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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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

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’