The Old Un’s Notes

Dolly: singer and novelist

Move over, Dickens and Tolstoy! Dolly Parton is publishing her first novel.

The great country singer has written Run Rose Run, out on 7th March, with the mega-selling American novelist James Patterson.

Rose is ‘a star on the rise, singing about the hard life behind her. She’s also on the run. Find a future, lost a past. Nashville is where she’s come to claim her destiny… Run Rose Run is a novel glittering with danger and desire.’

What energy Dolly, who’s 76 on 19th January, has. She’s also releasing an album of the same name – Run Rose Run – with 12 original songs she was inspired by the book to write and record. Tracks include Firecracker and Big Dreams and Faded Jeans.

What an inspirational idea – for writers to record albums inspired by their books. Still, it’s hard to think of writers with exceptional musical talents like Dolly – though surely Jeffrey Archer must think he has the world’s greatest voice…

As the last issue of The

Oldie reported, the new film Operation Mincemeat tells the tale of the great 1943 British intelligence coup – when the body of a Welsh tramp was dumped off the Spanish coast, with false Allied invasion plans in his pocket.

‘Wallet litter’ was placed in the tramp’s wallet – items such as his girlfriend’s picture – to make him look convincing. Now Oldie-reader David Shacklock has sent in his ‘pocket litter’ – the items he found in an old tweed jacket before it was downgraded to gardening status.

Here is the list of what he found in the jacket’s pockets: angle bracket with one-and-ahalf-inch screw; hearing-aid battery; remainder of packet of Polo mints; packet of vine eyes; picture-hook nail; two lengths of garden-plant tie (rubberised); length of garden-plant tie (plasticised); shaped wire-holder for loo roll; packet of staples; length of coarse string; length of twine; uneaten Cafe Crisp; metal washer; 5p coin; 1p coin; wiring screw eye for brick wall; Zebra biro; ‘Xtra strong’ tote bag; cable tie; clothes peg; drawing pin.

Have any other readers managed to squeeze so much pocket litter into a single item of clothing?

January 5th was the 120th anniversary of the birth of poet and novelist Stella Gibbons (1902-89). It is also 90 years since the publication of her first and best-known novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932).

Oldie contributor Mark Bryant met her in 1983 at one of her monthly tea parties in her mock-Tudor house on the Holly Lodge estate, north London. She smoked an occasional cigarette and complained of a rheumatic thumb, which she said made reading paperbacks difficult as she was unable to hold them open.

Sherry and snacks were served. Stella asked Mark to open two bottles of white wine, remarking, ‘My two vices are the Wine Society and having my tea cloths laundered.’ She added that the greatest

Among this month’s contributors

David Wood (p14) played Johnny in Lindsay Anderson’s if… (1968). He was in Aces High (1976). He set up the Whirligig Theatre and wrote The Gingerbread Man (1976).

Rev Peter Mullen (p19) is the former Rector of St Michael, Cornhill, and St Sepulchre-without-Newgate. He is Chaplain to the Honourable Company of Air Pilots and the London Stock Exchange.

Lady Colin Campbell (p36) is better known as ‘Lady C’. She is the author of Meghan and Harry: The Real Story and The Real Diana. She was in the 2015 series of I’m a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here.

Peter York (p24) wrote The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook with Ann Barr in 1982. He co-founded the management consultancy SRU. He is the author of Dictators’ Homes (2005).

Warm comfort: Stella Gibbons (1902-89)

Important stories you may have missed

Ploughing and hedging society makes plans for next year Glamorgan Star

Hens to be fed maggots Times

Chase the pudding event will go ahead this weekend Dorset Echo

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‘Hey! This is really affecting my mental health’

inventions of modern times were Tide washing powder and paper napkins. An avid admirer of Noël Coward (her ‘greatest treasure’ was a personally inscribed collection of his plays), she was reading the complete works of Shakespeare in bed. A Winter’s Tale was her favourite so far.

At another tea party, Mark mentioned to her that he was editing a charity anthology about wildlife. She immediately copied out for him her poem The Giraffes – originally published in TS Eliot’s magazine The Criterion and much admired by Virginia Woolf.

Mark also helped maintain her rather wild garden.

‘I was always rather relieved that I did not discover “something nasty in the woodshed”,’ he remembers, echoing Cold Comfort Farm. ‘She gave me a cutting from a peace rose. More than three decades later, that cutting is now a bush in my own garden and every year the beautiful flowers remind me of a very kind, generous and muchmissed friend.’

Stories of cancel culture have become so depressingly frequent that it is cheering to hear of an oldie bucking the trend.

Jim Murray, a former Fleet Street tabloid crime hack, has for the past 20 years made a living by publishing his annual Whisky Bible, which does for whisky what Hugh Johnson’s wine guides used to do for clarets and burgundies.

Last year, Murray fell foul of the #MeToo brigade for comparing, amid his thousands of tasting notes, a handful of whiskies to beautiful women.

All hell broke loose in America and here. Some of the big distillers sent him to Coventry, bookshop chains refused to take his book and Murray faced financial ruin.

Undaunted, he has produced his 2022 Bible in his normal jaunty style, with just as many pages as ever, complete with a defiant foreword attacking the joyless puritans who tried to silence him. Murray’s readers have sent him a blizzard of supportive messages.

As far as the Twitterati are concerned, Northamptonbased Jim is as unfazed as you might expect from a man who in his newspaper career had East End gangsters cracking their knuckles at his door. Jim also suggested to the police at the height of the Yorkshire Ripper case that they might want to question a lorry driver called Peter Sutcliffe.

Ellen Jovin, grammar queen

The Old Un has found a new pin-up – in New York.

Ellen Jovin is a blonde, blue-eyed grammar teacher with a folding table, a few dictionaries and some foreign language books.

She sits for an hour or so at New York park entrances – and answers grammatical questions. The most frequently asked one concerns the Oxford comma.

Ellen has studied 25 languages besides English. In 1999, with her husband, Brandt Johnson, she started Syntaxis, a communication-skills training firm. Her book, Rebel with a Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian, will come out in the summer in America and Britain.

After she’d posted her sign to set up shop, it took less

‘We’re just not right for each other. I mean, I’m right, but you’re not’