But, while it holds itself out to be a beacon of truth, accuracy and fairness, it does itself no favours to be seen to be supporting political causes of any stripe.

It needs to tread carefully.

Neil Collins: Money Matters Green economy in the red

Do you believe in net zero?

Woe betide you if you don’t, because it has taken on the mantle of a national religion to rank alongside the NHS.

The government has passed a law to say we must hit it by 2035. Labour has responded with an even more evangelical 2030 pledge. Neither party has the courage – or perhaps even the

knowledge – to spell out how much this will cost.

Ah, but we must all do our bit to save the planet, mustn’t we? Just think of the example we will set to the rest of the world if Britain achieves net zero for CO2 emissions by 2035. Other countries will gasp and stretch their eyes, and rush to follow our example.

Except that, as with the NHS, they will do nothing of the sort. The cost of forcing us to rely on windmills and sunshine is going to be ruinous, and since we contribute just one per cent to the world’s CO₂ annually, it will make no difference. Picking out the exact cost of all this is hard but, following the failure of the previous round of bidding for offshore

wind, the 2024 Budget quietly raised the price from £66 to £102 per megawatt hour of output, giving the lie to the claim that renewables costs are falling. The subsidy for new projects is £1.4bn, plus an extra payment for existing ones. There will be a further subsidy to build gas-fired power stations, which a lot of the time will stand idle.

Yet this looks almost like a rounding error when set against the £58bn needed to upgrade the power-distribution network by 2035. Ed Miliband’s pledge to hit zero by 2030 is a fantasy. We are impoverishing ourselves to set an example that the world will not follow.

It’s heresy even to suggest it, but you can’t negotiate with reality.

‘It’s the British version – there are no ships’

Join us at the Reid’s Palace hotel for a tour of Madeira

Following the success of our visit in 2018, we are returning to this magical island. It lies 500 miles off the coast of Africa and is clothed in glorious subtropical vegetation that has delighted botanists and gardeners –as well as winter sun-seekers – for centuries. 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. We will be having dinner every evening in the hotel’s restaurants.

Gerald Luckhurst, the renowned landscape architect and author of The Gardens of Madeira, who has been based in Portugal for 40 years, will be showing us around the more famous gardens and sharing his tremendous knowledge of the island. The Oldie’s James Pembroke and Amelia Milne will be the tour reps.

2nd to 9th April 2025

two-storey building. Lunch in a typical Madeiran restaurant followed by a brief tour of some town gardens en route to the hotel.

Friday 4th April – Boa Vista and Blandy’s Wine Lodge

Wednesday 2nd April – Arrival

Depart from London to Funchal (flights TBC). Transfer to Reid’s Palace hotel; welcome talk by Gerald Luckhurst.

Thursday 3rd April – Funchal

Leisurely stroll through the historic centre – taking in the main shopping street and the cathedral – to the Mercado des Lavradores: fragrant with dozens of flower stalls, housed in an open-roofed

A morning visit to the Boa Vista orchid gardens which house the rarest – and most unusual collection of – orchids on the island, followed by the Jardim Botânico, located in the Quinta do Bom Sucesso. Free afternoon, followed by a tasting at Blandy’s Wine Lodge.

Saturday 5th April – Monte

Ascend by cable car to Monte, where exiled aristocrats and wealthy merchants built their palaces in the 19th century. Visit the lush subtropical

Monte Palace gardens. Lunch at the Quinta do Monte hotel. The famous basket toboggan run is an optional extra for intrepid oldies!

Sunday 6th April – Blandy estate at Palheiro

Visit the Blandy family estate at Palheiro for lunch and a guided visit. The extensive subtropical gardens, first acquired by John Blandy in 1885, have been continually developed by the family. A dragon-tree sanctuary in the outskirts of Funchal is preserving this rare species, at risk of extinction in the wild.

Monday 7th April – Island tour, mountains and north coast

A day exploring the island’s rich botanic and geographical diversity. Travel by coach to the north coast to visit enchanting São Vicente; return through spectacular mountain scenery to Funchal.

Tuesday 8th April – Lunch by the sea

A leisurely last day, punctuated by lunch at Vila do Peixe, which has fabulous views of pretty Câmara de Lobos, one of Churchill’s favourite coastal towns.

Wednesday 9th April – depart for London

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 September 2024.

Above: Reid’s Palace hotel. Left: Madeira Botanical Gardens

The Dabchick

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

Upon this promise did he raise his chin Like a dive-dapper peering through the wave

Who, being look’d on, ducks quickly in, So offers he to give what she did crave

But when her lips were ready for the pay

He winks and turns his lips another way.

William Shakespeare, from Venus and Adonis, verse 15

The ‘dive-dapper’ Shakespeare refers to is the little grebe (Tachybaptus ruficollis), popularly known as the dabchick.

Grebes are Podicipedidae (podex/ rump, pes/foot). Their lobed feet are positioned far back, with paddles replacing tails. The dabchick was Podiceps but has been renamed Tachybaptis (quick diving).

It is the most common grebe, with 7,300 breeding pairs. The great crested grebe has 4,900. But it has fewer winter migrants: 8,000, compared with 13,000 great crested. Three other grebes that breed in Britain are rarities.

Grebes are aquatic. The ten-inch dabchick is no exception. Threatened, it submerges noiselessly and surfaces out of sight. Principally a lowland bird, it is found throughout the British Isles where there are larvae and small fish. Its habitat includes the world’s 200 chalk streams, most of them in southern England.

Chalk streams such as the Itchen and the Test are famed for dry-fly fishing – the supreme angling art, where the fly floats, rather than sinks. Prime time is May, with the first big mayfly hatch. Lord Grey of Fallodon (1862-1933) was a keen angler and, as a Wykehamist, a beneficiary of the school’s stretch of the Itchen – he later owned an Itchen beat. He owed his classic books – Fly Fishing (1899) and The Charm of Birds (1927) – to the sport. In the latter, he described a dabchick’s nest as a blob of ‘sodden weed’, often in midstream. When disturbed, it covers the eggs and hides – most birds freeze.

One time, Grey knelt by the Itchen’s edge to cast and found himself splashed by a repeatedly diving dabchick, defending her nest. When first in the Foreign Office in the 1890s, he witnessed newly hatched dabchicks in St James’s Park, carried to safety under the swimming mother’s wings.

This century, Greater London has seen a record breeding population of 130 pairs (Andrew Self in The Birds of London, 2014). There are usually at least five in central London parks. Nick Burnham, senior wildlife officer for St James’s Park, reports no breeding pairs there.

Three quarters of chalk streams are now polluted, mostly by the side effects of farming. Things are made worse by

over-stocking and over-fishing –creating even fly-shy trout – to satisfy clients of commercially-run beats. Now only a few traditionalists privately offer a semblance of the old challenge. Dabchicks there may be, but they no longer inhabit a chalk-stream idyll.

How Grey would hate it. As Foreign Secretary, he was an advocate of the First World War, with its still-disastrous consequences. When Asquith asked him a question, he would reply, ‘I go a fishing,’ which the Prime Minister, seemingly ignorant of John 21:3, never failed to find irritating.

In old age, Grey suffered from poor eyesight. And two of his brothers were killed by wild animals: one by a lion, the other by a buffalo.

Travel

Sunny times in Blue Land

The Expressionists burst to life in Bavaria from 1910 to 1914. William Cook tracks down the spots where they loved and painted

In Murnau, a quaint market town 40 miles south of Munich, there is a pretty little house that changed the course of modern art.

From 1909 to 1914, the Münter-Haus – now a fascinating museum – was the lively rendezvous of a group of Expressionist artists who called themselves Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), now the subject of a new exhibition at London’s Tate Modern.

In Britain, we tend to regard the German Expressionists as a gloomy bunch, painting pictures of crippled soldiers, consumptive prostitutes and decadent nightclubs. That’s only half the story. Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider, at Tate Modern, reveals the brighter side of Expressionism, full of hope and light.

The Blaue Reiter artists were more interested in nature than in nightlife, and here in Murnau they found an ideal base for painting the countryside they loved.

A tour of this bucolic corner of Bavaria (known locally as Das Blaue Land for the region’s hazy blue horizons) makes a lovely little holiday, and offers a great introduction to the golden age of German art.

The Blaue Reiter story begins in 1901, when a wealthy young German woman, Gabriele Münter, arrived in Munich to study art. Then as now, the Bavarian capital was a centre of the German art scene, but women were barred from

its main art school, the Kunstakademie. So she enrolled at a private art academy run by a charismatic Russian called Wassily Kandinsky.

Kandinsky and Münter fell in love and set off on an odyssey around Europe, in search of artistic inspiration – and to escape Kandinsky’s wife. Eventually, in 1908, they ended up in Murnau in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. Surrounded by snow-capped peaks, it was a perfect place for landscape-

painting. Then as now, it was only an hour by train from Munich.

Their first base was Hotel Griesbräu, a handsome old Gasthaus on Murnau’s bustling high street. It’s still a hotel today and I’d heartily recommend it. Like all the best Bavarian hotels, it’s smart but gemütlich. There’s a microbrewery next door that serves superb beer and solid Teutonic grub.

In 1909, Münter bought a house a short walk away (the house I’ve come to

Das Russen-Hau by Gabriele Münter (1931). Also known as the Münter-Haus

see today), and she and Kandinsky moved in there together. For the next five years it became a hive of artistic activity – not just for Münter and Kandinsky, but also for their German friends Franz and Maria Marc, and their Russian friends Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky.

The vivid pictures they painted here were revolutionary, fusing realism and abstraction, infusing conventional subjects with fierce emotion. In Münter’s house, they compiled the Blaue Reiter Almanac, a progressive manifesto which championed modernist and so-called ‘primitive’ art.

Their neighbours were farming folk and they viewed this arty commune with suspicion, calling it ‘the Russian House’. It was this Russian connection that brought the Blaue Reiter to an abrupt halt. In 1914, Russia and Germany went to war. Overnight, Kandinsky, von Jawlensky and von Werefkin became enemy aliens. They were given three days to leave the country.

Von Jawlensky and von Werefkin fled to neutral Switzerland.

Kandinsky returned to Russia. Marc enlisted in the German army and died at the Battle of Verdun. Münter and Kandinsky stayed in touch, meeting occasionally in neutral Sweden. Münter still hoped he’d marry her, but in 1917 he broke off all contact with her. In 1921 she learnt, to her horror, that in 1917 he’d married a woman half her age.

Kandinsky eventually returned to Germany, to work with the Bauhaus, but he never returned to Murnau and he never saw Münter again. Von Jawlensky also returned to Germany, but he split up with von Werefkin (who went to Italy). Münter continued painting, but her later work received scant acclaim. The Blaue Reiter was no more.

When Hitler came to power, Marc, Kandinsky and von Jawlensky were denounced as ‘degenerate artists’. Their artworks were removed from public galleries. They weren’t allowed to display or sell their work. Thankfully, the Nazis never found the huge cache of their paintings that Münter kept hidden in her cellar. People were sent to concentration camps for less.

Münter wasn’t condemned as

‘degenerate’ – mainly for chauvinistic reasons. As a female artist, she was largely overlooked, by critics, curators and the Nazis. By keeping her head down, she managed to stay out of trouble, forgotten rather than condemned.

By the end of the Second World War, Kandinsky, von Jawlensky and von Werefkin were all dead. As the last surviving Blaue Reiter artist of any significance, Münter was fêted by the West German Bundesrepublik.

Only lately has she become widely known outside Germany. The Tate Modern show, which gives her equal billing with Kandinsky, is a big step in her rehabilitation. She is no longer dismissed by art historians as Kandinsky’s girlfriend but finally recognised as an important artist in her own right.

Murnau is an easy day trip from Munich (and it’s even nicer to stay overnight). The Münter-Haus, where Münter lived until her death in 1962, aged 85, contains a fine selection of her work. The house is intensely atmospheric, still just as she left it, with a jolly mural by Kandinsky on the staircase. The nearby Schlossmuseum, housed in a medieval castle, has an even bigger collection of her paintings, as well as numerous pictures by other Blaue Reiter artists.

For a hearty Bavarian dinner, head for Karg Bräustüberl, a cosy old inn on the high street, with its own brewery in the backyard. For Kaffee und Kuchen (the

German equivalent of high tea), drop into Kaffeehaus Krönner, a few doors away. They make their own chocolates, and their home-made cream cakes are delicious.

Ten miles away (about half an hour by bus) is Kochel, where Franz Marc, arguably the most significant of all the Blaue Reiter artists, lived with his wife Maria. Kochel is much smaller than Murnau, a village rather than a town, yet there’s a splendid museum devoted to Marc’s work, quite out of keeping with its sleepy surroundings.

The house where Marc used to live isn’t open to the public, but there’s a walking trail around the village, ending beside his simple headstone in the graveyard of the parish church. Marc’s work was more mystical and philosophical than the paintings of his peers. If he’d survived the First World War, who knows what direction his career might have taken? It’s one of the great what-ifs of modern art.

I finished my journey back in Munich, at the Lenbachhaus, the museum with the world’s biggest Blaue Reiter collection –much of it hidden by Münter in her house in Murnau during the Third Reich, and bequeathed by her to the Lenbachhaus on her 80th birthday, in 1957.

Seeing these colourful pictures here, all together, I finally realised what makes them so poignant. Painted just before the First World War, they seem so hopeful and optimistic. After the ‘war to end all wars’, German art became dark and tortured. The Blaue Reiter is a window on a better world and a brighter future that might have been.

Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider is at Tate Modern, London, from 25th April to 20th October (www.tate.org.uk)

Doubles at Hotel Griesbräu (www. griesbraeu.de) from €145 per night

Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, 1916

Franz Marc, The Tiger, 1912

Composition VI, Wassily Kandinsky, 1913

Tragic King of the Guinea Pigs

Charles Lamb created a fantastic castle for his beloved pets before dying at 40, blind and alone

Here are some delights for you!

Charles Lamb (not the great essayist) was a somewhat sad and lonely child, born in 1816. His particular passion was a fascination with chivalry and tournaments. And he built an exquisite castle for hundreds of pet guinea pigs.

His family’s estate-carpenter at Beauport in Sussex was responsible for creating this most marvellous little fortress, known as Winnipeg, topped with heraldic banners and castellations galore.

Kingdom of Winnipeg heraldic banners

By 1830, it had hundreds of tiny residents. After their deaths, each and every one of them was given a proper funeral.

From the age of seven, he created this kingdom for his creatures. At eight, he started to write the story of the guinea pigs’ lives. He called it ‘The History of the Kingdom of Winnipeg from the Foundation to the Present Time, BY ROYAL COMMAND’, and decreed that a kingdom would be built in which they would live.

As he grew older, his plans grew ever greater. They resulted in eight miniature, handwritten, illustrated books, bound in red and green leather, with 40 watercolours of the guinea pigs.

lucinda lambton

They ran free in the kingdom of their little buildings. So he decided that his ‘peeks’ (as he called his creatures) should be the heroes of the old-world chivalry that he had created.

Lamb’s family was thoroughly imbued with such romantic notions. His father and grandfather had both been Knights Marshal to the royal household. His father had married the widow of the Earl of Eglinton.

In 1839, his half-brother was the earl who inspired the group of young aristocrats to stage the famed mock-medieval Eglinton Tournament. Renowned for its accuracy, it was held in Ayrshire.

It was a doomed attempt to revive the ideals of chivalry. It was an uphill task in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, especially as he intended to stage the full panoply of parades and jousting with the maximum of revelry, banners, banquets and operas. Theatricals and entertainments were to be on the grand scale, enjoyed in full suits of armour and medieval dress.

Charles Lamb in 1835, with his eight miniature books. They include his illustrated stories of his guinea pigs and the Kingdom of Winnipeg; and letters to his mother

It took four full years to plan and cost a vast amount of money. But, in the event, it poured with rain and the occasion was a symbolically sodden washout. The Marquess of Londonderry was much mocked in his medieval attire, carrying a giant green umbrella.

Lamb took part, preparing himself by

A guinea pig stands below his coat of arms with a sword and feathered hat

sitting in meditation by the graves of his own (guinea-pig) Knights of the White Rose, Turkwine, Earl of Newton and Prince Heliodorus of Rarriburn.

By now, his character was being described as ‘whimsical, sometimes lovable, often tiresome and with a childish streak,’ and he modelled himself on the Knight of the White Rose.

Meanwhile, he had been working for 16 years on his chivalrous schemes for his guinea pigs. There were kings, queens, princesses, princes, knights, counts and dukes with coats of arms and castellated dwellings.

Guinea Pig Castle, Kingdom of Winnipeg

His map of Winnipeg showed a walled city with pyramid tombs and a columned monument. There were two smaller cities, called Farai and Lelia. The estate carpenter had been busy with his many castellated buildings, with Guinea Pig Castle – or Cabbage Castle as it was also called – in pride of place.

The king was called Geeny and the queen Cavia. They had two ‘blameless children’, Limpy and Loidowiskea, before Cavia – ‘poor Cavia, dear Cavia’ –died of consumption. Loidowiskea, now queen, bore her father five children. After that, seven more guinea pigs arrived in the kingdom – and the story begins.

It was all written in Charles Lamb’s singularly quaint hand. He lamented that plagues of ‘dusyintery’ and consumption were suffered by many of the bucks, does and ‘cheeldren’. ‘Thus,’ he wrote ‘did ten thousand griefs happen in Winnipeg.’

The Rarribuns – his chosen name

for rabbits – were troublesome neighbours. ‘Whenever there was pandemonium, in came these gaulking ambassadors, bullying the inhabitants, these horrid pests.’ These were illustrated as arms-bearers, along with the ‘peeks’.

In one of his pen-and-ink drawings, a guinea pig stands below his coat of arms, while his sword and feathered hat lie on a Gothic chest. Below is written ‘Sir Ino Fits Redais of Whittaken, K W R Sheriff of the border. From the original picture in the possession of The Rt Hon Coccineus Hector, Earl of Wittaken &c &c at Wittaken Castle.’

There was also a Sir Coccineus Wallai, as well as the Knight of Killinger and Prince of Rarribu and Turkine de Newton.

There were many drawings of the fiercest battles. In other words – twaddle!

But what a fellow! What a colourful man – much loved by his family but also, it must be said, a great puzzle to them all. As his elder half-brother later wrote:

Guinea pig in body armour

‘Under the influence of a bad course of reading and an unfortunate choice of friends, he became, I fear, almost an infidel. He never went into society and spent his time entirely in the country among his shells, insects, and guinea-pigs.’

Lamb had ‘an unfortunate marriage’ and died aged 40, blind and alone, abandoned by his wife and father, in a small cottage near Eglinton Castle, the site of the disastrous tournament.

A sorry end indeed to such a brilliantly colourful tale.

On the Road

It’s a family affair

Simon Williams tells Louise Flind about Upstairs, Downstairs, The Archers and Celia Johnson, his mother-in-law

Is there something you really miss?

Not knowing where the light switch is in the middle of the night. And I miss the dog terribly. He’s very grumpy. He’s a cockapoo. If he were a person, he would be the Major in Fawlty Towers.

Do you travel light?

Hand luggage only. The most boring thing to pack are all the endless charging devices.

What’s your favourite destination? The Caribbean, the sea there, and Portugal – the Algarve, where my parents lived. But, really, I like going for holidays where the dog can come – Cornwall in particular.

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?

Because I come from an actor family, it was feast or famine. We’d either have a glamorous villa in Majorca, such as when my father sold the film rights to The Grass Is Greener, or, when he was in a flop, we’d go on day trips to Dymchurch.

Did you always want to be an actor?

While my father was making up, I’d stand on the stage. I loved the empty theatres.

What was your father in?

Wuthering Heights, David Copperfield, An Ideal Husband One of Our Aircraft Is Missing was our favourite film because he had to dress up as a Dutch peasant girl to escape from the Germans.

Did he encourage your acting career?

Absolutely not. He said, ‘I’m going to cut you off without a penny,’ and I said, ‘I don’t want to be rude, Dad, but you are an undischarged bankrupt.’

And did you act at Harrow?

I would mimic different staff members at school for reviews. I was cast as Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

but by the time we came to rehearsing I was taller than Lysander, and my voice had broken.

What was it like touring in the ’60s?

On Monday night, you got there, looked at the empty auditorium and were terrified. By the middle of the week, you knew where your dressing room was, and how to flush the lavatory at your digs.

What was your first big break?

My only big break was Upstairs, Downstairs.

Do you prefer radio, television or the stage?

If it’s a good part, it doesn’t matter. I love being in The Archers

Will it be OK between Justin and Lilian? All 40 of us residents of Ambridge wait to see what the scripts bring, and always turn to the last page to check whether we’ve been killed off…

Where was Upstairs, Downstairs filmed? In the studio next to the National Theatre.

What’s the most exotic place you’ve ever filmed in?

I’ve done quite a lot of filming in Vienna, and a film in China.

And the least exotic?

The great thing about playing toffs, cads and privileged people is that we usually work in stately homes. I did three months in EastEnders and got a little glimpse of how the other half live.

How did you get along with Celia Johnson, your mother-in-law? We did a play together and Celia was the leading part, and we became very good friends.

How did you plan the show about their letters with Lucy Fleming, your wife? We started reading them out loud, and it’s gone on from there.

How do you get along with your brother, the poet Hugo Williams?

He’s been my guiding light, really.

Do you like the books of Ian Fleming and Peter Fleming?

Peter’s books are wonderful – complex prose, very rich in detail – whereas Ian’s seem to me to be nouns, verbs, action and brown legs.

Where did you go for your honeymoon?

We went for one night at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons in Oxfordshire. We had five children between us, and they all wanted to come too.

Do you lie on a beach?

We used to cover ourselves in olive oil to make ourselves very, very brown. Now we sit in the shade with a hat on and listen to audio books.

What’s your biggest headache when travelling?

Because I have a hip replacement, I have to take my shoes, belt, jacket and glasses off and still get patted down.

The strangest place you ever slept in?

When I was in weekly rep in Kidderminster, I couldn’t find my digs after the first night and I went back to the theatre and broke in.

Do you like coming home?

I like the fact the dog still goes, ‘Who is it? Oh, it’s you.’

What are your top travelling tips?

It sounds silly, but I think you have to try and enjoy jet lag.

Posting Letters to the Moon – wartime letters between the actress Celia Johnson and her husband Peter Fleming, played by their daughter Lucy Fleming and Simon Williams – is touring

Across

1 Not still angry? (7,3)

6 Reversible raincoats must be a con (4)

10 Extra source of security for customs (5)

11 Stroke insect (9)

12 Seeming reliable, and at home with golf (8)

13 Figures income covers what plant may produce (5)

15 Down-to-earth beings, motorists will absorb tax with roads empty (7)

17 A jar in the morning for broadcast beginning to appeal (7)

19 Got wind of South American cash held occasionally (7)

21 Temporary accommodation hosting a number - of these people? (7)

22 Talk incessantly about part of Africa (5)

24 Furious state of father being covered in beer by Yankee (8)

27 Dubai about to host PMQs? Sadly a disappointment (4,5)

28 A dessert sent back as cold (5)

29 A sharp intake of breath when pinched by doctor (4)

30 Without thinking, sadly recall essay has no answer (10)

Down

1 Fool losing head might get this if offended (4)

2 Newspaper for a teacher featuring drill (9)

3 Revolutionary children’s writer having no time for dramatist (5)

4 After infection returns throws out rubbish (7)

5 Island against island, mostly (7)

7 Copper’s arresting two fellows - wearing these? (5)

8 Sometimes I annoy Americans holding up dressing (10)

9 Animal quietly lying in ground (8)

14 Pet could be unhappy about routine and turn up (7,3)

16 Cause amazement with regard to broken shin (8)

18 Offensive old boy confronting Number Ten with evidence of debts (9)

20 Doctor has answer before raising a fortune, mainly for blood count (7)

21 Difficulties created by beginning to trade currency (7)

23 Knocks politician cutting public transport (5)

25 Renounce time off work (5)

26 Doubtful moment, dropping head (4)

Moron crossword 439

Runners-up: Mr A Hinder, Southampton, Hampshire; Fiona Burke, Clontarf, Dublin

Winner: Storm Hutchinson, Dulas, Anglesey

One of the joys of top-level bridge is visiting new places. I loved last year’s European Open Championships in Strasbourg. I’d be lying if I said that my team performed brilliantly, although we had our moments … such as this one featuring Simon Cope of Hertfordshire.

Both Souths opened a light one-club. Our West player gambled a one-notrump overcall and boldly stood it when North doubled. North naturally kicked off with the ace of diamonds; he then continued with a low diamond, prepared to give up a trick to declarer’s queen to set up four winners. However, after winning that bare queen, declarer could cash out the clubs to escape with only one down.

Dealer South East-West Vunerable

The bidding

South West North East

1 ♣ Pass 1

♦ Pass

1 ♥ Pass 4 ♣ (1) Pass

4 ♠ (2) Pass 5 NT(3) Pass

7 ♥ end

(1) Splinter bid agreeing hearts.

(2) Cannot sign off with such good trumps and no wasted club values. Four spades was a control bid – albeit the king. (3) Grand-slam force – ‘Bid seven with two of the three top trump honours.’ Our Radlett declarer ruffed West’s hopeful top-club lead. He cashed the queen of hearts and crossed to the ace. He ruffed a second club and crossed to the king of spades. If hearts had split 4-1, he’d have needed West to hold queen-low-low of diamonds, cashing two more hearts and leading a diamond to the jack. On the actual 3-2 heart split, he could draw West’s third heart (throwing dummy’s ten of spades), then cross to the ace-king of diamonds and ruff a diamond, succeeding when the queen appeared in two or three rounds. He could now return to dummy’s ace of spades and cash winning diamonds. Thirteen tricks and grand slam made.

ANDREW ROBSON

Competition

TESSA CASTRO

IN COMPETITION No 305 you were invited to write a poem called Dawn Chorus. I liked Charles Owen’s description of the cock or rooster as ‘Hot hacksaw-headed, braggart-breasted,/ Liveried in flame’. Wally Smith was right to call ‘A jay’s call like a block and tackle’. Dorothy Pope addressed a ‘spry robin on your self-entitled post’. Finlay Campbell considered the man for whom ‘Their din may well induce a swift return to bed/ Where, if sober, he may listen to early morning radio/ Emitting information he has no wish to know.’

Commiserations to them and to Fay Dickinson, Bill Greenwell, Brian Howe, Christine Ractliff, Richard Spencer, Fiona Clark, Mike Berry, Max Ross, Ann Beckett, Philip Wilson and Terry Baldock, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Ian Nalder’s exotic dawn.

At first light cockerels crow as one sleek cat Slyly treasures her once plump trophy shrew Dangling limply below a gruesome drool; Gaudy dragonflies whirr with great ado And like a whirling dervish skim the pool. In celebrating dawn, the Indian roller Haply collaborates with parakeet

To welcome home the Panjim fishing fleet While on the soiled sands of Dona Paula Zuairi’s waters gently pitter-patter. Soon hoots of bus and truck compound their clatter, Deaf to temple chant wide-eyed runners pant

And housewives holler for the night-time catch

To rival cries of vendors in their rant; Youngsters in white delight at needle match As shouts of ‘Howzat’ greet crack of ball by bat.

Ian Nalder

Avocets, blackbirds and chiffchaffs and dunlins, Egrets and finches, a great black-backed gull; Harriers, ibises, jays, kites and lapwings, Magpies and nightingales, owls, pipits, quail;

Red-breasted flycatchers, stonechats and tanagers,

Upupa epops and vultures and wrens, Xanthocephalus, the yellow-head blackbird, Zoothera dauma – and that’s where it ends –

For restless, insomniac, tossing and turning,

He’s peopled his aviary from A to Z. Mindfulness triumphs, his troubled brain learning

To visualise feathered friends flying instead –But just as his eyelids, now heavy, are closing And sleep brings its soothing, restorative balm,

The morning’s dawn chorus is superimposing Its melody on his percussive alarm.

David Silverman

At one of Christianity’s cradles, mist Is thinning on the moors. Our early walk Is to the castle’s broken walls, but first We pass the church, a low grey place of rock.

And with the singing of the wind, a psalm Blends in with high birds calling. Words of praise

Have risen here since Bede, exalting Rome, Grew blind while writing histories. March clouds

Prohibit the sun. Chilled, we stand as still As gravestones. The castle’s tower leans, held Only by a new steel strut. Then voices tell Us worship’s over. Folk file out; some nod. A congregation numbering only five, Warmed by Calor gas, keeping God alive.

Jim C Wilson

I used to hear the milk float in the street, The clink of bottles going down on doorsteps

As dawn reduced the greyness in the sky. The diesel buses with their wheezy brakes And livery of clotted cream and brown Asthmatically rumbled past our gates Toward the roadways of the waking town, And even so, were almost never late. This was suburbia. Out in the country

Nothing mechanical stirred; the dawn came in

To clamorous birdsong; blackbirds, robins, Thrushes shouted for precedence in every tree, And from the radio, sixties music animated me.

The Beatles drowned the wren, and the kettle On the gas ring whistled the weekday in. G M Southgate

COMPETITION No 307

Returning to the house where I had earlier mopped the kitchen floor, I was struck by the smell – of cherry-flavoured lavatory-cleanser. Please write a poem called A Funny Smell Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie. co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 307’, by Thursday 30th May.

Taking a Walk

The Magna Carta yew patrick barkham

Five minutes from the madness of Junction 13 of the M25, where Britain, frankly, appeared irredeemably ruined – dirty, noisy, frantic, ugly – there was a small place that changed everything.

Along a suburban road, cherry plum blossom exploding from front gardens, turning sharp left, I bumped the car down a puddled and obscure dead-end track: Magna Carta Lane.

At the bottom was a collection of tatty barns. ‘This car park is small,’ said the least helpful of a blizzard of National Trust notices.

It wasn’t a beauty spot – just a rural farm – and suddenly Britain was beautiful again. The warm air and light breeze sang of spring. The small birds knew it, and they sang too, from all directions. A bumble-bee toured the bullace, bursting bridal white into the hedgerows.

It seemed miraculous that these hedgerows, wet, green meadows and peace could endure, so close to the M25 and its domineering current of contemporary life.

I set out on a public path into the green. As the sun threatened to break through the clouds, a steady stream of aircraft rising from Heathrow banked overhead, their pale undersides shining like languid whales turning belly up in the ocean.

A green woodpecker cackled as I joined a handsome avenue of grey poplars. At the avenue’s end, a stone bridge crossed a ditch onto Ankerwycke Island. There was a screen of holly, tall ashes and young yews and then a pretty glade, dotted with snowdrops.

In the centre stood the Ankerwycke Yew, a hummock of dark green about the size of a very small two-storey cottage. At first glance, it did not look particularly old, or special, but it is.

This tree is around 2,000 years old. It has been a holy tree and a meeting place for millennia. Just beyond it flowed the Thames, and the water meadows of Runnymede, where bad King John reluctantly signed Magna Carta and the

principle of all men being equal before the law – the kernel of British democracy – took root.

Although the Magna Carta memorials are on the river’s south side, this ancient tree on the north bank has a good claim for being where the King and his rebellious barons agreed this revolutionary document.

In 1215, the Thames was a braided river within a broad, wet valley; Ankerwycke Island was dry ground and its already-ancient yew a traditional meeting place. The island was also home to a priory, a religious realm where both sides would be safe in treacherous times.

As I regarded the yew, the sun broke through the wispy cloud and a flash of butter yellow – a male brimstone –entered the glade. It was the first butterfly I’d seen this year and it lifted my heart.

I ducked between the tree’s boughs, which touched the ground all around. Inside the tree was a dry, quiet ‘room’, about as crepuscular as if illuminated by candles. The tree was as peaceful as a

chapel; its gnarled multiple trunks an altar, and several admirers had stuffed offerings – flowers, notes, memorials – in the tree’s multicoloured wood.

By the time you read this, it may well not be possible to meet the Ankerwycke Yew as I did. The National Trust is installing a new viewing area, from where it can be admired but not touched. Ancient tree experts welcome this: soil compaction from worshippers’ feet can hasten the end of a very old tree.

We owe the Trust our thanks for preserving the tranquillity of this place. But something, I think, is lost if we cannot touch these ancient miracles that, despite everything, still exist a short stroll from the madness of modern life.

Park at Ankerwycke Farm (space for about five cars) at what3words: stored. votes.adjust. Take the public path south across two fields, turning left and then right onto the poplar avenue to Ankerwycke Island. Public footpaths galore for a circular walk

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Is my son really mine?

QI’ve been happily married for years, with a son of 14. The problem is that I remember my wife became friendly with another man about the time my son was conceived and I’m becoming convinced it’s his child.

Can I ask my wife for a DNA test? It might upset her too much. But how can I get these thoughts out of my mind?

AYou can’t ask your wife for a DNA test. You could become very interested in genealogy and ask your family all to be tested for fun.

This might shed some light on the situation, though I doubt it. In the meantime, remind yourself that boys often start becoming difficult at this age – especially around their parents. They’re trying to prepare themselves for the time they have to break away, and often they make it easier – for both sides – by becoming objectionable. It’s around this time of adolescence that many parents wonder if they haven’t reared a cuckoo in the nest. But then, a few years later, the cuckoo starts getting a lot nicer and more familiar, and you start spotting characteristics in them that remind you of yourself relating to your own parents.

Wait a few years. In the meantime, accept the thoughts as what they are –thoughts. Not, necessarily, reality.

What’s the bloody point?

QI’m 45, working all hours of the day in a boring job, and have had relationships with only dreadful men. My sole interest is in completing a PhD in my spare time. I have hardly any friends and I’m very unhappy. I don’t get on with my siblings. The counsellors I’ve seen are either hostile or

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

too cheery. How can I recapture the joy, passion and enthusiasm I had as a child?

Name and address supplied

AUnless you suddenly have a revelation, it’s unlikely you’ll ever recapture the ‘joy, passion and enthusiasm’ you had as a child.

Speaking personally, I feel you should count yourself lucky to have experienced those emotions in the past at all. They seem to have passed me by. Have you thought of getting a referral to a psychiatrist or even a psychologist rather than a counsellor? These are medically trained doctors, rather than any old person who’s got a piece of paper from an often brief counselling course. Many counsellors are, of course, wonderful, but I suspect you need to see someone a bit more heavyweight.

Dinner-party cheat

QI went out to dinner recently with some other elderly people and was given a delicious moussaka. I congratulated the hostess, who simpered politely – and I’ve since found that she had bought it ready-made from a local supermarket. I’ve always thought it was rather naff to give guests ready-prepared meals. What do you think? Briony, by email

AAfter a certain age, cooking can become extremely physically tiring. Shopping with a bad back is excruciating, arthritis makes chopping painful, and even lifting pans full of water can be taxing. There’s nothing wrong with serving up ready meals as long as there’s enough to drink, the atmosphere is fun and stimulating, and there’s plenty to eat. Potential mistakes include not heating them up enough, and they can get a bit samey. It’s worth adding your own vegetables to

give an individual twist – and I would never pretend I’d made the dish myself.

At our age, people should have the confidence to tell the truth. Pretending about anything – from facelifts to Botox, hair dye to wigs, tooth-whitening to cooking – is like cheating at exams. Unacceptable at any age. Even worse, horribly humiliating if you’re found out!

Favourite grandchild

Q

My elderly mother and I live on opposite sides of the country; I rarely see her. My daughter by my last marriage looks in on her a lot because she lives nearby.

My mother gives her money now and again – but the other grandchildren, by my current marriage, receive nothing. I’m worried that when she dies, she’ll leave everything to my first daughter –my mother’s hinted as much – but the relationship seems based on greed and proximity, not love. What can I do?

Eddie, Cornwall

A

You have absolutely no idea what this relationship is based on. But you know that it would be possible for the other grandchildren in the family to stay in touch with their grandmother by Zoom, Skype, email, letter, text and phone. They could even take the train and pay her a visit. We have so many ways to keep in contact these days that there’s really no excuse not to.

At the end of the day, it’s her money and her will. She’s entitled to leave everything to whomever she wants. Some things in life we have no control over.

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.