Competition, run in conjunction with The Oldie and The Chap, challenged entrants to match Wilde’s style with their own original entries. There were more than 300 entries – and the winners would make Oscar smile. The top entry came from Darcy Alexander Corstorphine, who is no stranger to this contest. He took top place in the first two Wilde Wit Competitions! This year, he achieved ‘I’ve always needed a gag-writer’ another feat, tying with himself for first prize, with introduce piped music from these two aphorisms: Classic FM or Virgin Radio. A nervous patient finally decides to have a jab and turns up at the vaccination centre only to be subjected to the wheedling tones of Alan Titchmarsh or Chris Evans? Come back!
The real Oscar Wilde
‘A moment of reflection should be taken before the mirror or not at all.’ ‘There are only two sources of sorrow in this world: one is a lack of understanding, the other is an excess of it.’ Second place goes to Robert Eddison for this wonderful line: ‘The quickest way to make your name is to lose your reputation.’ Silvia Gasparini won third place with her charming truism: ‘Truth is the name we give to the lies we like.’ Many congratulations to all these supreme Wildeans. Most oldies did their bit when it came to having COVID jabs. But would this continue to be the case were the NHS to follow a suggestion from Conservative backbencher Tobias Ellwood? The Bournemouth East MP rose in the Commons to suggest that vaccine centres
Many readers will be familiar with the works of the Scottish novelist Alistair MacLean, author of The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra and Where Eagles Dare, among other ripping yarns. MacLean was born 100 years ago, on 21st April 1922, and died in 1987. His books have sold over 150 million copies, and several have been made into hugely popular films. MacLean served with the wartime Royal Navy, and began his writing career in 1955 with the classic sea story HMS Ulysses. The book sold an almost immediate 300,000 copies in
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Alistair MacLean (1922-87)
straight face that he had been captured and cruelly tortured by the wartime Japanese. His own son called this a ‘drunken raving’. MacLean’s last years were afflicted by alcoholism, and he met an appropriately mysterious end. He died, after a brief illness, while staying in a Munich hotel. No one, including his own family, claimed to know what he was doing there.
hardback, and made its author a wealthy man. MacLean’s plots tend to affirm qualities like national integrity and personal heroism, and eschew the love element. Asked about this in an interview, he replied briskly, ‘Sex? No time for it. Gets in the way of the action.’ MacLean had mixed feelings about the whole literary process, claiming he wrote at top speed because ‘I dislike the job, and the sooner I finish a novel the better.’ He even wrote two books under a pseudonym in order to prove that the public would still buy them without his name on the cover. He was right; they did. MacLean’s imagination wasn’t confined to the printed page: he often insisted with a
The Lib Dems’ shock victory in December’s North Shropshire by-election marked another great comeback for the Liberal Democrats. To celebrate the occasion, they planned a dramatic photo opportunity. The idea was to have party leader Sir Ed Davey drive a tractor through a wall of blue ‘Tory’ bricks. Sadly for the Lib Dems, a few days before polling day Sir Ed went down with COVID and was forced to isolate, scuppering the stunt. ‘It’s a real shame,’ says a Lib Dem HQ insider. ‘Ed was really looking forward to getting behind the wheel of the tractor!’ The Oldie April 2022 7
