The Oldie magazine March 2023 Issue 423

24

Features

12 Olden Life: What was a crocodile? Eleanor Allen

12 Modern Life: What is manifestation?

Richard Godwin

23 Mary Killen’s Fashion Tips

65 Rant: Seat-hoggers

Liz Hodgkinson

66 Media Matters

Stephen Glover

89 Crossword

91 Bridge Andrew Robson

91 Competition

Tessa Castro

98 Ask Virginia Ironside

Books

54 Spare, by Prince Harry Hugo Vickers

57 Victory City, by Salman

Rushdie Nicholas Lezard

57 The English Actor: From Medieval to Modern, by Peter Ackroyd Robert Bathurst

59 Two Sisters, by Blake Morrison Tanya Gold

61 Confessions: Life Reexamined, by Edward Stourton Christopher Howse

63 Touching Cloth, by Rev Fergus Butler-Gallie

Rev Peter Mullen

Travel

Regulars

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Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA www.theoldie.co.uk

Arts

68 Film: Babylon Harry Mount

69 Theatre: Noises Off

William Cook

69 Radio Valerie Grove

70 Television Frances Wilson

71 Music Richard Osborne

72 Golden Oldies

Rachel Johnson

73 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits

75 Gardening David Wheeler

75 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld

76 Cookery Elisabeth Luard

76 Restaurants

James Pembroke

77 Drink Bill Knott

78 Sport Jim White

78 Motoring Alan Judd

80 Digital Life

Matthew Webster

80 Money Matters

Margaret Dibben

83 Bird of the Month: Great Crested Grebe John McEwen

84 Rajasthan’s Barefoot College

Heather Malcolm

86 On the Road: Jimmy

Tarbuck Louise Flind

87 Taking a Walk: along the Roding Patrick Barkham

Oldie walking tour p34

Oldie literary lunch p49

Editor Harry Mount

Sub-editor Penny Phillips

Art editor Jonathan Anstee

Supplements

editor Jane Mays

Editorial assistant Amelia Milne

Publisher James Pembroke

Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer

At large Richard Beatty

Our Old Master David Kowitz

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Front cover Jim Dale and Barbara Windsor in Carry On Again Doctor (1969). Pictorial Press / Alamy

Grumpy Paxo page 17

Gri Rhys Jones, made in Wales page 20 Cary Grant’s invincible suit page

The Old Un’s Notes

Much of the fun has disappeared from the book pages with the death in January of Fay Weldon at 91.

For journalists, she was a gift, being prolific, playful and madly quotable – for four decades.

The archetypal northLondon female novelist, with children underfoot – she said her sentences were short because she was constantly interrupted – she might open her door with ‘We have no coffee, or tea, or milk. So you’ll have to have wine [at 10am] or Cup-a-Soup.’

Sheer mischievousness impelled her to tell audiences she had not read her latest novel. ‘I wrote it, which is a different matter.’ If challenged for contradicting herself, she would reply, ‘But what I say is only a first draft.’

‘Did I write that?’ she’d often ask, with a tinkling laugh. Hearing one of her books read on Radio 4, she found herself thinking, ‘This is rather good.’

She marvelled that people ever took seriously her ever-changing aphorisms and overstatements.

‘I could make a case for anything,’ she’d say. ‘It’s my advertising background.’

Typically, she once fell into a coma and saw the pearly gates (‘orange and crimson – rather garish’). Latterly came psychic powers: she had advised a friend not to go on holiday ‘but she did, and the plane crashed’.

Got ahead in advertising: Fay

When she told this to a litfest audience in Cork, they laughed. ‘I protested, “But it’s a true story!” and they laughed even more.’

Her being fat made people kinder to her, she claimed. ‘A

literary award? Oh, let her have that – she’s fat.’

Every obit quoted the most famous slogan she worked on – ‘Go to work on an egg’ –while the Old Un’s favourite was sadly vetoed: ‘Vodka makes you drunka quicka.’

Most of our readers probably belong to the godparent generations –those who are godparents themselves, or who appoint a few per child.

While writing the piece on page 36, Valerie Grove found that godparents – once sponsors (Latin spondere – to promise), who agreed to encourage the child’s

Among this month’s contributors

Anne Glenconner (p16) was a lady-inwaiting to Princess Margaret. She wrote the bestseller Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown and Whatever Next?

Jeremy Paxman (p17) joined the BBC in 1972. He presented Newsnight for 25 years until 2014. He has presented University Challenge (1994-2023) and Paxman: Putting Up with Parkinson’s (2022).

Griff Rhys Jones (p20) starred in Not the Nine O’Clock News and Alas Smith and Jones with Mel Smith. His BBC series A Pembrokeshire Farm covered the renovation of his holiday home.

Hugo Vickers (p13 and p54) is our leading royal biographer. He has written biographies of the Queen Mother, the Duchess of Windsor, Queen Mary and Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece.

spiritual growth – are now a dwindling breed.

But as we’re all aware, they still flourish in royal circles and indeed proliferate among the Tatler classes (publisher Sir Nicholas Coleridge gave his four children four gods apiece, and Independent editor Geordie Greig bestowed six, including David Hockney and other artists, on each of his offspring).

Among celebs, Dame Joan Collins is a godmother 13 times. Sir Elton John is godfather to Sean Lennon, two of the Beckham boys and Elizabeth Hurley’s son, Damian. Elton gave his son Elijah to the care of Lady Gaga, knowing how kind pop stars can be. ‘We’re all bonkers in this business,’ Elton said, ‘but we’re human beings at the same time.’

Robert Adam (1728-92) is one of our greatest architects, responsible for sublime houses from Syon House to Kedleston Hall.

But no one has studied his lovely bridges – until now. New Yorker Benjamin Riley has just published The Bridges of Robert Adam: A Fanciful and Picturesque Tour. Riley, managing editor of the New Criterion, the New York arts magazine, pays fine tribute to Adam’s 12 bridges.

Among the best are at Culzean Castle, Audley End, Osterley Park, Pulteney Bridge in Bath and the

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charming Sham Bridge at Kenwood, Hampstead Heath.

as any reader of Dr Johnson will be aware.’

Traffic delays in King’s Lynn as Jaguar blocks the South Gate

Lynn News

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In the introduction, Simon Heffer, writer and journalist, salutes Riley: ‘He has made an academic study of Robert Adam’s bridges for the best possible reason: that nobody else, in the vast literature about this great architect, has.

‘With his brothers, John and James, Adam led the classical revival in Britain in the second half of the 18th century and did so across Britain at a time when attitudes to the cultural capabilities of the Scots (the Adams were from Fife and Robert was educated in Edinburgh) were prejudiced, to say the least –

The Old Un has grown depressingly familiar with his doctor’s stethoscope in recent years.

But he was strangely cheered up by Stethoscope: The Making of a Medical Icon, a new book by Anna Harris and Tom Rice.

The stethoscope – and its ability to ‘see’ inside the body, particularly the heart and lungs – was invented in 1816 in Paris by a French doctor, René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec (1781–1826).

According to the legend, Laënnec spotted some children playing with a log in

the courtyard of the Louvre. At one end of the log, the children were pressing their ears to the wood while, at the other, their playmates were knocking and scratching the timber.

Hey presto! Laënnec went home and rolled a stack of paper into a cylinder and pressed it to a young patient’s heart. He found he could hear her heartbeat clearly. And so the stethoscope was born.

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Geoffrey Fletcher (19232004), the great chronicler of changing London in the 1960s and 1970s.

Fletcher never became a

The high road to Scotland: Robert Adam’s bridge at Dalkeith Palace, Midlothian

TV or radio star, but his best-known book, The London Nobody Knows, was turned into a charming film in which James Mason plays Fletcher the flâneur.

Although he was born in Bolton, Fletcher’s work for the Daily Telegraph and in many slim volumes is dominated by the capital.

Exquisitely illustrated by his own hand (he was a graduate of the Slade), his writing focuses obsessively on vignettes of overlooked nooks and crannies.

His gimlet eye turns to back alleys, the places Dickens knew, bowed old shops, the Inns of Court, pubs, churches, music halls, barber shops, junk markets and odd characters from the down-and-outs and meths men to street entertainers.

He exposed the villainous plots of city planners, but his interests were closer to those of his contemporary urban observer Iain Nairn than to Betjeman’s. Fletcher always tilted in favour of the odd and obscure, the neglected and derelict: streetlamps fuelled by sewer gas, fading caffs and dining rooms; even public lavatories where fish once

‘Just go, Colin. I’ll only end up hurting you’

swam in water tanks overseen by attendants.

For those who love London, his books remain wonderfully fresh, and one pleasant surprise is how many of the places he surveyed are still recognisable.

Buy the books secondhand for a few quid each, keep them handy in your pocket for moments when you have a little time to spare in the great city, and join his small but passionate band of followers.

Men about town: Geoffrey Fletcher (1923-2004), left, at an exhibition of his art

Why are the British so obsessed with pets?

That’s the question answered by Jane Hamlett and Julie-Marie Strange in their new book, Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life

The authors also go into the great division in British life: between dog-lovers and dog-haters.

In 1937, the Daily Mail received an ‘avalanche’ of letters after running a letter from a reader who asked, ‘What is happening to the sanity of our race that dog worship is tolerated and encouraged to reach absurd lengths?’

The majority of the mass of letters received were pro-dog, expressing

amazement at the correspondent’s failure to understand human-dog companionship.

‘Money could not buy my dog any more than it could buy my son,’ wrote one enraged reader. The Mail responded to the correspondence by covering the story of a coroner’s court the previous week on an old man who ‘killed himself and his mongrel pet because of his dread at parting with it’.

The journalist F G PrinceWhite declared a pet ‘a very precious thing’ and often the ‘sole assurance of goodness in life’.

Hear, hear, says the Old Un. And ‘Woof woof,’ barks the Old Un’s canine companion.

‘It’s from IKEA’s Despot range’

There is nothing like my dames

Britain’s great theatrical dames, including Judi Dench, are putting on a show at the Palladium for my 75th birthday

With the wonderful Dame Judi Dench, at the beginning of March, I am hosting a charity matinée at the London Palladium.

It’s to mark my 75th birthday and, more importantly, to raise £ 75,000 for Great Ormond Street Hospital, where my youngest grandson was successfully treated for cancer when he was just a baby.

The show is going to be a celebration of some of my favourite people: Britain’s great theatrical dames.

The first actor to be knighted was Sir Henry Irving in 1897.

The first actress to be made a dame was Irving’s stage partner, Ellen Terry, in 1925.

Since then, just 50 actresses have become dames (many more actors have been made knights). Happily, most of the living dames will be joining Judi and me at the Palladium, doing turns and chatting about the dames they have known and admired.

The first theatrical dame I encountered was Dame Sybil Thorndike (1882-1976), Bernard Shaw’s original Saint Joan. When I was a little boy in the 1950s, living with my parents in Lower Sloane Street in Chelsea, Dame Sibyl lived nearby and we used to meet her waiting at the bus stop. She was a keen Christian Socialist and a natural enthusiast.

‘Oh Lewis,’ she said to her husband, Lewis Casson, when they were both in their eighties, ‘if only we could be the first actors to play on the moon!’

At 90, Dame Sibyl appeared in the theatre for the last time in a play called The Old Lady. At the final run-through,

she surprised the play’s young director by coming onto the stage haltingly, bent forward, miming pushing something rather erratically with her right hand.

From the back of the stalls, the young director called out, ‘Excuse me, Dame Sybil, but can I ask what you’re doing?’

‘I’m doing what it says in the script, dear,’ replied the old actress.

‘And what does it say in the script, Dame Sibyl?’ enquired the young man.

‘It says the Old Lady comes on and hoovers at the back.’

‘Hovers, Dame Sibyl,’ cried the young director, ‘hovers!’

Most of my heroes come from a bygone age. On my desk, I keep a framed, black-and-white photograph of an elegantlooking middle-aged man, sporting a white tie and a silk top hat.

‘Is that your dad?’ people ask.

‘No,’ I tell them, ‘it’s Jack Buchanan.’

Then, invariably, they say, ‘Who’s Jack Buchanan?’

Yes, it’s come to this. Nobody’s heard of Jack Buchanan! Perhaps it’s understandable. He was born in 1891 and died in 1957. But, as a singer, dancer, comedian and actor, he was once very famous – and on both sides of the Atlantic, too.

In 1928, John Logie Baird had him perform in the first-ever outside television broadcast. In 1953, he starred with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in Vincent Minelli’s Hollywood classic The Band Wagon. (Catch it if you can: Jack gives Fred a run for his money, I promise you.)

When I was young, I wanted to be Jack Buchanan. He was the epitome of the debonair English gentleman (though he was Scottish), described by the Times as ‘the last of the knuts’.

You probably don’t know what a knut is, either! It is Edwardian slang for a fashionable or showy young man.

Buchanan was a producer and theatre-owner as well as a performer and noted for his generosity towards others in the entertainment industry down on their luck.

Whenever he was in a show on Grand National day, he would cancel the performance and charter a train to take the entire cast and crew to Aintree for the race, providing food and drink for all, plus a fiver each for a flutter. That’s what I call style.

Though Edwardian in spirit, I am lucky enough to be kept in touch with the ‘now’ generation, the stars of Love Island, The Masked Singer and the rest, by appearing twice a week on ITV’s daytime magazine programme This Morning.

I love the show because it keeps me abreast of popular culture – and popular science. This week, I discovered that men who fancy big, fast and flashy cars really are compensating for intimate insufficiency. It’s not an urban myth. It’s an actual fact.

According to research carried out by Professor Daniel Richardson of University College London’s Psychology Department, there is substance to what he calls ‘the cultural phenomenon of genital inadequacy’.

Participants in the UCL study were shown images of luxury items such as champagne, a Rolex watch and a highend sports car and asked to assess how much they wanted each of them. Those identifying as ‘under-endowed’ opted for the sports car by a considerable margin.

I gave up drinking years ago. I no longer wear a watch. And I sold my car (it was quite a small one, by the way, and electric) last March. I don’t plan to buy another one.

Make of that what you will. I am about to turn 75, after all.

John Singer Sargent’s Lady Macbeth (Dame Ellen Terry)

Please, Lord, give me a sign!

Why do oldies indicate – and young idiots in Range Rovers fail to?

matthew norman

Identifying the precise moment when the country’s regression towards developing-world status started is beyond me – and possibly beyond those far cleverer than me (not, admittedly, the highest of bars).

But I have the nagging sense that this downward trajectory, which barely perceptibly began aeons before Brexit and has accelerated into a corkscrew spin, started when motorists came to regard the deployment of indicators as beneath their dignity.

The theory will lack strong support from both the relatively sane and left-leaning historians. The latter would doubtless look elsewhere for the genesis of our national collapse. To that time some decades ago, for example, when the idea that the desires of shareholders morally outranks the needs of workers completed its journey from the crazier outreaches of the far-right think tank to the epicentre of mainstream orthodoxy.

Who can say which of us is closer to the truth? But this I state with confidence: the precipitous decline in vehicular indication is a metaphor for that of the United Kingdom itself.

It is also one of those affronts that should concern the proctologist. It is a searing, shooting, debilitating pain up the rear – and not on one level, missus, but two.

For cyclists, God spare their bones, there is a trivial third level. A friend reports very nearly being propelled into the next life on a London street recently by a Range Rover (what else?) whose driver deemed warning of an imminent left turn unnecessary.

I do not propose to get bogged down here and now by the matter of outsize cars in urban environments. That can wait. Suffice it today to observe this. If an ailing motor-manufacturing industry wants to revive itself, it should fiercely lobby what passes for the

government for (a) the mandatory inclusion of sidewinder missiles in all correctly sized cars; and (b) legislation guaranteeing impunity to anyone who uses such weaponry to remove a 4x4 from this planet.

For god-fearing motorists whose lives are not endangered by non-indication, however, those two levels are these. First, the requisite arrogance and/or indolence is massively irritating. And secondly, awareness of the golf-clubbore prissiness required to be irritated by it induces pangs of self-disgust barely less acute than the loathing for those who cannot summon the energy to depress a plastic lever by a couple of inches.

Before we plough any deeper into this treacly abyss, a word of reassurance. There won’t be more than a very few of you reading these words (on reflection, that could be almost the entire audience) who are regularly guilty of this offence.

It is at least partly a generational thing. My mother, for example, reports never once having failed to indicate in a 63-year career at the wheel. On the other hand, in that so-called rival publication The Youngie, there may this month be an article railing at the self-righteous pedantry of those who take the trouble.

But the under-50s are notorious dunces, and a smidgeon of their idiocy resides in their wilful refusal to give fellow travellers on His Majesty’s highways a clue about their intentions.

So when did it begin, this mass middle-fingered salute to the laws and niceties of road travel? In the absence of

reliable research, we are marooned in the dark once again.

But it is at least 15 years since I first noticed a police car turning a corner without indication.

With hindsight, perhaps I overreacted. Approaching the car on foot from a north-westerly direction when it had the decency to obey a red light, tapping on the window and making the ‘wind it down’ hand-circling gesture was a misjudgement. The teen at the wheel seemed little more amused to hear ‘Excuse me, sir, but are you aware that you just breached the Highway Code?’ than the ensuing warning about his future behaviour.

Whether or not this met the formal criteria for wasting police time, as he brusquely posited, any ambition to perform a citizen’s arrest was abandoned.

In the intervening years, what was then a rarity has become the norm in towns and cities, though not in rural communities. On a visit to my beloved technical wife a fortnight ago (we do not cohabit; the relationship works best with a cordon sanitaire of six counties between us), a motorist screamed at her for an ultra-rare indicating oversight.

In Dorset, and elsewhere, they cleave doughtily to the old ways.

In London, on the other hand, it is now indication and not its absence that has come to seem peculiar. In an age when Chancellors regard paying capital gains tax as beneath their dignity, it seems almost natural that so many feel freed from the compulsion to obey less obviously important rules.

When a government is pathologically incapable of communicating the direction it wants to take, can you really blame countless millions of motorists (not all of them peering smugly down from the seats of urban Range Rovers in the belief that indication is for the little cars) mirroring that?

what was a crocodile?

A line of schoolchildren walking in pairs, shepherded by a couple of teachers front and aft, was once a familiar sight.

Temporarily released from desks to wend their way to a swimming baths, church or educational venue, they’d be chatting along like a flock of chaffinches. And the public, even when shunted by the line off the pavement into the gutter, would adopt an expression of benign tolerance.

We used to call this set-up a crocodile.

I presume the strange nickname came about because of the column’s wavy, sideto-side forward motion, combined with the head-up, shoulders-back posture usually adopted by the leading pair.

The term was only ever used in Britain:

‘Crocodile: a girls’ school walking two and two in a long file, 1870’. (Shorter Oxford Dictionary)

Later, the term was extended to lines of adults and vehicles, and the crocodile became a popular means of moving primary school children around.

‘You are representing your school!’ exhorted our senior mistress, back in the

early 1960s, running her beady eye over the length of our skirts and angle of our hats and ties, before releasing us into the glaring spotlight of the public stage.

‘Remember to comport yourselves with dignity!’

Things hadn’t changed much since Tirzah Garwood made her delightful woodcut called Crocodile (pictured), back in 1929. She captured the deep-rooted yet lightly flaunted pride in school and uniform, combined with a gleeful sort of insouciance; the awareness that, despite the ‘beetle-crushers’ on their feet and identical felt hats rammed on their heads, the girls nevertheless had little ways and means of asserting individuality.

From the end of the 19th century, showmen such as George Edwardes (Gaiety Girls) and John Tiller (Tiller Girls) had recognised the captivating charm radiated by crocodiles of ‘pert’ – but respectable – schoolgirls, ‘full of girlish glee’. They encouraged their chorus girls to attract publicity by emulating them in public.

In Paris in the 1930s, Miss Bluebell ruled that her Bluebell Girls, chosen for

their height and elegance, must always walk to the Folies Bergère in English-schoolgirl crocodile formation. Impeccably dressed in hat, gloves and unladdered stockings, they must convey the impression that, should they get run over, their underwear would bear inspection. Furthermore, they must never, ever be seen snacking in the street. Needless to say, Parisian necks craned, horns honked, brakes squealed…

Nowadays, schoolchildren tend to be bussed between venues and are only occasionally seen walking in a crocodile. We might catch sight of a line of primaryschool children wearing high-vis vests, but this is referred to as a ‘walking bus’.

My grandchildren talk of sometimes walking with a ‘talk partner’. Chaffinchlike chatter still carries on, but the word ‘crocodile’ draws a blank.

And when even a primary-school teacher on Mumsnet claims never to have heard of the crocodile, I guess the term may now quietly be heading towards extinction.

A pity, because it was colourful and fun.

Eleanor Allen

what is manifestation?

Manifestation is when you want something so much that you actually make it happen. Say, you want to be 20 per cent richer. Or to achieve a firmer bum.

‘Whatever you believe you can have, YOU CAN HAVE!’ insists the so-called Queen of Manifesting, Kelly Walker, who has manifested her way to a $20,000-a-month career as a life coach.

‘Trust the universe!’ counsels Roxie Nafousi, 27, the beautiful, successful, well-connected, independently wealthy author of Manifest: 7 Steps to Living Your Best Life. According to the strange circular logic of manifestation, she manifested her own bestselling status.

Indeed, so manifest are the powers of manifestation – there are 27 billion videos with the #manifestation hashtag on TikTok – it may seem surprising that no one manifested this miraculous discovery before.

But, as with so many phenomena in our amnesiac age, manifesting has been around for years. It was the eponymous disclosure of Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 book, The Secret, which sold 30 million copies. ‘If you want abundance, if you want prosperity, then focus on abundance. Focus on prosperity,’ Byrne told her readers. ‘Food cannot cause you to put on weight, unless you think it can.’ Byrne was drawing on the ideas of 19th-century American mesmerist Phineas Quimby, who claimed to have cured his own tuberculosis by thinking happy thoughts.

Now, try as I might, I cannot seem to manifest the data from any double-blind randomised control trials to prove that you can indeed cure disease in this manner. But psychologists will concede that there is a certain logic behind some of the strategies recommended by manifestation gurus. Precommitment, for example.

Say, you want to lose weight. I mean, literally, say it: to yourself, your family and all your Facebook friends. A range of

reputable studies have shown that you are indeed more likely to lose weight if you do this – since you are making your future self more accountable. Likewise, if you want to learn Spanish, it’s a good idea to sign up to Spanish lessons, set your phone to Spanish, book a trip to Spain and so on.

But it doesn’t take a genius to work out why, in times of uncertainty and disillusion, there might be a ready market for the idea that all you need to turn your miserable life around is positive thinking (and to sign up for this $10,000 online course).

I would recommend Barbara Ehrenreich’s Smile or Die (2010), written while the author was recovering from cancer, as a once-and-for-all antidote. ‘The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all,’ Ehrenreich writes. ‘Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?’

Richard Godwin

Tirzah Garwood’s Crocodile (1929)

Duchess of Kent at 90

The Duchess of Kent will be 90 on 22nd February.

Throughout much of 2021, I conducted a number of Zooms with the Duke of Kent, which became the book of conversations, A Royal Life

The question I was frequently asked was ‘How and where is the Duchess?’

She retains a large number of fans, who remember her charismatic appearances at Wimbledon (in 1993 famously consoling the Czech-born player, Jana Novotná, when she lost), her style and her beauty.

They recall how, for many decades, she was a popular member of the Royal Family, carrying out an enormous number of engagements, not only in Britain but as far afield as Iran, Uganda, the Gambia, Barbados, Tonga and Japan.

The answer is that she is very much there at Wren House, the Duke’s home in the grounds of Kensington Palace.

He takes her once a week to the hairdresser’s and, at the end of May last year, she came out to attend a Future Talent concert at Lancaster House, not having attended such an event for about three years.

In 2013, she acted swiftly when the Duke had a mild stroke, insisting on calling an ambulance immediately, and thus he made a full recovery.

The Duke spoke of her often and, one day, during a Zoom discussion, she made a surprise appearance. There was a click and a door opened. She drifted silently behind him as he spoke, and then there was another click as she left.

Then, not long afterwards, he said, ‘Katharine says there can’t be a book about me without her being in it.’

I was invited to come and see her for a chat. I was able to show her some digitalised cine films the Duke had found. One scene showed him walking to a new Jaguar at Coppins, formerly the Buckinghamshire home of the Kents.

She said, ‘That’s my husband. That’s the way he walks. He walked like that then and he walks like that now.’

There were scenes of croquet matches, games of tennis (Princess Marina playing in a tweed skirt), water-skiing in Majorca, picnics and lots of dogs. She gave me the line with which to end the book. I was keen to stress the Duke’s lifelong support for the Queen:

‘Well, that’s absolutely perfect. Exactly what he does,’ she said.

She was born Katharine Worsley in Yorkshire, and Yorkshire remains close to her heart. She adored her father, Sir William Worsley, Lord Lieutenant of the North Riding and a keen cricketer. When Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, she was pleased because he represents a Yorkshire constituency (Richmond).

Having married the Duke in 1961, she soon became one of the most popular members of the Royal Family, the subject of many stunning photographic portraits by Cecil Beaton, Norman Parkinson and Mario Testino, painted by Annigoni, and a stylish, original dresser.

She considered it a great privilege to have been able to visit so many countries as part of her royal duties, to meet so many interesting people in all kinds of walks of life, to talk to them and to hear about their lives.

Above all, they loved their year in Hong Kong, when the Duke was stationed there. And then there is music, a strong interest shared by Duke and

Duchess alike. Lady Helen Taylor said her mother was a pianist of almost concert standard.

There came a point when the Duchess asked the Queen if she could step aside from her royal duties, as Chancellor of Leeds University, conducting service appointments and involvement with a great number of charities. Permission was readily given.

She set off to Hull, where she found her late-life métier, giving singing lessons once a week at Wansbeck Primary School. Her granddaughters Marina and Amelia were at King’s College School, Cambridge. In 2003 the headmaster, Nick Robinson, invited her to open a new library and classroom.

She said she no longer did that kind of thing, but he suggested she come more informally.

So she did – and they had a long discussion about the lack of musical facilities in Hull, and how aware she was that when she stopped teaching there, she would not be replaced. From this sprang the charity Future Talent, of which she is still a Trustee.

They set it up and it gives music support and master classes, runs ensemble days and workshops, and contributes to the cost of instruments and to underprivileged children between the ages of 6 and 18. From small beginnings, they now support 100 musical children – roughly 50 in the north and 50 in the south.

‘Apart from the King, she is the only senior member of the Royal Family to have set up her own charity,’ said Nick Robinson. ‘Prince Philip had his Award Scheme, of course.’

It seems to me that the perfect 90th-birthday present for her would be a donation to futuretalent.org; a gift in her name to the children whose lives will be for ever changed by music.

After decades of royal service, notably at Wimbledon, the Duchess became a singing teacher and set up a music charity. By Hugo Vickers

Hugo Vickers wrote A Royal Life with the Duke of Kent

Kent, 90 not out: the Duchess

Jim Dale, 87, was in his first Carry On film 60 years ago. After acting for 70 years, he’s still performing, he tells York Membery

Carry on working

The son of a Northamptonshire iron-foundry moulder, Dale caught the showbiz bug after seeing actor Lupino Lane in the musical Me and My Girl in London as a child after the war.

‘I thought this would be a wonderful way to go through life, making people laugh,’ says Dale from his home in New York state.

He started doing dancing lessons after school, ‘learning ballet, tap dance and ballroom dancing’. Seventy years ago, at 17, he toured in variety as a comedian and dancer with other up-and-coming stand-ups, including Barry Took.

‘I played every major and minor theatre in the British Isles from the Finsbury Park Empire to Tonypandy in Wales,’ he recalls.

Who can forget the scene in Carry On Again Doctor (1969), when Jim Dale’s saucily named character Dr Nookey crashes through a window on a hospital trolley after taking a boneshaking descent down a flight of stairs?

It was the actor, comedian and singer’s finest Carry On moment. But he actually made his Carry On debut six

years earlier, in Carry On Cabby (1963).

To mark the 60th anniversary of his Carry On debut, Dale, 87, the last surviving big-name Carry On star, has taken a trip down memory lane with The Oldie – in his first British print interview for more than a decade – to discuss his extraordinary career. It takes in hit records, Broadway shows and a string of Harry Potter audiobooks, as well as the Carry On films.

After National Service – ‘Which set back my career by two years’ – he got a gig as a warm-up man, telling jokes, singing songs and playing guitar on the BBC’s rock’n’roll TV show Six-Five Special George Martin, later the Beatles’ producer, happened to be watching. He contacted Dale and asked him, ‘Do you want to be my first pop singer?’

He went on to score hits with songs such as Be My Girl, which got to number 2 in the charts in 1957, and found himself a pop heart-throb.

‘I’d go on stage and there would be all these screaming girls in the audience, and I’d think, “Where were you a year ago, when I was working as a stand-up comic?” ’ he laughs.

Lucky Jim: Dr Jimmy Nookey (Jim Dale) and Maud Boggins (Barbara Windsor) in Carry On Again Doctor (1969)

Dale then returned to his comedy roots, landing a small role in Raising the Wind (1961), opposite Kenneth Williams.

‘He screamed out his lines and I took the mickey, screaming back mine,’ remembers Dale. ‘I thought he was furious, but he later persuaded the Carry On team to hire me because he thought I’d be a good fit.’

After playing an expectant father in Carry On Cabby, Dale became a Carry On regular. From Carry on Spying (1964) onwards, he had bigger roles. Each film was shot in around eight weeks.

‘I was delighted just to be a part of the Carry On team and it was a joy to work with such funny people,’ Dale says. ‘They were also very giving. They didn’t try to hog the spotlight. You knew that at some point during a Carry On film the camera would be on you alone.’

After a day’s shooting at Pinewood, he would make his exit ‘as fast as I could’ and head back to London to see his wife, Patricia, and four children before they went to bed.

‘The only person I really became friendly with was Kenneth [Williams], who came round to my house occasionally,’ he says.

Much as he enjoyed making the films, the pay was no great shakes, admits Dale.

‘As Kenneth once said to the producer, “You can treat us like royalty and pay us nothing and we don’t mind, or can you treat us like shit and pay us a lot of money and we don’t mind, but you can’t pay us no money and treat us like shit!”’

Moreover, Dale was sometimes left battered and bruised after doing stunts. ‘I injured my arm going down that trolley [in Carry On Again Doctor],’ he recalls. ‘My elbow kept bumping onto the metal surface and it created some sort of elbow dysfunction – I had to have an operation that evening.’

While doing the Carry On films, Dale also co-wrote the theme song Georgy Girl for the 1966 film of the same name. It was a top-three hit on both sides of the Atlantic for the Seekers, selling 11 million worldwide.

After making eight Carry On films (though he later appeared in a ninth, the 1992 revival Carry On Columbus), he turned down the chance to appear in Carry On Up the Jungle (1970) after Laurence Olivier had invited him to join the National Theatre Company, then based at London’s Old Vic.

‘You just do not turn down an invitation from the world’s greatest actor,’ says Dale.

While at the National Theatre, he

starred in The Taming of the Shrew and Scapino, which both transferred to New York.

‘When we took Scapino to America we really blew it off the stage,’ he says.

The following year, he appeared in another National production in the States and, while there, landed a role in the Disney movie Pete’s Dragon (1977).

Back in Britain, he found work hard to come by. ‘There were no plays being offered to me and I had four children in private school and needed to make some money.

‘So when I got a job offer in America, I went back, and one job followed another until, by the mid-seventies, I was pretty much living there,’ says Dale.

His transatlantic work commitments put an unbearable strain on his family life. ‘Marriages can’t exist like that –marriages are togetherness, not only you and your wife, but you and your

Left: in Pete’s Dragon (1977)

children,’ he observes. ‘That’s what broke up my marriage.’

In 1980, he won a Tony for his starring role in Barnum, which made him ‘the toast of Broadway’, according to the New York Times.

He’s since narrated all seven of the Potter audiobooks for the American market – doing 134 voices for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in 2003 and 146 voices for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 2007 –earning himself two Grammy awards.

So how do you go about creating so many voices? ‘As a stand-up comic in British music hall, I’d travelled all over Britain – so probably unconsciously picked up all these accents and just dug them out of my memory,’ says Dale, who has since found love again with artgallery-owner Julie Schafler, whom he married in 1981. His Potter audiobooks have now exceeded one billion hours’ worth of listening.

In 2014, he put on a one-man show, Just Jim Dale, which he took to Broadway and London’s West End. The entertainer is still tap dancing and performing his one-man show in America.

He puts his longevity and good health down to ‘laughing a dozen times a day’ and has no plans to retire.

‘I intend to hang around as long as I can,’ he says. ‘Just let me get the gag line out before I kick the bucket on stage – I don’t want to go halfway through a joke!

Harry Potter’s mouthpiece: Dale voiced all seven audiobooks

Reasons to be cheerful

By Lady Glenconner

1. The luxury of time – to do what one wants for a change

When I was married to Colin [Lord Glenconner, 1926-2010], I was always on the go. Now I can plan my day and do what I want.

2. It’s much better being old than being young

I was shy when I was young. Being married to Colin, I wasn’t noticed. He was so flamboyant. I followed in his wake – and I followed in Princess Margaret’s wake, as her lady-in-waiting for 34 years.

Working for her, I met lots of people and now I’m not intimidated by anyone. Other people might be intimidated by me.

3. My lovely children are wonderful to me

My girls play cards at home in the evening with me and take me out. Darling Christopher [her surviving son] is also a joy to me.

4. Success with my books

I became an author at 87 and sold over half a million copies of Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown. It was published in 14 languages. It’s selling very well in America and I’m going on tour to New York soon to promote my new book, Whatever Next I’ve never had such a good time.

5. The joy of a hot bath

And an electric blanket. I’m early to bed. I like to watch something on telly – the occasional thriller. I love Happy Valley.

I do watch programmes on the Royal Family – quite often I’m in them. The Crown drove me mad with fury. It began well – the Duke of Windsor watching the Coronation in France was excellent.

I saw Helena Bonham-Carter – she came to tea – about acting Princess Margaret: how she spoke and walked. I said I never saw her run.

After seeing Helena in The Crown, I was very disappointed with the portrayal and told her, ‘It was rather awful, wasn’t it?’ She said she had no choice other than to do what she was told.

They couldn’t afford to film The

Crown at Glen [the Glenconners’ ancestral home]. When they filmed Princess Margaret first meeting Roddy Llewellyn, we were sitting by a swimming pool at what looked like a ghastly country club. They had me pimping for her, with us both in bikinis – Princess Margaret never wore a bikini. So cheap.

They should put a disclaimer at the beginning of The Crown, saying it isn’t true.

I don’t want to talk about Meghan and Harry. But I’ve been asked about Princess Margaret as a spare. She reacted wonderfully, even though she wasn’t even given a house of her own. The only thing she complained about was that she wasn’t educated as well as the Queen, even though she was very clever and well read. She was completely loyal to her sister – I never heard her once say anything against her.

6. Photograph books

I’ve got time to look at my photograph books, read and reread favourite books and do crossword puzzles.

I spend an hour every day answering letters from people who have read my books. I’m a gay icon in America. The Prince’s Trust told me, when I did a talk for them, that a gay community in Milwaukee has sponsored me. Gentlemen, thank you.

7. Chocolate

When I was young, I always had to think of my weight. Now I need my face to be plumped up a bit to avoid wrinkles. I love milk chocolate with nuts and raisins.

8. The price of oil

I was brought up in the war, when everything was scarce. We were always cold. We had no heating. Most people nowadays have never lived through a war. It’s a very good lesson in life.

I wish people were more stoic. I’ve hardly had my heating on at all this winter, though I do wear a puffer jacket.

When you look at what they’re suffering in Ukraine, the least we can do is use less oil. And send them more tanks. In the war, we used to collect money for a tank or guns, and my sister and I made gloves for the sailors on the minesweepers.

I adored my mother, but she was tough. She spoke her mind. She wasn’t too sympathetic. Sympathy can undermine one in lots of ways.

She’d say, ‘Come on, Anne. Buck up.’ There can be too much sympathy when really what you need is more stiff upper lip – it enables you to cope better.

That attitude has paid off in my life, what with my having lost two children, with a third one very badly disabled. And a very difficult life with my husband.

9. Eating with friends

I do go to dinner with the King and the Queen Consort at Sandringham. It’s a great treat. They send a car as I hate driving in the dark.

Usually, I prefer lunch to dinner. I don’t normally eat in the evening at all. It means I don’t get indigestion. I drink exactly what I want and as much as I want. Vodka and tonic is my tipple.

I’ve never smoked. I haven’t been to the doctor for three years.

My glass is full ...

… or gloomy

... and mine’s completely empty

By Jeremy Paxman

10. I do what I want to do

I have grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. I adore seeing them and if I want a rest from them, I pretend to be more infirm than I am.

It’s the first time I’ve been able to think about myself. Princess Margaret and Colin and the children required looking after. I was really fortunate to have staff, but now I have just a daily who comes twice a week, which is perfect.

11. Travelling in comfort

A wonderful Turkish friend with a yacht sends his jet to pick us up. When we arrive in Turkey, his helicopter takes us to his yacht.

I told him I can’t now go down ladders into the sea, being bashed around by the waves. So he arranged a hoist – the most wonderful wooden platform that goes up and down into the sea.

I’ve given up sailing on my own after a nasty accident. I learnt when I was five and stopped when I was 80. So I had a very good innings. Now other people take me out at Burnham Overy.

12. Younger friends

A lot of my friends have died. The thing about old age is trying to make younger friends.

13. Driving

I still drive up to Scotland. It can take eight hours to get to Glen. My children have told me to stop halfway at Scotch Corner to eat, and sometimes I stay overnight at a hotel to break the journey.

Driving was the only way I could get away from Colin and I always switched off my mobile phone. When Colin was gathered, it was a great relief.

I now think of the happy memories. The difficult ones fade into the past. It’s so much nicer.

In old age, I am very happy. I’ve been through the fiery furnace and somehow come out the other side.

Anne Glenconner’s Whatever Next: Lessons from an Unexpected Life is out now

It is perpetually damp in my part of the forest.

I can see no reason to join in the idiotic outbreaks of goodwill about 2023, since more or less the only certainty is that my Parkinson’s is not going to get any better.

I have not bothered to keep a tally of all the Pollyannas who’ve repeatedly chanted that Parkinson’s disease is not fatal. They seem unaware that while this disease may not kill you, it has the power to make you wish you were already dead.

1. I gave up making New Year resolutions the year I resolved to ‘swear less’. Less than what? I hope instead that, this year, fewer people resolve to become Prime Minister in the trivial and vainglorious 2023.

Ever since David Cameron wormed

2. It will take most of 2023 to get over the shutdown ordered to fight the COVID pandemic.

Unsurprisingly, the problem is bad in the public sector: by the end of 2022, in some government departments fewer than half of the staff had returned to the office. I do not expect to have my new driving licence issued in this calendar year.

3. In 2023, I also do not expect to break my own record for the number of salmon caught in a year.

Something is going on at sea –perhaps it’s as simple and complicated as a general rise in water temperatures – which means these fabled fish are not returning to their natal rivers in this country in the numbers we once knew.

4. I have so far ignored all requests

The original Iron Lady

Strongwoman Joan Rhodes tore up telephone books and could lift two men at a time. By her friend and biographer, Triona Holden

What does Gyles Brandreth have in common with Elvis Presley and Marlene Dietrich?

No, it’s not that they’re all iconic sex gods. They all had a huge crush on the same beauty, namely the late, great Joan Rhodes (1921-2010), known as the Strongest Woman in the World.

In the October edition of The Oldie, Gyles revealed that Joan was a boyhood pin-up of his. And who can blame him?

If you are a fan of music hall in the second half of the last century, you might have seen Joan and her remarkable feats of strength. They involved tearing bulky old telephone books in half or into quarters, bending steel bars in her teeth and picking up two adult men at a time.

Add this staggering strength to her movie-star good looks – think Marilyn Monroe – and audiences were mesmerised. Joan wore glamorous, sequinned evening gowns, showing off her 22-inch waist, and teeteringly high stilettos to highlight her shapely long legs.

But Joan was so much more than the Mighty Mannequin, as she called herself. Hers is a true story of grit, guts and gutters.

She was born into abject poverty in London in 1921. When she was three, her warring parents went their separate ways, leaving Joan and her three siblings, including a new baby, in their grotty Catford terrace house. Worried neighbours raised the alarm. The police rescued them and Joan ended up in a workhouse hospital.

She was reluctantly taken in by an aunt who had a pub in Smithfield Market. But she was so unhappy she ran away on her 14th birthday, to the unforgiving streets of 1930s London. She had eightpence in her pocket.

Starving, sleeping rough and desperate, she discovered a hidden talent – a natural super-strength. Joan allied herself to a

street performer, a strongman called Big Jock. At first she was just collecting money for him, but she soon became part of the act. She learnt on the toughest entertainment front line how to fascinate punters and, more importantly, get them to hand over hard cash.

She was spotted by an agent who got her work on a real stage and she appeared as an extra in films. From this oh-so-humble start, Joan built a career that took her to the top theatres in this country and abroad.

She got regular slots on television shows such as Sunday Night at The London Palladium. She rubbed sequinned shoulders with the best in the business. One frequent performing partner was Bob Hope, whom she would pick up and hold over her head.

She dropped him once. Bing Crosby sent a telegram, saying it should have happened sooner and from a greater height.

Joan wasn’t just a classic beauty, painted by her friend Dame Laura Knight. She also had a bucketful of brains. Quentin Crisp, author of The Naked Civil Servant, was a regular visitor to her Belsize Park flat, where she would beat him at Scrabble, much to his chagrin.

The career highlight for Joan was her being invited to amuse the Queen and Prince Philip in a show at Windsor

Castle. The Prince tried to bend one of her six-inch nails and failed. To spare his blushes, she closely examined the object and announced that he was responsible for ‘a bit of kink’ in the nail. This triggered even more blushes and sent the Queen into fits of laughter.

I’m very fortunate that Joan was a very close friend of mine in the last eight years of her life. I was with her when she died in 2010.

I promised I would not let her be forgotten – hence this article.

I went on the BBC TV show The Repair Shop, where they sorted out one of her costumes by stitching on thousands of sequins. The production team – mainly 12-year-olds, it seemed – were fascinated with Joan’s story and nagged me with questions about why they hadn’t heard of this amazing feminist figure. That led to the book I have written about my friend. She also appeared as the star of a recent BBC Radio 4 Great Lives episode.

Her famous admirers had different degrees of success in pursuit of their goddess.

Elvis arranged a secret assignation with Joan in a Parisian theatre’s dressing room. It was one of her favourite anecdotes; Joan would roll her eyes – but refuse to reveal the gory details.

Marlene Dietrich wooed her with gifts after the women fell for each other when they shared a stage in Copenhagen. Once again, Joan was sphinx-like as to whether there was any physical relationship.

I inherited some of the expensive trinkets the movie star left on Joan’s dressing table. They speak of more than a passing fancy.

As for the wee blazer-clad schoolboy Brandreth, I fear he didn’t have a chance. Sorry, Gyles, but thanks for remembering our iron girl.

An Iron Girl in a Velvet Glove: The Life of Joan Rhodes (The History Press) by Triona Holden is out now

Joan bends steel with her teeth, 1955

Griff Rhys Jones, brought up in Essex, is still completely Welsh –though lots of Welshmen refuse to believe him

Wales, land of my fathers

Idon’t want to over-glamorise myself, but I need to explain that I was once nominated for that singular honour, a Welsh BAFTA. (And, before anybody starts, I am very much aware that it should really be a WAFTA. Not a Welsh British Film and Television Award. Ridiculous. And, certainly, never a TAFTA.)

But the point is that I was called upon to brave the Cardiff Media Circus. I hate red carpets. I am the celeb they lower the cameras for.

All five members of the Welsh fourth estate outside the handsome Millennium

Centre completely ignored me, until – as is often the case – I had already got one foot in the foyer.

At that point a hearty, traditional Welsh greeting rang out. ‘Oy!’

I turned.

‘Oy, Griff. We had better have a few words.’

It was the walk of shame. I had to retrace my red-carpet footsteps, to be interviewed by BBC Wales. And, as is often the way, come one, come all. Every media rep wanted a go-see. This was in case I died in the night and the editor asked why Buzz had a picture and they didn’t.

Finally, I faced S4C – the Welshlanguage channel.

‘So, Griff…’ their interviewer began. ‘How does it feel being up against a Welsh presenter tonight, then?’

I gave a clucking laugh. The one that says, yup, I am game for this sort of banter, you nob-head.

‘Let me tell you,’ I swaggered, ‘there is not a drop of English blood in this body…’ (I borrowed that one from Sir Simon Jenkins – that other bogus Welshman.) ‘My full name is Griffith Rhys Llewellyn Gwyneth Kinnock Jones, you see. Born not one hundred yards

We’ll keep a welcome in the hillsides: Welsh football fan at Wales v Slovakia, Bordeaux, 2016

from where we are standing now… This is the land of my aunties…’

I was about to extend this Welsh badinage, when the presenter held up a hand. ‘Just a minute,’ he said. ‘Can we start this again?’

His cameraman fiddled with some buttons.

‘Righto. Griff … what does it feel like to be up against a proper Welsh presenter?’ Damn. I am not proper Welsh, you see. Though I do say ‘you see’, you see. Even Huw Edwards, who won the bloody thing that night, is more proper than what I am.

A commissioner for BBC Wales once told me, with significantly narrowed eyes, that I was ‘insufficiently Welsh’. It’s galling. I don’t pass.

I can’t speak Welsh. Germaine Greer took the trouble to explain why the ‘language of heaven’ is complicated for the middle-aged slacker like me – the lack of enough alphabet in a Bible-printer’s tray, its affinity with High German and not enough Welsh restaurants in London (unlike those handy teach-yourselfbasic-Italian trattorias).

When I first crossed the border with my wife, Jo, I explained the languageduality obsession. ‘Ambwlans,’ I explained, ‘on the front of emergency service vehicles, for example. That’s easy, but look out for araf, on the road, meaning “slow”. It’s everywhere.’ As we came to the bridge I pointed at the gantry. ‘Manneth,’ I said, using my woeful Welsh pronunciation. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘I think it means “manned”, she replied. ‘It’s English for “person in the pay booth”.’

I am one of the Epping Welsh. There were five of us and we all lived in the same house. I persuaded my mother and father to leave Cardiff when I was six months old. My uncle and a legion of aunties stayed to hold the fort.

We went to visit, of course. It was the eight-year-old’s ordeal. We were greeted by a cloud of talcum powder as we crossed the old Severn Bridge. My cute, chubby face was folded into a series of scented blancmanges in Pen-y-Lan and Radyr. The aunties of South Wales leant down to smother the unbearably cute little smart-arse that I was.

Gwen, Megan, Betty. ‘Eucch.’

‘Oh, Griffith bach!’

Was this the only Welsh my father knew? The only use of my full first name, too.

I was called after an ancestral miner in the female line. There were tons of

miners on Mummy’s side. Her father, for example, was in the pit. Out of the pit. Back in the pit in a depression. In Ferndale. Proper Rhondda Valley coalfield origins (‘See, S4C!’)

This gave bragging rights at the Marxist student gatherings of Cambridge but cut no ice with Dara Ó Briain. ‘You posh English…’ he would begin his tirades.

‘Dara, I’m a bloody bog-dwelling Celt like you!’

But I knew secretly that my father’s brother Ieuan (think of the ‘u’ as double ‘i’) wore plus fours and used the Wodehousian ‘what?’ at the end of sentences – in normal speech. As in ‘You don’t want to make fun of us Welsh, what?’

‘What? Us … what?’

‘It doesn’t go down well at the golf club.’

Some crude cracks in Not the Nine O’Clock News about the mother country rankled in Radyr. ‘Come home to a real fire: buy a cottage in Wales’ – that sort of thing.

Da was Glamorgan posh. (Impeccable lay-preacher-in-chapel poshness, though.) But in his mid-century midWales everybody wanted to be middle class, which is why Dylan himself got elocution lessons in Swansea and ended up talking as if he had swallowed a canteen of silver cutlery.

For much of my working life, the furthest west I travelled was White City. But later, I was asked to go around pointing at things for the BBC.

Programmes like The Bookworm and Restoration had a ‘remit’. Being worthy, they had to be worthy all over the United Kingdom. No conquered peoples of Great Britain could be left out.

I was sent off into wild, western Wales, to find that half the mountainsides had been blasted away by slate mining. I went into the impeccable Conwy Valley. I went panning for gold, climbing Tryfan and bog-snorkelling in mid Wales. I visited the Gower Peninsula.

I voluntarily plunged into a frozen Snowdonian lake, and – let me just pause for a moment here – I discovered that Wales is the most beautiful country in Britain. I loved it.

‘Oh, not that bloody old thing.’ An interviewer from the Western Mail was unimpressed.

‘Yeah. That tired old thing. Beauty.’

Of course, I understand all that stuff about Welsh struggle and why proper Welsh people think all English people are essentially as creepy and rapacious as

David Cameron – yet another AngloWelshman, in fact, the grandson of Nance Llewellyn.

I made the mistake of suggesting to my dear cameraman mate, Tudor Evans, that Wales was ‘united’ with England.

‘We are a subject race, Griff!’

‘Right you are.’ But not being properly educated in Wales I was never brought up to think of something that happened 700 years ago and was perpetrated largely by French-speaking Normans as being urgently Anglo-oppressive.

I do understand it. I was invited to mangle a Welsh accent in Mine All Mine by Russell Davies and everybody else on the production was proper and very Welsh. They were sweet to me.

We stood on the steps of Swansea Town Hall between takes, eating Joe’s ice cream, and one of the other actors leaned in. ‘It must have been terrible for you…’

‘What?’

‘Being brought up in London,’ he said, feelingly. ‘You must have experienced a lot of racial prejudice.’

I looked vacant. ‘Er… no. Not really. No. You know nobody really noticed that I was Welsh.’

He grimaced. ‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ he said, sympathetically. ‘Those English just don’t care that we are Welsh.’

I am sorry to report that English audiences laugh at that story, but in Neath a man came up and commiserated – he had been moved by my plight.

When I was a boy, we Rhys Joneses were proud to be Welsh. We couldn’t wear funny clothes on special days like fifth-generation ex-pat kilt-wearing Scottish dentists in Saskatchewan, but I can guarantee that if Shirley Bassey came on the telly, we sat in awe of her golden lungs until my mother finally said, as she always did, in respectful tones, ‘She’s Welsh, you know.’

You can’t better that form of indoctrination.

So, despite being humiliated in turn by the University of Wales, S4C and BBC Wales, I spend a lot of time in Cymraeg now. I got all rootsy in South West Wales and bought a farm in Pembrokeshire. This was my homeland, after all.

Who Do You Think You Are? then helpfully uncovered that I actually come from North Wales.

Ah, well. Mind you, you don’t get much more proper than Penmachno. If you doubt me, look it up.

Griff Rhys Jones has won two Welsh BAFTAs

Let your fingernails do the talking

I am often mesmerised by the garishly coloured, two-inch-long nail extensions worn by women who have to use keyboards and generally handle things.

How and why do they do it? The fashion was largely inspired by the TV show Keeping Up with the Kardashians, but of course the flawlessly groomed members of that family have ‘people’ to do their chores for them.

Kardashian influencees do, however, have to get on with the normal jobs that hands perform – so they have trained themselves to use the pads, rather than the tips, of their fingers. ‘It’s just like learning how to walk in a pair of new shoes,’ an airline check-in girl told me. ‘You soon adapt.’

When nail extensions break, you have to go back to the nail bar to have them cut down with a special tool – ordinary scissors will not work.

Extensions are a source of pride and viewed as ‘wearable art’, although to some eyes – eg mine – they resemble the claws of reptilian predators.

These days, nail bars are popping up on every high street. The main thing they have in common is that you have to pay in cash and you can’t tell them what you want, as no one speaks English. So you have to point to a menu card.

I was delighted when over-thecounter glue-on false nails appeared in the chemist. I had never had naturally long fingernails, because they always got snagged on something before they had grown beyond stubbiness.

But false ones made my hands look elegant for the first time ever and I could not stop admiring them. I was a student at the time; they were useful for turning the pages of books and doubling as a satisfying comb when I ran them through my hair.

But their main advantage was that my flatmates – it was summer and we had a small garden to sunbathe in – queued up to have me lightly claw their backs while they writhed in ecstasy.

However, my chief flatmate and landlady told me they looked plasticky and hideous. The day I brought home a packet of false toenails (I had never had long toenails either), she told me I had crossed a line and, if I insisted on wearing false toenails as well, I would have to vacate my room.

To investigate modern extensions, I decided to visit a Kensington salon – Marcela’s in Holland Street – just to see what incentivises other women of my age group.

They don’t want Kardashian nails, but they do want to have manicures. Why can’t they just do it themselves?

Marcela, originally from Colombia, started life as a beauty therapist at Claridge’s ‘with VIP people – very good experience’ and then at Harrods. She offers manicures, too – a different

experience from that available at the pop-up nail bar.

She has been in Kensington for 30 years: ‘We know all our clientele and they know us. Olinda has been here 26 years, Josefa 18 years, Teresa another 15 years. This is like a little community.’

‘The ordinary simple manicure,’ says Marcela, ‘will clean your cuticles and make your nail beautiful and the manicurist will polish it for you. But to be a nail technician, you need to train. Anyone can learn the techniques, but to be a good nail technician will take three to five years and the best way to learn is to be in a salon with demanding customers. It is the experience which makes you very good.’

She also does shellac. This is a gel coating of the nail which masks unsightly ridges and makes your nails feel very secure for the three weeks it lasts. It really is a beautifying treatment and will cost you between £34 and £60. Marcela also gives a paraffin wax to the hands, which ‘gives beautiful looks to your hands and gives the feeling of moist that will last for one week’.

As we talked in the cosy salon, it was dawning on me why I might want to make this a repeat experience.

‘This kind of job, Mary,’ crooned Marcela, ‘is therapeutic. Yes, I want to do your manicure. I want you to feel better. While you are here, you are my princess.’

I can see why the women of Kensington beat a path to Marcela’s door. Being in her salon in her company and having her fuss over you was, indeed, therapeutic in its own right.

And it’s cheaper than therapy.

America’s got talons: Khloé Kardashian, TV star

A visit to a talon salon brightened my nails – and my spirits

In North by Northwest, Cary Grant grapples with a plane, kisses a beauty, fights baddies – and always looks perfect. By Todd McEwen

The world’s best suit

North by Northwest (1959) isn’t about what happens to Cary Grant. It’s about what

tailored, beautifully falling, lightweight, dusty blue.

It’s by far the best suit in the movie: the villains, James Mason and Martin Landau, wear funereal, sinister (though expensive) black, while their greasy henchmen run around in off-the-peg crap. ‘The Professor’, head of Intelligence, bumbles about in pipe-smoked tweed.

In 1959, America was a white-shirt and black-suit nation. Outside on Madison Avenue, the white shirts blind you but none of them is quite so white as Cary’s.

His silk tie is exactly one shade darker than the suit, his socks exactly one shade lighter. In the cab, he tells his secretary to ‘think thin’, which allows us to regard his suit, how it lies on his physique.

There’s a good suit moment later in the movie, when he tries on one belonging to George Kaplan, the guy he’s looking for, who doesn’t exist.

Since these suits have been planted by the US Government, they’re stodgy, old-fashioned, unbelievably heavy for a summer in New York, with turn-ups on the trousers.

‘I don’t think that one does anything for you,’ says Cary’s mum – and, boy, is she right.

She also contributes the joke that Kaplan maybe ‘has his suits mended by invisible weavers’, which is what happens to Cary’s suit throughout the picture! His suit is like a mouse victim of repeated cartoon violence – in the next shot, it’s always fine.

He’s able to travel all over the country in just this one beautiful suit because it’s the perfect weather for an adventure in this suit.

The suit holds for Cary a number of tools. It’s so well cut you can’t tell if he’s even carrying a wallet (turns out he is). He goes all the way from New York to Chicago to the face of Mount Rushmore with a monogrammed book of matches, his

wallet and some nickels, a wristwatch, two cufflinks, a pencil stub, a hankie, a newspaper clipping and his sunglasses.

All this stuff fits invisibly into the pockets of the most wonderful suit in the world.

Now he’s sitting in the dining car with Eva Marie Saint (still with us, at 98). Does the suit get crushed in the upper berth when they end up in her carriage? No – even though his Ray-Bans are smashed. Cary keeps his jacket on in the make-out scene that follows. The suit defines him; he’s not going to take off that jacket.

When the train gets to Chicago, there might be an opportunity for a shower. You itch but he chooses merely to loosen his shirt and have a quick shave, with Eva Marie’s comically small razor.

The suit is temporarily stuffed into her luggage while he makes his exit from the train disguised as a porter. Has the suit suffered? Has it hell! It looks like a million bucks; his shirt still glows.

But now comes the suit’s greatest trial, the crop-dusting scene at Prairie Stop. Cary gets covered in dust from giant trucks going by (a deliberate and somewhat comic attack on the suit), sweats like a pig (or should – we do), has to throw himself in the dirt, gets sprayed with DDT, then practically gets run over by a tanker, grappling with its greasy undercarriage and writhing around on the asphalt.

After all this, and having fled the scene in a stolen pick-up truck, Cary has only his hankie with which to make himself presentable at the Ambassador East hotel, where he thinks Kaplan is staying.

Still he’s done a pretty good job –despite all that stuff that happened to him, he looks more as if he’s been teaching at school all afternoon; just a bit chalky.

His tie is still pressed and the shirt is

white – even the collar and cuffs. You cannot violate the white shirt of America. You can kill me but you will never kill this shirt.

Eva Marie tells Cary she’ll have dinner with him if he’ll let the valet clean it. So Cary takes off the suit, goes into the shower; she gives it to the valet and she skedaddles. The suit is not there – so Cary is not there. We get to see that he wears yellow boxers – another sign that he’s a daring guy in a ‘creative’ profession.

Once Cary gets to the auction gallery, the suit is perfectly restored – that valet is some little ‘sponger and presser’. He gets in a fist fight (no blood), is arrested, taken to the airport and put on a plane to Rapid City.

The next day, it’s hot as blazes at Mount Rushmore, but the shirt is clean, the suit’s fantastically smooth; a hot breeze rustles it a little.

Later, Cary gets punched out for trying to interfere between the Professor and Eva Marie. AND WHEN HE WAKES UP, THE SUIT HAS BEEN CONFISCATED!

The Professor has locked him in a hospital room with only a towel to wear (although you feel a lot of relief that he’s had his second shower of the picture).

This heralds the real act of cruelty: the Professor brings Cary a set of hideous clothes from some awful menswear shop in Rapid City. You can just imagine the smell of it: Ban-Lon shirts and cheap belts. He gives him an off-white white shirt, a pair of black trousers, white socks and icky black slip-ons.

Delightful to discover that, in the end, when Cary and Eva Marie are on the train back to New York (she in virginal white nightie), he’s got his suit back. He’s not wearing the jacket, but he has a nice clean white shirt – and those are definitely the suit’s trousers and his original shoes and the gorgeous socks.

I managed to acquire a pair of trousers several years ago that were somewhat like Cary’s. They weren’t tailor-made and weren’t the same quality of material, of course. But the colour was really close and the hang of them wasn’t bad.

And they turned out to be lucky trousers – very, very lucky. Until I burned a hole in them.

The veneer of civilisation is thin, boys. Exceeding thin.

Cary Grant’s

Suit: Nine Movies That

Made Me the Wreck I Am Today by Todd McEwen is out on 28th February (Notting Hill Editions)

CHRISTOPHEL / EVERETT COLLECTION / ALAMY

Suits you, sir: Cary Grant with Eva Marie Saint – still with us at 98

Widow’s weeds

After the death of my husband in 2021, when he was 76, someone described me as the most eligible widow in London.

That’s as maybe. I intend to stay a widow for ever. The world is full of blithering idiots and predatory males who consider me fresh on the market and therefore vulnerable.

I met an old acquaintance in the street recently. He asked me why I was looking glum.

‘My husband’s died,’ I said.

‘But that was months ago!’ he said, bewildered.

I have had more than a year to adjust and have conducted myself with dignity and decorum. Though I don’t want a husband or a boyfriend, I’ve been besieged by offers from predatory males, mostly married, seeking recreational adultery in the name of ‘comforting’ me.

On top of that, people have urged me to get a dog/travel to Bali/go to a Devon spa. My dentist’s receptionist said, reeling with laughter, three weeks after my husband’s death, ‘Get a toyboy.’

Another woman, when I mentioned that my husband died at home, said, laughing, ‘Did you kill him?’

I have braved a few parties, sombrely dressed. I’ve learned not to mention my husband’s death, as most men press their telephone numbers on me, saying, ‘Ring me if you ever want just to talk.’

When I say I don’t want a new partner, plenty of people say, ‘Don’t tell me you’re going to turn into a lesbian.’

Supposed condolences are often offensive. People say, ‘I know exactly how you feel,’ because their father, mother or aunt has died.

While the death of a parent is tragic, I object to the word ‘exactly’. Unless their spouse has died, no one has any idea how I feel. The only acceptable response is ‘How awful. Is there anything I can do?’

Some ask how old he was – code for ‘How many years do I have left?’ Another person asked which COVID vaccine he’d had – hoping to avoid the one he’d chosen.

And so the insensitive remarks keep coming. ‘Are you going to sell your house?’ is a very common question.

I once read that a woman living alone should never allow a man into her house unless he is a paid workman or a plumber, and that seems very sensible. I remember that when my mother was widowed, a creepy bloke had his feet under her table within weeks.

But even that advice isn’t foolproof.

In the summer, I had a telephone engineer round, tidying up cables in my husband’s office.

He asked, ‘Isn’t your husband around any more?’

‘Oh Gawd!’ I thought. Not another one. So I cheerfully said, ‘Of course he is. It’s such a beautiful day that he’s just out riding his horse.’

Invitations from long-standing male friends of my husband’s seemed kind to begin with. Still, the first of these men left an extraordinary message on my answer machine, saying the death of my husband had opened up endless exciting opportunities and possibilities.

After dinner at the Colbert restaurant in Chelsea, he suggested Dukes Hotel in Mayfair for ‘cuddles’.

I gawped and refused his offer.

‘Excuse me while I don’t walk you home,’ he said.

Another reliable friend of my husband’s also asked me to the Colbert. After lunch, he asked if he could come in and give me a hug.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t do hug.’

A few days later, I got an email requesting payment for half the restaurant bill.

When Basia Briggs’s husband died, it wasn’t long before predatory men started moving in on her

Basia Briggs was besieged by married men, seeking recreational adultery

After dinner in Chelsea, he suggested Dukes Hotel in Mayfair for ‘cuddles’

Martin Jarvis is the voice of Just William, Bertie Wooster and Twix chocolate. But he lost out on the Toilet Duck gig to Chris Tarrant

The art of speaking

John Gielgud never did voiceovers – despite his instrument being described by Alec Guinness as ‘a silver trumpet muffled in silk’.

Now almost every thesp, knighted or not, is keen to race into Soho or, with the new upsurge in working from home, duck under a duvet and breathe heavily into a friendly microphone.

As a young actor, I couldn’t break into that world of extra dosh. I did Dickens, Shakespeare and Wodehouse on radio and television – but that was ‘proper acting’, not being ‘a gob on a stick’.

Eventually, I found myself in a voice studio, recording a nature commentary. Not big advertising bucks but maybe a start as a reach-me-down Attenborough.

As I was leaving, a lady stopped me: ‘Have you got a few minutes, Martin? Can you come into the booth and say something into the mic?’

I could.

She told me their ‘voice’ hadn’t turned up. Could I just say, ‘Twix, the longerlasting snack’?

I did.

I said it three times, attempting different inflections.

‘Thanks. If we use it, we’ll let your agent know.’

They did.

Phew.

Many actors do achieve longed-for days in the Soho sun, dashing from studio to studio. When I graduated to the circuit, I regularly found myself panting at the mic, taking on the breathless intonation of one of my heroes, Richard Briers.

We actually recorded together, extolling the virtues of supermarket chicken. Richard opened seductively with ‘Breast and thighs’ – I answered with ‘Butterball, boneless’. How fortunate that voice-overs are performed anonymously.

Voice-overs produce their own peculiar kind of incidents. During one session, a puzzling request came from the client: ‘Can you sound a bit more like yourself?’

Once, an actor challenged me: ‘Are you voice-hanging?’

What?

‘Your session finished ages ago and you’re still here.’

Voice-hanging was, apparently, lurking in the lobby too long afterwards. Hanging about on the off chance of picking up another gig if someone didn’t show up. Not a bad idea – but not guilty.

Another problem came with a promo for a Mexican restaurant chain. How should I pronounce fajitas? They ditched my Take 1: I had attempted to beguile the audience with ‘You’ll love our fajjytass’.

A Soho star of the 1980s was Canadian Bill Mitchell. Dressed always in black, including film-noir fedora and dark glasses, he could be seen emerging from a studio (at any time) and approaching the Coach & Horses for his liquid lunch. Sensible agencies knew not to hire him in the afternoons.

His unmistakable low tones synthesised groovily, with plenty of gravelly grit, with an old jazzer’s sense of rhythm. When I shared a microphone with him for a Superman commercial, his ‘You’ll believe a man can fly’ effortlessly eclipsed my run-of-the-mill ‘All over London from tomorrow’.

He generously told me, ‘Marty, you – you’re a classical actor; me – I’m just a noise…’

A big one.

I heard he flew to Spain for a short break and was met off the plane by fellow actor Norma. She gazed at him in astonishment: he was sporting a white linen suit, white shirt and tie, white hat, no shades. ‘Bill – what happened?’

The newly blanched figure replied

mysteriously, in the familiar basement voice, ‘Baby, there are no enemies out here.’

I met an engineer who said, ‘Y’know, I worked with Bill when he first came here from Canada. He didn’t have that voice then. He sounded like you and me. I wonder where he found it.’

Orson Welles?

Mr Welles often appeared in Soho to record at the acclaimed John Wood Studios. His enormous girth prevented him from entering the booth. Frequently a chair of vast proportions arrived by van for his enthronement in the main part of the studio.

It was here, while vocalising a frozen-peas ad, that he castigated the agency producers, growling, ‘What is it you want, in the depth of your ignorance…? You are such pests… No money is worth it…’ (Now to be enjoyed on YouTube.) When Orson became too expensive, or unable to be directed, his voice match was – Bill Mitchell.

John Wood, top recording engineer, seemed like an in-house father figure: ‘Martin, try it American – but without the accent.’

One afternoon, John leant over the mic, smiled and whispered in my ear, ‘I’ve watched you’ – I prepared myself for a compliment – ‘getting tireder and tireder…’

True. I was exhausted, performing Ayckbourn or Frayn at the Vaudeville Theatre each night. (Full-body acting, my vocal pals called it.) And each day (again their term) turd-gilding. There were a few successes, though sadly I lost the Toilet Duck gig to Chris Tarrant.

Fine actor Patrick Allen was known as the king of voice-over at this time. In many commercials, he would add an extended half-syllable, a sort of hmm sound, to the final ‘strap-line’: ‘Get some tomorrow-hmm. You know it makes sense-hmm.’ In the ad breaks of today, I

still hear attempts to imitate the king’s approach. Hmm.

Occasionally the very people who hired us would resent us. One accounthandler moaned to actor Robin Bailey, ‘I think it’s disgraceful the way you lot can come in here, say “Every little helps” and five minutes later walk away with all that money.’

Robin countered reasonably, ‘Five minutes – and a lifetime’s experience.’

In America, I worked with a man who had voiced what became a celebrated, long-running ad campaign. ‘Got milk?’ He’s retired now to the ranch he bought with the millions he made from those two words.

I was lucky enough to record with John Gielgud. Not a voice-over – but an onstage recital of Paradise Lost, adapted by newsreader Gordon Honeycombe. In rehearsal, Gordon dared to give Sir John a note on how to emphasise a particular word.

The great man nodded, turned to me and confided, ‘I suppose I might say it like that if I were reading the nineo’clock news.’

Then, having movingly delivered a cascade of verse from the silken throat, he looked up from the script, shook his head and observed, ‘It’s all wrong, you know. I shouldn’t be reading. Milton was blind.’

‘Where do your audiobook voices

come from?’ somebody asked me recently.

Well, when I’m inhabiting Bertie Wooster’s jolly Aunt Dahlia in P G Wodehouse recordings, I think of warm-hearted Joanna Lumley. Lord Emsworth’s sister, Constance: gracious Patricia Hodge. And for the Hon Galahad Threepwood, I’ll channel congenial Charles Dance. When I ultimately directed the three of them in those same roles for BBC radio, they showed me how it should really be done.

My version of Jeeves is Gielgud-inspired.

Role model for Wooster? The late Jonathan Cecil who, in his own recordings, nailed Bertie’s blitheness perfectly.

For Mr Brown in Just William, I reach for the dark, dismissive resonance of Harold Pinter.

A blueprint for William’s speech is astutely indicated on the page by his creator, Richmal Crompton: ‘Doin’ good, ritin’ rongs, pursuin’ happiness. Posh cockney.’

Like Harry Windsor?

I haven’t yet heard Spare – Harry’s audiobook. Will he, I wonder, come over like Crompton’s imaginative hero?

Martin Jarvis’s recording of Michael Frayn’s autobiography, Among Others, is on Radio 4 in April

How to speak proper: Martin Jarvis has impersonated William Brown, Jeeves and Bertie Wooster

We will remember them

Charlotte Metcalf is looking forward to Celebration Day in May – a new way of honouring loved ones who are no longer with us

We do death superbly in Britain. Nothing demonstrates that more than our state occasions. The Queen’s funeral showed that military precision and attention to the tiniest detail were no enemies of grand emotion, giving us a reassuringly reliable public framework for our collective grief.

On Remembrance Day, our connection to the veterans who fought so hard for our fragile democracy is resoldered by this well-rehearsed, structured display, soothingly devoid of surprise or change.

Even a small funeral in a country church, with its ritual of pleasingly familiar hymns and eulogies, conducted by a respectful vicar, reminds us all who we are and where we have come from. Our long line of traditions was forged by ancestors who make us who we are.

Funerals and memorials ultimately uplift us. Show me an oldie who hasn’t declared that a funeral can be just as enjoyable as a wedding.

In spring last year, a few friends gathered to wonder why it was that while military veterans are venerated and remembered annually, ordinary people are not.

Once we’ve dispatched our loved ones to the ground or the flames, we tend to set about ‘moving on’ in our ever-sopractical, British way.

Grief often frightens us because of its ability to ambush and disable us. Brits are not good at howling at the moon. We do what we believe to be sensible, and push grief away.

One of those founding friends was the grief therapist, author and podcaster Julia Samuel. She has long counselled her grieving patients that embracing the connection with someone we’ve lost rather than severing it is to emerge stronger. We will know more about who we are if we’re plugged in to where – and whom – we came from.

We are moulded by people we love.

Keeping their memories fresh and close, while sometimes being painful, gives our identities ballast.

So, last year, the friends launched an annual Celebration Day. On the day, we step away from our frantic, digitally demanding lives and rejoice in someone we have loved or admired.

The idea quickly caught on. The actor Richard E Grant said he was planting armfuls of his beloved wife Joan’s favourite lupins. Celebrity chef Prue Leith celebrated her younger brother, Jamie, by re-reading his hilarious book, Ironing John, about being a house husband.

Handbag entrepreneur and ecoactivist Anya Hindmarch said she was buying herself a large pair of sturdy underpants in memory of her aunt. Catherine Mayer, co-founder and President of the Women’s Equality Party, honoured her husband Andy by dancing under his picture in the kitchen.

Julia Samuel herself ate a large piece of chocolate cake to remember her friend Anthony Gordon Lennox, an image consultant who died in 2017, aged 48.

Celebration Day appeals to everyone, regardless of age, religion or background.

One woman cooked risotto in memory of her father. One man ate a Scotch egg and let off fireworks in memory of his son.

A school competition was launched

via The Day magazine, and hundreds of children of all ages submitted written accounts of talking to the oldest people in their family about someone they’d loved and lost.

Moving and eloquent winning entries were read out by actors Harriet Walter, Gemma Arterton and Lennie James. The day showed how much the children had enjoyed learning more about their identities by delving into their pasts.

As someone whose parents both died relatively young, I often regret not having done more to find out about my grandparents.

In 2023, Celebration Day will be on Sunday 28th May. Another schools competition is underway, and there are plans for a painting competition and a celebratory run. The Home Choir, which began in lockdown singing on Zoom as the Self-Isolation Choir, led by the irrepressible enthusiast Ben England, is composing a joyous anthem and organising choirs all over the country to gather and sing it.

Perhaps we should all plant a tree or involve the parks. Ideas are plentiful as the concept gains momentum.

What united everyone who celebrated last year was a sense of joy. Focusing beyond pain to the reasons we most miss and love someone is exhilarating. We shouldn’t have to wait for a big state occasion to marshal ourselves into rediscovering our happy memories. This is a way of keeping a door open after the closure of a funeral.

Celebration Day can keep us from feeling bereft and isolated. The beauty of it is that it’s not prescriptive, allowing us to create our own rituals and traditions to pass on to those we’ll leave behind.

We are the sum of our parts. As a society, we would be more resilient and happier if we spent one day a year rejoicing in those long – or recently –gone figures who have shaped us.

RIP: Richard E Grant and his late wife

Charlotte Metcalf is editor of Great British Brands

Boston Tea Party runs out of tea

Prince Harry’s book and a teabag shortage ruin Anglo-American links

Dominic Green

After nearly two decades in America, I am running out of teabags.

I am also running out of patience with Meghan and Harry’s incessant propaganda against Britain and its people. Americans, meanwhile, are running out of patience with one another.

Their country will in 2026 celebrate 250 years of independence from the British. Like me, it is disintegrating with age.

The teabags are Donald Trump’s fault, but I’ll get to that later. The Meghan-and-Harry part is my fault. My accent and prior convictions as a historian give the misleading impression that I, like all Brits, am deeply versed in the history of the Royal Family and may even know some of them personally.

Whenever America’s royals do something for the cameras – and it’s not clear if they do much else – I am asked to opinionate.

No one forces me to respond, but respond I do. Apart from my Harry-like impulse to disburden myself of my inner monologue whenever I spot a live mic, it has become a way of life, which in America means a living.

If someone had told me 20 years ago that I would be paid to review Harry’s memoir Spare, and even to read it first, I might have reconsidered moving to America. I might have considered moving to Antarctica.

This kind of individual transformation has always been the point of America. For all its troubles, it remains a place where anyone with chutzpah, pizzazz and moxie can become a royal correspondent. In the Land of Opportunism, even an unemployed prince can win a $100-million Netflix contract and land a mansion with 16 bathrooms: truly a royal flush. The price of Harry’s American transformation will, however, be paid by Britain.

The Anglo-American relationship is

‘special’ in a master-canine way, but it is also real. It exists at every level, from family ties to commercial and political ties, and ever-closer military and intelligence co-ordination.

It has been like this since the late-19th century. As no one who is around now was alive then, that’s like saying it’s been like this for ever. But it hasn’t, and it has changed in my time here.

There have been worse times. The sacking of the White House in 1812, for instance, or sending Burgess, Philby and Maclean to the Washington embassy, or allowing James Corden to rove the streets of LA in daylight. Usually, though, Britain sends talent. In settling in LA, Prince Harry flaps his flipflops in the footsteps of Hitchcock, Chaplin, Cary Grant, David Niven and Aldous Huxley. And Rod Stewart, who pined so furiously for the misty glens of Muswell Hill that he formed his own amateur soccer team, the LA Exiles.

Americans have a unique form of nostalgia. They cultivate an image of the past to remind themselves not how much better it was then, but how much better they are now. They believe George III was a tyrant, when in fact he was conscientious about his constitutional limits.

This origin myth explains why the villains in Hollywood have British accents. It is overlaid by a more recent mythology taking in the Blitz spirit, Winston Churchill and the Beatles.

All this gives the misleading impression that ‘England’, which is what Americans call the United Kingdom, is inhabited mostly by blue-blooded officer types in bespoke suits, with a small minority of chirpy songsmiths in the Liverpool area.

Further information about this strange people comes as a shock, especially if it’s President Obama saying the British imprisoned and tortured

his Kenyan grandfather during the Mau Mau uprising.

Obama’s score-settling was a prelude to Meghan and Harry’s. In America, no accusation is more ‘toxic’, as everyone now says, than that of racism, and the worst kind of racism is, as we all now know, ‘institutional’.

Obama’s presidency brought wokeness out of the academy and into the institutions, the media included.

Little Britain was always a football in the culture war. Meghan and Harry’s denunciations elide the old image of bad Britain (a royal dictatorship) with the new, post-colonial image of the former evil empire. This appeals deeply to blue-state America, which, having lost its religion, has no other way to redeem the hereditary sins of slavery and massacre than by blaming the Brits.

Over in red-state America, it’s still the Blitz, Churchill and the Beatles. Meanwhile, blue-state media and schools teach that Britain is the root of all America’s evils. The revenge fantasies of the turncoat prince give this fiction a royal imprimatur.

Which brings me to the teabags. The Trump administration imposed tariffs on foreign imports, to support American workers. There is no sign of America’s domestic tea industry, but supplies of PG Tips at my local Stop ’n’ Shop are becoming erratic, their price eye-watering.

The teabag drought symbolises America’s drift from Britain. Americans are no longer steeped in the Old World’s ways. America began with a handful of angry Bostonians tipping imported tea into the harbour 250 years ago, in 1773.

The America we knew is ending with a handful of thirsty Bostonians – including me – waiting for their ship to come in.

Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist

I hate library phone boxes

As hundreds of real libraries close down, these tatty old crates enrage librarian Katrina Robinson

When is a library not a library?

When it’s a disused phone box (or other roadside receptacle), with a few Maeve Binchy or Tom Clancy paperbacks thrown on the directory shelf, plus quite possibly Windows 95 For Dummies

I’m a librarian – so people think I should love it when people put any old books in any old crate and label it ‘Library’. They think I’m blaspheming against mighty Thoth, the Egyptian god of reading, when I tell them how I feel.

I feel the way any worth-her-salt GP would feel if she spotted a rusty first-aid box by the side of the road, with ‘Hospital’ emblazoned all over it – while

real hospitals were closing or becoming semi-open ‘community hospitals’ staffed by unqualified volunteers.

It would feel like a sick joke, the worst of it being that sights like these selfdesignated ‘hospitals’ might be slowly conditioning patients to accept it.

If a first-aid box isn’t a hospital, then a phone box containing some books isn’t a library.

Language matters. It’s not petty or pedantic to call out misnomers when you see them. Of course, some politicians might prefer it if we gradually came to associate the word ‘library’ with random shacks of discarded books, instead of with properly maintained buildings with knowledgeable librarians; internet

access for those who don’t have it; and literacy and tech support for adults and, above all, children. Through libraries, children are given the key to unlock the world beyond their own early circumstances.

If you value reading and information, don’t let some well-meaning but unaware person get away with a proud social-media selfie of themselves posing in front of a container of books, on which they’ve stamped the word ‘Library’. Politely say, ‘Oh, how lovely. But aren’t they called book swaps these days, not libraries?’ Quietly re-relabel if necessary.

And, as I’m sitting in a real library right now, I can’t say that quietly enough.

Walking Tour with Harry Mount Wren’s City of London

Thursday 11th May 2023

Three hundred years ago, Britain’s greatest architect, Sir Christopher Wren, died at the age of 90, just as his finest work, St Paul’s Cathedral, was completed. Join Harry Mount, architectural historian and editor of The Oldie, for a walking tour of Wren’s London, from St Paul’s to his fabulous City Churches, built after the Great Fire of London. Includes lunch (and wine) in Middle Temple Hall, the best Elizabethan building in London.

11 am Meet Harry Mount outside the main western entrance of St Paul’s Cathedral

1pm

Two-course lunch in Middle Temple Hall

Tickets are £135 (inc VAT) per person, including lunch with wine. Limited to 20 people. Guarantee a place with Katherine by emailing reservations@theoldie.co.uk or calling 01225 427311 (Monday-Friday)

St Paul’s Cathedral

Christopher Wren by Godfrey Kneller

The great Wrenaissance

Harry Mount

Not long before his death 300 years ago, Sir Christopher Wren had a terrible shock.

Looking at the final plans for St Paul’s Cathedral, he saw his dream vision for the cathedral had been brutally altered.

Wren wanted to punctuate the London skyline with statues dotted along the parapet of St Paul’s. Instead, the Church Commissioners overruled him and put in a stone balustrade – pointless, because no visitors would ever go up there and need to be protected from a fall. You can just make out the balustrade in the picture of St Paul’s on the opposite page.

As Wren later mournfully said of the balustrade, some people, ‘like ladies, think nothing well without an edging’.

Britain’s greatest architect had gone out of fashion by the time he died, aged 90, on 8th March 1723. Wren’s baroque had been eclipsed by Palladianism –thanks to George I’s accession in 1714, the publication of Vitruvius Britannicus, the Palladian Bible, by Colen Campbell, in 1715, and Giacomo Leoni’s first English translation – The Four Books of Architecture – of Andrea Palladio, also in 1715.

Wren had been Surveyor of the King’s Works for almost half a century, since 1669. But in 1718 he was brutally replaced by a Palladian architect, William Benson, 50 years Wren’s junior.

Benson built handsome Wilbury House, Wiltshire, for himself, and the Kensington Palace state rooms. But otherwise he was a disaster, lasting only 15 months in the job, sacking capable employees and falsely claiming the House of Lords was about to collapse.

So Wren’s epitaph on his tombstone in St Paul’s – ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice’ (‘If you seek his monument, look around’) – is only partly true. The cathedral isn’t quite as Wren envisaged it.

Not only was that horrible ‘edging’ added. Wren couldn’t have wrought-iron railings outside the cathedral. The Commissioners insisted on cast iron.

The Commissioners even quibbled

over his fee. They persuaded Parliament to delay half Wren’s payment until the building was complete. Only after much argument did he finally get his money.

Still Wren didn’t give in to bitterness. He retired in 1718, aged 86, to Hampton Court. According to his son, he spent his last years in ‘Contemplation and studies, and principally in the Consolation of the holy Scriptures; cheerful in Solitude and as well pleased to die in the Shade as in the Light’.

Ninety was then a great age for anyone to die. Wren was the first architect to build a cathedral within his own lifetime. Previous cathedrals had taken centuries.

Still, for all the nastiness of his treatment at the end of his career, Wren had been in style for an astonishingly long time.

It helped that he’d really created that style – Anglo-French-Italian baroque – from the 1660s onwards.

When it comes to classical architecture, be wary of praising any British architect ahead of, say, Michelangelo, Bernini or Borromini. As John Betjeman put it, ‘Be careful before you call Weymouth the Naples of Dorset. How many Italians call Naples the Weymouth of Campania?’

But Wren – and Inigo Jones – do rank with the best Italian architects. Jones, 50 years Wren’s senior, was the first British architect to absorb the rules of classical architecture and invent a correct British form of classicism. He toured Italy with the Earl of Arundel in 1613.

His sketchbook survives, as does his copy of Palladio’s I Quattro libri dell’architettura (1570). The copy, at Worcester College, Oxford, is covered with Jones’s notes and measurements of ancient and Renaissance buildings.

Before Jones and Wren, British architecture had been lagging half a century behind the Continent.

Wren closed the gap. He met the sublime sculptor and baroque architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini in Paris. Wren said, ‘Bernini’s design for the Louvre I would have given my skin for.’

As well as creating an understated

British baroque, Wren also produced his own type of Gothic. When Wren was born, in 1632, Inigo Jones’s classical buildings were all the rage. But classicism was a new phenomenon.

The young Christopher Wren was surrounded by Gothic buildings as an undergraduate at Wadham College, Oxford, and a graduate at All Souls’ College, Oxford, still the ultimate brainbox college today.

Wren returned to Oxford to build the Sheldonian Theatre – a hybrid of ancient Roman classical theatre with an avantgarde flat roof, showing his engineering skill. And he also built the majestic gatehouse at Christ Church, Tom Tower, a mixture of fashionable classicism and the Gothic style in which the college had been built over a century earlier.

Wren was blessed in his timing. He launched his career just after the Civil War, when few important building projects could be designed. And the tragedy of the Great Fire of London gave him the best rebuilding commission any British architect has ever had: for St Paul’s and 51 City Churches.

Cometh the hour, cometh Sir Christopher Wren.

See opposite for Harry Mount’s Oldie Walking Tour of Wren’s London. A Wren debate – with Griff Rhys Jones, Anna Keay, John Goodall and Harry Mount – is at St Mary Abchurch, 9th February, 6pm. Tickets at wren300.org

When Christopher Wren died 300 years ago, his sublime style had gone out of fashion. He wasn’t forgotten for long, says

British baroque: Wren’s St Mary Abchurch

Joy of fairy godmothers

Why are godparents out of fashion? They are a delightful – and mischievous – bonus for children. By Valerie Grove

Dame Carmen Callil’s recent funeral was, appropriately for the founder of feminist publisher Virago, a thoroughly feminist service.

It was conducted by the Rev MarieElsa Bragg, with Carmen’s goddaughters among the coffin-bearers.

Afterwards, my son – her godson – sent me an email. He’d listened to the eulogies, watched Carmen on video, and now he kicked himself that he hadn’t got to know her better.

When Oliver was born in 1983, one godfather (publisher Duff Hart-Davis, who later taught him to shoot a rabbit) sent him a case of port. The other godfather, Sunday Telegraph and Oldie journalist Oliver Pritchett, sent shares in Kodak – a good joke, anticipating a spike in family snap-taking.

‘I shall be,’ promised Carmen on a scrawly postcard, ‘the best godmother ever.’

And she might have been, Oliver realises: ‘You couldn’t have known, when I was born, that Carmen was just my type, as I now know: ferocious, funny, fiery and entertaining. I will have to live with the regret of never having taken her out to lunch.’

Oh dear: I should have organised this. Cricket-mad Carmen sent him a set of Edwardian cricket cards when he was 12 and spending his Saturday mornings in the nets at Lord’s. Yet Carmen, a member of MCC, never took him to a Test match. And he never took her anywhere.

‘Perhaps,’ Oliver added, ‘godparents should be given to children when they come of age, conscientious enough to make a relationship…’

Perhaps he’s right. We did have some jolly godparents’ parties, at first, with the infants on parade. Now seven of the honoured 12 are sadly missed: dead, alas, or in a cloud of unknowing.

The late Angus McGill – an Evening Standard columnist, a family best friend, humourist, game for anything from roller-skating to barn dancing – was

ideal for our first-born, Lucy, who took to him at once.

Bestowing godparenthood is part of the fun when you start a family. The choice of godparents is arbitrary – a not-necessarily-religious pledge of future friendship, often embracing the child-free and fun-loving. Brief encounters around the time of the birth play their part. Not many of the chosen refuse the honour. Wrong choices are quickly obvious.

Today, godparents are sadly out of fashion, as christenings dwindle. Only five per cent of newborns in London are baptised. Sometimes now there’s a ‘naming party’ – a picnic in the park, where carousing friends are appointed ‘oddparents’.

I’ve been a poor godmother to my niece/goddaughter, Alexandra, but I now turn to her for medical advice as she’s become a GP. I loved my own godfather, bachelor uncle Cecil, my father’s younger brother. The family black sheep, he introduced me to seedy dives and louche bars and, spluttering with loud guffaws and a 60-a-day smoker’s cough, the doggerel verse of William McGonagall.

Nicholas Coleridge, who wrote a splendid novel, Godchildren, about the six godchildren of a capricious tycoon, has collected seven godchildren himself.

‘It can be a close relationship, or it can be a damp squib,’ he says.

‘Ned Donovan [one of his godsons –son of Tessa Dahl] has just married the sister of the King of Jordan. But I suppose the most famous is the supermodel Cara Delevingne. The last time I was about to send her a birthday cheque – £50 or £100 – her agent told me not to bother. She’d never notice it among her millions.’

He’d just watched her new TV series, Planet Sex, in which Cara attends a masturbation class. ‘I have to say her godfather felt slightly queasy. It seemed a long way from the baptismal font.’

When he was chairman of the magazine empire Condé Nast, Coleridge found himself the go-to godfather for work-experience requests.

On a recent I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, panellists were asked for posh versions of popular film titles. The best was The Godfather … Got Me a Job in the Foreign Office.

I know a godfather of 12 who, defeated by remembering all their birthdays, takes the whole gang out to lunch every year on his birthday. Another has collected a harem of 15 honorary goddaughters, who in their twenties appointed themselves for platonic trysts across the world.

God-siblings can become a parallel network of family supporters. Last summer, my daughter Emma and her god-siblings gathered around the deathbed of their adored childless godmother, the storyteller Mary Medlicott, and recited a tribute in verse, To Mary.

The novelist Rachel Billington is a perfect godmother. She is too discreet to discuss her godson, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. But Boris’s mother named her first daughter (and Oldie pop columnist) Rachel Johnson after her –and so did the historian Linda Kelly, mother of Rachel Kelly. The two Rachels used to refer to their godmother (‘not unkindly’) as Big Rachel, and both became writers – whose bylines jostled together in a recent Oldie issue.

Oldie columnist Mary Kenny tells me Auberon Waugh reacted breezily to becoming godfather to her younger son, Edward, in 1978. ‘He came in jolly mood to the christening (by dear Monsignor Francis Bartlett, uncle to “Fat Lady” Jennifer Paterson), bringing Ed a christening mug and 12 silver Maria Theresa thalers,’ says Mary.

‘And Bron sent me a jokey message, saying, “Does this mean I’ll have to take him to a brothel in Paris when he’s 18?” ’

Valerie Grove is The Oldie’s radio critic

The Battle over the British Empire

In colonial debates, why do people ignore other empires?

david horspool

It is more than 60 years since Dean Acheson, the former US Secretary of State, told an audience at West Point Military Academy that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role’.

One role that we do seem to have embraced wholeheartedly since then is discussing that empire.

Much of that discussion turns on the question of whether the British Empire was a good thing or a bad thing. In Oxford, a project was set up called Ethics and Empire which, until recently, was notable mainly for the stink its very existence caused among fellow academics.

Some 170 of them signed a letter arguing that the project ‘obscures the complexities which scholars of empire have carefully unpacked over recent decades’.

This was a fair-enough plea to move beyond moral ‘cost-benefit analysis’ when discussing the British Empire. That said, the language of a recent, critical imperial history, Caroline Elkins’s Legacy of Violence, set out ‘monstrosities [that] inflicted untold suffering’. It is an example of a tendency not to want to cool the argumentative temperature on the other side, either.

A new book by the project leader, Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, will provide more fuel.

To add to the sense of embattlement, the book, after being commissioned by Bloomsbury and accepted, Biggar says, by his editor there as ‘a book of major importance’, was then removed from their list, and his contract cancelled. The book is being published by HarperCollins.

Historians used to shy away from moral judgements. For good reason: the past is complex, values change and, anyway, it’s not clear that moral certainty is useful for historical study. I know the

Holocaust was unmitigatedly bad, but would that certainty make me draw any more convincing conclusions about its origins, causes or course, or is it possible that concentrating on the moral dimension could lead me to overlook other crucial details?

Of course historians should have a moral compass, but concentrating too hard on it might make us miss the turns in the road.

I agree with Biggar that the British Empire needs to be put into context. So much of the debate over it takes place in a historical vacuum. Imperialism is remarkably old and remarkably widespread.

But, to read much of the discussion of the British version in newspapers, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a unique experiment in human history.

A walk through the British Museum, that great imperial treasure house, puts you right. It is a tour of empires, from the cylinder seals of the Akkadians and Assyrians, via Persian, Greek and Roman sculpture, the remains of Ashoka’s Buddhist Indian empire and the lacquer cups of the Han Chinese, to the booty of the ocean-going colonisers of the Americas and the Pacific.

Every continent inhabited by humans has witnessed or spawned empires.

For every advance these objects represent – the invention of writing, agricultural technologies, the bureaucratic state – they are testimony too to dominance, death and defeat; in other words, to winners and losers. To talk about the British Empire as if it

might be an exception to these rules seems hopelessly parochial. Naturally the British did things differently from other civilisations at other times. But they did not change those fundamental truths of human interaction. And it is not clear how putting different aspects of empire in the balance – positive (cricket! railways! the rule of law!) and negative (massacres, famines, the wholesale suspension of the rule of law) – helps.

In most cases, these empires were long enough ago or far enough away to enable us to look at them without feeling the need to pass moral judgement.

What would be the point in calling Ashurbanipal, Emperor of the Assyrians, a war criminal?

To know what kind of ruler he was and what kind of empire he presided over, it is important to recall his ruthlessness and violence, which included destroying rivals’ religious sites as well as killing their leaders. But giving a moral verdict on the empire of Ashurbanipal, which perished shortly after his death in the seventh century BC, seems absurd.

Time will eventually allow the same critical distance from the British Empire. But, for the descendants of the colonised, wherever they live, it hasn’t yet passed from memory.

The journalist Sathnam Sanghera’s book Empireland was partly motivated by that sense of personal connection, but commendably also by the sense that the British have ignored their imperial history.

If we do feel the need to make moral judgements, it’s better not to do so from a position of ignorance.

Rue Britannia

Town Mouse

Who wants to be a millionaire? I do

tom hodgkinson

insurance. He enjoys what you might call a traditional marriage, whereby he earns a healthy crust brokering insurance policies for warships in Ukraine, while Mrs Vole does everything else.

‘Mrs Vole never asks me to do shopping,’ he says. ‘That’s her department.’

Another friend, Mr Vulture, who makes vast sums in mergers and acquisitions, also says it simply would not occur to his wife to burden him with a shopping list, following a day of his doing stressful multimillion-dollar deals. It’s the opposite. She enjoys easing his burdens, not adding to them.

When he walks through the front door, she says, ‘You look tired. How about a gin and tonic?’

Then the penny dropped. If you’re a freelance creative type, who doesn’t earn much money and apparently loafs around all day enjoying life, which is the case with Mr Squirrel and me, then your partner correctly realises you can easily pop in to the bakery as you go about your daily business.

It’s distinctly unonerous by comparison with the daily business of Mr Vole and Mr Vulture, who are doing Very Important Work.

It’s a fairly regular occurrence.

Soon after I’ve left the house, whether walking or bicycling, my phone will ping and a text message will arrive from Mrs Mouse containing some sort of command.

Looking back over the texts from the last few months is a bit like reading a cryptic diary. You try to remember what on earth was going on at the time.

Recent examples include this moving and poetic line:

‘I have a craving for Baileys.’

I happily acceded to this instruction and stopped at the Tesco Metro on Uxbridge Road to fulfil it.

There was also this more frugal request:

‘When you come home, would you bring me a bit of bread?’

Another text, if seen by a passing spy, might indicate that we mice are living at a highly luxurious level.

‘Remember cigars.’

Still, this was closely followed by:

‘And get butter.’

In fact, the cigars were a house present for a friend in the country we were off to visit. Mrs Mouse and I do not spend every evening luxuriating in the waft of a Cuban Montecristo, I promise you.

What a casual observer would make of the following I dread to think:

‘Bring back the plastic bag of Tupperware and also the milk jars.’

Sometimes, if I stay at home, I’ll also be pinged little jobs.

‘I’ve left my purse at home. Can you see it? I need my joint card CVC.’

I’m not alone in this. It seems fairly common for wives (and husbands) of all genders to text husbands (and wives) with these requests. One partner takes it upon themselves to control domestic affairs. The other submits.

After I played tennis the other day with Mr Squirrel, Mrs Mouse texted me with this (it was just before Christmas):

‘Could you bring back some pound coins for the Christmas pudding? Change some money at the café or somewhere?

‘And a can of Coca-Cola to clean them in.’

When the text arrived, Mr Squirrel groaned in recognition.

‘That happens to me all the time,’ he said. ‘I’ve barely left the house when the orders start pouring in.’

Looking back, I can see the logic. I was happily playing tennis with Mr Squirrel, having a lovely time, with not a care on the world, while Mrs Mouse was slaving away in a hot kitchen making a Christmas pudding, working for her family. It would naturally occur to her to spread the labour and delegate tasks.

I was keen to discover how widespread this phenomenon is. I questioned Mr Vole, my friend who works in marine

How I crave to live like one of these old-fashioned alpha males, the paterfamilias of yesteryear, who had only one job to do – earn money.

That’s it. They’ve never changed a nappy, cooked a meal, hung out the laundry, cleaned the floor, changed the sheets or been texted a shopping list on their way home from the office.

Their wives fuss around them, making sure they’re happy, bringing them a beer, ironing their shirts and sewing Cash’s woven name tapes into the clothes of their offspring.

Perhaps we slackers had more peace in the olden days, before the invention of the internet and mobile phones. Back then, we could walk out of the house and go and fall asleep on a bench or retire to the pub for a quiet pint, certain of complete peace.

Still, let’s not get too misty-eyed. My own baby-boomer parents were fairly progressive. My mother made huge efforts to prevent my dad from slacking off, and that was before the invention of the mobile phone.

On a Saturday morning, she would present him with a list titled Mousie’s Jobs. It included things like driving to the dump, replacing light bulbs, fixing shelves and taking the kids to the park. She used to boast to friends that she had him ‘well-trained’, like a household slave in ancient Greece. Like father, like son.

Country Mouse

Riviera. But, even this far away from London, there are enough one-percenters to create a booming business.

Is it a crime now to be aspirational? The Tories are doing their best by overtaxing us to kill ambition. But mine is to own my own detached stone house in Dorset in my eventide years.

It was nice to get into our Airbnb property. At home, every door has swollen in the rain and our carpenter assured us with typical Wiltshire logic that the best way to deal with doors that won’t open or close is do nothing. ‘Don’t shave them or sand them down – just wait until they dry out.’

Wiltshire is a huge county, and the part of it that lies south of the notorious A303, with its famous bottlenecks, resembles Dorset.

Suddenly, streetlights and UPVC windows become rarities and noble trees like Atlas cedar, Douglas fir and Wellingtonia dot the Elysian Fields.

I have a thing about Dorset. I think it might suit me better than Wiltshire. H J Massingham, the expert on England’s downland, claimed the Dorset Downs ‘give a warmer welcome than those of Wilts’ – maybe because they’re just that bit further from London.

Our older friend Anne believes that you need to be at least 100 miles from London for a place to have its own atmosphere, without the blight of excess weekenders importing their own atmospheres.

Recently driving through Dorset’s untamed and unmanicured Cranborne Chase, I observed fallen trees, left in situ to nourish the landscape, in contrast to what happens in other counties, where posses of under-gardeners will instantly descend to chainsaw them into discs for the Big House.

Behold the Boastagram pages of architectural and interior designer Ben Pentreath featuring his own Dorset idyll, which he clearly favours above all the other landscapes of perfection he posts from his globetrotting lifestyle. What a work/life balance.

I sigh heavily when I see photographs of gardener Anna Pavord’s 18-acre Dorset arcadia. She too once lived in Wiltshire. It would have suited me to have been born in Dorset 50 years earlier than I was. Then I could have made pilgrimages to the home of the late environmentalist Kenneth Allsop, to Chideock to meet writer brothers John, Llewelyn and Theodore Powys, or supreme woodengraver Reynolds Stone, who designed

the coat of arms on our UK passports –underappreciated names now but giants of their time.

A huge number of Dorset houses are made of stone – not brick like my own squat dwelling in Wiltshire. The county has a generous stock of the prettiest houses England can offer. None more so than the silvery 1633 Stafford House near Dorchester which glints in the sunshine and is the seat of Lady and Lord Fellowes of Downton. Magnanimous hosts, and patrons to resting actors and artists, the Felloweses allegedly let no man be turned away –not even distressed gentlefolk like me.

Mary was keen to crack the whip over my commission to produce nine illustrations for a forthcoming book. She therefore wanted to get me away from my ‘garden’. Some artists will work only to a deadline. So, to avoid wasting time packing and assembling documents – a well-known displacement activity among creatives – she booked an Airbnb, exactly one hour south of our cottage, one mile from the Dorset border, and a stone’s throw from the agreeable hostelry the Beckford Arms with its roaring log fires and locally sourced ingredients.

Even in lashing rain in the bleakest, most stuttering days of the forthcoming agricultural year, we were advised to book. This is Wiltshire, not the Italian

The Airbnb superhost turned out to be the son of Reynolds Stone. He told me that Reynolds, who grew up at Eton, where his father and grandfather were masters, yearned, after childhood visits to Dorset, to live there permanently. He succeeded, buying the Georgian Old Rectory at Litton Cheney in 1953, for £8,000. A thickly wooded five acres had a wild romantic atmosphere, animated by crystal-clear springs that burst from fern-fringed hollows in the hillside.

Stone found all the spiritual nourishment he needed in his own immediate parish. He shunned London and abroad as well as shunning modernism, and instead embraced the English pastoral tradition.

Parish is a bond word: a covenant with place. It requires courage to be parochial, according to Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, as the word has a painful double edge, epitomising insularity and selfcontainment. Stone developed a local attachment, but he was not a ‘parochial’ artist any more than Samuel Palmer was.

We have been 30 years in Wiltshire and, as I say to Mary, ‘It’s time to let someone else take on the challenge of a derelict property – let’s go for a stonebuilt gatehouse on the edge of a Dorset estate. Then there would be someone to keep an eye on us when we have falls.’

‘I’d love you to move to Dorset,’ she replied. ‘But I’m very happy here – so I won’t be joining you.’

When a man is tired of Wiltshire... giles wood

‘I’m not too keen on this finger food...’

The human right to smoke

Each time I take my monthly Aer Lingus flight between Gatwick and Dublin, I buy a carton of Silk Cut cigarettes for a dear family member who enjoys the odd few fags. As Ireland is in the EU and Britain is not, duty-free purchases are on sale – so the gaspers are cheaper.

But when the next Labour government arrives – and there will very likely be one next year –cigarettes will be en route to prohibition, with a view to a total ban within six

Do I feel guilty buying these ciggies, complete with their graphic photographs of diseased organs and ghastly afflictions caused by smoking?

No. I’m acquiring this tobacco product for someone mature enough to make her own decisions, who moderates her smoking sensibly and with consideration to others.

Hasn’t the universal cry of feminism for the last 40 years been about women being free to choose what they do with their own bodies? Isn’t the ongoing mantra all about ‘consent’? So if individuals ‘consent’ to smoke cigarettes, why should the Government restrain them?

Ah, but I am told by the New Puritans, cigarettes harm other people, and smoking-related diseases place a burden on the National Health Service. But cigarette taxes also contribute hugely to the national exchequer (not, admittedly, when you’re dodging the said levies on a duty-free flight). And if smokers do die earlier, then they are relieving the NHS of the long-time care of the infirm old.

We of a certain vintage have known many contemporaries who have been felled by dementia, strokes, pancreatic

cancer, ovarian cancer, Parkinson’s, heart attacks, brain tumours and more, who never put a cigarette near their lips. As Oldie founding father Richard Ingrams has written, you have to die of something.

Yes, we’re all aware ciggies are bad for your health, although, in the past, they’ve often been seen as beneficial for social life, camaraderie and sharing a moment together. I don’t actually recommend taking up the old coffin nails, but it would be intolerably bossy to ban them.

The obituary can be a fine way to understand European history, as evidenced by the obits of Maximilian, Margrave of Baden, 89, a German aristo who was Prince Philip’s first cousin. His mother, Princess Theodora, was Philip’s sister.

The German cousins were banned from the 1947 royal wedding on account of wartime sensibilities, but later Theodora became Elizabeth’s favourite sister-in-law.

Like others of his ilk, Max von Baden fell on (relatively) hard times and had to sell the exquisite contents of his BadenBaden castle. But he turned to cultivating his vineyards, which dated from 1366, and produced a ‘fine white Riesling’. A civilised vocation!

There are two new road signs at the exit from Dover docks – one on the highway towards the A2, the other on the stretch towards the A20 – saying ‘Welcome to England’, accompanied by a single Tudor-rose design.

Is this a warm touristy welcome? Is it suggesting that people might not know that, after crossing the Channel, they are now in England? Is it a sly hint to distinguish England from Scotland or Wales? Is it a retreat from the imperialist history perhaps more indicated by ‘Great Britain’?

Since poetry alludes more usually to

England than to Britain – as in ‘Oh, to be in England/Now that April’s there?’ – is it just more poetic?

The Government (and maybe most people) believe that Northern Ireland would be better off if the schools were not segregated between Catholics and Protestants – as 90 per cent are.

The snag is that these religiously segregated schools are often rather good. Three Catholic schools – St Mary’s Grammar in Magherafelt, Co Derry, Aquinas Diocesan School and Our Lady and St Patrick’s College, both in Belfast – emerged as the top-performing schools of 1,600 surveyed in the UK.

Understandably, parents want to keep sending their kids to these academically outstanding schools. It helps, too, that Northern Ireland retained its grammar schools.

I also wonder if faith segregation isn’t sometimes a spur to competitive excellence. It’s said that a famous nun in Northern Ireland, invoking the dark humour of Belfast, used to say to her girls, ‘There’ll be murder if those Protestant boys [in the nearby competing academy] get better A-level grades!’

In an ideal world, everyone should learn in an atmosphere of peace, love and inclusion of all. But I’m not sure that most parents (or grandparents) prioritise such an ideal over the benefits of their poppets’ education.

Phew! It seems I’m in the clear with Prince Harry, who accuses media scribes of persecuting his mother.

Princess Diana said to Max Hastings at the Daily Telegraph, ‘Why can’t you write nice things about me, like Mary Kenny does?’

I had rather taken Di’s side in my 1990s Daily Mail dispatches, especially after she told me she’d really like to have been a nurse. I thought that a sweet Florence Nightingale aspiration.

As Richard Ingrams said, you have to die of something.

By Mary Kenny

The Savile Row of Cleethorpes has lost its charm

My shopping trip from Hell – in Mother’s jogging trousers

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 had noticed my fugue state.

She was not wrong. It’s because I’ve outgrown my remaining trouser waists. So I flop around in a tartan dressing gown, sighing a lot.

For my brief sorties to the shops, she lends me her own very elasticated, very forgiving jogging trousers. It’s a bit rich. She has never jogged – or forgiven anyone.

Last week, she said, ‘I appreciate the vogue is for January to be dry or meatless – Lent for non-believers. But rather than thinking of one thing to give up, you spent the whole of January giving up, full stop.’

So I went for the first time to a shop specialising in trouser wear for the BMI-challenged: BIG BOY PANTS.

It wasn’t Savile Row. The Australian shop assistant didn’t so much snigger as laugh openly in my face. At one moment, he had to hang on to his counter to keep upright after the ‘mirth bomb’ ignited by my presence exploded.

Between joyous tears, he explained, ‘You’re the shortest customer we’ve ever had. You look like a grass snake who’s swallowed a tortoise.’

Much as I admire a simile in the morning, he added injury to insult by creasing up at my waist size.

‘It’s gold dust,’ he said. ‘You must come back next month.’

I failed to buy my joggers but remained in my mother’s. I had been transformed into a lumpen leisurewear sort, permanently parked up in my Parker Knoll. I wasn’t working from home – more weeping from home.

Mother suggested I make a February resolution list, to perk up my ideas for the rest of 2023. She gave me a notepad, with the first five resolutions already filled in, in capitals.

I spent most of the morning putting lines through ‘STOP BUYING EXOTIC

FLAVOURS OF JAM; FATHER’S PALATE CAN’T COPE’; ‘STOP SLOUCHING – YOU OF ALL GOD’S CREATURES NEED TO BE AS UPRIGHT AS YOU CAN’; ‘WASH UP LIKE BACH, NOT WAGNER – YOU BANG ABOUT LIKE A BIN MAN’.

My own efforts weren’t much better. Like the Booker Prize judges, I made an overlong longlist. I am such a contrary man, with both elitist and populist pulses in my cultural bloodstream. And so I’d written, ‘WATCH FEWER EPISODES OF REAL HOUSEWIVES’ and ‘WATCH MORE EPISODES OF REAL HOUSEWIVES’.

I decided to go with ‘watch more’. If Father can keep on loving Gilbert and Sullivan, I can keep on popping a few episodes of 40-plus ladies, giddy on afternoon martinis and sustaining endless shouting matches. I claim it’s lightweight but culturally significant.

The realness – and therefore value – of reality shows is often questioned by TV-critic puritans. But it seems bang-on for my family: families in a cycle of venomous criticism, falling out, falling back in, with occasional years of unresolved rifts.

Later in the week, I had confirmation that life is the same all over.

I waddled to my corner coffee shop.

On the way, I encountered a Cleethorpes woman, with a knitted lilac hat and one too many miniature poodles. Her tan comprised solely head-to-toe nicotine staining.

She approached me in the street and – believing me to move in more rarefied circles than I do – said, ‘If you see Queen Camilla, tell her not to worry. We had trouble in our family. Ended up with him and his wife moving to Mirfield. Only comes back now at Christmas, and then won’t stay longer than one teapot and a toilet break. And all over who borrowed some patio furniture.’

I said I would pass it on.

This was what I needed, I thought: some air and to be among people other than my family.

But then, as we went our separate ways, she spoiled everything by yelling after me, ‘Why are you wearing women’s trousers, you fat sod?’

With my unfashionable eye, I’d wrongly thought they’d be taken for sexless salopettes.

I resolved not to speak to poodle ladies any more – and to go out in my mother’s trousers only under the cover of darkness.

I doubt whether anyone else shares these resolutions. Perhaps we aren’t all the bloody same.

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Ukrainians under siege – in our schools

Just before I got married, my soon-to-bemother-in-law gave her son some advice. ‘Whatever you do, always be kind to her,’ she said.

He reported this to me with tears of laughter. ‘Isn’t that the oddest thing you’ve ever heard?’ he asked.

It wasn’t, really. It was rather wise and very touching. It was his laughter at the very idea that stayed with me.

I was reminded of this on talking to the deputy head at a local school this week. I have some Ukrainians living with me and the older of the two children, a girl, had come to me with a problem.

It transpired that at the secondary school there was a culture of bullying the Ukrainian children. The locals (for want of a better word) were lying in wait for the Ukrainians and pretending to shoot them. They tripped them up, pushed them over, jeered at them and told them that the best Christmas present they could have would be all the Ukrainians’ being sent home. This had been going on for months.

Our little town has been fantastically hospitable to the refugees – we have taken in so many that we were given a royal visit of congratulation and encouragement – so it seemed not only

shocking but rather odd. How could so many parents be welcoming and so many children be foul?

The adult among my Ukrainian guests speaks very little English. So all conversations, however important, have to be with the daughter and I feel very much in loco parentis.

I rang the school and asked to speak to the person in charge of the welfare of the refugees. I left three messages, with no response, until I used the magic word ‘safeguarding’.

The deputy head was particularly horrified that the pupils had not gone to her because they felt it would make matters worse, and assured me that the school was full of ‘nice kids’.

Well, of course it is, but I was not concerned with the ‘nice kids’. I was interested in the brutes terrorising children who had already seen more

‘To tell the truth, all along I thought Noah was just one of those climatechange nuts’

horror than (please God) they ever will in a lifetime.

My own Ukrainian family comes from Bucha, and on arrival here they looked with wonder at the quietness of this town.

Finally, the teacher promised an assembly on ‘kindness’. I have watched so many children yawn their way through assemblies on kindness that I know how very little effect they have.

The problem is that everything has to be sugar-coated. Why can’t we sometimes go in at the dirty end and point out evil, rather than maundering on soppily about the good?

Ideally, I would give an assembly for all the children except the Ukrainians. I would show footage of bombed blocks of flats and exhausted soldiers. I would ask them to imagine the fear that you would never see your father or your home again.

I would shock them and I would shake them. I would not ask them to be kind. I would educate them.

I am convinced kindness would follow. Because, yes, most of these ‘kids’ are ‘nice’. They just need to be reminded that kindness does not always begin and end at home. It needs to be extended to the stranger every bit as much as to the friend.

Quite Interesting Things about … books

A single human being’s DNA contains as much information as 50 novels.

Bill Gates reads 50 books a year.

Ten per cent of Britons do not own a single book. Among 18-24-year-olds, it’s 20 per cent.

Google has a database of 25 million books that nobody is allowed to read.

Books banned in Texas prisons include Freakonomics, The Color Purple and

Monty Python’s Big Red Book, whereas Mein Kampf is on the approved list. About 4,000 books are written about the Holocaust each year.

The Iliad covers only four or ve days of the ten years of the Trojan War.

The Republic was Plato’s anti-democratic manifesto. The Domesday Book is full of people complaining.

In 2016, 181 books published in Britain had the word F*** in

the title: three times as many as in 2015.

In 2018, a librarian in Hong Kong was arrested for fraudulently reporting people’s library cards as lost, so they have would have to return books she wanted to read.

The word ‘she’ appears in The Hobbit only once.

When David Bowie was on tour, he took a mobile library of 1,500 books. Among his ‘100 most influential’ was The Beano.

The world’s rst physics textbook, written by Galileo and published in 1638, was

sold in Paris in 2017 for €727,919.

Colonel Gadda ’s favourite book was The Outsider by Colin Wilson.

Many medieval texts come down to us only in fragments, with the pages used as stu ing for the leather covers of later books.

JOHN LLOYD

222 QI Answers to Your Quite Ingenious Questions is out now

For more on QI, visit qi.com and, on Twitter, @qikipedia

My late cousin once looked up at her large and impressive Scottish baronial stronghold – with its turrets, spiral stone staircase, huge roof and windswept hall – and sighed, ‘There are times when I wish I lived in a cell.’

The maintenance of such a house is a permanent headache. Like many people at some point in their lives, I think she was longing for the freedom that is the consequence of the shedding of possessions. She was the most upright woman imaginable, but not religious. So I was surprised that she yearned for a cell. She must have been very hardpressed at the time.

Cells vary. Mine has a view of beech trees surrounding a wide, open field where hares hold boxing matches and dance. It is lovely and always a pleasure to get back to.

Not every cell is as delightful, but even the most rudimentary and least attractive is, for a Carmelite, ‘an enclosure within an enclosure, where, above all she may be alone with God’.

A monastic cell is supposed to be

Glut reaction

perfectly tidy, with nothing superfluous. Ideally it should be furnished with a bed, a locker, a plain table, a chair, a small bookcase and nothing else.

This starkness is very impressive, but isn’t something I can achieve for more than a day – partly because I was born untidy, and partly because I need the God-given pleasures of a few modest objects that please the eye and lead to prayer.

Advertising, of which there is a great deal too much, can lead to a feeling of revulsion towards glut. There comes a

point when simplicity is far more desirable than surplus.

In the Old Testament, a cell was a room, a storeroom or even a larder, which always faced away from the street – a private chamber guaranteeing absolute privacy. ‘Go into your rooms, my people, shut your doors behind you. Hide yourselves a little while until the wrath has passed.’ (Isaiah 26:20)

Hiding from God is an impossibility, as we know from Genesis onwards. Jesus’s stance could not be more different. He urges us to contact God via prayer, not to try to conceal ourselves.

In Matthew 6:6, a secluded room with a closed door is a place of intimacy with God. There is no wrath involved. Jesus says, ‘When you pray, go to your private room and, when you have shut your door, pray to your Father, who is in that secret place, and your Father, who sees all that is done will reward you.’

This advice is not just for Carmelites. It is for all Christians. It is the prelude to the ‘Our Father’, urging us to find not only time for God but also space.

Memorial Service

Martin Kenyon (1929-2022)

Martin Kenyon was a publisher, church governor and supporter of overseas students, a lifelong campaigner against apartheid and a feminist.

Kenyon achieved 15 minutes of fame in December 2020, when he drove himself to Guy’s Hospital to become one of the first people to be inoculated against COVID-19. He became a media sensation when he said he couldn’t park his car and it didn’t hurt at all – and asked Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain, ‘And who are you?’

In 1945, he was a King’s Scholar at Eton when he was chosen to show Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret around.

George VI was visiting the school to bestow a knighthood on the Provost, Henry Marten.

At school he made friends with future politicians Douglas Hurd and Jeremy Thorpe.

In Africa, he became director of the Overseas Students Trust, getting to know Bishop Trevor Huddleston and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He became godfather to their daughters. He also befriended Nelson Mandela.

Tutu’s daughter, the Rev Mpho Tutu van Furth, was Kenyon’s goddaughter. She was banned from conducting his funeral in Shropshire by the Bishop of Hereford on the grounds that she is married to a woman. The funeral was instead held in a marquee at the family home in Shropshire.

The Rev Mpho Tutu van Furth led the memorial service in Stockwell.

‘God accept our prayers,’ she said. ‘Send us tears in return.’

Martin’s daughters, Nina and Eliza, both said prayers.

‘God, thank you for Pa, for Martin, for his full and excellent life,’ said Eliza, a singer and voice coach. ‘Thank you for the rich web of connection he shared with so many humans.’

‘Open our eyes and hearts so that we may be able to discern your work in the universe and be able to see your features in every one of us,’ said Nina, a nurse and photographer, whose wedding was attended by Archbishop Tutu.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

Doctors at sea

work stop you seeing your GP

dr theodore dalrymple

My family doctor of 65 years ago, Dr S, remains my beau idéal of a GP.

He was like Jim Dale of Mrs Dale’s Diary (rather than Carry On actor Jim Dale, interviewed in this issue of The Oldie). He came to the house whenever he was called, always wore a dark suit and looked at you through gold-rimmed half-moon spectacles.

Nothing could escape his notice: diagnostic X-rays emanated from his wise eyes. You knew that you were safe and that nothing could go wrong. Indeed, nothing did go wrong.

Nowadays an appointment at a GP’s surgery is like the Victoria Cross – rarely conferred but much valued.

One feels almost privileged to be seen by what in Nigerian English would be called a whole doctor. If Heraclitus were alive today, he would not say that you cannot step into the same river twice: he would say you cannot see the same doctor twice.

Practices differ in this, though. When I tell people I have seen the same doctor three times in a year (for the same illness), many are incredulous.

‘How did you manage it?’ they ask.

It helped to present myself in person to the receptionists – always pleasant and helpful. It’s more difficult to obstruct someone standing in front of you. The telephonists, by contrast, are trained at the Lubyanka School of Telephony.

Why should general practice have turned into such a nightmare for so many patients?

Partly it’s because GPs have so much more they can (and must) do. Gone are the halcyon days of placebo and reassurance. Now GPs actually make diagnoses. And elderly patients cannot be fobbed off by being told that whatever they are complaining of is attributable to their age and nothing can be done about it. Doing something takes time.

A majority of GPs now work parttime. An elephant in the room, impermissible to mention in polite society, is the feminisation of the profession (leading to absences for maternity leave and childcare).

Another elephant is doctors’ wages. GPs can earn enough to live on part-time work, which doctors now prefer, given the working conditions.

The aim of medical administration is to prevent doctors from seeing patients. The consultants of one NHS trust were told not to waste their time seeing patients.

What is the poor patient to do when he or she cannot get to see a doctor, let alone his or her doctor? Self-diagnose with help from the internet and from the nearest pharmacy?

I have one rule for dealing with a bureaucracy (which is what medical care, like the police force, has become). Make it implicitly clear to bureaucrats it will be more trouble for them not to do what you want than for them to do it.

We live in an interregnum, at the end of which doctors will be increasingly redundant. Artificial intelligence, which is improving – or at least becoming more sophisticated – all the time, is already as good at giving advice based on questioning of patients as doctors are.

Technicians, acting under the direction of computers, will do the rest of whatever is needed.

We live, however, not in the future or in the past, but in the meantime. Unlike the health service, we must do our best.

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

Pray for a short sermon

SIR: Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s lovely article (January issue) about the merits of short sermons put me in mind of my excellent vicar when I lived in Lancashire. I once said to him that he never preached a boring sermon and asked how he managed to achieve this.

His response was that he worked by the following drill: ‘I stand up, I tell ’em what I’m going to tell ’em, I tell ’em and then I sit down. Five minutes max.’

It is a formula I have often wished his fellow clergy would follow. Yours faithfully, Jane Moth, Stone, Staffordshire

The fall of man

SIR: A conundrum for my fellow pedants. I see that, in the serious part of his amusing column in the January issue, Gyles Brandreth says he has ‘fallen over’ three times in the last three years.

I tell people I ‘had a fall’ in Naxos last May, damaging my shoulder. Gyles is 74. I am 83. At what point does ‘fell’ become the clinical and ominous ‘had a fall’? 75? Later?

Benedict Nightingale, London SW6

Too fat to donate my body

SIR: Re Stephen Halliday’s letter (January issue) about seeking a cheap

funeral by donating your body to medical science.

During her medical studies at Oxford, my daughter’s ‘team’ spent many months dissecting a corpse.

During this process, my daughter begged me not to donate my body to science.

Somewhat touched, I asked why.

As my BMI was over 32, her response was ‘because it wouldn’t be fair on the students to have to cut through all that fat’.

Regards, Keith Appleyard, West Wickham, London

Lefties left out

SIR: Good, fun 2023 calendar, but one event missing: Sunday 13th August is national and international Left-Handers Day. You may have known that – but we always get Left out.

Neil Harding, Worth Matravers, Dorset

I’m a Latin lover

SIR: As was the case for many a young state scholarship boy in the 1940s, needing to study Latin in order to go to Oxford to study modern history, the real joy and mystery of the Aeneid were not the words and the translation but the fantastic rhythm of the poetry and the impact it had on the simultaneous discovery of Shakespeare.

Having spent two years in Cyprus on National Service, giving almost no time at all to thinking about Latin, and being faced within months by the need, on return, to prove an ability to translate a chunk of Virgil under exam conditions, I found it was those rhythms clicking into place that did the trick.

They allowed me to leap back into a sense of which part I was faced with, and thereby to translate easily into the memory of what it was about.

Stop studying the classics? Sacrilege! Oliver Trigg, Ferring, West Sussex

My name’s Sir Michael Caine

SIR: How disrespectful of your organ to omit the ‘Sir’ of Sir Michael Caine’s name ‘The usual, sir?’

on the cover of issue 422, while adding a completely spurious one to the scatological antipodean Les Patterson. Yours faithfully, Chris Elliott, Southampton, Hampshire

Wise Sir Les Patterson

SIR: I have just read the article by Sir Les Patterson in the February 2023 issue and I have yet to stop laughing.

The style is so funny and educational in respect of Oz talk. Keep it up, Les –columns like this make The Oldie the best. Terry Knights, Stamford, Lincolnshire

British Marie Antoinette

SIR: In her television review (February issue), Frances Wilson compares the Duchess of Sussex to Marie Antoinette.

I believe she has got the wrong duchess. The Duchess of Cambridge is a closer parallel with the French princess. It is Kate who will, one day, ascend the throne alongside the King, as did Marie Antoinette.

Meanwhile the Duchess of Sussex will live safely in California, while snobbery transmutes into radical republicanism. Yours, Robert Pellegrinetti, London NW5

Death of chivalry

SIR: John Davie writes (Olden Life, February issue), ‘Remember Burke’s

‘I see you’ve been looking at work again on your porn computer’

words to the House of Commons on the death of Marie Antoinette: “I had thought ten thousand swords would have leaped from their scabbards. But the age of chivalry is dead, and that of sophisters, calculators and economists is upon us.” ’

The quotation is essentially correct, but it came not from a postmortem speech in the House of Commons, but from Burke’s book Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790: Marie Antoinette died on 16th October 1793. Burke may have spoken in the House of Commons on the death of the Queen, quoting from his book, but I can find no record of it.

Yours faithfully, J Alan Smith, Epping, Essex

Way forwards is backwards

SIR: ‘Almost nobody uses a landline any more,’ says Matthew Webster (Digital Life, February issue).

More fool those who don’t.

Calls received from a mobile are invariably less clear than those from landlines. I need hearing aids, which may worsen the problem, but if phoned from a mobile I usually ask the caller to ring off and use their landline. Far less frustration and ‘Please could you repeat that?’.

It’s the same problem with digital radio. Although better than it used to be, digital-radio speech is too often indistinct. FM radio is far clearer.

Technical progress is not always for the best.

Yours faithfully, Roger Backhouse, Upper Poppleton, York

Cape Town’s fans

SIR: When two carrier pigeons finally drop your magazine in the post box of my friend Anne, there is ululating from all of us Oldie fans here at the tip of Africa.

We wait impatiently in line to have our turn to read it. First, there is Anne, who was given this very generous subscription by her husband. She sends photos of some of the cartoons and puts sticky notes on certain pages lest a reader fail to notice. The anticipation is heightened!

Next the Benefactor, who sometimes has to go to the back of the queue, lest he be too slow. I am third in line, and spend the next few days reading aloud to the Dyslexic One at my side – and anyone else who will listen. Then Alex, Anne’s best friend.

Thereafter, I, as the Hoofmeisie, decide who is worthy of the privilege of borrowing it. There has to be a pledge to transport it always in a plastic sleeve. Recently someone left it in a guesthouse! The drama, the texts to the owner, the recrimination…

All to say thank you so very much for a generous feast of reading. I read – and often re-read – every article always, just for the joy of such fine writing and entertainment.

Sincerely, Noeleen Sparks, Cape Town, South Africa

Beethoven’s deafness

SIR: Regarding Beethoven’s hearing (Old Un’s Notes, February issue), many oldies will know there is a difference between hearing impairment and deafness. Beethoven was 27 when he began to suffer from severe tinnitus and loss of high frequencies.

It wasn’t until 20 years later that he became profoundly deaf and had to resort to hearing trumpets and notebooks to communicate with others. Yours truly,

John Hornsby, Prémilhat, France

Sweet Caroline

SIR: Reading the article by Caroline Flint in your December issue brought back memories of being pregnant 40 years ago this year. I was very lucky to be invited on to a scheme called ‘Know your midwife’, which was headed by the lovely Caroline at St George’s Hospital in Tooting.

Throughout my pregnancy, I was cared for by a small team of wonderful midwives, each hospital appointment was half an hour long, a team member was always available on the phone and labour held no fear as I knew I would be familiar with my midwife.

How grateful I was to be part of Caroline’s group of mums-to-be and how very different obstetrics in the NHS is now!

Jacki McGlinchey, Woking, Surrey

‘A few of us are going out later to pretend we’re having a good time, if you’d like to join us’

Kenneth Griffith

In 1982, just out of university, I was asked by a new magazine to interview the actor, author and documentarymaker Kenneth Griffith.

When I arrived at his large home in Islington, the fiery Welshman opened the door wearing nothing but a dressing gown. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said in a loud Pembrokeshire accent, ‘I’m a notorious heterosexual.’

He was. Married and divorced three times, involved in numerous relationships, the father of five children, he certainly did everything with a flamboyant passion.

We got on well and became good friends, but I was never an intimate, unlike the great Peter O’Toole. They were like brothers, and would refer to each other by their surnames even when together. I’d sometimes listen to long, intense phone conversations with Ken sitting next to me and O’Toole’s voice booming from the speaker.

He’d been close to Peter Sellers too, but always said that one of Sellers’s partners had made him end the friendship. I suppose I can see how having Peter Sellers and Griffith in the same room would leave very little space for anyone else.

He appeared in more than 80 films between the 1940s and ’80s, but his genuine talents were frequently

obscured by the roles he was given –occasionally splendid but too often virtual caricatures. Frankly, he resented it. He always used the word ‘player’ to describe his profession and thought –and I agreed – that he was as good as most, better than many.

He also bridled at the censorship he faced over some of his documentaries. He adopted causes, which were various, controversial and even contradictory: the Boer War and the cause of the Afrikaners; Israel and Zionism; India; and Irish republicanism. He once told me that the only politician he viscerally hated was loyalist firebrand Ian Paisley.

It was Ireland, and a documentary about Irish political and military leader Michael Collins, that led to a ban from ATV in 1973. It would take another 20 years for the BBC to air it. He’d show

people an enormous cigar in a glass box above the stairs and tell them, ‘It’s the only bloody thing that Lew Grade ever gave me!’

But he could be foolishly provocative too. ‘I kept describing her as a good wife,’ he told me of a young actress with whom he’d worked, emphasising the word ‘good.’ The woman was evidently not happy. Then he’d lament how roles became increasingly scarce as he entered his 70s.

We once strolled in St James’s Park together and he suddenly said, ‘You’re honoured, mate. For years I couldn’t come here, because it’s where I’d once go when I was rejected for acting roles. I’d sit on a bench and fall into depression.’

He enjoyed nothing more than holding court, arguing his position and delivering fierce monologues in character – I’ve seen him be Napoleon, Nehru and Ben-Gurion in the middle of crowded parties. Thing is, everybody was glued to the performance.

I’m not sure why he liked my company, but when in 1986 I told him that I’d met a woman in Canada and was going out there to marry, he hugged me, kissed me on both cheeks and said, ‘Be happy, you bastard, be happy.’ When he broke the hug I saw that there were tears in his eyes.’ I still miss him.

Reverend Michael Coren

I was a not-so-delightful deb

In 1964, debs were the ones who came out. They did it in Hermès headscarves and style. I came out in spots.

My acne defied all diets and remedies, including my disappointed mother’s anointing my face with Milton, last used to disinfect my nappies.

Disguised with make-up, back-combed and adorned with hairpieces, flouncy frocks and floral earrings, I remained repulsive. I hated

my pitted and volcanic reflection. Being told to smile and that an inferiority complex was conceitedness didn’t help. Nor did knowing that vast sums were being squandered on trying to give me a rollicking good time.

I was riddled with the guilt of ingratitude. Lingering and hoping someone would take me to supper after a cocktail party was useless. I was destined to leave alone to return tipsily to a packet of biscuits in my dismal room, on the top floor of the dismal Sesame Imperial and Pioneer Club in Mayfair.

Staying with friends was even lonelier. They did get asked out to dinner; I didn’t.

Waiting for the phone to ring was pointless after 7.30, and going alone to the cinema wasn’t done.

As the parties became more extravagant and grander, things got worse. Without a car, there was no escape from a dance in the country. I had to wait until whoever had driven me there was ready to leave – at dawn.

Without partners, I lurked in luxurious loos and the stateliest bushes, smoking, scowling and longing for home, while the bands played on … for ever.

I was desperate to dance, but, in those days, that required a man. Being taken to smooch in dark and sexy nightclubs was as hopeless

an aspiration as attempting to transform my cratered, full-moon face into a lookalike Jean Shrimpton by starvation and sucking in my cheeks. Then, in late summer, a miracle happened … I got glandular fever. At last, I had an honourable excuse to flee home to Scotland, with the additional, dubious kudos of having conceived – albeit immaculately – the kissing disease.

By Amanda Nicholson, Adstockfields, Bucks, who receives £50

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

Notorious heterosexual: Kenneth Griffith

The ghost in Harry’s machine

Who and what exactly am I reviewing here?

Apparently this book is ‘full of insight, revelation, self-examination and hardwon wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief’. It purports to be the memoirs of Prince Harry, but it is ghost-written by the Pulitzer-awardwinning writer J R Moehringer, a man well qualified to write about dysfunctional family relationships.

At the end of his own fine memoir, The Tender Bar, Moehringer acknowledges a number of friends who ‘spent hours confirming or correcting my memory, and helping me piece together long-ago conversations’.

In that book, he describes a scene when a ‘bull-necked, swag-bellied’ man in the bar, known as Smelly, came after him, grabbed his neck and all but strangled him: ‘I thought that Smelly might crumple my larynx and permanently damage my voice … He was a cross between Yosemite Sam and Son of Sam, and this, I was sure, would be my last thought ever, because Smelly was determined to kill me.’

But did he have time to think those thoughts as he was being strangled? No – it is a dramatic recreation of the incident years later and makes for gripping reading. It could be a novel.

Read the drug sequence pages in Harry’s book (pages 260-2) and you will see what I mean.

Moehringer also ghosted Open, the immensely popular memoirs of the tennis player Andre Agassi. Here we have the same technique: One-liners.

Reported dialogue; unspoken thoughts.

Sometimes in italics …

Moehringer’s trademark: Yep

It is the job of the ghost to extract facts from the ‘author’, especially an inarticulate one, and turn his outpourings into a book that justifies the many millions spent on it by the publisher. (I believe the publishers have to sell 1.7 million copies to make Spare commercially viable.)

Moehringer clearly had his work cut out with Prince Harry. The result echoes Kris Kristofferson’s The Pilgrim – ‘He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction…’ Contrast this well-crafted memoir, beautifully written, with the evasive splutterings of the real-life Prince Harry when confronted on TV by Messrs Bradby, Cooper, Strahan and Colbert.

If you are not convinced, try this line in which Harry explains a Page Three girl for the benefit of American readers. Does this sound like him? – ‘That was the accepted, misogynist, objectifying term for young, topless women featured each

day on page three of Rupert Murdoch’s the Sun.’ Where did that come from?

I enjoyed Cecil Beaton’s The Glass of Fashion (1954), but when he writes about a ‘celebrated Taoist dictum’ or ‘the golden age of Plato and Phidias’, that is not Cecil. That was his ghost, a somewhat humourless intellectual called Waldemar Hansen.

This book opens with a quote from William Faulkner. On page 13, Prince Harry admits he has no idea who Faulkner was. I now believe in ghosts.

There have of course been royal memoirs before. Those of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were considered controversial when published in the 1950s. Again beautifully ghosted, they told their stories as they saw things yet without attempting to undermine George VI or Elizabeth II. Other royal memoirs, such as those by the two Princess Alices (Athlone and Gloucester) and Princess Marie Louise, have been informative without being controversial.

Having been a ghost myself, I have considerable sympathy for Moehringer. One of my efforts was ‘by’ Alexis, Baron de Redé, who lived in self-imposed luxury in the Hotel Lambert in Paris. He had the gift of remaining silent in eight different languages, which presented a challenge.

Desperate to get the tone right, I asked

The ghost writer of Spare makes the Prince sound bright – and unpleasant. There are plenty of mistakes, too. By Hugo Vickers

him what he most hated, wondering if he might say President Bush or the Iraq War. He said, ‘It is the man who after six o’clock at night does not wear the white shirt. It is the man who when he crosses his legs, he exposes between the trousers and the socks some pink flesh.’

At that point, I knew how to write it. I asked him if he knew the Marquis de Cuevas. ‘Of courssse I did.’ So in went some pages on Cuevas, researched and written by me.

Etti Plesch, the Austro-Hungarian countess (whose memoirs I also ghosted), had six husbands by the age of 40. Why did she marry the first? ‘Ach! He was so good-looking.’ Why did she divorce him? ‘He drank.’ On to husband number two. ‘He was so good-looking … He drank’.

And so on. I had to fill in the gaps.

I mistrust this book. Prince Harry admits to a shaky memory, apparently too traumatised to recall anything much before his mother’s death. He acknowledges the ‘superb fact-checking’ of one Hilary McClellen – but no! She has allowed numerous howlers to slip through, causing me to wonder how much else Prince Harry has got wrong or simply cooked up to sell his book.

The Queen did not consign the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to a remote grave in the Frogmore burial ground (page 2). This trivialises the Queen and misunderstands her sympathy. She even paid the Duchess the signal honour of commanding flags to fly at half-mast on public buildings on the day of her funeral.

Prince Harry could not have been offered a place in the Royal Vault in

St George’s Chapel (page 5). The Royal Family did not get out of the car on the way back from Crathie Church on the Sunday Diana died to look at flowers (page 20). They did come out on Thursday 5th September.

He seems in a muddle about what flag was on his mother’s coffin (page 23) (well, OK). He does not descend from Henry VI (page 43). He wouldn’t have known about Snowdon’s vile notes to Princess Margaret (page 73) until that was revealed years later by Anne Glenconner. He was not called at school about the Queen Mother’s death (page 75): she died during school holidays on Easter Saturday. He was in Klosters. So that scene was invented.

The Queen was not at the pop concert when Brian May played (page 78). May played at the beginning. She arrived just before the end. The Queen did not go to the Guildhall for the Charles-Camilla civil wedding in 2005, but she was most certainly at the Service of Blessing (page 99). (He talks of standing near the altar. He was sitting next to his brother.)

Need I go on? Yes – a lie on page 337 or another muddle: Meghan could not have bought her father a first-class Air New Zealand ticket. They do not run first-class seats from Mexico.

People will read this, as they watched Netflix – to salivate over the bile he pours out against his family. Enough has been written about that. I took additional exception to his unforgivable description of dumping lovely Cressida Bonas (page 240), but then who will not be moved reading of his burgeoning love for Meghan Markle (page 265 passim)?

Sylvie Krin can retire at last.

There are more dangerous messages here. On TV, the Sussexes gave a platform to articulate activists such as David Olusoga and Afua Hirsch who dished it out big-time, slagging off the Commonwealth. Via Prince Harry, they reached whole new audiences.

There is a line that shows just how hypocritical this whole exercise is. Harry is in therapy (page 310). He writes, ‘I vented about my family. Pa and Willy. Camilla.’ He stops when he thinks passers-by can overhear the conversation. ‘If they ever knew. Prince Harry in there yapping about his family. His problems. Oh, the papers would have a field day.’ I rest my case.

One further point. Prince Harry bases a large part of his premise on the idea that the only thing the Royal Family care about is being on the front page of newspapers. The enormous success of the Queen and Prince Philip (and the quiet success of Princess Anne) is that they did not care a jot what people thought. They got on with the job.

No doubt Moehringer and his team of shades were well-paid for their ghosting. But, given he comes from a considerably less privileged background than Harry’s, I wonder where his sympathies ultimately lie, and whether he is proud to have played a part in such an unpleasant exercise.

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

Spare by Prince Harry (Bantam, £28)

Me.

Rushdie’s brave return

NICHOLAS LEZARD Victory City

By Salman Rushdie Jonathan Cape £20

Aged nine, Pampa Kampana watches her mother, and all the women of the tiny province where she was born, build a huge bonfire and walk ‘unflinchingly’ into the flames.

The reason is ostensibly a humiliating military defeat in a battle not significant enough to have a name. Afterwards, the young girl is possessed by the spirit of the goddess Pampa, the local name of Parvati, lover of Shiva. That is: Pampa’s words start coming out of her mouth; the child herself is detached from them, but she becomes a prophet and a miracleworker, and later a poet.

This book purports to be the rediscovered manuscript of the 24,000 verses she wrote about the founding of the city of Bisnaga, towards the end of her 250-year-long life.

Towards the end of the novel, she is blinded by the returning king; in his absence (more wars), Pampa had made the city wonderful. The king accuses her of plotting to overthrow him and rule in his place, permanently. Pampa, who learned immediately after her mother’s death there was nothing that men could do that women couldn’t do too, including rule, replies, ‘I will say only that it is a kind of derangement in the world where a mere accusation, supported by nothing, feels like a guilty verdict. That way, madness lies for us all.’

The figure of the beleaguered storyteller has featured large in Rushdie’s work ever since the fatwa, under whose malign shadow he has now worked for by far the larger part of his creative life. He has reacted to this barbaric edict not only with unbelievable courage but with a fierce determination not to be silenced.

In August last year, Rushdie was very nearly killed by a fanatic, unborn at the time the book that engendered the fatwa, The Satanic Verses, was published; it was reported that he could lose an eye.

Whether he has or not I do not know; neither do I know whether he wrote the passage about Pampa’s blinding before or after the incident. Knowing how long it takes for a book to reach print, and suspecting that one might feel disinclined to work after such a horrific assault, I would suspect that it came before.

In which case, we are very much in the realm of life imitating art; or, to put it

another way, of the word having power over the world.

It is the kind of thing one could expect to happen in … well, a Salman Rushdie story.

Rushdie has always placed the story as the whole point of narrative. The first book he wrote after the fatwa, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, goes in the guise of a children’s story about the poet Rashid, who loses the ability to tell them. ‘Rashid’ is a cognate of ‘Rushdie’. It’s not the only time he’s given a story-teller a similar name to his own.

There is a great moment in Martin Amis’s memoir, Experience, where Amis starts mocking Rushdie for his love of Samuel Beckett; and Rushdie ends up offering to fight Amis outside.

I am wholly with Rushdie on this, but I remember at the time thinking: what on earth does Rushdie, the flamboyant, outrageously inclusive, crammingeverything-in stylist have in common with Beckett, who strips everything to the bone? And then I remembered his hero Malone, who on his deathbed passes the time by telling himself stories.

Other Beckett characters do the same. Malone is somewhat disparaging of his own efforts (‘what tedium’), but the impulse is similar.

Victory City is both one story and also lots of stories. They are written in a way that will not come as a surprise to the reader of Rushdie although, unlike much of his work, this book is entirely set firmly in the past.

A character says in The Satanic Verses that ‘information got abolished sometime in the 20th century … since then, we’ve been living in a fairy story’, and the fairy-story element has been a constant throughout Rushdie’s writing life. If you are immersed in the tradition of the

Mahābhārata, then it will be much more familiar and less of a struggle – but maybe less of a wonder, too – to get through.

At one point towards the end, Pampa says, ‘Let’s go to the roof of the Elephant Stable,’ and her companion thinks, exasperatedly, ‘More elephants.’

And I kind of know how this companion felt.

Nicholas Lezard is author of It Gets

Worse: Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury

A thespaurus

ROBERT BATHURST

The English Actor: From Medieval to Modern

By Peter Ackroyd

Reaktion Books £20

Peter Ackroyd has given us another sweep through history, roaring through the centuries. This time, we learn about the origins of spoken performance in England and how the art of acting has developed.

He takes us from the sacred rituals and liturgical dramas of the 11th century, through the miracle plays, morality plays and mystery plays up to the 1560s and the emergence of professional actors who are ‘well arranged and openly speaking’ with a proficiency in ‘cunning, voice and person’, reaching into the present day.

The Englishness of this study is not examined deeply. There is mention in the prologue of the contrasting styles and approaches of English, American and European theatre.

The primary distinction, Ackroyd says, is that English actors do not like to be told what to do. They resist the auteur and any passive acceptance of the director as demiurge. English acting is rooted in the play instinct, he says, of make-believe, a belief in a different reality of which one is part.

Much of the book focuses on the lives of actors renowned in each new generation, their careers, achievements and rivalries. As one would expect from an Ackroyd history it also draws vividly on the social atmosphere of each succeeding era, the fashion, behaviour and style, and how these informed theatrical production and performance.

Ackroyd paints for us a huge historical canvas but there is, perhaps inevitably, a nagging void in our understanding of what qualities it takes to be a successful actor.

He attempts to explain this by

‘This is Colin. We met at life-drawing classes’

presenting all the major players of each era, the battles they fought and the parts for which they have been celebrated. Their technique is explored, their bravery and indomitability well described, but an analysis of that ephemeral quality that allows the actor to engage emotionally with an audience remains elusive and undefinable.

A study of the idolised actor David Garrick (1717-79) gives some clue as to why this should be. It was said that he could make others feel while himself remaining quite detached – ‘spellbinding on the boards but ordinary and unimpressive in life’.

Even today, we yearn to believe that the essential character of the actor is being expressed in their performance.

‘Perhaps it is true,’ says Ackroyd, ‘that at the centre of many great actors there lies a vacancy.’ Of Henry Irving, George Bernard Shaw said that if you looked closely at him, you would find that he has no face.

The great actor’s practical preparation for a part is well illustrated. Garrick carefully observed a man driven insane by grief and was said to have learned from what he saw how to act the king’s madness.

Edmund Kean attended a hanging and declared that, in his next performance, ‘I’ll imitate every muscle of that man’s countenance.’

Many actors resist articulating what it is that they do to engage an audience. Ralph Richardson deflected the question by saying, ‘Acting is merely the art of keeping a large number of people from coughing.’

Having described so well the developments and advances in theatre and performance over several centuries, the book becomes a litany of actors, resembling a dictionary of biography.

Ackroyd quotes critics (the 1960s and ’70s are heavy with the opinion of Kenneth Tynan) and also, enjoyably, displays some of his own passions. Peggy Ashcroft shines brightly in his estimation, and he posits that in 1930s theatre the true heart of the period lay with music-hall performers.

Actors from the late-20th century and more recent times are listed exhaustively in a hall of fame with little analysis of their work. Their position in contemporary culture is without question but their place in history is uncertain.

This knocks the book off balance but throws up some choice vignettes, such as Paul Scofield’s ability to get the audience ‘to enter the drama, not merely to observe it’ and Glenda Jackson’s acting

being ‘like stripped wood, with all the splinters on display’.

The book is colourfully informative about the bridge between the premodern and modern ages in acting, the Elizabethan period with its rapid expansion of theatres, actor management and, later, the aspirations of the acting profession to attain a position in society.

As we would expect from Ackroyd, there is a lot of entertainment and enjoyable, ornate characters. The hysterical popularity of child actor William Henry West Betty inspired Mrs Jordan to exclaim, ‘Oh for the days of King Herod!’ Top billing goes to Shakespearean actor Will Kemp for Morris dancing from London to Norwich and walking backwards to Berwick. It wasn’t acting but, then, what is?

Kill your darlings

TANYA GOLD Two Sisters

By Blake Morrison Borough Press £16.99

Blake Morrison may think he has written a memoir about his dead sisters but he has, unconsciously, written a book about himself.

Who are they? There is his younger sister, Gill, ‘the plump pink infant with golden curls the ballet dancer, pony girl blazered schoolkid, Bee Gees fan’, who became an alcoholic and later went blind.

There is Josie, his younger half-sister, the child of his doctor father (the subject of Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father?) and his mistress Beaty, who was brought up near her siblings in Yorkshire, though the matter was not spoken of.

‘We knew he loved us,’ says Morrison of his father, ‘but his love allowed no room.’

I think Gill, the reluctant subject of a memoir, would identify with this. Josie killed herself by overdosing on insulin. Gill killed herself by overdosing on alcohol. Two dead sisters. Isn’t that a book?

The most telling anecdote comes from childhood: Gill and Blake are getting on a boat. He makes it safely, but the boat pulls away and Gill is stranded between land and sea. She screams his name, but he does nothing. Morrison was ashamed of Gill then, and he is still ashamed.

The father was noisy and charismatic; the mother was shrivelled and compliant. Do their children re-enact this dynamic?

Perhaps, with the unacknowledged

sibling Josie, there wasn’t room for them all. Gill had to be made small, to disappear, and she complied. She went to London and worked as a seamstress, was caught stealing from her flatmates and came home to her father, who locked her in the cellar as punishment. She married a kind man, Wynn, had two children, and began her career of self-destruction, while her brother became a magpie.

The alcoholic memoir is a noble genre, but I’m not sure it has ever been done quite so ungenerously. The best is Candia McWilliam’s What to Look for in Winter – or, in fiction, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Simply put, Morrison doesn’t understand Gill and her desire to drink herself to death. For instance, he supplies a list of possible reasons for Gill’s condition but omits to mention that alcohol is addictive. He has no insights into her life at all: hence the boring digressions on Chekhov and Henry James.

So his only real function here is to stand around tutting while Gill performs various self-destructive acts that inconvenience him: ‘She’d had a knack of phoning at inconvenient moments.’

Gill emerges thinly from Morrison’s pen, which is telling in itself: alcoholics are vivid in life.

Of course, it is because he avoided her. ‘Why am I so cold that I prefer to spend my time writing about not seeing her rather than seeing her?’ he asks, but he doesn’t answer the question. So I will: he prefers to meet her on his own terms, in a book written when she is dead.

‘I never hated her,’ he insists, but he does despise her. ‘She didn’t go to plays even when her eyesight was good,’ he marvels. ‘She didn’t go to exhibitions, ditto. She didn’t go to concerts.’

He complains that she kept his

‘It’s Little Bear sexting again’

Robert Bathurst starred in Cold Feet

mother’s ring, which was promised to his wife, and that she was ‘canny’ enough to keep a valuable painting.

After she died, ‘It turned out that Gill had made a funeral plan,’ he writes, but ‘the plan didn’t amount to much’. What do we expect from ‘an under-achiever’?

But she was, at least, a full sister. When Josie dies, he quotes Voltaire. Gill gets Hamlet, while Morrison wonders if, with two sisters dead, he is like Ted Hughes.

One of her last acts, before she died of heart failure on the floor between the radiator and the bed, was to crawl to the fridge and stick her hand in a tub of margarine. It made an imprint. ‘I thought of a glass plaque with my handprint that had been made at some literary festival,’ he writes, ‘and which I kept on my windowsill at home. Would Wynn keep Jill’s handprint as a memorial? The margarines would go mouldy in time. He’d have to take a photo.’

I wonder if guilt drives him, but anger is the engine of this book, along with vanity and a terrible self-deception. ‘Her great dread was to be noticed,’ he writes, ‘to be categorised, patronised, marked out,’ and this, then, is his posthumous revenge. ‘I don’t want to rob her of her dignity,’ he adds.

It’s too late for that, of course, but the siblings are still eerily conjoined. In taking Gill’s dignity, he took his own.

Broadcaster’s news

CHRISTOPHER HOWSE Confessions: Life Re-examined

By Edward Stourton Doubleday £20

Three subjects once forbidden in dinner-party conversation dominate Edward Stourton’s memoir: sex, religion and politics.

A fourth – class, the snob factor – has been used against him in his career as an international correspondent and anchor of the Today programme.

As John Prescott, lapsing into lucidity, put it live on Today, ‘He’s descended from 19 barons,’ which is almost true. Certainly Stourton is aware of the mixture of ‘faith and snobbery’ that moulded him at the Benedictine public school of Ampleforth.

In this connection, a rare misapprehension escapes him: that Dom, the style by which Benedictine monks are addressed, is an acronym standing for

Domine Optime Maxime. Someone might have been pulling his leg, for it is no such thing, but a shortening of the Latin dominus

Recently an element of ‘awokening’ has stirred Stourton’s life. He first noticed it perhaps as the compassion taught by reporting on events. It is certainly no unreflective tribal pursuit.

Now 65, he has been living with prostate cancer for seven years. He expects to make it into his seventies but not his eighties. This lends seriousness to his self-examination, though its telling is through mostly ridiculous incidents.

Rich absurdity struck on Today when he was interviewing the French author Michel Houellebecq, who did not speak English ‘in the normal sense of the phrase’, giving monosyllabic answers to ever more prolix questions. Then his ready and unelaborated agreement that his latest book was ‘pornographic sometimes, yes’ left no way out but an early transfer to the sports news.

Early in his book, Stourton condemns St Augustine’s Confessions as a monument to ‘spiritual pride’, which makes his own title Confessions a bit of a hostage to fortune. But if he finds Augustine ‘very difficult to like’, Stourton, as millions of Today listeners know, is a sympathetic chap.

Part of his character that he reexamines is implicit conservatism. ‘What marked my childhood was not being posh or cosmopolitan,’ he writes. ‘It was the belief that the past had, on the whole, been better than the future was likely to be, and that its values should be honoured.’

But when Theresa May declared, ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere,’ he found his experience had been ‘precisely the reverse’.

Born in Lagos, he was once helped in later life getting a visa to cover the Nigerian elections by an official at the consulate in London putting down his race as ‘Black African’.

Glittering prizes had come to him at Cambridge (President of the Union, member of the Pitt Club). His broadcasting career throve early – and saw some early falls. By an irony, ‘being fired from Today gave me a higher profile than any other event of my career’.

A straw in the wind was catching sight of a document not addressed to him, about the Today rota: ‘If you need to fill a gap, try Stourton or Montague – they are cheaper than Humphrys or Naughtie.’

In 2018, Stourton was made to look again at memories of happy school years by an official report about sexual abuse at Ampleforth decades earlier. He recalls no open sexual misbehaviour as asserted in the report, but the landscape of schooldays, already stripped of silly Brideshead snobbery, was now covered by bitter ashes.

Stourton does not discuss the BBC’s own history of abuse, scandalously exemplified by Jimmy Savile’s career. That, to be fair, was not part of Stourton’s life story.

His own place in the Catholic Church was modified by his being divorced and remarried, and thus unable to receive Holy Communion. By another irony, success in presenting the Sunday

Tanya Gold is the Spectator’s food critic

‘Make yourself comfortable on my new decorative throw rocks’

programme meant that he lost the habit of going to Mass on Sunday mornings.

The TV programme Who Do You Think You Are? made a discovery the producer hoped would provoke an emotional response. A Lord Stourton in Elizabeth’s reign had put his name to the condemnation of Mary, Queen of Scots, to death – a betrayal of Catholic loyalties. Here was the very document.

‘Could I squeeze out a tear or two, or even a gasp of shock? I could not.’ It was centuries ago and the peer had confessed, with his own tears, as death approached, to plenty of other acts of betrayal.

The election of Pope Francis in 2013 has for Stourton meant ‘the return of cheerful Catholicism’. He and his wife have filled with books a house in France where he sits, happily writing.

Christopher Howse works for the Daily Telegraph

More propriety, vicar

REV PETER MULLEN Touching Cloth

By Rev Fergus Butler-Gallie Transworld £16.99

Touching Cloth is Butler-Gallie’s memoir of his first year, mainly in a Liverpool parish, after his ordination to the Anglican priesthood.

He writes like an overpraised teenager with breathless literary aspirations and determined to keep on saying, ‘Boo!’ to his maiden aunt.

His style is unusual, perhaps unique, and might be termed ecclesiasticalscatological; and for a parson, his vocabulary is rather unexpected, pickled with arse, arsehole shit, crap, pee, piss, pissheads, bastard, sod, wazz, f**k and f**ked.

He tells what I think is a joke, in which a nun says, ‘F**k off!’ and he even quotes his mother as having said ‘f**king’.

He recalls a bishop whose only advice to his ordinands the night before he lays hands on them is ‘Never enter a public lavatory while wearing a dog collar.’

It’s like Round the Horne, with Jules and Sandy, where one of them – usually Kenneth Williams – exclaims, ‘Ooh, you are bold!’

I get the sense that this is what Butler-Gallie would like us all to admire about him: such language, such a mucky mind – and I’m a clergyman, too!

But … behind the pretentious theatricality and the narcissistic posing, there are better things in this story. Throughout my priesthood, I have

endured the sham antique produced by the illiterate, tin-eared concocters of new liturgies. So I was cheered by Fergus’s saying, ‘When it comes to Common Worship – the Church of England’s famously complex and supposedly more accessible liturgy devised in 2000 – while I’m sure it does for some people, I’d rather praise God using a dishwasher manual.’

And he captures the effete, primping and preening of those priests in the Anglo-Catholic daisy chain ‘in outfits so extravagant they make Liberace look like an odd-job man’.

Bishops and that procession of cliché-mongers who turn up on Thought for the Day wax squeamish when it comes to Remembrance Sunday parades because these might seem ‘to glorify war’.

Fergus sees the point of these rites in allowing us to express our gratitude to people such as ‘… the veteran of Arnhem who had seen friends, barely older than boys, die in front of him and had willingly jumped out of an aeroplane on to a continent under the grip of Nazism to bring about its end’.

Now that is reassuring. But, a few pages on, in a discussion about what constitutes sanctity, we are back in Round the Horne with Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick: ‘Would a saint have accepted a fourth gin?’

Or we’re in the public lavatory again with that bishop and his advice to his ordinands: ‘Would a saint, as I did later on, jump the barriers to avoid paying 20p for a wazz at Euston?’

Come on, Fergus. You can do better than that! And, bless him, he does do better than that. There are stories here to

hint at what priesthood is at its core; about the meaning of sacramental living.

But sentimentality and what Dietrich Bonhoeffer described as ‘cheap grace’ trickle all down the next page: ‘Sharing memories inevitably mixes grief and joy.’

And – no substitute for pastoral care – there’s the psychobabble of ‘sharing’ and ‘coping mechanisms’.

But we come to Fergus’s epilogue – a reminder that only one letter separates bathos from pathos. His story does not end well.

After his initial post-ordination parish experience, Fergus sought a permanent, salaried post but, ‘In the Church’s own words, I had failed to find enough experience and so I am, I hope temporarily, leaving ministry.’

He is understandably bitter. ‘I’m filling in at a parish where there is no vicar, but I’m not considered up to scratch to take it on full time.’

Fergus’s bitterness was compounded by his treatment at the hands of ‘clerics who delighted in sidelining their juniors or volunteers, those who were sweetness and light to people’s faces, then dealt in calumnies behind their backs’.

As a priest who has more than once over these last 50 years got on the wrong side of bishops and other superfluous ecclesiastical hindrances, I know exactly the sort of treatment meted out to Fergus. And, for all his occasional childishness and temperamental silliness, I believe he has priestly qualities.

I hope he comes back soon.

Rev Peter Mullen was Rector of St Michael, Cornhill, in the City of London

‘Great-Grandad is typical of his generation. He never likes to talk about what he did in the war’

Censorship obliged creators to find a way to show, without showing, thus giving the viewers liberal range for their imaginations.

Janet Leigh on the shower scene in Pyscho

Happiness is a useless subject for a writer. Especially in English. Why do you think that is? English seems particularly suited to irony and sarcasm, to suggesting the emptiness of human hope and the futility of human illusions.

Frederic Raphael, The Glittering

Prizes

It is always a pleasure to see other people desperately coveting expensive items that one has not the faintest inclination to own oneself – new model cars, designer clothes, up-to-date holidays, costly lotions and so forth.

David Sexton

Any piece of human behaviour will seem absurd if described precisely enough.

Anthony Powell

If you were a farmer, your farm cart needed oak for the frame and ash for the spokes of the wheels. Your plough was hacked out of oak, except for the ploughshare. The cog wheels on your mill were cut from hornbeam. If you were a landlord, your carriage had panelling of cherrywood and perhaps a walnut inlay.

Thomas Pakenham on wood in 16th-century England

Art is elimination.

Rudyard Kipling

The ordinary ‘horseless carriage’ is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle. The Literary Digest on the future of the car, 14th October 1889

Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects they know about.

Robert Conquest

One study of psychiatric patients suggested there’s a total of 6,000 facial expressions; another conducted by a Dutch artist, by electrical stimulation of the facial muscles, discovered 4,096 in half an hour. Another study guesses at 10,000.

The Face: A Natural History by Daniel McNeill

My London is not your London, though everyone’s Washington DC is pretty much the same.

Paul Theroux

Millions to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.

Herman Mankiewicz, later the writer of Citizen Kane, on Hollywood – to screenwriter Ben Hecht, 1927

Men do great deeds because women are watching.

Friedrich Nietzsche

America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don’t think that way. We don’t think much at all, thank God. Start thinking and pretty soon you get ideas, and then you get idealism, and the next thing you know, you’ve got ideology, with millions dead in concentration camps and gulags. A fundamental American question is ‘What’s the big idea?’

P J O’Rourke

Seat-hoggers

Don’t you hate it when one person takes up two seats on public transport – one for themselves and the other for their luggage?

You politely ask them to remove their stuff so that you can sit down. They either fix you with an icy glare at your impertinence or inform you crossly that there are plenty of other seats

available – even when there aren’t.

If you insist on taking the seat next to them, they will make such a huge palaver about moving their stuff that you’re made to feel guilty for inconveniencing them so much.

Others will resort to extreme strategies to ensure nobody dares to sit next to them. They will deliberately choose an aisle seat so as to make it especially difficult for another person to clamber over, or they will ignore you by looking far into the distance, as if you don’t exist.

The mobile phone comes in handy to them here: they will get it out and embark on a long conversation, ensuring you remain ‘invisible’ to them.

Worst of all are two-seaters who beckon you with their finger to join them. This, they seem to hope, makes potential seat partners think

SMALL DELIGHTS

Getting your hand far enough round your back to get at that itch.

DAVID BYE,

BUDAPEST

Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

you are so mad that they quail at the prospect of taking up the other seat.

I am on a mission to combat this selfish, antisocial behaviour. At the risk of making myself mightily unpopular, I say loudly, ‘It’s one seat per person, you know.’ If they still refuse to move their bags, I say, ‘If you want your luggage to have a seat to itself, buy it a ticket.’

If they remain reluctant to move their baggage, I inform them in my best sarcastic tone that luggage racks are for luggage and the seats are for humans. Then I plonk myself down next to them, even if there are other free seats.

LIZ HODGKINSON

What a scream! Janet Leigh, Psycho (1960)

Time to pay for the ’s sidebar of shame

The success of Mail Online comes at a cost for the print version stephen glover

As someone who writes for the Daily Mail, I am constantly astonished by the number of people who believe that Mail Online is its digital incarnation.

It’s not true, I insist, sometimes quoting the opinion vouchsafed some years ago by the Mail’s then editor, Paul Dacre, that Mail Online is ‘a totally separate entity that has its own publisher, its own readership, different content and a very different world view’.

The Daily Mail doesn’t boast what has been nicknamed the ‘sidebar of shame’, with its fascination for showbiz figures, and its photos of scantily-clad ladies with ‘peachy bottoms’ and glimpses of ‘side boob’.

In comparison with Mail Online, the Daily Mail seems high-minded and almost prim, although there is admittedly some overlap in content.

It’s no good. People won’t be persuaded. All right, they say, there may be some differences between the print and the online paper, but they’re essentially the same beast.

This widespread perception doubtless explains why the Mail has experienced such difficulty in building up its paid-for digital version, Mail Plus, which is a faithful replica of the print edition.

Why would people pay for something that they (wrongly, as is happens) believe they can get free on Mail Online?

Some, of course, do pay, and largely as a result of heavy discounting the readership of Mail Plus has grown in recent months. But it is still less than a fifth the size of the paper’s daily average print sale of around 800,000. At the Times and the Telegraph, in stark contrast, digital sales dwarf print circulation by a factor of about four.

Although it sells more print copies than any other British paper, the Mail’s circulation is roughly a third of what it was 20 years ago. Print sales are practically certain to go on declining

because that is what is happening to newspapers everywhere.

The obvious danger for the Mail is that in ten years the circulation of the paper will have fallen further, while Mail Plus – on account of the effect of Mail Online – will be unable to make up the deficit.

In such a world, Mail Online would continue to be a commercial success, but the Daily Mail, and its culture and values, would be slowly shrivelling.

Maybe such an outcome is acceptable to Jonathan Rothermere (who with his family now owns all the shares in Daily Mail and General Trust). After all, Mail Online has been a phenomenal success, not just in Britain but in the United States and Australia.

Nor, despite the meretricious ‘sidebar of shame’, should one doubt the excellence of much of Mail Online’s reporting. Perhaps Rothermere would be perfectly happy if the website were the jewel in his crown in ten years’ time.

But there is another way – which is to make readers pay for Mail Online, and bring it subtly closer in tone and content to the Daily Mail. The immediate consequence would be a dramatic contraction of Mail Online’s audience, possibly by more than 90 per cent. But those who remained would pay, and Mail Online would no longer be dependent solely on advertising revenue.

One drawback to this idea (I should stress that these are my own thoughts, and I have no inside information) concerns America, where Mail Online is

going great guns. It is among the top ten most visited media websites in that country, and over the past year its audience is reckoned to have increased by 14 per cent in what is obviously a vast market.

Making readers pay to read Mail Online in the US would probably be an act of self-destruction. Almost all of them would migrate to other free websites. Britain is a different proposition, not least because here Mail Online is inhibiting the growth of a paid-for digital Daily Mail

It should be possible, though, to keep Mail Online free in America while charging readers in the UK. Those in this country who tried to gain access to the free US version could probably be blocked. The Daily Mail would be protected.

Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with this idea?

Last month, I suggested that Geordie Greig was making a late run to be editor of the Sunday Times, though Ben Taylor, its deputy editor, remained the favourite.

Taylor has since been confirmed as editor, while Greig has been appointed editor-in-chief of the online Independent by his friend –and controlling shareholder –Evgeny Lebedev.

Greig, who is a leftist Tory, will have his work cut out since the online Indy is probably to the left of the Guardian

I also mentioned the rumour that Greig had been part of a consortium interested in buying the Daily Telegraph. If that story was true, he has evidently decided that there are other fish to fry.

But I believe the Barclay family does want to sell the Telegraph. My money is on the German publisher Axel Springer, which was pipped by the Barclays when they bought the paper in 2004.

The sidebar of shame has ‘peachy bottoms’ and glimpses of ‘side boob’

FILM HARRY MOUNT BABYLON (18)

Babylon is supposed to show how morally corrupt Hollywood was in the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, it shows how out of touch modern Hollywood can be with the art of making good films.

At three hours and nine minutes, this is an appallingly self-indulgent, sprawling, baggy work by writer and director Damien Chazelle. It’s learnt none of the lessons – in glamour, wit, style and how to enthral an audience – that the best films have taught over the last century. Less is more, as the saying goes. More is much less, you’ll find, if you undergo the ordeal of a visit to Babylon

The film intends to expose the hypocrisy of Hollywood in the 1920s as the supposed ‘most magical place in the world’. That’s what the main character, Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt, still wonderfullooking at 59), calls it.

Conrad is a fading superstar, based on John Gilbert (1897-1936), Hollywood’s leading man whose career and life were cut short by the shift from silent movies to talkies, when Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer came out in 1927. The arrival of dialogue has already been told many

Arts

times – and more effectively – not least last year in Downton Abbey: A New Era

There’s another familiar story in Conrad’s being eclipsed by the new kid on the block: Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), the wisecracking, gorgeous actress, who can cry a single tear at will and do all the dirty dancing 1920s Hollywood can handle.

That’s the plot of A Star Is Born (2018) with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, itself a remake of A Star Is Born (1976) with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, a version of the 1954 film with Judy Garland and James Mason.

Don’t remake films unless you can improve them – which hasn’t happened here: the Judy Garland-James Mason version remains the best.

Babylon brings no improvements –only Grand Guignol debauchery, with shouted dialogue, endless sex and drugs, and dreary amounts of swearing.

‘Frankly, Scarlett, you’re a c**t,’ says Brad Pitt at one stage. Not funny. Not clever. And a childish attack on Clark Gable’s line in Gone with the Wind.

How strange it is that as human attention spans decrease, the length of Hollywood films increases. As does the length of scenes and individual shots.

The opening scene in Babylon, of a grotesque Hollywood orgy, lasts

32 minutes before we get to the relief of the opening credits.

The picaresque declines of Jack Conrad, Nellie LaRoy and film executive Manny Torres (a cipher played by Diego Calva) have no plot arc to them. The seedy episodes in their lives are unconnected. The end of the film bears no relation to the beginning. All the rules of tight scripts and structured plots Hollywood has learnt over the last century are ignored.

Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie are marvellous, though. Pitt in particular transcends the ages, despite his 21stcentury swearing, with the looks and demeanour of a thin Orson Welles and a doomed Rudolph Valentino. Tobey Maguire, too, provides a flash of macabre brilliance as James McKay, a debauched mobster.

But their talents are wasted, thanks to a dreadful script. This is an epic film with trivial lines.

The attempts at humour are woeful – Jack Conrad claiming to speak Italian when he can only recite menus (‘Tortellini con pesto’) is a stale gag.

There’s plenty of unfunny slapstick. The whole thing manages to be both frenetic and dull. At one moment, when Nellie LaRoy is losing her touch, she shoots the same scene eight times. We’re forced to watch all eight scenes.

The same self-indulgence cropped up in the 2019 Tarantino film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, also starring Robbie and Pitt; also full of long, boring scenes, lasting a bottom-numbing two hours and 41 minutes.

In Babylon, real-life characters such as Irving Thalberg, producer of A Night at the Opera (1935), and the doomed Fatty Arbuckle are dropped in – for no real purpose other than for Damien Chazelle to show he knows his Hollywood history.

At one point, there’s a clip of Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, singing the title song. It’s all innocence and beauty. Oh, for old Hollywood!

Hollywood woman: Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) in Babylon

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK NOISES OFF

Phoenix Theatre, until 11th March

In 1970, Michael Frayn wrote a play called The Two of Us, first performed by Lynn Redgrave and Richard Briers.

Watching it backstage one night, he found it a lot funnier than when he’d seen it from out front. This revelation prompted him to write a one-act play called Exits. The producer Michael Codron encouraged him to expand it, and the result was this perfect three-act farce.

Noises Off opened at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1982, starring Patricia Routledge and Paul Eddington. It was an instant hit, running for five years in the West End, and transferring to Broadway. It’s been revived countless times since then. New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich, aka ‘the butcher of Broadway’, called it ‘the funniest play written in my lifetime’. I wouldn’t disagree.

The plot follows the trials and tribulations of a rackety theatre company, on tour in the provinces, performing a corny sex comedy called Nothing On. It’s the sort of hackneyed romp in which, owing to a series of implausible mishaps, young women end up stripping down to their lingerie and middle-aged men inconveniently mislay their trousers.

Most backstage dramas tend to focus on the interludes between the onstage action – before the show, during the interval or after the curtain comes down. What makes Noises Off so engrossing is that Frayn manages to reveal the offstage lives of his actors while this play-within-a play is actually going on.

It’s a technical triumph requiring incredibly precise stagecraft. If only those master craftsmen, Terence Rattigan and Joe Orton, had lived to see it. They would have loved watching such a well-made play.

The first act covers a fractious dress rehearsal, in which the cast forget their lines, fluff their cues and lose their props and their tempers. Suave, lascivious director Lloyd Dallas (a suitably oily portrayal by Alexander Hanson) directs from the stalls, which draws the audience into the action. But what’s most remarkable is how well Frayn fleshes out his characters, even while they’re playing other characters in this cheesy play-within-a-play.

The second act is Frayn’s masterpiece. The country-house set from the first half is revolved, so we’re now backstage, watching these actors squabble in the wings as they make their entrances and exits.

Meanwhile, the play-within-a-play that we saw in Act One is proceeding, out of sight.

Because these actors are compelled to keep their voices down, much of this second act is almost mimed. It asks a lot of this seasoned cast, and they all rise to the challenge. Real-life director Lindsay Posner moves them around the stage at a terrific rate, like comic performers in a silent movie. It’s a masterclass in ensemble slapstick, like watching the Marx Brothers.

In the third act, the stage revolves again and we’re watching the performance, laughing and grimacing as absolutely everything goes wrong and the show descends into chaos. It’s marvellous entertainment, which reminds you that theatre should be fun, rather than a worthy, dutiful ordeal.

The performances are all first-rate. Matthew Kelly is delightful as drunken luvvie Selsdon Mowbray. Joseph Millson is hilarious as gormless leading man Garry Lejeune. And Felicity Kendal is almost unrecognisable as ageing actress Dotty Otley, playing doddery old cleaning lady Mrs Clackett.

Has Frayn’s script dated? Not really. The sort of saucy comedies he sends up are a lot less common nowadays, but anyone over 40 will surely be familiar with the territory. It made me rather nostalgic for plays like No Sex Please, We’re British. If anything, it has even more charm as a period piece.

And if you go along, be sure to buy a programme. You won’t find anything in it about Noises Off, but you will find plenty

about Nothing On, including some priceless cast biographies (‘While still at drama school, Gary Lejeune won the coveted Laetitia Daintyman Medal for Violence’).

There’s also an utterly impenetrable essay about the semantics of bedroom farce: ‘Attention has tended to centre on the metaphysical significance of mistaken identity and upon the social criticism implicit in the form’s groundbreaking exploration of crossdressing and transgender roleplaying.’ I couldn’t have put it better myself.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE

A reader named Michael W Caldon is, like me, driven to distraction by babyvoiced women talking in croaky voices about ‘bucks’ or ‘berks’, rather than ‘books’. Our torment reached its apogee with Broadcasting House, when Paddy O’Connell celebrated the boom independent bookshops currently enjoy. Tim O’Kelly, of One Tree Books in Petersfield, a community hub, recommended two books: 33 Meditations on Death: Notes from the Wrong End of Medicine by Dr David Jarrett and the novel Still Life by Sarah Winman.

Paddy’s other guest was a Book-Tokker – ‘Hi!’ – who shares her reading finds on TikTok: ‘So, yeh, absolutely, I mean, definitely,’ she had been in a bookshop recently, and bought a book. Which one? ‘It was What Lies Beyond the Veil.’ ‘And what does lie beyond the veil?’ asked Paddy.

What a farce! Mrs Clackett (Felicity Kendal) in Noises Off

‘Fairies,’ replied Faith. Her baby voice babbled on.

Paddy asked her age. (I expected the answer ‘I’m eight.’)

But ‘T’enty-three,’ she croaked –whereupon Paddy, OMG, invited her to read Tim O’Kelly’s recommended books ‘and come back and review them for us’. What a sadistic idea! Paddy knows the gaping gulf between his mature audience and the airy-fairy ‘fantasy romances’ favoured by infantile Gen Z, like the one above set in ‘the land of the Fae of Alfheimr’. I await the comical/tragical result.

The trailer for a Radio 4 programme called Playing the Prince promised that various Hamlets would talk about the great challenge of the role; the presenter would be a current aspiring Hamlet. No surprises when the presenter, Jade Anouka, said, ‘I don’t know if there’ve ever been any queer, black, female Hamlets like me, from south London.’

By chance I had seen Jade in Twelfth Night at the Globe – the production with a female, black Sir Toby Belch. She can act. And we’ve known for decades that to question gender-bent, colour-blind casting is forbidden. As the admired black Hamlet, Adrian Lester, says, ‘The emotions expressed in great writing belong to everybody.’

But I shan’t apologise for wishing that anyone playing the lead in any Shakespeare play should be able to sound the letter ‘t’. Glottal-stopped Hamlet is Hamle’. ‘The first time I saw Hamle’ I though’, “Wha’ a par’,” ’ said Jade.

We heard from perfectly RP-speaking Sam West and Derek Jacobi as well as Lester, and were told about the Red Book passed on from the best Hamlet of each generation (currently with Tom Hiddleston, although I would nominate Ralph Fiennes at Hackney Empire in 1995).

But – a big but – I believe Hamlet is best left to well-schooled chaps who can pronounce their ts. ‘Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you,’ as Hamlet advised the Players, ‘trippingly on the tongue.’ With lots of ts.

I had nightmares after seeing the film Tar, with Cate Blanchett as the lady maestro. But now we have a delightful heterosexual male maestro in Stephen Barlow, the composer and conductor, on a new podcast, Joanna and the Maestro, recorded with his wife, Joanna Lumley, in the music room in their garden.

‘I’m just Joanna, but he is the maestro,’ purrs Joanna. They talk and reminisce and she asks questions (why ‘maestro’? what’s a harmonium?) and he plays his Steinway grand piano (which she bought for him – ‘Sssshhh’) and the music they

both love – Mozart, Wagner, Bach, Led Zeppelin. It’s a bit like her Conversations from a Long Marriage – with nice ‘Stevie’ replacing irascible Roger Allam. The diction, as in few podcasts, is superb. Well of course – these are oldie voices.

It was another pleasure to hear Diana Melly, aged 85, on Private Passions, choosing operatic arias – and confessing that ‘on the day of Patrick’s funeral [her son, dead of a heroin overdose at 24], I was too drunk to go.’

Also Patricia Hodge, 76, on Woman’s Hour, on having lost her husband to Alzheimer’s and steadfastly going back to work.

Thank you, Joanna, Diana, Patricia, for carrying torches for the beautifullyspoken word.

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON

Funny Woman (Sky), with Gemma Arterton in the title role, is an adaptation of Nick Hornby’s seventh novel, Funny Girl, set in 1964.

Hornby’s earlier novels, High Fidelity and About a Boy, were made into two very funny films, and Arterton’s cool screen debut as Kelly, head girl of St Trinian’s, was followed by the part of the Bond girl, Strawberry Fields, in Quantum of Solace

So, with her brains and his looks, what could possibly go wrong?

Arterton plays Barbara Parker, a beauty queen from Blackpool who pursues fame in London. Her raw comic genius is revealed when, working as a sales assistant in a department store, she tells a customer the fur hat she is

trying on looks like roadkill. What is she like! Barbara will say anything!

Changing her name to Sophie Straw, she wins a part in a ‘groundbreaking’ sitcom called Barbara and Jim, in which, playing a ballsy northern Brigid Bardot, Sophie redefines the nation’s attitude to funny women.

So this is a television show about the making of another television show – and the result is the worst television show I’ve ever seen. The problem with Funny Woman is that nothing Sophie Straw says or does is remotely amusing.

The humour that will turn her into a television star is based on burping, pulling duck faces, doing silly walks and making squawking noises while flapping her arms around.

The live television audience for Barbara and Jim might rock with levity as she flicks her feather duster around Jim’s ‘knick-knacks’, but the audience at home in 2023 stare on in disbelief.

Is it that Arterton has no comic timing or that the script (by Morwenna Banks) is so lame that no one, not even Jennifer Aniston, could salvage it?

Or is it that Arterton can’t rise to the challenge of a role this complex, and allows the Blackpool accent and blonde wig to do all the work?

Or could it be that Hornby, who made his name writing warmly about lads and lad culture, has never met a funny woman before and so has no idea how they work?

Sophie Straw is the kind of girl who is late for every important occasion, can’t walk into a room without falling flat on her face and is splashed in the rain by passing cars. Her period starts just as

Barbara Parker (Gemma Arterton) and Dennis (Arsher Ali) in not-so-funny Funny Woman

Bob Wilson

the 1770s. They were close associates of everyone who was anyone.

One such was David Garrick, whose Drury Lane theatre had passed to the Linleys in 1776. Another was the musically obsessed painter Thomas Gainsborough, who’d have loved to adopt the violin-playing Tom as the son he never had.

And then there was Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who, aged 22, eloped with Tom’s eldest sister, the 19-year-old singing sensation Elizabeth Linley. Fashionable society, from the monarch downwards, had collectively drooled over her voice and sexual allure.

The elopement, which provided Sheridan with material for his first stage success The Rivals, was the talk of the town – unlike the eerie silence that followed the death of Elizabeth’s beloved brother five years later.

she goes on set, and the studio mic is still on when she calls her cheating boyfriend (also her co-star) a c***.

Most irritatingly, she misunderstands everything that is said to her. Told to read the script at an audition, she settles down to read it to herself (‘No!’ says the director. ‘Out loud!’) ‘Take a deep breath,’ says the producer before she goes onto the set. ‘You can breath out now,’ he suggests as she stands there with balloon cheeks. ‘Break a leg,’ the scriptwriter tells her before her first show. ‘Why?’ she replies. ‘Did you catch his Coriolanus?’ an actor asks.

‘No’, she replies, ‘I had the vaccine.’

To be on the right side of sixties attitudes to homosexuality and race, Funny Woman tries to say something about the clash between the permissive society and Mary Whitehouse, but these limp plot lines go nowhere.

In a nod towards feminism, Barbara’s flatmate joins a women’s group. ‘As women we’ve got to stand up for ourselves,’ she says, ‘and not put up with all their patracarcal bullshit’ (she means patriarchal). In one meeting, the girls use their compact mirrors to become acquainted with their vaginas.

The beacon of hope in all this social turbulence is Sophie Straw – the woman of the future, if only she can make herself heard! Will anyone see beyond the blonde beehive, blunt accent and big boobs? At one point, she goes to a comedy club where Eleanor Bron and John Fortune are improvising. Her dim eyes light up; she can do that!

I mean, how hard can it be to just muck about on stage? She has already

stunned the producer by breaking the fourth wall and winking at the camera.

So what exactly is it that Sophie/ Barbara has to tell us? Beyond making an impassioned speech about the difference between men and women boiling down to whether you ‘tinkle’ standing up or sitting down, she has never had an insight in her life.

Thank flaming-haired Jesus that the BBC bought the US edition of The Traitors, so we could cleanse our palates with the honest showmanship of this madly entertaining reality show. There is more drama, humour, wisdom and skulduggery in one scene of The Traitors than in all six wince-making hours of so-called Funny Woman

MUSIC

RICHARD OSBORNE THE ENGLISH MOZART

Tom Linley was the musician and friend Mozart never forgot.

‘He was a true genius,’ Mozart told the Irish tenor Michael Kelly, as they sat at supper in Vienna in 1784. ‘Had he lived, he would have been one of the great ornaments of the musical world.’

Mozart wasn’t the only person to be grief-stricken at news of Tom’s death at the age of 22 – in a boating accident on the newly created lake at Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire, in 1778.

The Linley family – composerimpresario Thomas Linley and his five inordinately talented children – were centre stage in English cultural life in

Quite why Tom perished at Grimsthorpe that August morning remains as much a mystery as what happened to Wagner’s patron, Ludwig of Bavaria, on Munich’s Lake Starnberg in 1886.

In Tom’s case, it was not a lake and an attendant physician but a muddybottomed, rural water, a sudden squall, two companions – both of whom survived – and Tom himself. He was dressed to the nines, like Goethe’s young Werther, in an outfit that – bizarrely for a summer morning – included riding boots and a greatcoat.

The scene is vividly re-enacted in the opening chapter of Tony Scotland’s new Tommasino: The Enigma of the English Mozart (Shelf Lives, £25). The book is an immaculately researched, beautifullywritten, finely illustrated and elegantly produced monograph. It addresses Tom’s mysterious death with an eye for detail worthy of Agatha Christie.

It also manages to give a fascinating tour d’horizon of the Linleys and their world in Bath, London – and Florence. Here, for three years, between the ages of 12 and 15, Tom studied the violin with the great Tartini pupil Pietro Nardini.

It was in Florence on 1st April 1770 that Mozart, just 14, and Tom, about to be 14, met and bonded like long-lost brothers. As Europe’s leading expert on the violin, Mozart’s father, Leopold, already knew of Tom – ‘my greatest scholar’, Nardini later said – but even he was surprised by what he heard.

As he wrote to his wife, this ‘charming English boy’, so like Wolfgang, ‘plays most beautifully’, the words heavily underlined. He wished she could see them ‘performing one after the other throughout the evening, constantly

‘I told you I was ill’

embracing each other’, their playing mature beyond their years.

They probably played some of the violin sonatas Wolfgang had already written, music that would feed directly into the 20 violin concertos Tom would eventually produce. They spent just ten days together, two preternaturally gifted, cosseted and yet in many ways lonely boys, who played like ‘twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’ th’sun’. Bitter tears were shed when the Mozarts left for Rome.

‘What we chang’d/Was innocence for innocence,’ says Polixenes of his boyhood friendship with Leontes in that same passage in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Mozart was a dirty-minded little scamp, and Tom spent his life surrounded by seedy theatre folk and camp aristocrats, not least in Florence with its famously well-stocked community of exiled English queens.

Both boys would have been safe enough. Yet there was a certain added exoticism about Tom when he returned to London aged 15, fluent in Italian, with Italian dress and Italian manners, and much given to hugging and kissing. Un-English as he now was, he enjoyed a blameless reputation, until his trolling by an anonymous critic in the Westminster Magazine who may well have been trying to ‘out’ him during that fateful summer of 1778.

Happily, some of Tom’s music survives, with hints aplenty that here, indeed, was an English Mozart in the making. We can hear this on four beautifully judged CDs of his dramatic

and instrumental music, now on Hyperion’s Helios label, which Peter Holman directed with the Parley of Instruments in the 1990s.

Tom’s sole surviving violin concerto, gamesome and affecting in the early Mozart style, is on Helios CDH5 5260.

Enjoy it for itself, or alongside the poem – reprinted in Scotland’s marvellous book – in which the multitalented Elizabeth apostrophises her most treasured memento, Tom’s abandoned violin.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON BRITPOP IS BACK

This year is all very exciting already!

Elton is headlining Glasto for the first time. Stormzy is doing an all-day gig at All Points East. Reading and Leeds festivals are both looking tasty (the Killers, Billie Eilish, inter alia).

British Summer Time in Hyde Park is opening strongly with Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen – much to look forward to.

And the theme of 2023 is, it is agreed, the return of Britpop. Let me remind you. Tony Blair hosting the Gallaghers at Number 10. Ginger Spice in a Union Jack minidress. Patsy Kensit in a sheer black bra and black tights and Chelsea boots on a Union Jack (again) with Our Liam on the cover of Vanity Fair

Recall the Battle of the Bands when the nation divided. Were you going to

buy the DVD single of Country House by Blur or Oasis’s Roll With It? Both were released on the same date – Monday 14th August 1995. The results of the chart chase were revealed the following Sunday (Blur won).

Now Oasis are still refusing to reunite (the brothers are the William and Harry of pop), while both Blur and Pulp are back in action. So is it déjà-vu Cool Britannia all over again, nigh on 30 years later?

Well, I hope so, but can this soufflé really be made to rise twice – especially after we lived through the absolute shower that was the Festival of Brexit? That proved how much our young people hated any expression of national exceptionalism and refused to wrap themselves in the flag.

Alex James now wanders round the Cotswolds in shorts talking about cheese. I danced with him at a Cornbury afterafter-after party, on a table as I recall, with Sam Cam.

Damon Albarn uses the same convenience store as I do on the corner in Notting Hill.

A few years ago, I sprawled on Noel Gallagher’s oversized sofa in his Little Venice house after interviewing him –and the closest we got to the hard stuff was cups of Yorkshire Tea.

The reason I mention the above is not to name-drop but to point out that if Alex James thinks Bermuda shorts are a look, and Our Noel has turned from scowling sibling into family man who offers me Hobnobs, then they are ipso facto no longer cool.

I tell you who is, though: Damon Albarn. And Jarvis Cocker, behind whom I once queued on an easyJet flight to Geneva. Stone-cold legends.

The not-so-high priests of Britpop may be back, and I’ll be there for you, but HMS Cool Britannia – remember her Majesty’s tears – can never return. That ship really has sailed.

Gainsborough’s portrait of Elizabeth and Thomas Linley, c 1768

Brothers up in arms: Noel Gallagher

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU DONATELLO: SCULPTING THE RENAISSANCE

V&A, 11th February to 11th June

This unprecedented Donatello show began at the Bargello and the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence last year.

Since then, many of the exhibits have visited the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, and now they have arrived at the V&A. Reviewers declared the Florence shows ‘spectacular’ (Wall Street Journal) and ‘definitive and thrilling at every moment’ (Financial Times).

Several masterworks were included that had never before left the Italian cities for which they were made. Even though some have quite rightly not been allowed to travel further, visitors to the V&A are unlikely to be disappointed.

Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, otherwise Donatello (c 1386-1466), may not have been the greatest Renaissance sculptor, but he was probably the most innovative and he was the essential precursor for Michelangelo and the rest.

His monument to the condottiere Gattamelata, the first life-size equestrian statue since antiquity, alas cannot be moved. It is not only a portrait of power, like his apprentice Verrocchio’s similar Colleoni in Venice, but also a human portrait.

Similarly, his standing figure of St George, made for the exterior of the Orsanmichele in Florence, presents a very human saint, his face expressing resolve and a certain trepidation. It is very much in the round, marking a clear break from Gothic tradition.

It also shows how rapidly he himself advanced in his twenties from his first masterpiece, the marble of David (c 1408), where the face is a classical mask. That David is one of about 130 works by

Donatello, his contemporaries and his followers in the V&A show.

Originally, the St George statue would have had a real sword and helmet, since it was commissioned by the armourers’ guild. Donatello not only was a carver, but happily combined different mediums. He did so in the Piot Madonna, a roundel on loan from the Louvre, in which he used terracotta with glass and wax inlays, much of which would have originally been gilded. Marble and bronze might also have been coloured.

Unlike other Renaissance sculptors, Donatello was not also a painter. That may be a pity, since he developed a new form of bas-relief, relievo stiacciato, in which the thickness of carving decreases from fore to background to resemble perspective drawing.

It is his willingness to experiment that led Paola D’Agostino, Director of the Bargello, to label Donatello the ‘most surprising artist of his time’.

Clockwise from left: Lamentation over the Dead Christ (1455-60); David (1408-9); Attis-Amorino (c 1435-40); Head of a Bearded Man, Possibly a Prophet

GARDENING DAVID WHEELER TO THE MANOR BORNE

Again, alas, I’m hors de combat –irksome in the extreme at this time of the year when, everywhere, the sap is rising.

Following major life-changing surgery in December (don’t worry, I’m still a bloke), I’ve been told not to lift anything heavier than a pencil for the next few months. I look from one bedroom window to an area of the garden destined for light woodland planting.

And, from a window on the other side of the room, I see the ranked pots of young trees, shrubs and perennials ready to be slipped into moist, warm soil.

As supervisor, not doer, I can at least for the time being direct proceedings, anxious not to miss the year’s optimum planting window. Stacks of gardening books accumulated over many decades help to assuage my frustration.

As car journeys are out of the question for a while, a headful of vivid memories of gardens visited all over Europe and beyond adequately fuel both my day and my nocturnal dreamings.

One such garden that seldom wanders from my mind’s eye is at Rodmarton Manor in Gloucestershire, just a few miles from where I grew up and which today remains one of the classic Arts & Crafts houses of the Cotswolds.

I once wrote, ‘Its scale should daunt and frighten, but it doesn’t.’

Built in the early-20th century, ‘on the basis not of contract but of confidence’ (C R Ashbee, no less, 1914), for Claude and Margaret Biddulph by Ernest Barnsley, a keen follower of William Morris, it grew out of its own ground.

In Over the Hills from Broadway: Images of Cotswold Gardens, I wrote that ‘estate workers dug and carried the local stone; masons cut and positioned it;

craftsmen-carpenters took their timbers from the great trees thereabouts, while the blacksmiths burnt offcuts to generate heat to forge the latches and ironwork’.

The manor’s gardens were laid out at the same time. Twenty formal garden ‘rooms’ are stitched into the overall design, and superbly matured set pieces – the Hornbeam Avenue (‘a mighty nave’) and the exquisite little summerhouse terminating a vista flanked by long herbaceous borders –predominate. Topiary triumphs.

In the years I frequented Rodmarton most – the 1980s to 2000 – the house and garden seemed to lie if not forgotten then certainly underused. Vast, stone galleons like these, which have berthed themselves far inland, are not only expensive to maintain. They also need a series of beating hearts to animate them and to help fend off family ghosts (Rodmarton remains in the Biddulph family) all too willing to take over.

Enter Sarah Biddulph (her husband John took on the estate in 2017) and Sarah Rivett-Carnac, who run the Generous Gardener. It presents a series of Lecture Days by such luminaries as Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, author of English Garden Eccentrics; Chelsea award-winning designer Richard Miers; James Alexander-Sinclair; TV presenter Pippa Greenwood; the ever-colourful Jimi

Blake, whose Hunting Brook Gardens in the Wicklow Mountains is an essential destination; and world-renowned garden photographer Clive Nichols.

The day-long events run from March to October, with specialist plant sales involving several private nurseries, held on three separate days, run by Sarah Rivett-Carnac just down the road at Charlton Farm, Malmesbury.

The glory of such days out lie in their conviviality. Who knows whom you’ll meet and befriend over lunch? Who knows what new horticultural passions might be spawned? Who knows what hithertounknown plants will change the way you’ll garden for yourself in the future?

By midsummer, I might be fit enough to thumb a lift to one or more of these attractions. I’ll have my address book to hand.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD TENDERSTEM BROCCOLI

Broccoli comes in different guises.

There is the vegetable more correctly called calabrese, with a bunched green head and a tree-trunk-like stalk; purple- and white-sprouting broccoli; romanesco broccoli, with pointed pale-green heads; and what the Italians call broccolini or broccoletti and we know as tenderstem broccoli.

They are all brassicas of the species oleracea, while broccoli rabe, known in Italy as cime di rapa, are turnip tops and not of the same family.

Tenderstem broccoli was developed when calabrese was crossed with a variety of Chinese kale, and was introduced in Japan 30 years ago. It has become popular recently and often appears on restaurant menus. The

My dream house: Rodmarton Manor

British-grown tenderstem is available during summer and until November, and in midwinter it is imported, mainly from Spain and Kenya.

If sown in mid-March under cover, and then transplanted, tenderstem should be ready for harvesting by the end of June. Or sow the seed outside from late April. Purple-sprouting broccoli, by comparison, will need up to ten months’ growth before it is ready.

‘Inspiration’ is a tenderstem variety offered by most seed companies. For some unknown reason, an alternative name for the vegetable is Asparation. Is it because someone thought (mistakenly) that it looked and tasted like asparagus?

Tenderstem prefers a soil that is not too acid and, like all brassicas, it may need to be netted or otherwise protected if you have trouble with pigeons or cabbage caterpillars. When the plant is almost ready for cutting, remove the main head to encourage more side shoots.

This vegetable has been described as the king of broccoli because of its superior health benefits. It contains more manganese and calcium than other broccolis, and a significantly higher concentration of vitamin A, important for the immune system.

It is noted for the delicate flavour of its stems, and tastes better than it looks. One recommended method of cooking the vegetable is to parboil it and then stir-fry in oil and soy sauce. I have also roasted tenderstem broccoli in a hot oven for about ten minutes with oil and sliced garlic.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD A LENTEN FEAST

Lent this year is from 22nd February until 6th April.

It makes for 40 days of short commons in the run-up to Easter. And it’s a chance to repurpose what’s lurking in the back of the store cupboard and recycle the unmarked leftovers from the freezer.

It’s good to use them up. Dried herbs and powdered spices lose much fragrance over a year. Storable pulses harden and need longer cooking as they age. Dried fruits, left over from Christmas, are the perfect material for a well-spiced sweet-and-sour chutney – and curry powder is a great addition.

During Lent, prohibitions on rich food and strong liquor may work wonders for body and soul. But nothing makes a person feel so good as getting rid of the evidence of that pre-lockdown panic-buying.

Boston baked beans

Baked beans were originally a seafarers’

one-pot dish from which the famous commercial brand was hatched. Cook these in quantity and freeze in bags in one-person portions. Delicious in a baked potato. Serves 4 hungry sailors.

500g white haricot (aka navy) beans, soaked overnight

Aromatics: peppercorns, bay leaves, parsley stalks (tied in a bag)

Second cooking

150ml maple syrup (or molasses or brown sugar)

1 tsp English mustard powder

1 tsp salt

½ tsp freshly-ground pepper

2-3 cloves

250g unsmoked bacon in a single piece

Drain the beans, put them in a roomy saucepan with 3 litres of cold water and the aromatics, bring to the boil, turn down the heat, lid loosely and simmer for an hour (longer, if necessary), until the beans have softened.

Remove the bag of aromatics and reserve 1.5 litres of the cooking liquid.

In an ovenproof casserole, combine the beans with the syrup, mustard, salt and pepper. Push the cloves into the bacon, bury it in the middle and add enough of the reserved cooking liquid to submerge everything generously.

Cover and cook in a very low oven –300°F/150°C/Gas 2 – for 3-4 hours. Uncover for the final hour so the beans develop a crust. Add more boiling water if it looks as if it’s drying out.

Apricot and ginger chutney

Vary the recipe as you please. Possible inclusions/substitutions are dried figs, pears, prunes, diced apple, quince, pumpkin. Makes enough to fill 4-5 one-pound jars.

500g dried apricots, soaked to swell

250g sultanas or raisins

500g light muscovado sugar

1 large onion, skinned and diced

100g fresh ginger root, roughly chopped

2-3 garlic cloves, skinned and crushed

1 tsp coriander seeds

½ tsp dried chillis, de-seeded and crushed

½ tsp peppercorns, crushed

2 tsps salt

1 litre cider or white-wine vinegar

Drain the apricots, chop roughly and put in a heavy pan. Blanch the onion for a few moments in boiling water to soften, drain and add to the pan along with the rest of the ingredients. Include any left-over chutney from last year –maturity, as with the solera system in sherry-making, adds distinction.

Bring to the boil, turn down the heat and cook very gently, stirring regularly, for an hour or so, until thick and jammy.

Chutney is the devil of a sticker in the later stages. If a blackened crust forms on the base, tip the whole lot into a clean pan without stirring. Whatever sticks to the base of the first pan will taste burnt, but the rest will be fine. Pot up in clean, hot jam jars and don’t cover or lid till it’s perfectly cool.

RESTAURANTS

JAMES PEMBROKE

LAST LUNCH WITH MY FATHER

My father died on New Year’s Eve, aged 87. He deserves all the credit for my lifelong obsession with restaurants, because we ate out pretty much every night during my childhood. The only time I was told I was spoilt was when, aged four, I demanded ice cream, and wailed at the waitress, ‘And don’t you dare bring me a wafer.’ I have hated them ever since.

It never occurred to my parents or me that we were spoilt, eating our way through the seventies at Hungry Horse, Borsch N Tears, Le Bistingo, Bistro Vino, Halepi or Bertorelli.

Every night was theatre, especially if we went to Flanagans and sang along with the pianist. By the age of six, I was precociously menu-literate, flipping between boeuf bourguignon and duck à l’orange. Even during our weekends in our heavenly, slug-smeared cottage in Dorset, we ate out for lunch and dinner while the more perfect dads loaded barons of beef into their Volvos.

I now know that all this dining out was run through my father’s City business. Just about everything was: even holidays abroad were for research. Even my first school fees went through the books because the bill came not from Spyway School but from the headmaster brothers, E and G Warner.

My father’s bookkeeper assumed they were a firm of stationers, and for four painless years my father never corrected

him. I remember his woe when, after the school closed, the next bill arrived more accurately from the Old Malthouse School. Still, this urban Pa Larkin could always restore his equilibrium with lunch at the Contented Sole or Sweetings.

He was a surprisingly slim man and rejoiced in the role of the Charles Atlas of Swanage beach, where his own gastronomic career began during the war at his Aunt Nancy’s hotel, the Wolfeton. No slouch in the kitchen, she got the hotel into one of 91 slots in the first-ever Good Food Guide in 1951.

He had no interest in making friends, and was bemused by the concept of seeing anyone regularly, but my father revelled in the sociability of restaurants and pubs.

He was only too happy to talk to neighbouring tables in London or on holiday, heckling them with his views on his pet topics, Charles and Di in the nineties and Madeleine McCann in the noughties. While his various audiences regaled him with their own conspiracy theories, he would suddenly burst out laughing at his own sense of the absurd before delivering another well-honed soliloquy on Edwina Currie and John Major.

My last lunch with him was in September at the Pier Head, overlooking Swanage Bay. Like a boy released from boarding school, he leapt out of the car, forgetting he was tethered to a small oxygen tank the size of a fire extinguisher.

It was the weekend of the Folk Festival; a passing troupe of Morris dancers untangled him and sat him down. We had a massive sea bass for just £38, he still adhering to his childhood rule of eating all the vegetables first.

Like me, he wasn’t a perfect dad, but he didn’t mind a bit. When my brother and I were small, he loved to ask us, ‘Would you prefer this daddy or another daddy?’ And he delighted in our guaranteed response: ‘ANOTHER DADDY.’

I’ve changed my mind.

DRINK BILL KNOTT MODERN GREEK

As I recall, the wine list in Angelo’s Taverna at the western end of Agios Georgios beach on Corfu was brief: retsina, Demestica white, or Demestica red. That was 40 years ago – and I drank Henninger lager for a week.

The Henninger brand has, sadly, gone to the great Bierkeller in the sky, but the Greek wine industry’s star is definitely in the ascendant, as I discovered at a recent tasting organised by Greek wine specialists Maltby&Greek. More than 100 wines

from 25 wineries were on show, with styles ranging from bone-dry Assyrtiko to ambrosial sweet Muscat, via strawberryscented Xinomavro and sparkling Vidiano.

According to Maltby&Greek’s co-founder Stef Kokotos, Greece’s great strength – a multitude of ancient, indigenous grape varieties, each with its own personality – is also perhaps its biggest problem (‘especially pronouncing them!’). He singles out Agiorgitiko as being a particularly difficult mouthful.

Business partner Yannos Hadjiioannou – who left his job as an investment banker to start the business and was soon ‘driving, delivering, cleaning the loos, cooking for the team… actually, I still do that’ – sees Greek wine’s strong suit as in the mid-market, between £10 and £20 a bottle, ‘where we can offer a lot more individuality and excitement for drinkers, compared with many traditional regions like Bordeaux and Burgundy’.

Their website – maltbyandgreek.com – lists 40 or so wines in that price bracket. Like that of many wineimporters, their pre-COVID business was heavily focused on the on-trade, and they quickly realised retail sales would be crucial to their survival.

These days, the restaurant trade has returned, and they supply independent wine merchants around the country – but their retail arm is thriving too. As well as wines, the website offers artisanal cheeses, Cretan sausages spiked with wild thyme, olive oils, honeys and preserves.

On the wine side, I recommend trying one of their dozen mixed cases: the six-bottle For the Love of Burgundy case (£167.45), perhaps, featuring whites from Santorini and reds made from the Pinot Noir-esque Xinomavro; or a six-bottle case of winter reds (£102); or three bottles of winemaker Chloe Chatzivaritis’s stunning natural wines from her family estate near Goumenissa, in the hills above Thessaloniki.

And what of the future? Greece may have an ancient history of winemaking but, as Stef points out, ‘It’s not a continuous history, and the industry has only recently started to modernise.’ Stef and Yannos have supreme confidence in the winemakers they represent and in ‘the unique sense of place that their wines offer’.

Yannos’s tips for grape varieties to look out for include Savatiano (traditionally used to make retsina) and two Cretan varieties: Vidiano, an aromatic white grape; and Liatiko, a pale, early-ripening red grape once used to make Malvasia.

Getting your tongue around the names on the bottles is tricky, but doing so with their contents is gratifyingly simple.

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 Chardonnay with a nice weight to it, a classic, clean-as-a-whistle Grüner Veltliner, and a pleasingly fruity and uncomplicated Sicilian red. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Montsablé

Chardonnay, IGP Haute Vallée de l’Aude 2021, offer price £9.50, case price £114.00

Aged on its lees, with a judicious amount of oak, plenty of fruit and a dry finish.

Funkstille Grüner

Veltliner, Ferdinand Mayr, Niederösterreich, Austria 2021, offer price £10.99, case price £131.88

More rounded in style than many Grüners, with agreeable notes of grapefruit and melon.

Frappato Incanto del Sud, Baglio Gibellina, Sicily 2021, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88

Fresh, lively, unoaked Frappato with plenty of red fruit: great with charcuterie.

Mixed case price £121.92 – a saving of £30.99

(including free delivery)

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NB Offer closes 28th March 2023.

SPORT HEROES AND VILLAINS

One of the joys of sport for us spectators is watching a participant refusing to yield.

Andy Murray battling through the early hours in Melbourne. Michael Smith and Michael van Gerwen exchanging 180s in the World Darts final. The time the now sadly departed Jim Redmond stepped on to the Barcelona track to help his stricken son Derek hobble and stagger across the finish line in the 1992 Olympic Games 400-metre race.

These are moments that are central to our understanding of what sport is all about, those involved doing whatever is required to make it to the last.

Nobody, we believe, sets out to lose. Unless, that is, they are playing snooker. The revelation that the 2021 Masters champion Zhao Xintong and nine other leading Chinese players are being investigated for match-fixing should alarm not just those who follow the game, but anyone who takes delight in sport.

China is these days not just snooker’s biggest market; it is becoming the centre of the next generation of talent. It’s on the tables of Shanghai and Beijing that the biggest flowering of young players in the game’s history is happening.

Goodness, they are good. And now we discover that many of them are also being recruited by criminal syndicates wishing to exploit the ever-growing gambling market that surrounds the game.

It is pretty obvious why this has been happening. It’s far easier to manipulate results in an individual sport than when a team is involved. Plus the criminals know where to target – because few of those on the professional snooker circuit are earning enough to make them immune to financial incentive. Of the top 100 players in the world, more than 50 earn less than £20,000 a year from their efforts. The sharks have long been circling.

Sure, the insidious proliferation of gambling around sport has opened up all sorts of areas of betting. The FA recently launched an inquiry into an Oxford United player getting himself booked in a Cup tie. Apparently people were placing bets on his receiving a yellow card at some point in the game – just as it was possible to wager on the first throw-in or corner, things that can be simply organised without any influence on the final score.

But the better odds have always been

available on outcomes. Gambling, like sport, is after all a results business. And that is why this news is so depressing. No gangster is going to fork out for victory, because that can never be guaranteed.

Not even the kind of industrialised doping of the Russian sporting system could ensure that. No, it is the requirement to lose that the bad guys are buying.

And paying for defeat undermines sport’s very purpose. If Murray had been being encouraged to lose, we would never have been treated to his magnificent, age-defying grunt-and-growl on that Melbourne court.

Had the two dartsMichaels been being paid to throw the game rather than their arrows, we would never have been on the edge of our seats, astonished by their unworldly exchange of maximums.

These are moments that make sport special, elevate it and turn it into drama. And that is what’s under threat from this proliferation of cheating. Here’s hoping the snooker authorities agree with the insistence of former world champion Shaun Murphy that anyone found to have taken a bribe to fail should get a lifetime ban.

For all of us fans, this has to be stopped.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD MY FUEL CRISIS

Over Christmas, I joined a club I never sought to join: the Ancient Order of Misfuellers.

To qualify, you have to fill a diesel car with petrol or vice versa. This usually happens when people muddle the pump nozzles. My case was worse – I did it unthinkingly but deliberately.

On Christmas Eve, I took the diesel Volvo out for some last-minute shopping. The day before, I had taken my wife’s petrol Polo and filled it with superiorgrade fuel. I was musing on the wisdom of this: superior grade costs more and the cheaper premium grade is perfectly adequate for almost all cars.

People denigrate ‘supermarket fuel’ but that’s nonsense – all fuel has to meet the same minimum standards. The advantage of superior grade is its higher octane, allied with cleansing additives, which benefit the engine.

More octane means more bang for your bucks. It’s what manufacturers use when

achieving their published fuel-consumption figures. But any car should run happily throughout its life on premium grade.

Whether it’s worth paying the extra for a few more mpg and a cleaner-running engine depends on the costs/savings ratio and will vary with the car, its use and how long you keep it.

I’ve used superior grade since an unscientific test in an old Discovery, when it appeared to yield an extra 2-3 mpg, just enough to pay for the price difference. Also, I could ascend a particular hill in top gear which had previously compelled me to change down. But other factors, such as weather and the way I drove, could account for both.

Musing thus, I noticed a local garage selling superior grade less expensively than the competition. I pulled in, selected it and filled my diesel car. If you had asked which fuel I was using, I would have told you. If you had asked which fuel the Volvo required, I would have told you that too.

I realised what I’d done only when I’d driven half a mile, parked, done my shopping and tried to start again. It sounded like a car without fuel. Fuel? Surely, I thought, I’ve just…?

Thus it was that I spent Christmas in and out of touch with the AA. It’s understandable that on Christmas Eve it took a long time to speak to an operator, after I’d been told by the AA app that it didn’t recognise me and been told online (I had to get a lift home for this) that my server was unrecognisable.

Eventually I got through to a human who said that no specialist AA misfuelling patrols were available (they have about 35 nationwide) but they could arrange for a subcontractor to do the job. Either way, it would cost £255. Well, stupidity is rightly punished. The ETA for the subcontractor was 14.55 hours. I returned to my car.

It was 21.35 by the time I spoke again to someone who could explain what was (not) going on: the contractor had gone home. But no one had told me.

They offered me my money back so that I could make alternative arrangements, or the promise of an AA man on Tuesday morning. I chose the latter, and a friendly patrolman did the job competently, as AA people usually do.

The lesson (apart from the obvious one for me)? Apps are not enough. When you break down, you need human contact. The AA should spend less money on promotions and other frippery and employ more human beings.

That said, I’ve just got £100 off my membership by asking to pay less. It works every year. Make sure you do it, too.

Wizard in Oz: Murray

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

What happened in Vegas

Every year, in January, there is a huge event in Las Vegas called CES – the Consumer Electronics Show.

It is one of the largest tech-based trade shows aimed at you and me and it’s a place for all manufacturers to display their latest products, prototypes and dreams. Exhibitors include tiny companies and colossi such as Samsung and Microsoft.

Its scale is astonishing: over 3,200 exhibitors spread across 50 acres of Las Vegas conference centres. The stuff displayed includes thousands of next-generation TVs, laptops, smart home gadgets and more.

I have no desire to visit such a mammoth event (or to visit Las Vegas for any reason), but there is extensive

Webwatch

For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

Imperial War Museum iwm.org.uk/history

Much-improved site; lots of free articles and videos.

Quordle quordle.com

If Wordle is too easy, try this – nine guesses to find four words.

I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems. Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk

coverage online and I watched a lot of it during our grim winter nights.

CES is important, as far as any such event can be, not just because of the individual products that appear, but because of the industry trends that it reveals. That’s not to say that the products are dull – far from it.

But many will never make it into serious production. Manufacturers often use events like this to gauge what the public think of their ideas, in the hope that if they see real people laughing at a prototype, they can save a fortune by cancelling it.

However, in the world of actually available products, and leaving aside the obligatory droning-on about sustainability that infests every presentation, the two main growth trends seem to be in health-related gadgets and simpler TVs.

There is a real explosion in the creation of home health-monitoring products. One company even announced plans to use artificial intelligence to measure your blood pressure, heart rate and other things, just by looking at your picture – diagnosis by selfie.

If it works, this is an extraordinary development, and offers the fascinating prospect of being able to check the blood pressure of politicians on TV as they get crosser and crosser.

I welcome this general trend. Given the pressure on the NHS, the more reliable information about our health we can generate ourselves, the better.

Another welcome development is that the newest televisions are being

made with fewer bells and whistles. I’m delighted to hear it. So-called smart TVs can be hard to fathom and frustrating to use, and the software inside them can go out of date just months after you’ve bought one.

If iPlayer or something similar doesn’t respond quickly when you press the button on your remote, it may well be because the TV software is outdated and not as smart as it used to be.

The solution is un-smart televisions and smart add-on boxes (often less than £30) through which you access internetbased services. They work well, and buying an improved smart box in a year or two won’t break the bank, unlike buying a new TV.

But what of the dreamers? There were more than 1,000 start-ups enthusiastically peddling their wares at this year’s CES. Some may be brilliant, while some are just barmy, like the £3,000 self-driving baby buggy.

I doubt that any sane parent would entrust their child to such a thing –but they’ve thought of that. It moves under its own steam only if there is no child in it. So to make it shift, the child has to walk. Brilliant. Your child will, in effect, be taking the buggy for a walk. Then there is an electric car that changes colour, a fridge that glows at night (why?) and a box that hangs inside your lavatory bowl and analyses your urine, sending the results to your mobile phone.

I get enough waste products on my mobile phone as it is, thank you. I don’t need more.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

The financial emergency service

Every one of us is at risk of harm, says the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and we are at even more risk if we are in a vulnerable situation.

The impact of the pandemic, the lockdown and now the financial downturn has left increasing numbers of people without financial resilience. They don’t have enough money for their bills.

The FCA reckons half of UK adults have at least one vulnerability. If you are

aware of this and face up to it, you can greatly improve the treatment you get from financial institutions. Suffering harm is serious – it can cost you money if you can’t search for the best deal, or you fall victim to scams, get into debt, commit to loans you cannot afford, or buy insurance that will never pay out.

Every firm regulated by the FCA –including banks, insurance companies and financial advisers – is required to

take extra care of vulnerable customers, though not all of them comply as considerately as they should. Some firms don’t even understand what counts as being vulnerable.

A few signs are easily recognisable –being elderly or very sick; having dementia. Many others are also vulnerable: those with poor communication skills; people on low income; anyone subject to abuse; people

with cultural and language barriers or who are illiterate or innumerate.

You can be regarded as vulnerable if you have health problems that affect your day-to-day activities; suffer an upsetting life event such as bereavement, the breakdown of a relationship or job loss; take on caring responsibilities; have little knowledge of financial matters or low confidence in dealing with money.

Vulnerability can be temporary or permanent, and firms must adapt the way they treat you as your circumstances change.

You might hesitate to say anything because you worry that what you are buying will cost you more, or that you could be refused a loan. You might want to keep your personal situation confidential, or you simply don’t know that you can disclose your circumstances.

Whatever your approach, staff should be trained to spot clues from all customers who are struggling.

For example, if someone asks about investing a large sum of money they have received from a life-insurance payment, staff should pick up that he or she could be in distress and give them more time to consider their options.

Some companies create specialist teams, train their staff well and give

them resources to take care of vulnerable customers. Just how sensitively you are dealt with can also depend on the empathy shown by the individual person who is serving you.

If you are dissatisfied, you can always ask to speak to someone else. Having procedures in place to care for vulnerable customers should be embedded in the whole way a company does business under the new strict

‘Give it to me straight, Doc. How long will my car have to spend in the car park?’

Consumer Duty rules coming into force in July.

Just having a vulnerability does not automatically mean you need extra consideration, but it is worth knowing when you are entitled to be treated with extra care. The FCA says much more still needs to be done to improve outcomes for vulnerable customers.

And it threatens action against firms that are not doing enough.

invites you to come and stay at

13th-20th October 2023

La Foce was the Tuscan home of Iris Origo, which she immortalised in her wartime memoir War in the Val d’Orcia. In the 1920s, she commissioned Cecil Pinsent to design the world-famous gardens. Four years ago, her granddaughter renovated the 15th-century villa and its outbuildings, and they are now available to rent. So we snapped up an available week. We will have the Origos’ home to ourselves, and will be able to swim in the pool and wander through the gardens, while looking across the valley and its famous zigzag road which features on so many book jackets. Not to be missed.

ITINERARY

Friday 13th October – arrival

Morning flight to Rome; late lunch at the villa followed by tour of the garden.

Saturday 14th October –Perugia and Assisi

Guided tours of Perugia, where we will have lunch, and Assisi, to marvel at Giotto’s frescoes of the life of St Francis.

HOW TO BOOK: Please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk or call 01225 427311. Price per person: £2,750 which includes all meals, all drinks at the house and great wine with meals, transport and entrances. You need to book and pay for your own flights. Single supplement: £500. A non-refundable deposit of £750 will be required, with the full balance due on 1st July 2023.

Sunday 15th October – day at the villa Dinner in the Dopolavoro restaurant, which was built by Iris Origo for the farm labourers.

Monday 16th October – Montepulciano and Montalcino

A day of wine-tastings in these two classic hill towns.

Tuesday 17th October – Arezzo

Guided tour of the city, including the duomo, followed by lunch in the Piazza Grande. Afternoon at La Foce.

Wednesday 18th October – Lake Trasimene and Cortona

Morning guided tour of the walled hilltop town of Cortona. Lunch at Albergo Ristorante da Sauro, on the pretty island of Maggiore on Lake Trasimeno, where Hannibal won his famous victory.

Thursday 19th October – Orvieto

Morning guided tour of the duomo followed by lunch. Afternoon at La Foce.

Friday 20th October – home

Leave after breakfast for Rome Fiumicino.

NOWBYREDUCED £500 PERPERSON

La Foce, the former home of Iris Origo, in southern Tuscany

The Great Crested Grebe

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

In her acceptance speech at the 2022 Oldie of the Year awards, Dame Jane Goodall said chimpanzees differ from humans by only just over one per cent.

Her Kenyan mentor, Dr Louis Leakey, chose her to do the chimpanzee study because she had not been to university. So she had a mind uncluttered by the arrogant scientific assumption that animals are inferior to humans. She duly found animals – famously, chimpanzees – ‘more like us than we like to think’.

Ethology is the scientific study of animal behaviour, often under natural conditions. One of its founding fathers was Sir Julian Huxley (1887-1975), who in spring 1912 spent a fortnight’s holiday with his brother Trevenen studying the courtship of great crested grebes (Podiceps cristatus) on the four Tring Reservoirs, Hertfordshire.

The resulting scientific paper, The Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe, remains a milestone in ethological history.

Huxley wrote, ‘A good glass, a notebook, some patience and a spare fortnight in the spring – with these, I not only managed to discover many unknown facts about the crested grebe, but also had one of the pleasantest of holidays. “Go thou and do likewise.” ’

In a footnote, he clarified the creed of modern ethology: ‘Let it never be forgotten that emotions and attitudes are just as much characters as are colours or structures.’

Great crested grebes winter in coastal flocks, returning inland to breed in February. In March, they pair up, with much chasing about on open water. Once they’ve paired, a nest is built among reeds, on which coition follows.

It is succeeded by as ritualistic a courtship as that of any bird. The great crested’s ear-like tippets and ruffs were feather features treasured by the 19th-century fashion trade, almost to the

species’s extinction. They are pricked and fanned in open water as the couple head-shake, bow, crouch, dive and even rear upright like penguins to face each other beak to beak, proffering weed tokens fetched from the depths.

In humans and most birds, courting precedes coition. Huxley nevertheless viewed the post-coition courtship in his grebes as ‘an expression of emotion not very different’ from our own, sealed with a passionate kiss.

The great crested has as famous a place in Evelyn Waugh’s fiction as in Huxley’s scientific writings.

In Scoop, Waugh’s satire on journalism, its hero, the naïve and country-bound William Boot, is unexpectedly promoted to become a war correspondent for the Daily Beast

The promotion comes about because Boot’s fortnightly column of nature notes, Lush Places, has provoked a prodigious mail from readers – his manuscript on the badger having been doctored by his mischievous sister to read ‘great crested grebe’.

Irate bird-lovers accused him of condoning the bird’s baiting by terriers; and suggesting it attacked young rabbits.

According to Selina Hastings (Evelyn Waugh: A Biography), Waugh’s hostility to the great crested grebe arose from his being forced by his host, after a long lunch on a country weekend, to take a walk to see one nesting.

The 2023 Bird of the Month calendar, with Oldie illustrations, is available from www.carryakroyd.co.uk

Travel

Rajasthan’s hero of the illiterate

For 50 years, Bunker Roy, born into India’s elite, has trained the poor to become builders, engineers and doctors.

By Heather Malcolm

On the bookshelf behind me is a statuette of the Hindu god Ganesha, remover of obstacles.

When I was sitting chewing my pencil, attempting something for The Oldie’s Jeremy Lewis Prize for new writers, I promised Ganesha that if he helped me win, I’d give the money away.

It’s going to Barefoot College Tilonia, in Rajasthan. But the college is just one of thousands of organisations working to improve the lives of the poor all over the world. Why is it special? For me, this is why.

Fifty-five years ago, a well-born, very highly educated young man rejected a glittering future to labour alongside the poorest of his country, India, digging wells out of the stony desert.

Bunker Roy, born in 1945, chose the road less travelled. Born into a distinguished family, with India’s first Air Chief Marshal a paternal uncle and a mother who became India’s State Trading Company’s ambassador to Moscow, he attended Doon School in Dehradun – an Eton equivalent, which

prepares young people for the Indian Civil Service or high government office. Rajiv Gandhi was a classmate and friend.

An exceptional squash player, for three years Bunker was India’s national champion, playing in two world championships. Life’s glittering prizes beckoned.

Everything changed in 1966 when he

helped in the famine that hit Bihar, seeing for the first time, up close and personal, the horrors of extreme poverty: death by starvation on a fearful scale, men fighting dogs for bones in the street while society’s wealthy gorged on, uncaring.

The injustice seared his soul. To his family’s great disappointment, he turned away from that brilliant career,

From national squash champion to champion of the underdog: Bunker Roy (left)

going instead into the desert as an unskilled labourer, digging open wells for five years.

Learning more from this about Mahatma Gandhi’s rural India and realising the value of its ancient knowledge, skills and wisdom, he was determined to improve the quality of life of the rural poor.

Working with the poor for five years, he listened to what they said, shared their lives and tried to understand what they wanted. Then he founded a college just for them, teaching what they had told him they wanted to learn.

At first it was called SWRC – Social Work and Research Centre – but soon everyone around knew it as Barefoot College. Now it’s Barefoot College Tilonia, after the village where the building is.

It’s been thriving since 1972, offering a cornucopia of good things from clean water (collected and filtered from rain, not pumped from environmentallydamaging wells) to basic education.

Traditional skills and knowledge are blended with modern solutions – as long as those solutions are simple and kind to the environment, and work.

That young man, Bunker Roy, is no longer young, but he still adheres to the principles that inspired him, those of Mahatma Gandhi. Equality for all, regardless of caste, gender or religion; the dignity of labour. Simplicity. Austerity.

Nobody working there, including Bunker, the director, draws more than the smallest of salaries: it doesn’t cost much to live simply, doing without ‘things’. Some of what he and his team of volunteers have achieved is breathtaking.

I met Bunker 40 years ago, when he was a speaker at a conference I’d helped to organise. His belief that dispensing charity in the form of cash or subsidies wasn’t the answer to ending poverty because ‘people don’t value what comes for free’ was a fresh thought for me.

But showing belief in people, giving encouragement and drawing out their best so that they could earn a living wage – that was his way.

Bunker believes illiteracy is no barrier to achievement. Illiterate people may not be able to read or write, but they aren’t stupid.

Under his guidance (I know he’d argue with that term and remind me that he’s only one in a brilliant team), for 50 years illiterate and near-literate people from the poorest of India’s rural poor have achieved marvels: built houses (some using recycled plastic),

repaired machinery, given rein to their artistry and trained to become barefoot doctors, along similar lines to the model used in China. Importantly, they now know their worth.

Perhaps most astonishingly, they’ve become solar engineers. In this case, it’s actually women – and not young women either. Illiterate and semi-literate grandmothers – Bunker insists on that – come to the college to learn how to make and maintain solar panels and associated equipment such as lamps and cookers.

Think of it: illiterate grandmothers from rural villages, with hardly any standing in society at all, becoming solar engineers!

And why must it be women? Because with training such as the grandmothers receive, men tend to see themselves as ‘qualified’. They rush to cities, looking for well-paid work. They aren’t interested in staying in a village, even though the sad truth is that most end up in city slums, unable to go home because of the shame in failure.

Grandmothers, on the other hand, are rooted in their communities, with children and grandchildren nearby, and want to make life better for them there.

From 2000 on, with help from the Government of India, rural grandmothers from India, Africa and South America started coming to Tilonia for training. Colour-coded charts show them what to do, making illiteracy unimportant; Barefoot College Tilonia staff demonstrate, and they learn.

For six months, these women who’ve often never before left their remote villages, let alone their countries, and speak no language but their own, live at the college, learn and return as heroines to their homes, taking safe light and heat with them. Their guts and determination awe me.

By now, over 1,700 women from 96 countries in the developing world have been trained, and over 1,500 villages can use stored sunlight to extend and gladden their days.

Re-reading a letter Bunker wrote to me in 1983, saying how pleased he was, just having taken delivery of photovoltaic cells to start this great experiment, I feel some astonishment.

Somewhere along the way, the world sat up and noticed something unusual happening in this corner of Rajasthan’s Thar Desert.

In 1992, Prince Charles and Princess Diana visited. In 2008, the Guardian named Bunker as one of the 50 environmentalists in the world who could save the planet. In 2010, Time magazine listed him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

The college has won countless national and international awards. In its 50th-anniversary year last year, it received congratulatory letters from HRH Prince Charles (now King Charles III) and the Dalai Lama, among others.

But that’s not why I support Barefoot College Tilonia. The personal connection is important, naturally. But what I like is knowing that every penny I contribute will be spent well, with nothing hived off.

I like it that the college empowers downtrodden women in desperate need.

I like it that its programmes are inclusive and work with the environment. Quietly and steadily, Bunker Roy’s Barefoot College Tilonia is changing the world, and I want to help with that.

I hope Jeremy Lewis, The Oldie’s late deputy editor, would approve.

Heather Chisnall Malcolm won The Oldie’s Jeremy Lewis Prize for New Writers in December 2022

Sun queens: illiterate and semi-literate grandmothers learn to make solar panels

On the Road

My Brucie bonus

Jimmy Tarbuck, 83, has cracked gags with Bruce Forsyth, Eric Morecambe and Des O’Connor for 60 years. By Louise Flind

Did you always want to be on the stage?

I always wanted to be the centre of attraction.

Do you remember John Lennon at primary school?

He was a good laugh. I got on well with him, but I was more sport-minded than him. I went to school just to play football and basketball and go to the local swimming baths, where I cracked my tooth and got the gap in my teeth. I saw my sister yesterday, who’d lost a tooth, and I said, ‘Are you trying to look like me?’

Were there any entertainers in your family? Mother was a dancer, and Dad used to like to get up and give a song.

What was the Palladium like in the ’60s? Sensational. Crosby, Hope, Sinatra, the Beatles, Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, Cilla, Frankie Vaughan, they’d all been on that stage and I defy you not to get a touch of the nerves. The night before my first night, I’d been on at a club in Manchester and then we drove through the night, slept in the car and the next minute I was at the Palladium.

I did the worst rehearsal possible because of nerves and then the producer Val Parnell came up to me and said, ‘Is this funny what you’re doing?’ and I said, ‘It was last night.’

He said, ‘Call me Uncle Val.’

I was 22 and he said, ‘Enjoy it tonight. You’ve got a lot of style. Get on there and give it them.’

And Bruce [Forsyth] brought me on and the first gag never got a titter. And I just said, ‘Well, don’t laugh then’ and that got a bit of a titter.

What were the early days of comedy touring like?

They were great. A lot of the comics were 20 years older than me and, all of a sudden, this kid comes on and they said he’s the fifth Beatle. And I was dressed like them – the hair – and it happened. Eric Morecambe, an absolute hero, said, ‘You’ve got something, son. Don’t try and find out what it is. You just be you.’

What was Bruce Forsyth like?

He was very nice to a young comic. He introduced me great the first night and I was on the Royal Command with him and there was the Queen in the box. The only time I’d seen the Queen was on a stamp.

How did you get along with Barry Cryer?

I didn’t work with him much, and we didn’t mix in the same company – except one of his friends was one of my very best friends, Ronnie Corbett.

You shot to fame – how did you cope with that?

I didn’t have to cope with it. The fame just coped. When I went to America, Bob Hope was very nice, put me on his television show, and then I flew to Australia and it was just like being at home. I was enjoying myself.

What was it like touring with Des O’Connor? A pleasure. He was the ultimate professional. Every night I’d get a gag to make him laugh – and he was a giggler. I’d say, ‘They’re queuing for your autograph: all those old ladies want their pension books signed.’

Why do so many comedians come out of Liverpool?

The great Arthur Askey said, ‘You’ve got to be a comedian to live there.’

What’s your view of alternative comedy? If someone says ‘F off’, it can enhance a

joke, but people don’t want to hear ‘F off’ every other word. You don’t mind a rudish cheeky joke.

Is golf your favourite game?

Football’s my favourite game. I had two or three trials and played in the junior teams at Brighton & Hove Albion, and I was working at Butlin’s at the same time doing the jokes every night.

Did you enjoy celebrity golf?

I enjoyed working with Peter Alliss on the celebrity golf because you played with the world’s best players: Tom Watson, Seve Ballesteros.

Where did you go on your honeymoon? Nowhere – couldn’t afford it in those days.

Is there anything you can’t leave home without?

For work, the suit bag – and in there’s the outfit that I walk on stage in. And the golf clubs if I’m going to play golf.

What’s your favourite destination?

We have a residence in Portugal. They’re gentle people, the Portuguese – friendly – and there are wonderful golf courses. I’ll go to my favourite restaurant, Mr Frango’s: ‘Ah, Mr Jimmy, you’re back. Is that young girl you’re with your wife?’ It’s a lady of 75 and we’ll have a laugh.

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?

My dad, Fred, used to take my sister, Mum and me to the Isle of Man, very near Liverpool. What tickled me was they had donkeys pulling the trams.

Do you have a go at the local language?

I’ve learnt certain words – por favor, jambon – and beer is the same all over.

What are your top travelling tips?

Patience. These poor buggers on these desks, they’re trying their best.

Jimmy Tarbuck is touring in 2023

Taking a Walk

The River Roding runs through it

patrick barkham

It is difficult to identify when a humdrum stroll beside the thirdmightiest river in London turned magical.

It may have been on my finding a small forest of illicitly planted trees. It could have been when I stepped over a low wall onto a path through the nettles – a respectable walk turned into a trespass.

But in truth, it was the moment I met my walking companion, Paul Powlesland, a dashing, Cambridgeeducated barrister and eco-agitator, guerrilla tree-planter, wild swimmer, half-man half-sprite in a retro jumpsuit.

He leapt onto bridges and climbed trees as he showed me the sights, because placing one foot in front of the other as I’ve done most of my days isn’t really sucking the marrow out of life.

We met at Town Quay in the ancient fishing metropolis of Barking, where the River Roding nears the Thames, after springing up close to Stansted. Barely known by Londoners, the Roding shimmies into the capital east of the Lea, its valley dominated by the roaring M11 and the North Circular.

Powlesland piloted his dilapidated houseboat up the Thames to live on the Roding five years ago, founding the River Roding Trust, a charity that champions this neglected and yet potentially magnificent London river.

Volunteers join Powlesland planting trees, litter-picking and campaigning to stop sewage seeping into their stream. The charity is also hoping to reopen a riverside path from Barking to Ilford, our walk on a gloriously sunny winter’s day.

Crossing to the west bank, we headed north on an official footpath. New flats are rising fast, but developers rarely add greenery to the riverside public space. So Powlesland is doing it himself.

In a boggy corner, where silt was accumulating below the concrete riverbank, he popped in willow twigs and black poplar saplings. ‘Small interventions that grow big,’ as he put it.

The black poplar is one of our rarest native trees but 100 saplings are sneakily growing in Barking. Its burghers will get a shock in ten years’ time when their town is framed by new towers of green.

The path bumped behind Wickes, Toolstation and a car park where fly-tipping is a near-daily occurrence. Powlesland paused our walk to video himself opening up bags of dumped rubbish –evidence he’ll submit to the council.

Turning back the tide of rubbish is a Sisyphean task, but Powlesland’s spirits are fortified by this river and its inhabitants: from the kingfisher perched on a half-submerged shopping trolley to the sand martins that fly from Africa to nest in drainage holes in a riverside brick wall.

Further on, unexpectedly large reedbeds appeared beside the river. Hidden in this bucolic scene were the moorings that Powlesland and friends built from scaffolding. They contained his boat and a communal area for other ‘river guardians’: a barbecue area, a woodfired sauna and a home-made hot tub. The sauna’s wood-burner was recently stolen.

Beyond this ingenious construction, we stepped over a low wall and were now, Powlesland informed me, trespassing. He hopes our unofficial route will become a public footpath –the River Roding Trust has the funding – if only Redbridge Council will act. This illegal wiggle along the riverbank was a mixture of glory and gory. An ancient oak spread its limbs over the Roding, and some surprisingly lovely woodland flourished between the noisy North Circular and the

tranquil river.

Minutes from central Ilford, there was a heron, bird song and a precious slither of green space. But there was also sewage trickling into the river, more fly-tipping and several tragic summer camps made by homeless people, dotted with charred plastic, excrement and needles.

‘Let people in, walk this riverbank, and it will be cherished and cleaned up,’ argued Powlesland before we parted in the shadow of Ilford’s high-rises. The sprite is right.

Take the west bank of the Roding north from Town Quay, Barking. The path becomes an unofficial one shortly after half a mile. Trespass at your own risk! With a bit more persuasion, one hopes Redbridge Council will make it an official path

Across

1 Leap forward by obscure Conservative... (9)

6 ...to confound rumour of defect (5)

9 Social status of a good person in church (5)

10 Jump on stage as companion held by request (9)

11 Peer’s hope dashed, with king interrupting stockholder (10)

12 Killer’s fine in Ireland once held by clerics (4)

14 Stop filming girl to find weapon (7)

15 Broadcast covering new academic peak (7)

17 A day to embroider speech (7)

19 Share standard revenue from sales (7)

20 Join fool for audition (4)

22 Mother perhaps welcomes post being returned for assembly (10)

25 Key tenor must hold beat (9)

26 Put under some strain? Terrific! (5)

27 Supported conduct in speech (5)

28 Understood about belief accepting Conservative idol (6,3)

Genius crossword 423 el sereno

Down

1 Cuts poor staff employed by newspapers (5)

2 DT editor’s sadly out of shape (9)

3 Mole’s holiday lake? (10)

4 Make economies? That’s no good (7)

5 Hesitates and hits red badly (7)

6 Worry generated by guitar bar? (4)

7 Supplementary article taken on board by soldiers (5)

8 Dealing centre with diamonds held for reserve (9)

13 Mineral expedition with graduate on track (10)

14 Try fish and crispy pork (9)

16 Face heading off rushed discussion (9)

18 Reported view on instrument that’s found in school (3,4)

19 The art of government detailed as expedient (7)

21 Intimate just has to ignore leader (5)

23 Cast finished on air (5)

24 Brought up money, having no answer (4)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 8th March 2023

We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25. Two runners-up will receive £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 423

Across

1 Bears, transports (7)

5 Steed, mount (5)

8 Transmit; wireless (5)

9 Sunshade (7)

10 Teaching, instruction (9)

12 Quick swim (3)

13 Heavy with moisture (6)

14 Complain peevishly (6)

17 Automobile (3)

18 Bring back to life (9)

20 Instalment; occurrence (7)

21 Norwegian playwright (5)

23 50/50 Chances (5)

24 Settlement (of debt, eg) (7)

Down

1 Swear (5)

2 To free (of) (3)

3 Put in quarantine (7)

4 Blood poisoning (6)

5 Large wading bird (5)

6 Dwelling house (9)

7 Block out, obscure (7)

11 Subvert, sabotage (9)

13 Place out of sight, hide (7)

15 Fill with alarm, apprehension (7)

16 In the land of nod (6)

18 Origins (5)

19 A belief, opinion or doctrine (5)

22 View; understand (3)

Winner: Paul Dendy, Treuddyn, Flintshire

Runners-up: David Taylor, Selkirk, Scottish Borders; Florence Proctor, Kinrossie, Perth

Genius 421 solution

Moron 421 solution: Across: 1 Head, 3 Honest (Hedonist), 8 Amateur, 9 Vicar, 10 Dense, 11 Servile, 12 Dainty, 14 Sonnet, 18 Implore, 20 Tesla, 22 Erode, 23 Provost, 24 Escape, 25 Jeer. Down: 1 Hoarded, 2 Again, 3 Harass, 4 Never, 5 Section, 6 Defeat, 7 Erne, 13 Impious, 15 Option, 16 Traitor, 17 Temple, 18 Idea, 19 Omega, 21 Swore.

I looked up the word ‘finesse’ in the dictionary: ‘impressive delicacy and skill’. It continues, ‘In bridge, an attempt to win a trick with a card that is not a certain winner, typically by playing it as the third card in the hope that any card that could beat it is in the second player’s hand.’ In the Cambridge Dictionary, there is another angle: ‘to deal with a situation or a person in a skilful and often slightly dishonest way’.

To make this month’s 3NT on West’s four-of-diamonds opening lead, you need to show impressive delicacy and skill. No dishonesty is necessary.

Dealer South North-South Vulnerable

Competition

TESSA CASTRO

IN COMPETITION No 289 you were invited to write a poem called The Hobby-Horse. I was surprised by how many of you took for a subject the folklore creature, often represented in mumming performances by a horse’s skull.

The children’s stick-horse and the all-too-favourite topic figured less, though Sue Smalley wrote of an old man long infuriated by items in newspapers: ‘Deep inside him angry hooves still beat, / Their furious echo bursts forth in a tweet.’

Commiserations to her, Con Connell and Fiona Clark, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of the Chambers Dictionary going to Basil Ransome-Davies.

The hobby-horse, the King Charles’ head, A fetish, a fixation: All monomanias bringing dread To every conversation.

What you’ll give she’ll always take –Drink your beer and eat your cake. Her next address you’ll never know; Open the door and let her go.

Ann Drysdale

Nick’s hobby-horse (a horse head on a stick)

Suddenly says, ‘Neigh!

Nick, stop! I need some hay!’

‘My mind,’ the boy assumes, ‘has played a trick,’

And brings him to a halt. ‘A talking toy?’ Nick marvels, gapes and gawks. ‘I’d hoped for a horse that talks!’

The stallion utters, ‘Hold on tightly, boy!’

And all at once they’re galloping pell-mell Way, way above the trees, Beyond the Pleiades!

Approaching Mount Olympus’ citadel, They’re jolted by a tolling, clanging jangle –

The school bell. Back to class!

The bidding

South West North East

1 ♥ Pass 2 ♣ Pass

2 ♦ Pass 2 ♠ (1) Pass 2NT Pass 3NT end

(1) Fourth Suit Forcing – ‘We’re going to game; more information please.’

At the table, declarer beat East’s knave of diamonds with the king and cashed the three top clubs. Pleased the knave fell, he enjoyed the two long clubs. He could promote one spade trick, but finished one down. In fact, the game had been unmakeable as soon as the first trick was over.

Let us replay. Declarer must assume the knave of clubs falls in three rounds to get even close to his 24-count game. This gives him five club tricks and two diamond tricks. Hearts are too slow and ‘gappy’. The reality is you need a second spade trick.

Communications are tricky. You must win the first diamond in dummy with the ace (you could duck a round and win the second with the ace). At trick two, you must lead a low spade and finesse the ten, hoping East holds the knave. As you hope, the knave draws West’s ace.

You win West’s second diamond with the king, cash the king of spades and only now play the ace of clubs and cross to the king-queen (no finesse of the ten in this black suit – the best odds for five tricks is to play the suit from the top). The knave falling, you claim three more tricks via the two long clubs and the queen of spades. Game made.

ANDREW ROBSON

It may be golf or NFTs. Lord knows it may be Brexit. But for the hapless addressees It spurs an urge to exit.

The harped-on themes, the pedant’s thrum, The endless myths and fables –Whence does this cloud of boredom come?

The hobby-horse’s stables.

I seldom get out any more, Don’t rue my disconnection. It gives me endless hours to pore Over my stamp collection. Basil Ransome-Davies

Bone white, star bright, Mari Lwyd comes tonight. She bears no malice, brings no sin, Open the door and let her in.

She is the horse that used to be The pitman’s drudge or the punter’s chance, But benevolent death has set her free To hit the road in a crazy dance.

But the dance is fast and the road is long

And often she needs to catch her breath, So she comes to your house to sing her song

Of the old illusions of life and death.

Abandoned on the grass, Nick’s steed lies comatose in the quadrangle.

Martin Elster

Beware the pub bore (male, of course) Keen to trot out his hobby-horse

At every opportunity, Especially, unfortunately, When hobby-horses are his spiel –Folklore, their history – all that he’ll Insist you want to hear. You’re trapped (And long gave up on looking rapt) While he evokes the Tourney, Sieve –But it’s the Mast with most to give. His favourite is the Mari Lwyd, How cleverly the sheet’s employed, How deathly sinister, until You’re nodding too. You’ve lost the will To think, to feel, to live and curse The hobby-horses’ universe.

D A Prince

COMPETITION NO 291 Owners of a plastic lawn once gloated while others laboured to cut their grass. Now fake grass is regarded as almost criminal. So a poem, please, called Plastic Grass Maximum 16 lines. We still 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 291’, by Thursday 9th March.

To advertise, contact Jasper Gibbons on 0203 859 7096 or via email JasperGibbons@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £45+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 20th February 2023

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My violent, ill husband

QAfter 35 years of a marriage that really wasn’t that happy – he could be violent and both of us had affairs – we considered divorce, but eventually decided we couldn’t afford it.

For another year or so, we didn’t speak much; just tolerated each other in the same house. Then, a year ago, he had a severe stroke. He’s in a care home and barely recognises me, and when he does, he becomes extremely pitiful and sentimental. But I feel so resentful. I have no pity for him, and resent visiting him at all. Is there any point? I know that if the positions were reversed, he wouldn’t dream of coming near me.

The trouble is he has no one else to visit him as our children refuse to go near him. Name and address supplied

AWhat he would do in similar, but reversed, circumstances has nothing to do with it. You must do what you think is right. Presumably you were once in love or you wouldn’t have got married. There must have been some sweet sides to him. But if you can’t think of a single thing, then simply think of what is the very best way to behave.

And notice I say ‘behave’. Inside, you can loathe and resent him as much as you like, but I believe you have a duty (not as a wife but as a member of society) to continue to visit, say, once a month for just 20 minutes at least. It’s not just that I think this would be right and civilised I’m also thinking of how you might feel if he dies. Don’t create for yourself any risk of feeling even the faintest guilt or recrimination when he’s gone.

I may be being too preachy here. I know this is the right advice but even I, in your shoes, would find it hard to follow, though I hope I would at least try. The Oldie is published by Oldie Publications Ltd, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

Grandson’s university blues

QI’m so worried. My grandson is adamant that he doesn’t want to go to university. He’s a lovely, bright boy with a large group of friends and has got startlingly good A Levels.

But he says it’s pointless and expensive and he’d rather just get a job. He’s not academic and at the moment he’s working in a bar and has two jobs at weekends: one working in a hardware shop as an assistant and another walking people’s dogs. His parents just say it’s his choice, but I’m horrified. My mother was the first in our family to go to university, and I owe my whole career to a superb university education. How can I persuade him to change his mind? Name and address supplied

AI’m the wrong person to come to: I never went to university and I’m to this day delighted that I never did. (No, I tell a lie – I went as a mature student but, after one term, I was carted off to the Priory, having had a nervous breakdown. I, happily, never returned to formal education.) But think about it. He’s clearly got huge charm and abilities THREE jobs! He’s no slouch –and he doesn’t have a driving ambition to study a topic for which further education is essential. He doesn’t want to be a lawyer, doctor, accountant or scientist. He can live off his wits and charm. It would be far more sensible for him to find out what he’d like to do long-term by getting about a bit more and learning on the job – and earning at the same time, instead of paying for expensive lodgings in, say, Oxford and for lectures on Zoom.

You and your mother broke the family mould. Let him do the same. And good luck to him. Remember, he can go to university later if he changes his mind.

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My wife is Fag Ash Lil

QI’ve just discovered that, 30 years after stopping – 40 years ago – my wife has started smoking again. I’d thought I smelled it on her breath recently but she always denied it. When I found a cigarette stub, I confronted her again and she admitted it. She says it’s because she ‘just feels stressed now and again about getting older’ but I’m really upset. First, I don’t want her to die. Secondly, there’s the problem of second-hand smoke – and anyway it’s such a disgusting habit. And expensive. How can I get her to stop?

John, Andover

AI’m afraid you can’t. It sounds as if she smokes only outside, so don’t worry about second-hand smoke. If she pays for it, then the cost is her responsibility, not yours. As for dying, if she hasn’t already got a serious problem with her lungs, I think the chance of her dying of lung cancer after 40 years without a fag, and if she’s now smoking only occasionally, is pretty slim, but you should check this with a doctor.

Whether it’s a ‘disgusting habit’ or not is entirely subjective. Before the 1950s, some doctors thought cigarette-smoking was a healthy habit. ‘More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette,’ boasted one ad. They were wrong, of course, but, still, smoking used to be thought the height of glamour. Your wife is stressed. She’s in her seventies. It’s her one little treat. If you can’t help alleviate her stress – and who doesn’t feel stressed about growing old? – can’t you give her a break?

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.

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