The Oldie magazine - January 2021 issue 395

NEW OLDIE MEMOIR COURSE – FRANCES WILSON MY DRY CHRISTMAS

MARY KILLEN

January 2021 | £4.95 | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 395

Merry Christmas, Possums!

Dame Edna Everage’s review of the year

The Archers turns 70 – Gill Powell Barry Cryer on the secret of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue

Give The Oldie for under £2 an issue See p41

Burt Reynolds does am-dram page 16

Features 13 She has overcome – Joan Baez turns 80 Simon Hemelryk 15 Dreaming of a dry Christmas Mary Killen 16 Burt’s amateur performance Nick Newman 18 Holy Hitch Alice Cockerell 19 The end of National Service Charles Pasternak 20 My gaudy nights Oswyn Murray 22 Christmas commonplaces Harry Mount 24 The Archers turns 70 Gill Powell 28 How to write a memoir Frances Wilson 30 Still living with my parents at the age of 50 Jeremy Clarke 31 Guests from hell Tanya Gold 32 My brainy pin-ups Bel Mooney 34 Swell party-givers Charlotte Metcalf 35 Jeremy Lewis Prize: the winner 35 Panto in Iraq Janet Lawrence 36 Yorkshire Ripper’s lawyer Duncan Campbell 37 The best book titles Rachel Johnson

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith

Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA www.theoldie.co.uk

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ABC circulation figure Jan-Jun 2020: 47,170

Christmas guests from Hell page 31

9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: What was a serinette? Deborah Nash 12 Modern Life: What is K-pop?

Richard Godwin 38 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 39 Country Mouse Giles Wood 40 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 42 Letter from America Dominic Green 43 Profitable Wonders James Le Fanu 44 School Days Sophia Waugh 44 The I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue story Barry Cryer 45 Home Front Alice Pitman 46 God Sister Teresa 46 Memorial Service: Colonel John Waddy, OBE James Hughes-Onslow 47 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 48 Readers’ Letters 50 I Once Met… Burt Lancaster, Telly Savalas and Jack Palance Piers Pottinger 50 Memory Lane 65 Media Matters Stephen Glover 67 History David Horspool 69 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor John Bowling Books editor Claudia FitzHerbert Supplements editor Liz Anderson Publisher James Pembroke Patron saint Jeremy Lewis At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

Hold back the years with style page 85

69 Rant: Modern job titles Adam Burgess 97 Crossword 99 Bridge Andrew Robson 99 Competition Tessa Castro 106 Ask Virginia Ironside

90 Joe O’Biden’s Irish home Dea Birkett 92 Taking a Walk: Covehithe, Suffolk Patrick Barkham 93 On the Road: Emma Bridgewater Louise Flind

Books

Arts

53 A Promised Land, by Barack Obama Ivo Dawnay 55 Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, by Dolly Parton and Robert K Oermann Tanya Gold 57 Types and Shadows: The Roy Strong Diaries 2004-2015, by Roy Strong Nicola Shulman 57 The Time Traveller’s Guide to Regency Britain, by Ian Mortimer Kate Hubbard 59 News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World, by Alan Rusbridger Matthew Norman 61 Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology, edited by Alice Oswald and Paul Keegan Hamish Robinson 63 Collected Stories, by Shirley Hazzard Cressida Connolly

70 My brilliant year Dame Edna Everage 71 Netflix: The Crown & Diana: In Her Own Words Harry Mount 71 Radio Valerie Grove 72 Television Roger Lewis 73 Music Richard Osborne 74 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 75 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Travel 88 King of the Purbeck Stone Age Treleven Haysom Oldie subscriptions ● To place a new order, please visit our website subscribe.theoldie.co.uk ● To renew a subscription, please visit myaccount.theoldie.co.uk ● If urgent, please email help@subscribe. theoldie.co.uk, or write to: Oldie Subscriptions Rockwood House 9-16 Perrymount Road Haywards Heath West Sussex RH16 3DH

Pursuits 77 Gardening David Wheeler 77 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 78 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 78 Restaurants James Pembroke 79 Drink Bill Knott 80 Sport Jim White 80 Motoring Alan Judd 82 Digital Life Matthew Webster 82 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 85 Getting Dressed: Keeping up appearances Liz Hodgkinson 87 Bird of the Month: Goldcrest John McEwen Advertising For display, contact Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or Melissa Arancio on 07305 010659 For classified, contact Kami Jogee on 07983 097477 News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk Front cover Michael Farenden/Alamy

The Oldie January 2021 3

The Old Un’s Notes How to buy The Oldie under the tier system Thanks to the tiers, buying individual copies of The Oldie may not be quite as easy as usual at the moment. There are three simple ways of getting round this: 1. Order a print edition for £4.95 (free p & p within

the UK) at: www.magsdirect.co.uk.

2. Order a digital edition at www.pocketmags.com for £2.99.Then scroll down to the Special Issues section.

3. Give a 12-issue print subscription for just £20 and also receive three free books.

See page 43.

Sign up for The Oldie e-newsletter and Barry Cryer’s jokes Under the tier system, the Old Un is producing extra pieces every day on The Oldie website, including Barry Cryer’s jokes.

Every Friday, we send a newsletter with the best of our

blogs, with a Talking Pictures recommendation.

To access it, go to www.theoldie.co.uk and, at the top right of the home page, enter your email address in the white box, above which is written ‘Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter’.

on Churchill and the American Civil War and obsessed with Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

‘He educated me about music, history – he was very smart,’ says Angela More. ‘He used to laugh when I told him so, saying, “I was a

duffer at school! I only know the answers now because I’ve lived so much!” That wasn’t true!’

The sunny attitude that comes across on screen was the real thing. Keen on Martinis, wine, whisky and brandy, More, according to his widow, ‘seemed to revel in

the hangovers which followed the next day, feeling he’d earned them as a result of a good night out!’

What a lovely, glass-halffull attitude.

Among this month’s contributors More, please!

The great Kenneth More died from Parkinson’s disease in 1982, aged only 67.

Now the star of Genevieve (1953) and Reach for the Sky (1956) is affectionately remembered in More, Please!, his first ever biography, by Nick Pourgourides, published on 10th December.

In it, More’s widow, Angela More, fondly remembers him for his idiosyncratic charm: mowing the lawn in his boxer shorts; swimming in their pool, either starkers or fully clothed.

Beneath the relaxed, debonair movie star’s skin, More was something of an intellectual, devoted to books

Bel Mooney (p32) spent 50 years as a journalist, novelist, bestselling children’s author and TV and radio broadcaster. She now writes an advice column, comment and book reviews for the Daily Mail.

Oswyn Murray (p20), Emeritus Fellow of Balliol, is author of Early Greece and editor of the Oxford History of the Classical World.

He built a new street in the centre of Oxford and is an expert on Greek drinking customs.

Treleven Haysom (p88) is the author of Purbeck Stone (Dovecote Press). Eleven generations of his family have quarried stone on the Isle of Purbeck since 1698.

He’s worked with stone for over 60 years.

Charlotte Metcalf (p34), former awardwinning documentary film-maker, is now a writer and the editor of Great British Brands.

She is also an enthusiastic podcaster on Break Out Culture with Ed Vaizey.

No sex, please – we’re British.

That’s the message of a wise new book by Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn’t Matter, coming out in February.

As Fane writes, the ancient Romans wouldn’t have spoken about their ‘sexuality’ with the reverence we do today. The Romans were right to think of sex as fun and quite possibly an art – and to give it no further serious consideration.

In our sex-obsessed culture, this sounds revolutionary. But why not get all that messing about out of the way and settle down to a nice cup of tea, a good book or the latest issue of The Oldie?

Harvard maths don and comic legend Tom Lehrer, 92, is as nice in the flesh as he is on screen.

Oldie contributor Oliver Pritchett was reminded by Francis Beckett’s article The Oldie January 2021 5

Important stories you may have missed Doughnut theft is alleged in Keswick News & Star

Man loses chair leg after carrying it as ‘offensive weapon’ Shetland Times Fined for brandishing butter knife Orcadian £15 for published contributions

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Day-trippers and a 1947 Leyland bus, Rothesay, the Isle of Bute. From the new book A Transport Journey in Colour

on Lehrer (December issue) of the evening he played to the students of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1960.

Pritchett, then a Magdalen undergraduate, remembers, ‘Lehrer came to give a concert in the city. One of the bolder members of our year went to the stage door and invited the great man to a party after the show. To everyone’s surprise, Lehrer accepted.’

It was all very rushed. The college buttery was cleared, drink laid on and an upright piano found somewhere and wheeled into the room.

‘Sure enough, Lehrer turned up, lean and laid-back in a dark suit and those heavyrimmed spectacles, looking mildly amused by his eager, young hosts – about 20 of us.

We pointed to the piano in the corner but he didn’t react. We suggested he might give us a tune and he refused. “I only do it for money,” he said.’

So the students plied him – and themselves – with drink. Tom Lehrer remained coolly detached. Then he announced that he would like to meet a don.

Pritchett says, ‘We had just the man: C E “Tom” Stevens, a popular tutor in ancient history, eccentric, convivial and free with the sherry. Someone went to fetch him from his room nearby in the cloisters.

‘The tweedy, slightly dishevelled Tom and the immaculate Harvard mathematician Tom took to

each other at once. Soon Lehrer was at the piano, singing The Old Dope-Peddler.’

The party carried on into the early hours. Next morning, Lehrer, elegant as ever, was breakfasting in the college dining hall.

Peter Williams, an Oldie reader, saw this ad on the Nextdoor neighbourhood social-media website in Honing, Norfolk.

‘For sale. A4 rendition of The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci in Fuzzy Felt. Due to lack of shapes, one of the Disciples is a Tractor. Offers.’

Normal for Norfolk?

The late Sean Connery was an utter pussycat on the golf course.

He never indulged in the cheating that goes on in

Goldfinger, when Connery’s Bond beats Auric Goldfinger at Royal St George’s, Sandwich.

‘One summer’s evening in 1973, I was playing a few holes of golf on my own at Sunningdale, when a man came up and asked if he could join me,’ remembers Chris Beharrell, an Oldie reader. ‘ “Delighted,” I said.’

After a while, Connery, still unrecognised, asked Beharrell what he did. He told him he was a student at St Andrews, the Scottish university.

‘I come from Edinburgh,’ Connery said.

Beharrell asked him what he did.

‘Oh, a bit of acting, but I prefer playing golf,’ said Connery.

‘A splash of water … a splash of water…’

When they finished, Connery invited Beharrell for a drink in the clubhouse.

‘Your usual, Mr Connery?’ the barman asked.

No, it was a malt whisky,

‘Before we begin, let’s all take a moment to google the true meaning of Christmas’

not a dry martini, but Beharrell was certainly shaken and stirred on realising who his nice golf partner really was.

13th January 2021 marks the 80th anniversary of the death of James Joyce (1882-1941).

Best known for Ulysses (1922), he is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century. This has not always been the case.

His first book, Dubliners (1914), took nearly ten years to appear as it was rejected by numerous publishers (one even burnt the printed sheets).

Ulysses, published on Joyce’s 40th birthday, also provoked strong reactions from literary heavyweights.

Edmund Gosse dismissed him as ‘a literary charlatan’.

D H Lawrence (no slouch when it comes to fruity novels) said the last part of the book was ‘the dirtiest, most indecent, most obscene thing ever written ... it is filthy...This Ulysses muck is more disgusting than Casanova.’

Meanwhile, Virginia Woolf, in a letter to fellow Bloomsbury Group member Lytton Strachey, pronounced emphatically, ‘Never did I read such tosh.’ In her diary, she said she was ‘puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’.

Poor old Joyce. At least history remembers him kindly, even if his fellow writers didn’t.

While the nation has been knocked sideways by coronavirus, another pest has been stalking the land.

The heather beetle is gradually destroying vast tracts of our glorious, purple heather moors and turning them a nasty orangey brown.

The beetle is currently laying waste to the North Yorkshire moors, the largest expanse of purple heather in Europe, and there are fears it will soon move into Scotland.

As autumn progresses, beetle larvae embed themselves in the heather where they will hatch in the spring.

In severe winters, many of these larvae die and the heather recovers. But the past few winters have been so mild that millions of larvae have survived, damaging the heather to such an extent that it never will recover.

The only solution is to kill the larvae by controlled burning. If you want the heather to bloom, let it burn.

For the Old Un, Christmas is Alastair Sim as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1951).

In A Fate Worse than Hollywood, his new memoir, screenwriter David Ambrose describes the joy of working with Sim in Siege, a 1972 play.

Sim and his wife, Naomi, rejoiced in the ways critics described him: ‘puckish’ and ‘pawky’ with ‘jowl-wobbling double-takes’. The Old Un is delighted to discover the supposedly ‘lugubrious’ (another critic’s word) Sim was a charmer in the flesh.

The Old Un is much enjoying Pen Vogler’s new book, Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain.

He’s horrified, though, by how often the rich try to police the diet of the poor. In 1541, Archbishop Cranmer decreed the number of dishes each rank in the clergy could eat.

On long dining tables, salt was available only at the top end – hence ‘below the salt’.

George Orwell nobly

prue leith

Bliss on Toast

Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers

Welsh rarebit with crisp, fried bacon on granary loaf

defended the right to eat and drink chips, ice cream and sugared tea in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). And so does the Old Un. This

Christmas, he’s going to eat and drink himself silly – and hopes all readers will, too.

Merry Christmas, one and all!

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The Oldie January 2021 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Happy Annunciation!

Christmas is cancelled – so we’re celebrating another Christian festival I have been to see a psychiatrist only once, but I am glad I did. He changed my life.

This was about 20 years ago, when I had lost my seat in Parliament and was feeling a bit down in the dumps. He gave me a set of rules to live by that he thought might help lift my spirits, and one of them was to ‘accept change’.

‘Don’t resist change,’ he counselled, ‘Embrace it. Change is the salt in the soup of life. It adds to the flavour. People say, “Don’t rock the boat,” but a little gentle rocking does you good.’

I followed his advice and, for me, it’s worked wonders. I am following it still, which is why, regardless of what the government is saying can or can’t be done this December, in the Brandreth household, we have decided to change the date of Christmas 2020.

There is a pandemic on. This really isn’t the time for taking unnecessary risks with extended family gatherings, is it? I say let’s embrace change and do things differently this year. No one knows for sure when Jesus was born anyway.

We have Christmas on 25th December only because it roughly coincides with the winter solstice. There are historical and biblical grounds for alternative dates and the one I’m opting for is 25th March. It’s the Feast of the Annunciation, but some authorities say the date marks Christ’s birth rather than his conception.

So that’s the Brandreth plan: a safer, happier family Christmas three months down the line, when spring is sprung, the hospitals aren’t so crowded and the vaccines that are currently just around the corner have had time to arrive and begin to work their magic. Simples, eh?

The psychiatrist I went to see was the best: Dr Anthony Clare – yes, the famous one from the radio programme In the Psychiatrist’s Chair. I have been reading his official biography, just published,

written for the Merrion Press by two distinguished medicos from Trinity College, Dublin, Brendan Kelly and Muiris Houston.

They have done a grand job, capturing the charm and genius of Clare, who, from the mid-1970s onwards, demystified psychiatry both through his research and through his broadcasting. It’s the remarkable story of a remarkable man – one that ends sadly.

Clare (the father of seven children – ‘not because I am a Catholic,’ he told me, ‘because I like children’) died suddenly in Paris in 2007, aged only 64. Towards the end of his life, he became unhappy about the way he had used it. Because of his prolific radio and TV work, he feared he was judged as ‘lacking gravitas’. Like many brilliant broadcasters I have known (from Robin Day to Jeremy Paxman), he wondered at the last if he had wasted his life. All I can say is that he changed mine.

It’s because of Anthony Clare that I am in touch with Natalia Garibotto. Embracing change, I embraced Twitter and Instagram when they came along and

‘Please fix the boiler quickly. We really need heat down here’

Natalia is huge on both. You don’t know her? You should. She’s fun.

She is the 27-year-old Brazilian bikini model who hit the headlines recently when Pope Francis (who is also on Twitter and Instagram) ‘liked’ a saucy photograph of Natalia, skimpily clad and sporting a bare behind.

The Vatican quickly explained that it must have been one of His Holiness’s social-media team who inadvertently pressed the ‘like’ button on his Instagram account, but if it was the pontiff himself he needn’t feel ashamed. Natalia is a good Catholic girl who (she tells me via Twitter) always says her prayers and never goes too far.

If you’ve not yet tried Twitter, give it a go. When you’re next allowed to see them, one of your grandchildren will show you how. Natalia and the Pope have millions of followers. I have just 111,000, but then I’ve always been a quality-overquantity man. When you’ve joined Twitter, follow me on @GylesB1. Tell me you’re an Oldie reader and I promise to follow you back.

As you can tell, I am loving the new technology. It’s even led me to open my own online shop. I am calling it Gyles Brandreth’s Old Curiosity Shop. It’s not yet in the Jeff Bezos Amazon league, but the principle is the same. You come to my shop online, see if you like what I’ve got to offer, buy it and, soon after, it’s delivered to your door.

At the moment, I am just selling my own books (all autographed), but I am being encouraged to add personalised mugs and tea towels to the range. I have a fun mug in the pipeline that features a picture of me and the great Roger Moore on one side and, on the other, an ad that I spotted at the local chemist: ‘Try Viagra.

It won’t make you Sean Connery but it might make you Roger Moore.’

I am hoping Pope Francis might ‘like’ that.

The Oldie January 2021 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

Have yourself a Hellish little Christmas Why am I addicted to awful, schmaltzy films at this time of year? matthew norman

The Germans will doubtless have a word for the condition shortly to be outlined.

But, no modern linguist, I must resort to long-winded English to describe the mental collapse that reached its zenith yesterday.

Until then, I had smugly assumed that nothing could more succinctly portray the raising of the white flag to useful existence than the arboreal tableau observable in my front garden last spring.

Back then, well into the first lockdown, this tiny patch of unkempt west-London land played host to not one but two years’ worth of discarded Christmas trees. Both had long ago shed all pine needles, the bare branches having turned an unappetisingly wan shade of tan.

Their owner lacking the energy and minimal self-respect to shift them the few feet to the roadside, they lay limply outside the front door like some neovoodoo warning.

Knock, they mutely informed the innocent Jehovah’s Witness or charity pest, and it was long odds-on that the door would be opened by a hunchback named Igor, who would slowly turn his head and utter ‘Earthlings, master’ to a dark, unseen presence within.

Eventually, my son’s patience snapped, and he had sufficiently firm words about the trees to expedite their departure.

I cannot recall them verbatim. But his tone was eerily similar to the one with which he introduced the clothes he gave me for a recent birthday. My wearing these garments, he hoped, ‘will suggest someone less intimately acquainted with mental-health issues or homelessness.

Or both.’

What he’ll say about this latest Christmas-related sign of surrender, time will tell. But it’s a safe guess that it will tend towards the trenchant.

Anyway, before the suspense becomes overwhelming, what I have done in preparation for the approaching Yuletide is subscribe to the Hallmark Channel.

10 The Oldie January 2021

This cable network, for any of you blessed with ignorance, is the closest the medium of TV has or will come to gifting the viewer a surgery-free frontal lobotomy.

The lexicon of idiocy (including the German edition) has no words to convey the depth and completeness of imbecility required to so much as tolerate, let alone enjoy, any of the myriad Christmas movies on Hallmark.

Each, apart from anything else, is virtually identical to all the others regarding what we will, with seasonal Christian charity, term the plot.

A young woman who left her idyllically snow-festooned hamlet some decades ago is a hotshot lawyer/musician/architect/ chef/dominatrix (sorry, that last one is my little joke) in LA, New York or Chicago.

Having wisely fled the anodyne winsomeness of small-town America, she is having a ball in the metropolis.

But then some compelling reason – a family illness, perhaps; an elderly aunt’s sudden incapacity to run the nauseatingly twee B&B – brings her home.

At first, being naturally bored beyond endurance, she cannot wait to return to the city. But then she is reunited with her high-school sweetheart, generally a widower with a monstrously cute sevenyear-old child in tow. Before you know it, she is smitten with decorating the Goliathan Christmas tree one knows will duly be off the premises by Twelfth Night.

So it is that she not only rediscovers the child-like wonderment of Christmas; she also learns, as Dorothy needed that arduous detour to the Emerald City to appreciate, that there is indeed no place like home.

‘There are creatures crawling under paving stones that would write better scripts’

Bubbling menacingly away beneath the surface, the subliminal messaging is repellent. This version of what the US far right likes to call ‘the real America’ is as gleamingly white as the snow.

These deceptively rancid offerings propel events on Walton’s Mountain or within that little house on the prairie towards the grittier end of the cinéma vérité spectrum.

There are creatures crawling under paving stones – and not the smartest invertebrates – that would write incomparably better scripts. These screenplays could be, and conceivably are, churned out by the least sophisticated software in the AI arsenal.

And I am irredeemably, unendingly addicted. With all the glorious culture in the world so freely available, night after night between now and mid-March will find me devouring Jingle Around the Clock, Christmas Bells Are Ringing, Christmas on Honeysuckle Lane, Christmas Next Door and dozens more of these clones.

Worse yet, my lachrymals will be sent into overdrive whenever Mary Lou, the allure of her Manhattan law firm having yielded to the passion for baking gingerbread, finally kisses Brad gingerly on the mouth. In this universe, you’re twice as likely to meet a drug lord or drag queen as a tongue.

Somewhere in Hallmark’s enduring commercial success, though it would take a non-self-lobotomised mind to write it, lies an intriguing thesis about how the marriage between casual racism and nostalgia lust helped propel a rampant maniac to the White House.

He will definitely be gone in January.

Who knows – this year’s Christmas tree might be, too. The snivelling addiction to Hallmark, and the unconditional mental surrender it so brutally encapsulates, will not.

what was a serinette?

The serinette is a small bird-organ, used to teach dance tunes to pet birds in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The name derives from serin, the French for canary, as these robust little birds were particularly adept at learning new sequences of pitches. Introduced to Europe in the 1500s, the canary quickly caught on at court, then as a popular parlour bird. The novelty of a bird singing well-known melodies such as The Blue Bells of Scotland or La Petite Chasse encouraged the development of an international bird trade, with songsters commanding significant sums.

Hence the invention of the serinette.

Before the rise of the bird-organ, bird-keepers played airs to their pets from a collection of scores known as The Bird Fancyer’s Delight (1715-17) using a flageolet (a kind of recorder).

The serinette, which originated in Mirecourt, France, enabled families with little musical skill or knowledge of birds to train them successfully, thus providing ambient music in the home. The bird and its serinette became status symbols,

what is K-pop?

K-pop – short for Korean pop – is a type of pop music, invented in South Korea. It combines Western pop with rock, gospel, hip-hop, jazz, classical and traditional Korean music.

The first big K-pop band was the boy band HOT, who first hit the headlines in 1996. These days, the band Bangtan Sonyeondan – popularly known as BTS – was worth $4.65 billion in 2019, accounting for 0.3 per cent of Korean GDP. The perfect complexions of K-pop 12 The Oldie January 2021

Hogarth's The Graham Children (1742) – with their serinette

barrel’s pins and staples lifted the keys, opening the valves to let air into the pipes.

A serinette usually played about eight tunes and these were listed on a paper pasted inside the lid. A larger version of the serinette was the merline (from the French for blackbird, merle). There was also the perroquette (parrot) and the turlutaine (from the French for curlew, turlu); this was probably used by bird-catchers to entice the curlew.

One of the finest serinette-makers was Monsieur Davrainville (born 1784; Christian name unrecorded). The son of a serinette-maker in Paris, he had built his first by the age of 13 and went on to create ever more ambitious bird-organs, including one that could play four overtures.

The use of the serinette declined in France following the 1789 Revolution and the abolition of the royal court. Its function as a teaching aid faded with the development of new technologies such as phonographs, recording equipment and the radio. Consequently, the serinette was played more as a music box.

Today, it’s simply a curiosity, attracting the attention of the Musical Box Society and interested collectors.

Mechanical-musical-instrument-maker and -restorer Rob Baker recalls working on one: ‘Compared with other types of larger barrel instruments, the construction [of the serinette] is rather basic and rough.’

Deborah Nash

‘idols’, male and female, now adorn the bedroom walls and smartphone screensavers of teenagers the world over.

BTS recently addressed the UN – they’re that popular.

The wider phenomenon is known as Hallyu, a Chinese neologism meaning Korean Wave. Since the late 1990s, a series of targeted measures (tax breaks, company restructurings, relaxation of censorship laws and travels bans etc) have helped make Seoul the trend factory of Asia, an innovator in everything from soap operas to skin care, fashion to consumer tech.

It’s not for nothing that the first non-English-language movie to win the

Best Picture Oscar (Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite) was Korean. And now K-pop is doing the unthinkable and challenging Anglo-American pop hegemony.

An early harbinger was Psy’s 2012 hit, Gangnam Style, the first video to score one billion YouTube views. But it’s the seven members of BTS – RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V and (especially) Jungkook – who are the poster boys for Hallyu. Last year, they became the first K-pop band to land a number-one album in the UK. In August, they scored their first American number-one single, edging out Cardi B’s WAP. BTS translates as Bulletproof Boy Scouts, by the way. If you don't know

demonstrating the triumph of science and culture (in particular, refinement and artifice) over the natural world and offering an antidote to the noise of urban crowds.

Serinette construction was remarkably consistent: instruments built a century apart bear a strong similarity. The serinette consists of a hand crank that pumps the bellows inside a wooden box, supplying air to a set of ten pipes, while simultaneously turning a barrel encoded with tunes by the pins embedded in it. As the bird-trainer turned the handle, the

what WAP stands for, you’ll have to google it.

So what does this crazy new music sound like? A lot like Anglo-American pop – only it’s sung (for the most part) in Korean, produced to a high sheen, and comes with outstanding dance routines.

Seriously, the videos are great! The main difference is, how shall we put this … attitudinal? Cardi B is filthy, she’s provocative, she’s hilarious and she’s exactly what Western pop stars have been since, ooh … Cab Calloway?

BTS are nice, clean-cut, polite young men. Most K-pop idols emerge from reality TV or dedicated academies – a bit like Hogwarts, but for K-pop. It takes formidable dedication and sacrifice.

‘That's the reason idols seem like humble,

BTS – the Bulletproof Boy Scouts – are the kings of K-pop

decent people, which is a breath of fresh air compared with the braggy American/ Western artists,’ enthuses one fan.

There is a darker side (there always is). Gruelling schedules, impossibly high beauty standards, youth fixation… One reporter, visiting the studio that produced the girl band G(I)-dle, noticed a sign on the wall saying, ‘Those who lack effort. Those who lack passion. Those who lack potential. Will go home’.

But be careful before you criticise. K-pop fandom is vast, online and organised.

K-pop fans proved effective mobilisers during the Black Lives Matter protests and flummoxed Donald Trump’s rallies by flooding event-organisers with fake ticket requests. Upset them at your peril.

Richard Godwin

USIA/ALAMY

She has overcome – Joan Baez turns 80 From hanging out with Martin Luther King Jr to camping in a tree to stop the destruction of a Los Angeles urban farm, Joan Baez has led quite the protesting life.

The American singer, who turns 80 on 9th January, grew up in a Quaker household. Born in Staten Island, she spent her childhood in Europe, Canada and the Middle East thanks to her father’s work with UNESCO. She was a big advocate of social justice from an early age. And it was her singing voice that became her campaigning weapon, after she burst onto the US music scene with a performance at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival.

Hit albums followed and Baez became a leading figure in the civil-rights movement. She performed an epic version of We Shall Overcome at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Martin Luther King Jr, who delivered his ‘I have a dream’ speech that day, was a good friend and ally. Indeed, an FBI report alleged they were lovers.

In 1964, Baez turned her attention to the Vietnam War, refusing to pay some of her taxes in protest. She later got caught in a bombing raid on Hanoi while delivering presents to American prisoners of war. Unbowed, she included audio clips of the explosions on the 1973 album, Where Are You Now, My Son? She went on to take a stand on everything from gay rights to the environment, and helped establish Amnesty International in America. In 1981, she was even banned from performing in Chile, Brazil and Argentina, in case she said something unpleasant about the governments.

‘Joan has that rock-and-roll attitude toward life and freedom and love,’ fellow folk singer Bob Neuwirth told Rolling Stone. Madonna reportedly put it much more succinctly: ‘She’s a f***ing warrior hero.’

Baez seems to have lost little of her belligerent spirit in recent years: she has continued to campaign against capital punishment and in 2017 released a song called Nasty Man about Donald Trump.

‘Nobody in the 1960s could have imagined anything [so] f***ing awful,’ she said.

Her private life has been high-profile, if chequered. She had a relationship with Bob Dylan and helped launch his career, before he unceremoniously dumped her.

She also dated Steve Jobs. Baez did marry American journalist David Harris

in 1968, but they divorced in 1973 and she’s been single ever since.

‘I was terrified of intimacy,’ she said in a 2009 Daily Telegraph interview, ‘That’s why [performing for] 5,000 people suited me just fine.’

Now living a fairly simple life in a rambling Californian house, Baez, who’s released 25 studio albums, supposedly retired from touring last year. But in October she was back on stage, singing with Lana Del Ray. ‘We went out clubbing [afterwards] and she f***ing outlasted me,’ Del Ray reported.

‘I feel young,’ Baez, whose mother lived to 100, has said. ‘[But it takes time] to maintain the body and the spirit.

Stretching is not optional.’

Simon Hemelryk

Forever young: Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, the March on Washington, 1963 The Oldie January 2021 13

I’m dreaming of a dry Christmas

After decades in Drunkland, Mary Killen suddenly lost the taste for drink. She now sees the festive season in a whole new – clear – light

GL ARCHIVE/ALAMY

D

o you remember the days when people would chuckle about how much alcohol they were buying in for Christmas and how legless they’d get over the festive period?

No longer. These days, many drinkers are drinking ‘Christmas amounts’ every day of the year in the same way they’re stuffing in Christmas Day feasts of treat food every day.

But I’ll no longer be tipping back my usual nine units of champagne and wine per day this Christmas. I don’t drink any more – on any day of the year.

I’m not in recovery from alcoholism.

Nor will I be exerting willpower to resist the blissful nectar of dull opiates. In fact, almost like magic, I simply went off alcohol three years ago.

It happened after a dose of Campylobacter and a course of antibiotics. Could that antibiotic have triggered some sort of hormonal aversion to alcohol? Or did the Campylobacter just knock so much stuffing out of me that I could no longer process the toxins?

All I know – and many women who have had the same feeling while pregnant will remember this – is that my body instinctively just does not want alcohol any more. It recoils, even at the idea and at the most fragrant of bouquets.

I’m a born drinker – I’m Irish and a writer. Eighty per cent of my friends still drink at least six units a day. How can my social life continue?

So much of social bonding centres around meeting up with thirsty others and then travelling together into Drunkland – where I once rejoiced in the agreeable taste, the coolness of the glass, the salt-based snacks and the olives. The anaesthetic slowly used to steal up on me. The inhibitions fell away as indiscretions were exchanged. Then there was the surge in self-confidence, the BC (Before Covid) hugging and the pure pleasure of swallowing.

Drink is bonding in the way that sharing a glorious holiday location can be

No thanks, Bacchus

bonding. In both cases you ‘go’ to another land where things are pleasant, and you conflate the joy of that place with the joy of the other person present.

This is my second incarnation as a non-drinker. I was off it between 1999 and 2009 following a bout of a Legionnaires’-type atypical pneumonia and, again, a course of antibiotics.

While I traded my sense of euphoria at 6pm each evening for a clear head the next morning, I noticed friends didn’t like it at all if I sat there with a glass of Perrier. It made them feel like alcoholics.

As long as I was drinking something that looked like alcohol, my friends were happy. I discovered Cobra alcohol-free beer and Waitrose one-per-cent cider. I didn’t drink for ten years during one of the most social decades of my life. I was working on the Sunday Telegraph, House & Garden and the Spectator. I also led parties of alcoholic journalists on fact-finding missions to the Caribbean, under the aegis of Jamaican philanthropist Butch Stewart who wanted to trigger more Anglo-Caribbean business.

All that sobriety came to an end in 2009 when, by chance, I discovered I was no longer repelled by alcohol.

It was on a 90-minute tour of the Krug vineyard in Rheims, given by Olivier

Krug. With graphic sensuality, he described to our gang of four journalists (including the late Sir Peregrine Worsthorne) the journey of one of his most prized grapes from vineyard to bottle.

The grapes were grown in small quantities on the rarest, most perfect slope for sunlight, drainage and soil consistency. They were hand-harvested with nail scissors, squashed, riddled and stored for six years. Then there was the sound of a cork being withdrawn and he poured us each a glass.

I drank it, thinking, this will probably kill me – but I felt I could hardly refuse as for the last hour I had been nodding with fake interest. There were no ill effects.

That night, I went back on alcohol.

Then in 2017 I went off it again, and I am off it now.

Do I find the company of drunks tiresome? No. I have an insatiable appetite for socialising. Obviously my enthusiasm wanes at the end of the evening when others stop making sense but no, I still prefer the company of drunks. And I suppose I find my husband, The Oldie’s Giles Wood, who hardly drinks anyway, slightly less annoying than when I drank alcohol.

And now there’s been a huge breakthrough. Anyone with a palate knows that food is best with wine.

Alcohol-free beers and ciders are great with olives and crisps, but not with food.

And although I have tried more than 30 de-natured wines, none has given me that compatibility with food.

Until now. I have been introduced to something called Jukes Cordialities, made by wine-writer Matthew Jukes. It isn’t de-alcoholised wine, but a cordial based on organic apple cider vinegar. You pour 125ml of chilled water into a wine glass – you can use sparkling water if you want a champagne effect – and then 15ml of cordial. It is something that looks, tastes and even smells slightly like wine.

At last, I’ve found my Christmas tipple. Cheers!

The Oldie January 2021 15

Nick Newman was thrilled to sign Burt Reynolds for his film. If only Burt had remembered his lines and hadn’t spent so much on wigs

A very amateur performance

W

hen we saw the giant ‘idiot boards’, we knew there was trouble.

Arriving on the set of our small British movie A Bunch of Amateurs, we had been warned that our star, Hollywood legend Burt Reynolds, had ‘problems’.

That morning, he had demanded that the stunt co-ordinator be fired. There were problems with Burt’s wigs – of which more later. But the most pressing issue for us as writers was that our leading man couldn’t remember his lines.

This did not bode well for the scenes in which he had to perform long speeches from King Lear.

A Bunch of Amateurs was filmed on the Isle of Man in February 2008. My co-writer Ian Hislop and I had rewritten a script about a Hollywood has-been who arrives in England imagining he is playing King Lear at Stratford, only to discover it’s not on Avon, but Stratford St John in Suffolk – an amateur dramatic production to save the local theatre.

Hilarity ensues as our antihero, Jefferson Steel, behaves badly, forgets his lines and is embarrassed by the am-dram cast. With Burt on board and the film greenlit, a stellar British cast was assembled around him – including Sir Derek Jacobi, Samantha Bond and Imelda Staunton. What could possibly go wrong?

Life began to imitate art at an alarming pace. When Burt was being courted for the role, he had said, ‘If there’s one movie I make before I die, it’s this one.’

When the 72-year-old arrived, his first words were ‘Why, when you had a perfectly good script, did you f***k it up?’

16 The Oldie January 2021

Not a word had been changed – other than to reduce the Shakespeare, as Mr Reynolds had requested. Yet still we were hopeful.

At the meet-and-greet drinks party, Burt was delightful and twinkly – albeit worryingly frail for such a legendary Hollywood hunk. Up close, his skin was taut through multiple botched plasticsurgery procedures.

But he was still sparky. He recounted how John Wayne had performed Julius Caesar. When the Duke mumbled his way through the lines, the audience started booing. At which point, Wayne stopped the play and said to the audience, ‘Look, I agree with you, but I didn’t write this shit!’

I was much cheered by our star’s reminiscence – a reminder of the Hollywood history Reynolds brought to the role.

Back in the 1970s, he was one of the top five Hollywood box-office draws.

His breakthrough role in the classic hillbilly thriller Deliverance was followed by crowd-pleasing romps such as Smokey and the Bandit and The Cannonball Run. He was almost as famous for the films he turned down as for those he accepted.

James Bond, Star Wars, Die Hard, Terms of Endearment, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Pretty Woman and The Godfather were all allegedly offered to the actor once described as the ‘standard of hirsute masculinity’.

Later, he was nominated for an Oscar for Boogie Nights (1997) and now here he was, in our £5-million romcom. As he left the party to assume his role of ill-behaved actor, I joked to Burt, ‘I do hope you’re going to behave spectacularly badly on set.’ He replied, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep ’em on their toes.’

He was true to his word. Inability to remember lines led to his own frustration that our Brit cast knew Shakespeare inside out. Confronted with a page-long meltdown scene, Burt said, ‘I can do it with a look.’

Such was the problem with lines that, in a scene with his character’s agent (played

by Burt’s old pal Charles Durning – who had similar script-learning issues), it was hard to position the camera to avoid glimpses of the copious, handwritten prompts.

Drastic measures were employed to feed Burt dialogue – idiot boards weren’t enough, nor was the earpiece used under his wig. In one scene, in which he ranted at his agent from a public phone box, lines were fed through the phone receiver. At the end of the scene, the receiver told him, ‘Put the phone down, Burt.’

Burt solemnly said to the camera, ‘Put the phone down, Burt.’

Shakespearean tragedy: Burt Reynolds as King Lear

AF ARCHIVE/TCD/PROD.DB/ALAMY

Above: Imelda Staunton, Alistair Petrie, Burt and Derek Jacobi. Right: Newman, Reynolds, Staunton and Ian Hislop

When we writers arrived on set, he was charm itself. But there was a looming problem – Burt’s fabled hairpiece. His rug was a miracle of technology, glued on, he said, by the stuff NASA used ‘to hold rockets together’.

Unfortunately, like dilapidated satellites, Burt’s wigs started to disintegrate – so a stand-in wig had to be sent for from LA. The make-up team were beginning to pull their own hair out when Burt’s wig man belatedly dispatched a rug.

The vital box was collected from Gatwick. On its arrival on the Isle of Man, there was found: 1 Subway sandwich 1 bundle of receipts 1 wig – the wig-maker’s own.

Burt’s wig-maker had accidentally sent on a 6,000 mile voyage his own wig – and lunch.

In the meantime, Burt’s wig budget had spiralled from $6,000 to $26,000 – considerably more than we were getting paid as writers.

When I next visited the set, relations with Burt had deteriorated further. He had tried to punch our unflappable producer, David Parfitt, and was no

longer on speaking terms with Andy Cadiff, the director. That morning, he had stormed off set yet again.

Burt clearly wasn’t well – the Isle of Man cold had taken its toll on the ex-stuntman who had broken most of the bones in his body. As well as rattling with prescription pills, he was convinced he was being stalked by the media (he wasn’t) and kept awake at night by ‘that woman’ in the hotel room next door. By ‘that woman’, Burt meant an imaginary Vanessa Redgrave, who wasn’t even there.

Insurers were called in to discuss shutting the production down. But, using every possible scrap of footage available, Cadiff pieced together a complete movie.

My favourite scene, set in a hospital corridor, featured Burt’s character running beside a gurney timing his lines perfectly – and clearly! Except the figure on screen was Burt’s double, and the lines were voiced over by the actor John Sessions.

The film had many redeeming features but at its centre was a slow, mumbly actor who was supposed to be playing an erstwhile action hero. The rom had been edited out of the com, and we were left asking, ‘What might have been?’

To our amazement, the film was chosen to be 2008’s Royal Film Performance première. Burt did not appear. We had our moment on the red carpet, met the Queen and were

astounded when it was reported that Her Majesty enjoyed it so much that she requested that the film be screened for staff at Christmas. Otherwise, the film sank without trace.

Burt Reynolds died in 2018, aged 82.

In the ensuing obituaries, A Bunch of Amateurs was barely mentioned. This was better than his 2015 autobiography, in which it didn’t feature at all. In his final film, The Last Movie Star (2017), he seemingly played the same character all over again. Perhaps he’d forgotten he’d ever made A Bunch of Amateurs.

For us, though, the experience was unforgettable. When asked to turn the film into a stage play, we reinserted all the lines Burt couldn’t remember and rewrote the character of the Hollywood has-been to mirror the star we had met in the tautly honed flesh.

The play has proved surprisingly popular with am-dram companies.

Before lockdown, it was about to embark on a national, professional tour.

With luck, it will return next year. So Burt will live on for ever – on stage and in our nightmares.

The Oldie January 2021 17

Holy Hitch Christopher Hitchens, the most famous atheist in the world, was a wonderful, generous godfather to Alice Cockerell

M

y godfather was once the most famous atheist in the world.

Although Richard Dawkins had a rival claim, there was a time when no one did celebrity scepticism better than my godfather, Christopher Hitchens. Strange to say, but I think of him particularly at Christmas.

Funnily enough, he actively lobbied for the job as my spiritual guardian.

It was the late 1980s and although he hadn’t quite wrestled himself into full atheism, he was belligerently agnostic enough for it to come as a surprise to my mother when he petitioned her: ‘I remember he focused me with those dissipated blue eyes, which bulged at moments of great intensity, and said, “Please, Bridge, let me be her godfather.

I will be such a good one.” ’ Hitchens’s career as a godfather was a curate’s egg. Ironically enough, he always came good at spiritual milestones.

He bought my presents at Tiffany’s.

For my christening, he gave me an engraved silver rattle. For my confirmation, he gave me a beautiful, silver chain necklace, as well as his book, The Missionary Position.

He inscribed his polemic about Mother Teresa with the words, ‘To my dearest goddaughter Alice, I congratulate you on joining the Church and hope, with this tome, to give some context.’

The Hitch had an instinctive mistrust of institutions. This was intensified when he was pulled into a police van for snogging his androgynous girlfriend (later wife) Eleni Meleagrou outside Notting Hill Gate tube station in the ’70s, on the grounds that they were a gay couple.

Still he adored pomp and had a soft spot for ceremony. His memorial service at the Cooper Union in New York in 2012, four months after his death, aged 62, was everything he would have wanted.

Martin Amis eulogised about his campaigning zeal, reminding us of my godfather’s favourite third-person 18 The Oldie January 2021

‘I think of him particularly at Christmas’

catchphrase, ‘Enter the Hitch’. Then Stephen Fry praised his erudition.

At the after-party, the actress Olivia Wilde, the daughter of his great friends Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, told me, ‘The last time I saw Christopher, he said he counted his greatest achievement was to be my babysitter.’

I saw my godfather only sporadically over the years, when he came back to London. ‘The Hitch has landed’ was the cry around town. We generally met for a cocktail at the Savoy.

One of the last times I saw him was on a freezing winter night. ‘Brass monkeys,’ he said. This was a Hitchism; not only had his father been a naval officer but Hitchens prided himself on being able to speak exclusively in aphorism or cliché if required. It was a skill honed in ‘The Sock’ – Martin Amis’s squalid flat.

For all the biting cold, the Hitch wore no overcoat – just a white linen suit. It was his habit to buy one a year and wear it pretty much exclusively for 12 months.

‘It is because of the pelt,’ he explained.

‘I am lucky to need neither underclothes nor outer ones, as hair covers most of my

body’s surface.’

He was very proud of the pelt, explains his great friend, journalist Emma Soames: ‘Three buttons were always left open on his shirts. He thought it fantastically sexy.’

Emma, who had been a girlfriend of Amis, remembers her loutish brothers, Nicholas, Jeremy and Rupert, flinging poor Hitch into the rush of the mill where her mother Lady Soames lived: ‘He didn’t mind about the white suit but he clutched his breast, crying, “My address book!”’

Hitch was deeply social. A Bollinger Bolshevik, he was also a great one for high society, in the early days, despite his serious Trot friends.

He priggishly dumped Anna Wintour, not because he disagreed with her political opinions but because he said she had none.

My uncle, former Conservative MP David Heathcoat-Amory, remembers they used to say the Hitch’s most unlikely remark would be: ‘I don’t care how rich they are. I am not going to their party.’

The last time I spoke to the Hitch was in early 2011, just as the Arab Spring was really kicking off. Though seriously ill, he was in a bustle of excitement, at his most bellicose (those bulging eyes) and controversial.

‘Everything he said was equivocal,’ Martin Amis writes in his new book, Inside Story, much of it about the Hitch.

‘Flippant and heartfelt, ironic and serious, whimsical and steely. Even his self-mythologising was also part of a project of self-deflation.’

Though often capricious and contrarian, the Hitch was not a ditherer.

He often nailed his beliefs to the door, only to tear them down, but they were no less devoutly believed for that. And who wouldn’t pray for a godfather with that sort of conviction in times like these?

Twelve new editions of Christopher Hitchens’s books will be published in 2021 by Atlantic Books

Playing the Army game Charles Pasternak loved National Service, which ended 60 years ago, even if an officer thought he was a Russian spy

S

ixty years ago, on 31st December 1960, the last men in Britain to do National Service were called up. For just under 12 years, from 1st January 1949, men between the ages of 17 and 21 did National Service for 18 months.

In 1953, I was called up. I was allowed to make three potential choices for National Service. My choices were Royal Artillery, Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry and the Intelligence Corps – four years at university would give me an edge in getting my choice, I thought.

Instead I was bidden to Buller Barracks in Aldershot, and inducted into the Royal Army Service Corps, a regiment barely superior to the Army Catering Corps. A group of Geordies were fellow recruits. After confessing to having passed School Certificate, I soon found myself reading and writing letters for some of the less literate squaddies.

In the POC (potential officer cadet) platoon, we were put through our paces with drill, assault courses and route marches. Weighed down by large pack, small pack, ammunition pouches, water bottle and rifle, we resembled Napoleonic grenadiers trudging across the Austrian plain to Austerlitz.

Room inspections were preceded by late nights when we polished the floor of our barrack room until it shone like our ‘best’ pair of boots. Even the coal in the grate (which was never lit) was smartened up with blacking.

The humour of the army professional occasionally shone through. When, during one of the innumerable ‘smoke breaks’, our weapons instructor was asked why the butt of a Sten gun was not solid like that of a rifle or light machine gun, he replied, ‘Holes for lightness.’

While my fellow POCs would be summoned, one by one, to attend the four-day War Office Selection Board appraisal for assessment as officer material, I remained at Buller Barracks for so long that I was made an acting,

local, unpaid lance corporal. Then one day I was summoned – not to WOSB, but to an office in London, where I was questioned by a man in civilian clothes.

‘When you were at Oxford you were a member of the Anglo-Soviet Society?’

‘No, sir,’ I answered. ‘I was a member of the Oxford Union, but I didn’t participate in debates. I joined the Patten Club [for members of my alma mater, Magdalen College School] and the Spectator Club.’

The latter was an arty-crafty society addressed by eminent speakers. During my time as President, I invited Evelyn Waugh, making clear that we were a non-political, non-sectarian society. ‘I speak only to political, sectarian organisations,’ he replied.

‘Oh, I think you were,’ my interlocutor continued. ‘Did you not attend a showing of the film Battleship Potemkin in the School of Geography on 7th June 1950?’

‘You’re absolutely right, sir – I did.’

I recalled signing my name in a book on display as one entered the auditorium.

The showing of Eisenstein’s iconic film had obviously been sponsored by the Anglo-Soviet Society. MI5 might have missed Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, but they knew that I had watched Battleship Potemkin in 1950.

After my admission, I was soon summoned to WOSB. For my lecturette, I chose the ascent of Everest by Colonel John Hunt’s team who were inching their way up the mountain at that precise moment, according to reports sent by the team’s photographer James (subsequently Jan) Morris.

IQ assessments, initiative tests and obstacle courses followed. I remember

‘Even the coal in the grate – never lit – was smartened up with blacking’

hauling myself laboriously up some wall while the watching officer, a clipboard containing each aspirant’s background in hand, exhorted me on, shouting, ‘Too much sherry at breakfast?’

At the end of the evaluation, everyone was handed a piece of paper on which was written either RTU (return to unit) or OCTU (proceed to Officer Cadet Training Unit). I got the latter. The relief that I wasn’t going to spend the next year and a half in a barrack room was seismic. Buoyed up, I asked for a transfer to the Artillery.

Off I went to Mons Officer Cadet School, where Armoured Corps and Artillery cadets were trained. For the next few months we were shouted at by the iconic RSM Brittain of the Coldstream Guards – said to possess the loudest voice in the British Army. My first brush with him resulted in my being told to get rid of the fungus on my upper lip. I had thought a moustache appropriate to my new position.

Life was distinctly better at Mons. We were allowed out in the evenings when we were not on guard duty. A fellow cadet invited a few of us to dine at his parents’ home nearby. I recall a large, alarmingly modernised house in which King Haakon VII of Norway had spent the war years.

At our passing-out parade, the invited audience must have been amused by the less than Anglo-Saxon sounding names of the top cadets. ‘Best cadet, Royal Armoured Corps, Senior Under Officer Pasteur,’ the adjutant hollered. ‘Best cadet, Royal Artillery, Senior Under Officer Pasternak.’

Years later, I found myself sitting next to Lord Carrington at a dinner party. To make conversation I told him of my brush with MI5.

‘How extraordinary,’ he harrumphed.

‘When I was appointed Foreign Secretary, and later Secretary General of NATO, I was never positively vetted.’

‘That,’ I replied, ‘is because your name is Carrington, not Pasternak.’

The Oldie January 2021 19

My gaudy nights For 50 years, Oxford don Oswyn Murray welcomed back old pupils to his college – except for one in 10 Downing Street

DAFYDD JONES

G

audies are lavish feasts for former students of Oxford colleges, designed to keep them happy and keep donating to their old college.

They are supposed to occur every dozen years or so for each graduate. In my 50 years as a Fellow of Balliol College, I have attended many of them. Once you’re retired, alumni are interested not so much in your replacements as in their old tutors and their own contemporaries.

And we still get great enjoyment from meeting our former pupils.

Each gaudy has its own characteristics. At the first gaudy, everyone is young and full of themselves and their brilliant careers inventing Barclaycard or whatever; they also have small children to be excited about.

At the second gaudy, they are more chastened: many of them have lost their jobs, but are full of their new careers selling fridges to Eskimos or doing good works in the charity sector. Some of them have also lost their partners and/or found new ones.

At the third gaudy they have all settled into comfortable middle age, and now of course are proud of their own offspring as future Balliol undergraduates. At the fourth, they are basking in success and thinking of their retirement careers. At the fifth, they are wondering how on earth the college has missed them in choosing its Honorary Fellows. At the sixth, the college provides chairs and the field is narrowing. The seventh happens mostly in heaven.

Two gaudies stick in my mind. The first, in 1969, was also my first gaudy as a young Fellow – it involved ‘contemporaries from 1898 to 1920’. The span was so long because of all those killed in the First World War. Harold Macmillan gave his hallmark speech: ‘Those who have not known Oxford before 1914 have not known what paradise is’ – and there followed a litany of the names of those who were missing.

20 The Oldie January 2021

I had looked up, in the College Register, the careers of those sitting near me. On my right was a Spanish marquess.

‘I see that you fought in the Spanish Civil War,’ I said brightly. ‘Which side did you fight on?’

‘Ze wrong side,’ he replied, ‘but I have made up for it ever since: I have worked for world peace.’

Opposite was someone who had invented BBC television; and beside him was the most beautiful old man I had ever seen, tall, slim and elegant. From the Register, I had learned he’d fought in the North West Frontier Rifles in India, and in the First World War. He’d owned the only coal mine in Pakistan. After the First World War, he’d given it all up to study sculpture in Paris. In the Second World War, he had joined the RAF. What a career, I thought, as he smiled benignly at me. But alas, his mind had completely gone and he said nothing all evening.

From the back of the hall, throughout Macmillan’s speech, someone was shouting, ‘Bollocks!’ – the archetypal Balliol revolutionary, I thought.

We listened to Macmillan’s reminiscences, drinking whisky in the Senior Common Room till well past midnight. On the next day, we breakfasted with him in the Master’s Lodgings, with champagne at 11am.

Gaudies were hard work in those days.

The second gaudy, I recall with affection,

BJ in a DJ: Christ Church Ball, 1985

was on 24th June 1989. It was for my contemporaries who had joined the college in the same year as me – 1968. I was deputed to speak on behalf of the Fellows.

The revolutionary generation were spread out before me, except for Howard Marks, Mr Nice, the great drugs baron, awaiting extradition in Spain before his sentence of 27 years in a Miami jail.

I spoke of the graffiti our generation had inscribed on the front of Balliol. The graffiti had been carefully recorded by my predecessor Russell Meiggs as a professional epigraphist, before it was washed off daily (having been considerately written in chalk) by the college scouts: ‘Max Weber is a Fink’; ‘Is this a Sparrow or a tit?’ (this caused John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls, to write a formal letter of complaint).

I ended by recalling the great desecration of the Senior Common Room the night before the dinner for Prime Minister Ted Heath (a Balliol alumnus), with the words in red paint (still almost visible): ‘F**K HEATH’.

Unfortunately, the two Etonian revolutionaries (the President and Secretary of the Junior Common Room) who perpetrated this outrage wore tight designer jeans, and one of their wallets fell onto the floor. The following morning, as they were expressing their shock at this desecration and their intention to pursue the culprits, the Dean presented the owner with his wallet, with the words ‘Is this yours?’ This was the only time I recall that anyone was expelled from the college.

My last gaudy was in 2019. It was Boris’s year. I’d already sent him a renuntiatio amicitiae (a ‘renunciation of friendship’ – the formal letter emperors send when they want someone to commit suicide or go into exile on the Black Sea).

I bought an EU bow tie to wear with my dinner jacket. Fortunately it was just before the election and Boris decided not to come. But I sat between two Brexiteers – so the tie was not wasted.

Harry Mount reveals the funniest, saddest and wisest things he read – and overheard – in 2020

Christmas commonplaces You’ll get married. Everybody who likes sex does.

Kingsley Amis, Take a Girl Like You I was all right.

Augustus John’s response when asked, ‘How are you?’

It doesn’t make me any less a person because I was a binman. It makes the people less because of the state they left their bins in. Some were awful.

Former Everton and Wales goalkeeper Neville Southall It comes to something when I’m upstaged by f***ing gloves.

The actor Trevor Howard on his film scene being cancelled because the Muppets were due on at ATV Studios The soldiers would all be required to attend a lecture about Keats.

Their sergeant remarked, ‘I don’t suppose any of you ignorant bastards know what a Keat is.’

Auberon Waugh tells an old army story All money spent. Can no longer remain maidens.

Victorian postcard sent by two girls to their mother from Delhi There are five things that make a man sexually attractive to a woman: power, money, energy and the ability to make her laugh.

Asked about the fifth, he replied, If you think I’m going to tell you that, you must be crazy.

George Axelrod, writer of The Seven Year Itch and Breakfast at Tiffany’s 22 The Oldie January 2021

The most intoxicating romance in the lover’s library – the railway timetable.

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Left: Bernini’s Cardinal Scipione Borghese. Below: Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch

I haven’t got anything against the Private Eye letters. Oh no!

They marvellously camouflaged Denis’s value to the Prime Minister.

Kept the reptiles off his trail – that’s my profession he was kind enough to designate as reptiles.

Bill Deedes on the Dear Bill letters, speaking at Denis Thatcher’s memorial service, 2003 Carol Vorderman, W H Auden, Evelyn Waugh, Lewis Carroll, A A Milne, Christopher Hitchens, Stanley Baldwin, Alec Douglas-Home, Hugh Laurie, Rory McGrath and Richard Whiteley People who got a Third at university All ranks should be left outside the doors; similarly titles and, particularly, swords.

Catherine the Great’s first rule for behaviour in the Hermitage Justin, an undergraduate: Two cheese toasties, please, Neville.

Neville, a waiter (to the chef): Two cheese toasties, Tom. Tom, the chef, acknowledging: Two cheese toasties, Neville.

Tom (to Neville, when toasties are ready): Two cheese toasties.

Neville (to Justin): Two cheese toasties.

Conversation overheard in the buttery of Christ Church, Oxford.

Every time ‘Two cheese toasties’ was said, it was said with a different intonation I spoke Italian because, in Naples during the war, I had a dizionario coi capelli lunghi – a dictionary with long hair – and a very nice girl she was.

Denis Healey I was always extremely disappointed that Edward Thomas did not take the opportunity to note the name and number of the engine of the train.

Mr Peto, a trainspotter, on Edward Thomas’s poem Adlestrop

Because of his height, people who expected to be separated at crowded events would say, ‘Meet you at the British Ambassador.’

Daily Telegraph obituary of Lord Sherfield, former Ambassador to Washington, 11th November 1996 Better to be Hereditary Carver than the Keeper of the Closet, with all that entails.

Sir Ralph Anstruther, Hereditary Carver of Scotland in the royal household ‘I didn’t mean it,’ he protested with feeling. ‘We never mean it.’

Nina Planck, Washington DC, in a letter to the Spectator, quoting an English guest who offered to help make dinner People’s features are most characteristic when they’re about to speak or have just finished speaking.

Said of Bernini, the baroque sculptor.

Particularly true of his bust of Cardinal Scipione Borghese (pictured opposite) [People] whose trouble was compounded by booze, or whose trouble had become booze (there is a difference).

Frederick Exley on the different types of drinkers, A Fan’s Notes (1968) …how great drivers made curves, how bad drivers hove over too far in the beginning and had to scramble at the curve’s end…

Jack Kerouac on driving, On the Road (1957) Conceit is the strongest of all human failings because it is always detectable. You can never get away with awarding yourself the credit denied to you by others.

Writer Nigel Nicolson Visam Britannos hospitibus feros – I shall visit the British who are ferocious to strangers.

The Roman poet Horace, writing in the first century BC. Nothing ever changes There will be few who, when they are in want of matter for conversation, do not reveal the more secret affairs of their friends.

Friedrich Nietzsche I have made a point of asking anyone who was at school with members of the IRA, the INLA, the UDA and the UVF what these people were like at the age of ten. All have agreed

that each child displayed a nasty, early sign of terrorism long before he had a cause.

Colm Tóibín in a letter to the London Review of Books

From top: Evelyn Waugh; Paul Eddingon and Penelope Keith in The Good Life; William Hazlitt

True happiness in life attended that man who could persuade someone to pay him to work at something which he would otherwise do for love, anyway.

Alan Coren Shyness is egotism out of its depth.

Penelope Keith A good year. I have begotten a fine daughter, published a successful book, drunk 300 bottles of wine and smoked 300 or more Havana cigars.

I have about £900 in hand and no grave debts except to the Government; health excellent except when impaired by wine; a wife I love, agreeable work in surroundings of great security. Well, that is as much as one can hope for.

Evelyn Waugh looks back on the previous year, on his 39th birthday, 28th October 1942 He seemed to have shortened almost to vanishing point the distance between ambition and achievement: no sooner did he approach an art than it surrendered to him.

Kenneth Tynan on Orson Welles Though he couldn’t look young, he came near – strikingly and amusingly – to looking new.

Henry James on Mr Longman, a middle-aged dandy, in The Awkward Age An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

F Scott Fitzgerald We may be willing to tell a story twice; never to hear one more than once.

William Hazlitt

There is one golden rule for those who enjoy teasing and poking fun at people: make sure you do it properly. If the person concerned takes offence, you’ve done it badly.

Nicolas-Sébastien Chamfort (1741-94) She found herself even without the solace of being able to blame her own unhappiness on others, a solace which is the last protective device of the desperate.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard Lucidity, simplicity and euphony Somerset Maugham on the aims A classical education teaches one to despise the wealth it prevents one from earning.

An old Oxford scholar Caffeine is the only psychoactive

drug that has not been made illegal at one time in America.

Bodies make their faces pay the price of ageing … his middle-aged face needed flesh.

John Updike, The Other Woman At the outbreak of the Civil War, Britain was the first republic in Western Europe.

The Oldie January 2021 23

The Archers turns 70 Programme assistant Gill Powell taped Grange Farm’s turkey chicks, printed Phil Drabble’s Nature Notes – and made one awful mistake

I

n 1989, in a BBC Pebble Mill boardroom, I walked into a job interview unlike any other.

I was asked, ‘What car does Eddie Grundy drive?’, ‘Name Peggy’s cat’ and ‘On a romantic night in, what music would Shula and Mark listen to?’

For a 20-something undergraduate who listened twice a day to The Archers, and again to the Sunday omnibus, it was a dream come true.

I landed the role of programme assistant.

A few years later, in 1991, I helped celebrate their 40th anniversary. On 1st January 2021, this radio institution will be 70.

During my first week, producer Niall Fraser introduced me to the cast, with a warning: ‘Never call the actors by their character name.’

A white-haired chap, immaculate in a cream suit, looked me up and down. ‘And who the hell are you?’ muttered the inimitable voice of my favourite character, Nelson Gabriel, played by Jack May. ‘I’m Gill,’ I said. ‘You must be Jack.’

His eyes twinkled; an unexpected friendship was formed. It was always a joy to spot him and the fabulous Margot Boyd (Mrs Antrobus) in the BBC Club, tucking into egg and chips, washed down with a wee dram or two. Mollie Harris (Martha Woodford) presented the production team with bottles of her home-made sloe gin every Christmas.

In my job, preparation for the monthly script meetings was key. I noted forthcoming events both real (such as the FA Cup Final) and in Ambridge (such as Mike and Betty’s wedding anniversary). I never knew how the writers would use my research. Christine Barford’s birthday might result in a passing reference from Kenton: ‘I’ve bought a card for Auntie Chris.’ Or it could lead to a whole episode with a party, where I might be roped in for the family chorus of ‘Happy birthday’.

Other tasks included photocopying Phil Drabble’s Nature Notes and, most importantly, booking the buffet. One lunch inspired Sam Jacobs to write a line

24 The Oldie January 2021

later spoken by the Grey Gables chef Jean-Paul: ‘Those damp mattresses the English call quiche.’

I penned the ‘Teasers’ – one-sentence descriptions of each episode for the Radio Times. ‘A dip in time saves a fine’ summed up a sheep storyline; for Good Friday, ‘Eddie is hot and cross’. As well as fine-tuning the gaps between scenes, I ensured the edits were properly done, and made cuts in episodes that were over-long.

Once the scripts were recorded, the mammoth task of typing endless continuity cards began before I filed them in the archive. Continuity details I archived included the fact that landowner Cameron Fraser drove a Jaguar with ‘one of those newfangled CD players’.

Attention to detail was paramount. In one episode, incorrect sounds of the Borsetshire Hunt resulted in a stiff letter from Willy Poole, the famed master of foxhounds, pointing out mistakes. He travelled to Birmingham where I recorded his horn blasts and noted their specific meanings for the sound library.

When the Aldridge children flew a kite, I travelled to the Malvern Hills with a studio manager for authenticity (below).

For Grange Farm’s ten-day-old turkey chicks, I tracked down three-week-old poults, the closest I could find both in age and in distance from Birmingham.

Let’s go fly a kite: Gill Powell recording The Archers, the Malvern Hills, 1990

The owner warned me, ‘Them birds’ll sound too old.’ I never knew if that farmer was winding me up but, if he was, the mature chirps passed undetected by the eagle-eared audience.

A fan was disappointed when Tom Forrest mentioned that he’d never seen a Montagu’s Harrier, recalling that the gamekeeper had talked about the bird in the past. The listener wrote, ‘Is it simply that your continuity supervisor cannot cope with a 30-year time span?’

According to the Head of Network Radio at the time, Jock Gallagher, I was ‘the best continuity girl the programme has ever had’. Not on that occasion.

One studio visitor worked in local radio and interviewed the cast. Many weeks later, the day before his recordings were due to be broadcast on Radio Suffolk, he called: ‘Why is there a pancake toss in Ambridge? It’s not Shrove Tuesday.’

‘What do you mean?’ I replied.

‘Shrove Tuesday’s next month,’ he said.

I glanced at my BBC diary and gasped.

He was right. The whole nation was going to be listening to Ambridge enjoying pancakes four weeks too early. With the script meeting so far in advance, I had worked out the date using the previous year’s calendar. I was wrong.

Across the corridor, I sought sanctuary in the Radio 4 Features Department, imagining my P45.

Producer Sara found me slumped, head in hands. Calmly, she advised, ‘Bosses want solutions, not problems.’

We read the script. No one had actually said, ‘Today’s Shrove Tuesday.’

Nervously I knocked on the Editor’s door. Vanessa Whitburn’s smile slipped into a scowl when I explained my mistake. The episode was broadcast that evening and we waited for the letters to the Radio Times. Nothing. No one noticed – unless you found yourself irrationally craving pancakes a month before Shrove Tuesday in 1992.

If you did, I apologise. It was my fault.

The Way We Live Now

Spirits of Christmas Past Pub-crawling Santas and tourists on the Strand in pre-COVID days. 10th December 2016 26 The Oldie January 2021

dafydd jones

The Oldie January 2021 27

Look back in candour Lockdown led to a boom in autobiography. Frances Wilson gives you her tips on how to tell the story of your life

I

f everyone has a book inside them, in most cases it’s a memoir.

Time was when only the gilded and the good – celebrities, politicians, aristocrats and entrepreneurs – were considered entitled to share their memories, but the genre has now opened its doors to the general public.

Personally, I am less interested in what St Augustine or Elton John have to reveal than I am in the confessions of the crazy cat lady over the road, who rummages around in the neighbours’ dustbins and delivers bottles of wine to our doorsteps. Now that’s a memoir I would buy in hardback.

Last April, as lockdown was kicking in, I ran a course called How to Write a Life Story. Nothing unusual here; I’ve been running memoir, family-history and biography courses for over a decade.

Except that, instead of sitting with ten people round a table, I ran this one via Zoom with 150 people lying on the sofa at home. Two were celebrities, one a politician, and there was a smattering of aristos and entrepreneurs. Everyone’s story was extraordinary because there is, I have learned, no such thing as an ordinary life.

Coronavirus has released a nation of writers. There are obvious reasons for this: writing takes time – oceans of it – and an ocean of time has suddenly been made available. Plus, when the present is put on hold we are forced to reflect on the past.

Some of the participants were tracing their heritage through ancestry.com, and finding a host of previously-unknown relatives around the world; others were recording their experiences of cancer, or motherhood, or marriage. Plenty had been up in the attic, unearthing the letters of parents and grandparents.

Figures who had been as drearily familiar as faded wallpaper emerged from these pages as glamorous strangers who fell in love and danced the foxtrot.

Families all had their secrets. One woman learned that her grandfather was

28 The Oldie January 2021

Write stuff: Rembrandt, 1648

a bigamist; another that an uncle was a murderer; a son discovered that his mother, who had spent her life happily – so he thought – washing the dishes, had longed to be prime minister.

The most closely guarded silences were faced by the children of Holocaust survivors. Was it possible to uncover the tales your parents were determined to forget? This kind of detective work can become so absorbing that it forms part of the narrative.

The best family histories, like Ariana Neumann’s When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains, are also quests in which the writer describes how they learned who they were only when they learned where they came from.

One man, a retired headmaster, had decided to write the eulogy to be read at his funeral. There was no one else who could do it because he had outlived his wife and closest friends; neither his children nor his grandchildren had the faintest idea what he was really like.

The problem, he realised, was that he too had no idea what he was really like.

So I helped him select the anecdotes that would paint the best picture.

Memoirs, like eulogies, are effective only if we are on intimate terms with our subject matter. Lots of people write

about themselves without having a shred of self-knowledge. A famous termagant might see herself as a timid woodland creature, while a pennypinching miser might present himself as an open-handed saint. These are what I call Botox memoirs, and they are of little long-term value.

A good memoir is like a Rembrandt self-portrait: you must look dispassionately into the glass and record every line and shadow. The prize for the most self-critical memoir of the 21st century goes to Max Hastings, who describes his younger self as ‘charmlessly assertive’ and apologises to anyone who ever had to sleep with him.

Some participants were producing a record of their lives for their grandchildren; others had an eye on publication. Some were born writers; others had to find their feet. Lots couldn’t begin because they were concerned about ruffling the feathers of friends and family.

Would they be sent to social Siberia if they did a Sasha Swire? Was it possible, for example, to tell the world your mother (now in a nursing home) was a terminal bore and your father a repressed homosexual?

One man on the course was determined to write about the brothers who had made his life a misery, while knowing this would create mayhem. How could he limit the damage? A woman came up with a solution: he should ask his brothers to read his manuscript and, at the points where they disagreed, give their own versions of events as footnotes.

Another way round the issue was to change the names and alter appearances in a fictionalised memoir – also known as a novel.

Frances Wilson is offering the Oldie Memoir Course via Zoom. Three onehour lessons for £95 at 10am on 3rd, 10th and 17th February. (Zoom is very easy to install on your computer!) To enlist, please call Katherine on 01225 427311

The parents trap Jeremy Clarke, 50, has lived with his mother and father in the same Cleethorpes house since he was born – and there’s no way out

I

knew my life was not going to plan when my parents’ gift on my 50th birthday was an adult-size single bed.

It turns out that, up until now, I had been unknowingly sleeping in a child’s single bed. Full disclosure: I am extremely short for a man – if I were a chocolate, I’d be ‘fun-size’.

Still, I expected my doting parents to have upgraded my bed over the years. I suppose I should be thankful I’m not still ensconced in an Action Man duvet-andpillow twinset.

Second disclosure – I still live with my parents, having never moved out, like Timothy Lumsden, the Ronnie Corbett character in Sorry!, the comedy that began 40 years ago, in 1981. I shall be with them at Christmas as I have been for ever.

Being a tiny man, I was aware romance was never on the cards – unless that card read ‘LULU. Lives local, discreet’. ‘Tall’ always trumps ‘GSOH’ for the lonely-hearted lady. It’s absurd to think that, rather than having a good laugh, most women would prefer not to see the top of their beau’s head.

The job market for creatives in Cleethorpes, the northern seaside town where I live, meant it was difficult to afford a bus ticket, let alone a rental deposit.

My parents, between periods of utter despair and resentment at my continued presence, have been understanding. It helps that everyone in the house is under five foot one – so the three-bedroomed semi is roomier than for three adult-sized adults. There’s less chance of cabin fever for us tiny folk.

Still, on ‘dusting day’ – Monday, despite my petitioning for a change to Wednesday at the last family meeting – the dusting wands

30 The Oldie January 2021

are always fully telescoped. Reaching crevices was never going to be our thing.

Some summers ago, we had to coax the extremely tall, extremely agoraphobic spinster three doors down out of her house for the first time in 20 years, to capture a bird that had glided out of the flue to sit on our out-of-reach curtain rail. The game old girl allowed us to put a dust sheet over her at her front door – so she didn’t know she was outside. Once inside our house, she ingeniously used the dust sheet to capture the bird.

There was no fairy-tale cure to her agoraphobia. We haven’t seen her since, though I’m happy to report Asda still delivers her weekly shopping – so there’s a sign of life of sorts.

Not only have I lived with my parents my whole life, but also in the same house. I would love my parents – and myself – to be declared the longestserving residents of the street.

Sadly, an even-longer-term resident, Jinty, a sickly-looking woman (so sickly that, by the millennium, I thought I would have it ‘in the bag’), is still staring gormlessly but purposefully at me from her generous porch when I walk up the cul-de-sac.

Other than my parents, that’s the main thing I don’t like about living here.

Because ours is the last house on the left in the cul-de-sac, there’s no way in or out without having to walk past the various households

I’ve feuded with over the years. I look as if I’m inflicted with facial tics and twitches, as I try to remember which house I’m acknowledging with a nod and which with a scowl, and changing awkwardly between the two modes before the next driveway.

Since COVID began, I’ve been shopping for my parents – more walks up and down this damned road. I know it’s time I gave something back for all these rent-free years. But I think the scale has tipped too far the other way, now that the weeks have become months.

My cheeky, distant – and six-foot-two!

– brother called me to make sure I was coping with COVID measures. I assured him I eat separately from our parents, distract myself by watching daytime runs of Can’t Pay? We’ll Take It Away and tell my parents to stay the hell away from me.

‘So, just like a normal year for you,’ he quipped in the condescending tone that resonates from the ribcage of the overly tall man.

I once spent three and a half days setting my parents up on a computer and tutoring them in how to use emails. The first email they received was from my brother’s wife, announcing he was now a ‘superhead’ of a school. Champagne was opened, sherry was schoonered, with not a word of thanks for my free e-learning event.

I muttered that clinking glasses for Long-Gone Tom the Superteacher reminded me of the parable of the prodigal son. My father corrected me: ‘Tom has never shamed the family and been forgiven. You are more like the prodigal son – you just never left.’

In response, I buried myself in the local newspaper, looking for the classified rooms-to-let section. Unfortunately, owing to COVID and the decline in print advertising, there was no such section.

‘No one can say my son’s not trying,’ my mother said, with a wink.

Language, Timothy! Corbett in Sorry!

Guests from hell When Tanya Gold moved to Cornwall, she invited lots of friends to stay – she won’t be asking them back for Christmas

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didn’t know, when I moved to Newlyn, Cornwall, that there is an art to having house guests. My godmother says they go off like fish in two days and are to be avoided.

But my husband and I were thrilled with our five bedrooms – we left a small Camden flat. So, with a mixture of grandiosity and insecurity, we invited everyone we knew. Winters are wet and long here; no one comes. Let the world come to us in summer – and they did.

This Christmas, they won’t be coming, even though we’re in Tier 1.

The problem is no two households are the same. We all have our peculiar rhythms, systems and habits. It’s hard to present guests with a list of laminated rules that must not be broken. I know someone who does this, and he’s a pleased host. So here is my list of rules for the perfect guests.

GRIZELDA

I’m not tidy but I dislike squalor I can’t believe some people put used nappies in the kitchen bin or leave them on the floor of the bathroom; or leave puppy pads in the wastepaper basket in the study. I can’t believe they over-fill the bin, so that I’ll have the joy of wrestling with it later; or that they leave recycling by the kitchen door, so I can pick it up.

Be helpful to the host My childhood was, among other things, a directive to tidy the sofa cushions. When I stay at people’s houses, I cook meals, wipe worktops, stack dishwashers and sweep floors. My friend’s mother in Ireland calls me ‘the maid’.

Hotels exist to infantilise – but I am not a hotel. Most guests don’t understand this. They let dirt settle – what’s it got to do with them? – and appear in the kitchen only for meals.

My favourite guest was a mother of five, who washed the kitchen floor and cooked her own meals. She can come every year.

My least favourite was an old

university friend, a mother of four, who let her children draw on the walls, flood the bathroom (at 6.30am) – ‘Get a wet room,’ she suggested when I complained – and pull up my husband’s seedlings.

She didn’t clean the house – but she did walk on my mopped floor and let her dog excrete all over the place. When I pointed this out, she said, ‘You told me to bring him.’

Have similar parenting styles With one guest’s family, from Somerset, I wanted the children to watch The Railway Children. The mother suggested Jaws 2, where many children are eaten.

I like my son to have sugar once or twice a week. The Somerset mother fed her children sugar from breakfast to midnight. I found her three-year-old on his back on the kitchen floor, sucking chocolate milk out of a bottle.

So my son had the same diet – injustice trumps obesity avoidance. By the end of the week, his clothes did not fit him. When they left, he begged for vegetables, which I think surprised him.

We are not babysitters Another guest, from Kent, went to the beach with my husband and three of the children.

She disappeared for almost an hour, meaning that my husband had to prevent the younger children from knocking over other children’s sandcastles, and the older children from going nearer the surging, Storm Ellen-powered sea. She returned with a new wetsuit, and the phone number of the shop owner.

I suggested it might not be a good idea to meet random people during a pandemic. She suggested a compromise: she would shag him on the beach (or, if wet, in a car park), while her most touching child sat on the end of our bed, spraying himself in his mother’s perfume and asking us if we loved him.

Treat our neighbours with respect Cornwall isn’t London and infractions will be remembered for generations.

The manager of the local pizza restaurant said one of our guests, from Sussex, had left, saying to the waitress, ‘Here’s something for you.’ He handed her what turned out to be not a tip but just a scrap of paper. My husband had to pay the tip to preserve his honour.

On another occasion, the astonished fish merchant knocked on our door at breakfast to ask, ‘Was the car parked in the clearly marked LOADING ONLY bay anything to do with us? It’s stopping our lorries getting fish on board.’

Of course, it was our Sussex guest: he thought his disabled parking permit was a licence to park in the middle of the road.

Leave only worthwhile presents The Sussex man did leave us a parting gift – an evil glass fish which, one of his children said, his ex-wife had given him.

I am, then, landfill, too. I wanted to throw it out, but my husband said no.

It lives on his mantelpiece – a reminder of the terror of guests from hell.

The Oldie January 2021 31

A

s a student (Eng Lang and Lit at University College London), I loved frontispieces – those steel engravings of Defoe, Fielding and Swift in curly wigs.

I wondered if they really looked like that: Donne in his ruff and Pope in his velvet hat. How do we know? And what did the faces reveal?

That fascination led to a three-decade passion for collecting author portraits: etchings, photographs, cartoons, oils and sketches.

As well as the 71 (or so) hanging, there are around 15 objets, too: an 18thcentury Royal Worcester Milton (rouge and carmine lipstick!) and matching Shakespeare, a ghostly, Parian Byron and an early souvenir jug showing Burns.

Early-’80s purchases were a set of etchings by the great Muirhead Bone (Robert Louis Stevenson, Hardy, Shaw, Binyon, Conrad and ‘Compleat Angler’ Isaac Walton) as well as my favourite, Augustus John’s Yeats.

All collectors relish the hunt. In 1990, I loved the Peter Edwards exhibition Contemporary Poets at the National Portrait Gallery, especially his majestic portrait of Seamus Heaney.

I signed the visitors’ book with a cheeky ‘Do you have any studies of Seamus?’ and my phone number – like a call girl touting for business. It worked. I gained a lovely pencil drawing of a hero – joined now by P Edwards oils of Ted Hughes and Carol Ann Duffy.

Cheek often pays off. In 1996, the photographer Mark Gerson asked if I’d write an introduction to the catalogue for his exhibition Literati at the NPG. I’d interviewed him at the Fox Talbot Museum for a TV arts programme and loved his work. So I naturally agreed.

‘I’m afraid they can’t pay you much,’ he apologised.

‘It’s OK,’ I said, ‘I’d just love some prints.’

Bingo. He gave me Edith Sitwell, John Betjeman, Muriel Spark (shopping in Peckham Rye), Evelyn Waugh (pictured opposite) and his famous image of the Faber poets – young Ted Hughes flanked

by Spender, Auden, Eliot and MacNeice.

Since Eliot is one of my favourite poets, I was delighted to pick up a moody black-and-white portrait (photographer unknown) framed with a letter from his Russell Square Faber office.

Dated 23rd September 1947, it rejects the work of a hapless playwright with a kindly equivocation: ‘I … believe it must have been successful for the purpose for which it is designed.’

Twenty years ago, my first husband, 32 The Oldie January 2021

For 30 years, Bel Mooney has collected portraits of her favourite writers

My brainy pin-ups

Jonathan Dimbleby, gave me a wonderful gift: an original Julia Margaret Cameron portrait of a very shaggy Tennyson (pictured opposite). Schooled by me, he kept his eye out, too.

Collecting can make you singleminded. I scoured art fairs and talked to dealers. And I was lucky. A massive favour to somebody in trouble led to a precious gift: a delicate pencil sketch of a young George Eliot.

Then an exquisite watercolour of a VAD nurse, dated 1916, turned out to be a brilliant (and not-enough-known) woman writer of the First World War, the American Mary Borden.

I was tireless. On holiday in New Hampshire with my second husband, Robin Allison-Smith, I heard of a huge collection of prints in a barn. After a day of sightseeing, though tired, I insisted on the diversion. Surrounded by daunting stacks of prints, I said to the elderly lady in charge, ‘I’ll cut to the chase – do you have a literary section?’

She shook her head, and I was heading, weary and disappointed, for the door when she called me back: ‘I forgot, I have something I’m selling for a lady … might you be interested in Frost?’

I nodded, thinking that, even if it was an ordinary frontispiece print, Robert Frost was one I didn’t have.

‘Why did Michael Ayrton caricature William Golding with such a vast beer gut?’

She came back with a beautiful pencil portrait of the poet, ‘sketched from life’, dated 1927 (pictured right). The Frost summer home was in New Hampshire – so might this have belonged to him? He certainly sat for it – and that thrilled me.

Meanwhile, the saleslady warned, ‘I have to charge you $300; I’m sorry.’ I’d have paid four times that to leave that barn with such a beauty under my arm.

There was the thrill of attending my first ever auction at Bonhams in 2005 and snaffling William Blake, Edna St Vincent Millay, bewigged Richardson, and rare photographs of Edward Thomas and Isaac Rosenberg.

And there are little messages in the way I hang them. Carol Ann Duffy is next to Adrian Henri, her mentor and one-time lover. Sassoon is next to a collage of Wilfred Owen by Graham Arnold.

And Sylvia Plath’s actual high-school yearbook photograph (that beaming, youthful heartbreaking optimism, (pictured right) hangs in an ‘installation’ devoted to Plath and Hughes, with five portraits of charismatic Ted. What do such portraits reveal? Can you read the soul of Conrad in that casual posture? Did J P Donleavy have to make Samuel Beckett quite so cadaverous? And why did Michael Ayrton caricature William Golding with such a vast beer gut (pictured opposite)?

There’ll be no more now – because I have no room. But my beloved authors keep the world at bay and give me comfort. They tell me they were just as fallible, and that everything we know and feel has been experienced before.

Clockwise from top left: Robert Frost; William Golding; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Evelyn Waugh; W B Yeats; Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath The Oldie January 2021 33

What a swell party!

As coronavirus kills off Christmas parties, Charlotte Metcalf remembers friends who made the evening go with a swing

HARRY BENSON/DAILY EXPRESS/GETTY

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OVID-19 has put paid to that most British of seasonal institutions the Christmas party.

Many will feel relieved to have escaped the obligation to feign festive jollity. We’ve all been hemmed into the corner of an overheated, noisy room by a bore, with only a small glass of sour, warm wine for consolation.

It’s easy to forget that a good party can lift the soul. It can restore our capacity for joy, convincing us the world is brimming over with fun and excitement.

Yet the art of throwing a great party is as magical and elusive as alchemy.

The painter Lindy Dufferin (aka the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava), who sadly died in October at 79, knew how to do it.

She was our editor’s godmother and, in the summer of 2019, she threw an Oldie party for him at her Holland Park house, to which I was lucky enough to be invited. Her knack was to appear delighted to be opening up her beautiful house and garden, sharing her good fortune rather than flaunting it. We all stayed long after dark and agreed we’d had an astonishingly good time.

The recent deaths of writer Derwent May, 90, and Sunday Telegraph editor Peregrine Worsthorne, 96, triggered memories of another legendary party hostess. Margot Walmsley (1914-97) worked for Encounter magazine, scandalously discovered to be funded by the CIA, and edited by Mel Lasky, the American anti-Communist leftie.

Margot threw regular parties, mainly for writers, between the ’70s and ’90s. I went to many. Derwent May, with his wife Yolanta, and Perry Worsthorne were often there. Other well-known regulars were lots of Lawsons, including Nigel, Vanessa, Nigella and Dominic, Freddie Ayer, Barry Humphries and Lizzie Spender, Beryl Bainbridge, V S Pritchett, Charles Moore and Katharine Whitehorn.

Margot lived in the top-floor flat of a tall house on Earls Terrace, Kensington, 34 The Oldie January 2021

Last of the great party-givers: Lindy Dufferin (1941-2020) in 1960

long before the terrace’s rented flats gave way to mansions with underground car parks and swimming pools. When guests rang the bell, Margot opened a sash window, leant perilously out and threw down the key in a sock or an envelope.

At the top of several flights of stairs, Alec the butler was there to hand you your favourite tipple, invariably remembering what it was. The quality of the alcohol was dubious but the quantity generous. The canapés were limited to fish paste on Ritz crackers, peanuts and crisps but Alec circulated them at great speed, simultaneously refilling glasses.

No conversation at Margot’s was dull, partly because no one ever finished one.

It was customary for Margot to wheel you away mid-sentence to meet someone else because she considered it a heavenly treat for us all to get to know one another.

She called everyone Darling, which was a genuine expression of affection and never affectation. ‘Darling, do you know Darling?’ she’d say, as she propelled you into someone you knew quite well.

She twice introduced me to my own mother and bubbled with merriment when she realised. Her generosity of spirit never betrayed her double tragedy – the terrible suicides of her journalist husband and only son.

As an oldie, I’ve clocked up hundreds of parties, but Margot’s were among the very few I have entered alone confidently, without that slight but definite feeling of dread. It is utterly unnecessary for a party to dazzle with splendour and abundance. That might look generous but it’s probably just showing off and can intimidate.

To feel happy at a party, you must feel you belong, that you have found your tribe – even if it’s brand-new.

When I was going to Margot’s parties as a very young woman, most people I talked to were decades older, but I would look forward enormously to seeing them every time – Bill Letwin, the AngloAmerican academic, twinkling behind his cigarette smoke; writer Peter Vansittart, red toupee askew, tilting gallantly forward to hear what I was saying; V S Pritchett with his sputtery giggle.

I once left to escort Beryl Bainbridge (still carrying her glass of wine and lit cigarette) home in a taxi and then turned straight round and came back again, because Margot’s party was where I most wanted to be.

Post-lockdown and, touch wood, postvaccine, some of us will rush to the first party we’re invited to while others will feel timid about renewed social contact.

Lindy and Margot made us feel safe, cosseted among allies. Without ever needing to be lavish or extravagant, their parties buoyed us up for weeks because, however old, experienced and battlescarred we are, we thrive where we feel sheltered from life’s worries and dangers.

As we endure another lockdown and enforced separation from family and friends, many people are discovering that a fundamental pillar of happiness is feeling cherished. The rare skill of Margot and Lindy as great hostesses was to make every guest feel just that, even if they arrived as a stranger.

It’s the cornerstone of every great party and I wonder how many partygivers of the future understand that.

The Jeremy Lewis Prize for New Writing

A hilarious Ulster story – this year’s winner of the annual award in honour of our late deputy editor the pipes were gurgling and keeping him awake. He found an unlocked room down the corridor. I can get him if you want.’

‘No, stay where you are,’ said the hotel barman. ‘I’m in charge in an emergency.’

And so it was that Derek found himself shaken roughly awake in the middle of the night.

‘Get up and come with me,’ the young Ulster lad shouted, a degree of nervousness adding to his insistent tone.

Thinking that he was being kidnapped by the IRA, Derek didn’t earn any points for familial loyalty that night.

‘Please don’t kidnap me,’ he pleaded.

‘I’m only one of the princes. The King is along the corridor. Take the King!’

‘We’ve already got all the others – it’s just you we need,’ came the reply. ‘I’m Sean the barman, you eejit, and there’s been a f***kin’ bomb scare.’

We slept the rest of the night at another hotel. Returning the following

morning, we discovered that the army had blown up the suspect car in a controlled explosion. There was no bomb. Sean the barman was sweeping up broken glass and listening to the car radio, which was still working.

Our tour moved on, not without further incident, to Omagh, Derry and Magherafelt. We were due to stay at that same Belfast hotel for our last week in Newry.

Unfortunately, the hotel was burnt down while we were in Coleraine. It wasn’t a bomb, we were told.

Almost certainly an insurance scam.

Adam Norton, Camberwell, London DAVID HOCKNEY

In 1977, I did a tour of Northern Ireland.

Not as a soldier in the British Army, but as King Philip of France in a touring production of The Lion in Winter, the story of Henry II and his squabbles with his wife and children.

It was enormous fun, despite the fact that the political situation was tense.

Our Angevin haircuts often aroused suspicion in pubs, but once we had explained that we were actors, not squaddies, the hospitality flowed.

While we were playing at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, there was a bomb scare late one night at our hotel. A car parked on the forecourt was deemed to be suspicious and we were all evacuated to sit in our minibus in the car park. A head count was taken, whereupon Derek, the actor playing Prince John, was found to be missing.

‘I know where he is,’ I volunteered.

‘He moved his room last night because

Jeremy Lewis 1942 - 2017

Puss in Boots goes to Baghdad

In 1975, ex-pat Janet Lawrence starred in a panto in Iraq Iraq isn’t a holiday destination. Wars, destruction and destitution have afflicted and vandalised the country.

But as part of the transient British community working there in the 1970s, we made our own social lives. At Christmas, we couldn’t deprive the children of that essentially British entertainment the pantomime. We opted for Puss in Boots.

Wives and expat nurses happily signed up. The men were reluctant – many had jobs that took them away. But eventually we had our cast. I became Rollo, the principal boy (always played by a woman) – the only part left.

Other parts included Puss, his cat. Then there was Miss Decorum, the palace governess, also played by a man. The man playing the part of the town crier doubled up as Giant Crunchbones.

Left: King gooses the governess Right: Rollo (Janet) & princess We had the perfect princess and found just the girl for the king’s voluptuous daughter.

Others, including my 11-yearold daughter, Suzy, and our distinguished director, became maids and yokels.

Typewriters clattered to get the script copied and duplicated via Roneo. The fabric for the costumes, including ‘real fur’ for the cat’s costume, was bought from the local department store, Orosdi-Back.

A dedicated team built and

painted sets. At the nurses’ home, smoke issued from my friend Marge’s sewing machine as she tested its limits to get costumes sewn, including the amazing cat’s amazing costume. We had less than four weeks to rehearse.

Work absences of half the male cast – working in Basra, Kut and elsewhere in Iraq – meant other cast members stood in for them. The dress rehearsal was so bad that we had to go through it again

on the morning of the show.

When the curtains opened that evening, we performed a panto within a panto. It bore only coincidental resemblance to our rehearsed version.

Unexpected things happened. A table laden with lunch plates crashed to the floor, just as Giant Crunchbones entered. The ample-bosomed governess pulled a chicken out of an Ali Baba basket and flung ping-pong-ball ‘eggs’ from under the hen’s feathers.

For the next evening’s ‘adult’ performance, three British nightclub dancing girls treated us to their exotic movements.

Still, the riotous success of the show attested to the fellowship between expatriates spending Christmas away from home.

The children got their pantomime – and their Christmas was complete.

The Oldie January 2021 35

Brief encounter Crime correspondent Duncan Campbell remembers the lawyers who represented the Yorkshire Ripper and the Kray twins’ henchman

MIKE WALKER/ALAMY

P

eter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, has died, unmourned.

In his memoir, A Life of Crime, the former barrister and judge Sir Harry Ognall recounts his part in Sutcliffe’s prosecution.

Describing how Sutcliffe gave evidence in his Old Bailey trial in 1981, he writes, ‘The indelible impression with which I was left was that his appearance in the witness box was Sutcliffe’s last chance to strut a stage, invested with the colossal notoriety of the forensic spotlight – and he enjoyed every minute of it.’

He also recalls that, while preparing for the trial in London, he locked himself out of his flat when he stepped outside to collect the milk from the doorstep and the door slammed shut behind him.

‘Dressed only in my underpants, I had to cross the Brompton Road and make a reverse-charge call to Chelsea Police Station. I can tell you that the officers who attended took some persuading that I was a QC preparing for my crossexamination in the Sutcliffe trial.’

A Life of Crime heralded a flood of legal memoirs, from Geoffrey Robertson QC’s Rather His Own Man and the anonymous bestseller The Secret Barrister to this year’s In Black and White by the young black barrister Alexandra Wilson, who recounts how court staff often assume she must be a defendant.

The latest in this series of briefs’ encounters is by solicitor Henry Milner.

To spot Milner in the canteen at the Old Bailey is to be sure a big trial is under way.

His client list is like a national rogues’ gallery. There’s Kenneth Noye, acquitted of murdering an undercover policeman but convicted of killing another man in a road-rage stabbing. Or Fred Foreman, one of the last surviving henchmen of the Krays, jailed for disposing of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie’s body but cleared of killing Frank ‘the Mad Axeman’ Mitchell.

We learn which judges were hardhearted, which gentle. ‘I would receive a

36 The Oldie January 2021

call from a defendant the day before his trial was to begin, anxious to hear who his judge was. Hearing the names Abdela, Argyle or Edward Clarke would put fear into the heart of the most hardened criminal.

“Many defendants found themselves conveniently ill or even beaten up, in the hope that their trial would be postponed and allocated to a more kindly judge, such as Christmas Humphreys (nicknamed “Father Christmas”).’

If he had a pound for every time he had been asked ‘How can you defend someone you think is guilty?’, he says he would have retired years ago. ‘Suppose he tells you he’s guilty?’ is the next question. ‘Then he has to plead guilty or you can’t act – certainly not if he wants to give evidence.’

Hardened criminals are canny about phrasing a delicate question: ‘Hypothetically speaking – if I was there (which I wasn’t) – would I be able to run self-defence?’ Or ‘If a person in my shoes were to plead guilty, what sort of sentence would he get?’

Milner had a soft spot for some of his clients. He represented the dodgy John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, acquitted in the Brink’s-Mat stolen-gold-bullion case but shot dead in his Essex garden

Death of the Ripper: Peter Sutcliffe died, aged 74, in November

in 2015 in a still unsolved murder.

Palmer was jailed for defrauding elderly would-be time-share-buyers in Tenerife. ‘When he came to London every few months, he would invite me to the River Room at the Savoy to ask my opinion on this and that,’ writes Milner.

Palmer told him that, while at the Ritz in Paris, accompanied by a couple of bodyguards, he ordered what he thought was a £700 bottle of wine and found out too late that it was in fact £7,000. So easy to miss that third nought when you’re having fun.

With Fred ‘Brown Bread’ Foreman, the Kray henchman, Milner found his manner ‘refreshing, compared to the usual hyperbole one has to suffer, listening to clients trying to impress you with their power, wealth, shrewdness and charitable deeds’.

William Clegg QC, in his recent memoir, Under the Wig, cites the fictional television attorney Perry Mason as his role model: ‘I loved the drama of his plots and the theatre of his showdowns.’

He also recalls the old days at the long-closed Bow Street Magistrates Court. Drunks in dinner jackets would appear in the dock and ‘certain solicitors would slip a few pounds to the press to go and have a cup of coffee when their client came in so that their case wouldn’t get in the papers’.

Even now, with so many courts closed

by COVID, there will never be a shortage of legal tales.

One of my favourites concerns the late former Labour leader John Smith QC, an admired advocate in his native Scotland.

After one of his clients had been convicted and jailed, he went down to the cells to commiserate.

‘Aw, dinnae worry, Mr Smith,’ was the response. ‘You were so good I almost believed you maself!’

Henry Milner’s No Lawyers in Heaven: A Life Defending Serious Crime is out now (Biteback, £18.99)

What’s in a name?

How do writers come up with book titles? Rachel Johnson picks the best – from P G Wodehouse to John Grisham – and the worst

A

s a mid-list, middle-aged author, I spend far too much time pondering the eternal riddle of publishing. Why are some books stone-cold all-time classics – and most of them total turkeys?

The clue is in the title. Had F Scott Fitzgerald called The Great Gatsby ‘Trimalchio in West Egg’ or ‘The HighBouncing Lover’ – two of his many working titles – would we still quote that deathless last line about being boats borne back ceaselessly to the past?

I think not. It’s the holy trinity of title, author, and content that sweeps it into the top 100.

Like every author, I sweat blood over titles, but sadly can’t resist puns (Notting Hell, Shire Hell). Those who hope to be taken more seriously fish from the deep pools of the classics, the Bible, Shakespeare and poetry.

The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway, Wharton’s House of Mirth and A Time to Kill by John Grisham are all plucked from Ecclesiastes.

My agent and publisher both thought my last book – about being a prospective candidate for one whole month for Change UK – was to be called the ironic ‘My Life in Politics’. They were happy with the little jokey package until I came back from a walking holiday in the Cévennes and announced it was called Rake’s Progress. That guaranteed that all but a tiny handful of readers related to me wouldn’t have the first clue what the book was about (my family call me Rake). This was a mistake.

‘I spend as much time on titles as on covers and editorial,’ says the agent Jonny Geller. ‘Imagine you’re in a supermarket and have less than a second to tell readers what they’re buying.’

Geller represents David Nicholls, whose titles are minimal to say the least.

‘To tell you the truth, we were always worried about them,’ Geller reveals. ‘If you do a keyword search on Google for “Us” or “One Day”, the books won’t come

Winter’s tales: three vintage Christmas crackers

up.’ He need not have worried – both of them sold and sold.

Geller says American publishers and readers prefer titles that do what they say on the tin. The agent Caroline Dawnay, my sister-in-law, disagrees. Her favourite title is The Worm Forgives the Plough.

It’s about an academic who pitches in working on the land to help the war effort – not that you’d guess.

A glance at the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list proves Geller right. There’s a book about President Obama called Obama and a book called How to Be an Antiracist which need no elucidation. They’re sledgehammer titles.

Like American advertising, in fact: ‘Take Advil. It works!’

There are exceptions. Liza Campbell’s memoir, Title Deeds, recounts dark tales of Cawdor Castle and the disinheriting by her adored father, the 25th Thane, of his oldest son in favour of his stepmother. The book couldn’t have a more perfect title, given its theme and revelations.

In America, though, Liza’s book became A Charmed Life. The blurb then explains the book: ‘The story of the last child to be born at the impressive and renowned Cawdor Castle, the same locale featured in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.’ It sounds more like a feature

for Town & Country than a book lifting the lid on toffs behaving badly.

As an experiment, I trawled my bookshelves for titles that will never stale. All of P G Wodehouse. Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The Female Eunuch.

A Dance to the Music of Time (taken by Anthony Powell from the eponymous Poussin picture). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Vanity Fair.

Goodbye to Berlin. A Handful of Dust (borrowed by Evelyn Waugh from Eliot’s The Waste Land). Each unimprovable in its perfection.

The New York publishers Doubleday used to have a man known as ‘the title guy’ in the room when these matters were under discussion. The title guy became especially prized after publishers were struggling to come up with a title for the third book in Bruce Catton’s trilogy about the American Civil War. ‘A Stillness at Appomattox,’ he piped up.

The book won a National Book award and a Pulitzer.

There is a niche category of books where the title is better than what’s between the covers: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart, and Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Massage.

But if a book’s no good, it doesn’t matter how memorable, commercial or timely its title.

During the festive season, publishers try to flog us books with Christmas in the title, just as cheesy seasonal movies are too often released at the most magical time of year.

It’s very hard to remember any of these movies or books. I can think of only three Christmas crackers – The Snowman by Raymond Briggs, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

Still, in the end, it’s the market, not the author, that decides if a title works or not. As the late super-agent Ed Victor said, ‘A good title is the title of a book that’s sold millions of copies.’

The Oldie January 2021 37

Town Mouse

Of mice and murderous men tom hodgkinson

My country-dwelling cousin, the harvest mouse, doesn’t like humans.

According to the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Mus minutus ‘lives entirely away from houses, commonly taking up its abode in wheat or hay fields’. He’s very different from the house mouse Mus musculus, who, according to the same source, ‘with man’s involuntary aid, has succeeded in establishing itself throughout the civilised world’. In the city, mice and men live with each other, though not, generally, in harmony.

The other day, a specimen of Mus musculus appeared in our London kitchen and scampered down some infinitely tiny hole. This is no surprise: the precise mouse population of London isn’t known, but some half a million are supposed to dwell in the tunnels of the London Underground, subsisting on discarded McDonald’s and enjoying the warmth. The house-mouse population of Britain is estimated to be 5.4 million.

When our cat Milly was alive, we didn’t have to worry about mice. We never saw a hint of rodent invasion, because to the mouse, the cat is a cruel, 38 The Oldie January 2021

sadistic monster of terrifying proportions.

Now that Milly is dead and winter is here, Mus musculus has become bolder.

We also found evidence of mice in the form of droppings round the bin under the sink. They’d been having a great time feeding on spilt food by night, retreating to their mysterious nests by day.

Loath though I was to murder my own kind, I trudged down to the hardware shop and surveyed the various rodenticide devices and systems. There were the conventional traps my parents used to put around the house. I remember retrieving many a squashed mouse from them, though the traps never really got rid of them entirely – hardly surprising when you consider that a female mouse can give birth to 64 babies in a year.

With a heart full of foreboding, I bought one of those plastic bait boxes

‘I was a calculating murderer – a mousekiller. I had turned on my own kind’

and a box containing four sachets of poison. ‘NEW IMPROVED FORMULATION – KILLS IN ONE FEED,’ boasted the packaging. ‘Contains brodifacoum.’ This new version of warfarin leads to internal bleeding, shock, loss of consciousness and eventually death. A horrible way to go.

Back home, I put a plastic bag filled with murderous blue granules into the bait box. I placed it by the bin under the sink. I was a calculating murderer – a callous mouse-killer. I had turned on my own kind. Wasn’t a trap a more human and pleasingly traditional method of dispatching the rodents?

A few days later, I opened up the box and was hugely relieved to discover the bag of bait remained undisturbed. The mice had clearly decided to leave it alone. I moved the box to another location – at the top of the cellar stairs – where it remains.

We haven’t seen a mouse since I put down the bait box.

Since the poison hasn’t been taken, the lack of mice must be down to the other, less vicious, strategies we employed. First, we blocked their entrance holes. House mice live outside quite happily when it’s warm but, in winter, they start to enter buildings in search of food and warmth.

Mice can squeeze through the tiniest aperture – a quarter of an inch – but what they really hate is wire wool. Wire wool pricks their noses and has a deterrent effect similar to that of barbed wire on humans. I found two tiny holes and stuffed as much wire wool down them as I could fit, using a bradawl to dig it deep into the passageways.

Our second measure was to remove the tim’rous beasties’ food source. We cleaned up a bit under the sink and had a rethink about our domestic wasteprocessing system.

We bought a caddy – a little green dustbin with a lid designed for food.

Unless mice can live on the tiny drops of beer and wine that may collect in the recycling, then we are all right.

Yes, I feel sorry for my brethren. Our friends the voles have a different and vastly more humane approach to rodent control: they’ve learned to live with the mice. They don’t mind them.

That’s well and good for the voles.

But, for us, I am sorry: the house mouse will find no welcome in this house. He will find no bits of discarded grain if he does manage to squeeze in. Still, at least no mouse has ingested the fearsome, cruel rodenticide bait. I have consigned that fearsome substance to the dustbin for ever.

Country Mouse

Maggi Hambling’s lessons in painting – and drinking giles wood

Marooned again under Lockdown 2, I find it difficult to know if we are part of a wider trend.

This time, we are abandoning the TV drama series all our friends are watching and have urged us to watch, too.

Call it Chinese Meal Syndrome or the law of diminishing returns. We gave up first on The Haunting of Bly Manor on Netflix. And now we have abandoned The Undoing.

Oldies are doubly resentful of the theft of our precious time for the simple reason that we have less of it to spare.

No offence, as they say, to The Undoing lead Hugh Grant, but am I allowed to point out the calamitous decline in his legendary good looks? Or is it simply the shock of his not having had ‘work done’, as we have come to expect of Hollywood participants?

It was eerie to see his face, juxtaposed with that of his co-star and near-contemporary Nicole Kidman, playing his wife, whose complexion was as smooth as a millpond.

Kidman wore just the one pained expression throughout, although at least her nostrils could still flare. Even Donald Sutherland’s welcome appearance as her dad was not enough to stop Mary double screening with her iPhone.

‘Mary! Don’t you care who actually murdered the Hispanic flasher whose name I forget?’

We concluded that neither of us did.

Navigating the oversupply of screen dramas is not easy. However, the arts documentary doesn’t tyrannise with choice – and we find it rarely disappoints.

Maggi Hambling: Making Love with the Paint was no exception to the rule.

Disarming, charming, witty, serious, moving, engaging and surprising. The 75-year-old ‘controversial’ artist smoked throughout and, swigging directly from a

can of it, remarked that Carlsberg Special Brew had been one of Ben Britten’s favourite drinks.

For all her clowning, cross-dressing and love of mimicry, Maggi Hambling is deadly serious about her own art. It deals directly with the eternal verities of love, death and transfiguration, as well as triumph over adversity. Hambling is bold and, unlike me, ambitious.

‘That was one of the most agreeable and intimate offerings this reviewer has had the privilege to witness,’ I told Mary – who reminded me that making off-the-cuff comments on a reality TV show does not turn me into a latter-day Sheridan Morley.

I first came across Maggi in the late 1970s at Wimbledon School of Art, where I was a student of Fine Art and Maggi was one of our tutors. Armed with a full grant, funded by generous taxpayers, I would often spend the morning in bed before taking a taxi from Wimbledon tube directly to the local

‘So what algorithm led you to believe this would be a good idea?’

tavern, Ye Olde Leathern Bottle. Here Maggi regularly joined the students for a tankard before we repaired to the life class.

In those days, it was a rarity to see a woman dressed as a man. As a then fresh-faced, provincial youth, my knowledge of lesbians was as sketchy as that of the recently sacked FA chief, Greg Clarke.

However, I had, by coincidence, recently watched The Killing of Sister George, sitting alongside my mother in our villa near Keele Service Station.

I remembered my mother’s impressing on me that lesbians were ‘always prone to violent fits of jealousy and rage’. Thus brainwashed, I was naturally at first wary of this tutor.

What was not in doubt was Maggi’s dedication as a teacher of life drawing.

She has the eye and beak of a raptor – as she stalked my easel, I felt like a blue tit on a bird-feeder on the very brink of being snatched by a sparrowhawk. But her gruff exterior masks a rare sensitivity.

It is merely a defence mechanism evolved against the jibes of scaffolders of that era.

She was never impatient and had a particular gift with the more difficult or ‘tortured’ art students. That’s why I was so incensed by Bel Mooney’s banal comments regarding Maggi’s recently unveiled sculptural tribute to Mary Wollstonecraft – a nude woman with what I confess is a rather bird’s-nest-like pudendum, emerging from an ectoplasmic spurt of Bacofoil.

‘Hambling is yet another ill-informed modernist who can only view the past through 21st-century sensibility,’ wrote Mooney.

What arrant nonsense. Maggi is steeped in artistic tradition. When artist-in-residence at the National Gallery, she faithfully copied the Old Masters in charcoal on paper.

She was the only tutor who, in a sea of mindless 1970s abstraction, imparted practical, artistic skills, which have stood me in good stead to this day.

My loyal mother, still interested in any aspect of her son’s life, had been viewing the documentary from her bungalow in Anglesey.

I reminded her of her 1970s warnings about lesbians and suggested she might have been guilty of the fashionable psychological crime of ‘othering’.

These days, of course, it would be the other way round. As Maggi herself commented, ‘I suppose, in the past, one did feel more of an outsider being queer.

Now practically everybody’s queer. It’s become so fashionable that frankly I’m thinking of going straight.’

The Oldie January 2021 39

Postcards from the Edge

I’ve got my love of fur to keep me warm

TOBY MORISON

Mary Kenny will keep wearing her muskrat coat despite the fur ban It was distressing that Denmark had to slay 17 million mink. A mutated form of the coronavirus has been found among the furry little creatures.

I have a weakness for fur garments. I’d clung to the notion that the Danes were successfully practising humane fur farming. They’d certainly claimed their standards of ‘ethical’ fur production were exacting. But after the slaughter of the mink, I imagine this may also be a death sentence for Danish fur farming.

It won’t make much difference – furwise – to Britain. The importation of furs to these isles is likely to be banned in 2021, after the United Kingdom leaves the European single market. I suspect Carrie’s influence behind this – the Prime Minister’s fiancée has a tender heart for the protection of small animals. She has said anyone who buys fur is ‘really sick’.

Yet consider the rational facts. There is no opprobrium attached to the wearing of leather. If leather jackets are OK, why aren’t fur coats? Most people still eat the meat of animals, slaughtered in abattoirs.

We also lock up millions of chickens in cages before we kill them off.

Moreover, faux fur is much worse for the environment: it is made from plastics and takes 500 years to degrade. Real pelts are organic.

But there are certain trends in the Zeitgeist that you just cannot go against, and the battle for fur is probably lost.

There is still vintage fur – old fur coats, wraps, stoles and accessories found in charity shops. When I see a vintage fur bargain, I snap it up. Fur is beautiful and incredibly warm – and you can’t give it back to the animal. So why not use it?

I also tell those who question my 1950s muskrat coat that the creature is a rodent and thus related to the rat.

There are fewer objections to wearing the pelt of a rat relation than to wearing the fur of a weasel relation – the mink.

40 The Oldie January 2021

Morally, what’s the difference? Is mink just more glamorous?

The film Wild Mountain Thyme – out on 11th December – has been taking a pasting for its bad Irish accents.

‘Christopher Walken’s Irish accent is a war crime,’ said one critic. Emily Blunt and Jamie Dornan also came in for mocking for their ‘begorrah and bejasus’ fake-Irish speech.

Fair is fair: Irish accents can be difficult for British and American actors, and there have been some grievous offenders. Julia Roberts, in Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins, brought a Californian twang to Irish midlands inflections.

Even the superb Tom Cruise failed the test (along with Nicole Kidman) in Far and Away.

The lovely Petula Clark, our Oldie of the Year 2020, while rendering a tuneful version of How Are Things in Gloccamorra? in Finian’s Rainbow, was a bit wobbly on the accent, and her co-star, Fred Astaire, was sweetly laughable. Even James Mason, in that great picture Odd Man Out, was all over the place.

Irish accents are tied to region, and an actor needs to decide exactly where his Irish accent will be rooted. A Cork accent – to Irish ears – is utterly different from a Mayo accent. When Yeats was involved

with the Abbey Theatre, the national theatre of Ireland, they fashioned a generalised Irish rural accent they called Kiltartan.

All nations have regional variations: Yorkshire is very different from West Country. But England and France both have a ‘standard’ version of the language.

In England, this is RP – received pronunciation – heard in movies and dramas, set in London or in Downton Abbey’s drawing room. Most Irish stories are rural – so the accent reflects a definite county identity.

There is a ‘standard’ Irish accent – Terry Wogan’s and Graham Norton’s both came close to it – though for some reason it seldom inspires drama. Norton, to Irish ears, speaks with a modified, southern Protestant, middle-class accent.

Actors are now benefiting from better coaching with accents. My award goes to Alan Rickman, again in Michael Collins, who captured the nuance of the Clare/Limerick border, playing De Valera. He got to the source: pinpoint the region.

During lockdown periods, our local Boots pharmacy had several notices underlining the usual regulations, headed with the message ‘Shop safe’.

I approached the pharmacist and confessed that I had a strong urge to add ‘ly’ to the message. ‘It should be “Shop safely”,’ I said.

‘Yes, I agree,’ she said wearily. ‘But we’re not English any more, are we?

We’re Americans – in language, anyway.’

Some Americanisms are useful and add to the richness of the language, but must we accept them all? My least favourite, which emerged after the US election, was ‘lawyering up’: engaging lawyers. Ugh. Mr Trump’s ‘bigly’, on the other hand, seems engagingly amusing. So … enjoy Christmas bigly!

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The Oldie January 2021 41

Letter from America

My American-Chinese-Jewish Christmas New England’s festive rituals – from Peking duck to jazz carols dominic green

One of the first things that happens when you leave London for Cambridge, Massachusetts, is that you meet people you would’ve met if you’d stayed at home.

We moved thousands of miles from London and settled round the corner from Sara, an old friend of The Oldie’s publisher, James Pembroke, and her American husband, Tim. She acquired him in Chester but they settled here, possibly because the parking is easier.

Sara and Tim’s Christmas Eve carol-singing party is the highlight of the social season. There’s a wheel of Stilton, a monster ham, homemade chilli con carne and, best of all, mince pies with stuffing smuggled from England and therefore worth a little more than its weight in gold.

The guests stagger into the light and warmth from the snowy dark: old New Englanders, displaced Harvard professors, faces from the school run and arty types. The happy mixing of these factions at the carol party is our city’s equivalent of a Christmas truce.

Sara dispenses the pre-printed song sheets while Tim dispenses the champagne.

I play the piano and Sara’s friend Maureen plays the violin. I’m a recovering jazz musician, and not really a pianist.

Maureen is a filmmaker and occasional Irish fiddler. Our annual rehearsal begins with a quick glass of fizz before we get to work. Our bangings and scrapings impart more syncopation than usual to the Dickensian atmosphere. It’s as though Mr Pumblechook has strayed into a jazz pub.

We warm up on pop classics such as Frosty the Snowman and Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, and then move on to trickier stuff like Baby, It’s Cold Outside, in which the singers divide by gender, the men doing their best Dean Martin.

Over several years of desperate improvisation, Maureen and I have worked out some nifty arrangements. We do We Three Kings in the style of John Coltrane’s My Favourite Things, with a 6/8 jazz 42 The Oldie January 2021

feel and some jazztastic fiddle interludes.

We give Silent Night a country-andwestern lilt, as though Felix Mendelssohn is riding a broken-down mule, with James Wood the literary critic guesting on the trumpet, then pealing out the descants on Handel’s Joy to the World.

We come a cropper, as every year, on Good King Wenceslas – easy to sing but in the treacherous key of Ab and with too many chords – but we land safely and sentimentally on White Christmas.

This year, there is no carol party. It wouldn’t feel like Christmas at all, were it not for our other Christmas tradition, eating Chinese food in the American Jewish manner. This ancient ritual originated in New York in the early-20th century, which in American terms is as the Middle Kingdom is to modern Egypt.

The Jews are great eaters – in New York, to ‘appetise’ is to graze on deli food – and they had a day to fill. The Chinese, who never close, had a whole restaurant to fill.

The two ancient peoples soon discovered deeper compatibilities. The passions for family and work. The elders’ right to tyrannise each other’s children with demands for grandchildren. The recitation from memory of their progeny’s certifications in the professions. The willingness to discuss medical problems in a crowded room. And, most of all, the

‘Ah. We said no gifts – donations to charity only’

obsession with food. No other peoples greet guests by asking, ‘Did you eat?’ To which the only polite answer is ‘I could eat.’

The result is a wave of Jewish-Chinese marriages – mine among them – and a vast folklore of cures for indigestion.

Just as every Jew lives near two synagogues, in order that he or she can refuse to set foot in one of them, so we maintain two options for the Chrestmach lunch: Bernard’s in the ’burbs and the House of Chang down the street.

You have to book early for Bernard’s.

The best time is while you’re finishing the Thanksgiving turkey and working out what to do next. It’s a 1950s-style suburban Chinese in a mall by Route 16, with a big bar, sports on TV, booths, and those necessities of upmarket Chinese restaurants lazy Susans, multiple layers of tablecloth and piped-in piano muzak with strings.

Bernard is from Hong Kong – so he conducts his business in customary Cantonese fashion, discussing his guests’ appearances with his staff at ear-splitting volume. But he and his restaurant are pronounced Bernard, in the American style. Also American in style is the menu, with US-only items like chop suey.

Otherwise the food is pretty authentic.

Our daughters rate Bernard’s Peking duck as highly as the duck at Royal China in Queensway, where their Chinese grandmother takes them in their summer holidays. They eat duck while she discusses their educational and marital prospects with the other diners, most of whom seem to be her neighbours in Hong Kong.

But the House of Chang feels like home. Like us, it’s a family operation: wife out front, husband in the kitchen and children helping out.

‘Happy holidays!’ the Buddhists say to the Jews. ‘Have you eaten?’

Dominic Green is deputy editor of the Spectator (US)

Profitable Wonders

King of the swimmers james le fanu

F

ish have an easy ride in their buoyant, watery habitat.

Because water is 800 times denser than air, it neutralises the pull of gravity.

They thus have no need of those bones and muscles that we, and all terrestrial creatures, require to keep us upright.

And so they can devote all their energy to the joys of swimming. Movement incarnate, fish deploy practically every muscle of their bodies in generating the thrust that propels them forwards.

‘At one extreme is the eel,’ wrote Sir James Gray in his authoritative monograph The Muscular Movements of Fishes, ‘its distinct waves of curvature passing alternately down each side of the body from head to tail.’

Contrasting with this sinusoidal progression, the powerful muscles of the long-distance-cruising tuna exert their pull on its large tail, fin moving it from side to side with

Good with salt: brown trout

quick vigorous strokes. There are numerous further variations on the same theme.

There is more than enough space for fish to enjoy their easy ride. Almost ubiquitous, nearly numberless, they have diverged over the past 400 million years into more species (30,000) than all other vertebrates combined.

This complete mastery of their domain is the more remarkable – extraordinary indeed – because water should, by rights, be profoundly inimical to their flourishing on three counts. It is oxygen-impoverished. Its composition of salts is either too high (seawater) or too

low (fresh water) to be readily compatible with life. Though water neutralises the pull of gravity, fish should nonetheless sink under their own weight.

The ingenuity with which they circumvent this threefold threat to their existence is the triumph of fishiology.

Let’s start with that oxygen deficit. The challenge for fish is how to absorb enough of this vital gas at a concentration 30 times lower than in air. First, two natural pumps maximise the flow of water across the site of gas exchange – the long, blood-rich, finger-like filaments of their gills. Contraction of the mouth acts as a positive pump, forcing the water forward while, simultaneously, expansion of the cavity between the gills acts as a negative pump, sucking it inwards.

The real genius of this anatomical arrangement is a counter-current mechanism, where the flow of blood through the filaments is in the opposite direction to the inflowing water – ensuring that every last molecule of oxygen is absorbed into the circulation.

Next is the threat posed by the amount of salt in water being much higher or much lower than in the body fluids of, respectively, marine and freshwater fish.

Salt is essential for many physiological processes. Its presence within body fluids must thus be held constant within very narrow limits. It’s constrained by the universal law of osmosis, where water will move across a cell wall to equalise its concentration on either side.

Thus the tissues of marine fishes are constantly prone to dehydration, as

‘Possessing a gasfilled sac of sufficient volume renders them essentially weightless’

osmosis dictates that their body fluids, being half as salty as the seawater, should leak outwards. That is compensated for by their drinking copiously while excreting only small amounts of highly concentrated urine.

For the freshwater trout, the situation is reversed. The concentration of salts in its body fluids is greater than in rivers and lakes. Here, osmosis dictates that water should surge into its tissues, which would rapidly become waterlogged – were it not for the compensatory mechanisms of its drinking practically nothing while excreting large volumes of dilute urine. The practicalities of these two contrasting forms of osmoregulation are of the utmost complexity.

The third profound challenge is to the freedom of movement within fishes’ domain. Their bones and muscles, being denser than water, should cause them to sink. Here they exploit the principle of gas being lighter than water. Possessing a gas-filled sac (or swim bladder) of sufficient volume renders them essentially weightless.

When they’re swimming downwards, the increasing pressure of the surrounding water compresses the volume of this bladder, causing it to shrink. This necessarily compromises their ‘natural buoyancy’.

That is compensated for by the fishes’ inflating the bladder (like blowing up a balloon) with oxygen and carbon dioxide absorbed from the bloodstream.

When they swim back upwards, this situation is reversed. The reduced pressure of the surrounding water would cause the bladder to become overinflated.

That’s adjusted for by the reabsorption of those gases back into the circulation.

It took scientists the best part of 100 years to work out the complex physics of this finely tuned hydrostatic mechanism. Without it – and the simultaneous ingenious solutions to those two other threats to their existence – fish would never have happened.

The Oldie January 2021 43

Sophia Waugh: School Days

The little boy who made me cry If I cry, I do it on my own. And I don’t do it that often.

I can cry at a book (the death of George Osborne on the field of Waterloo gets me every time, for wretched Amelia rather than on his own account) or a play (‘We few, we lucky few, we band of brothers…’).

But cry at work? If there are any rules for survival in teaching, they would be to learn the children’s names as quickly as possible, and not to show any weakness.

Crying is alas as weak as you can be.

I have shed tears at work, but mostly, like the Everly Brothers, I do my crying in the rain. The bully at my last school reduced me to tears once – in front of her, to my shame. She won that round; I won the next. But no child has ever made me cry. I’ve felt tears well up on their behalf, but no insults or swearing, even physical threats, have ever brought a tear to my eye.

Until now.

It was such a small thing. I asked a child to take his coat off. The child refused, repeatedly, and pointlessly, until I asked him to leave the room. All well and good and part of the pointless argy-bargy that is the nitty-gritty of a teacher’s life.

I thought that was that but, behind my back, everything escalated. The child

refused to go to the ‘Think about what you’ve done and come back a more reasonable person’ room. ‘Foul’ was called and parents were summoned. The child left the site in high dudgeon, then finally agreed he would go to the ‘Be a nice person’ room the next day.

Except he didn’t. Back he came and, as he left my classroom the next time, I said quietly to him, ‘We’re all right now, aren’t we, after yesterday?’ It turned out we weren’t. ‘What do you think, miss?’ He asked. ‘You can f**k right off.’ And again ‘F**k right off.’ And twice more for good measure: ‘F**k right off. F**k right off.’

And he turned on his heels.

And I cried. I stood in the corridor with tears rolling down my face.

Why was it so very different from the times I’ve been called ‘b*tch’ or ‘c*nt’?

Both words are more aggressive. And yet, this time, this child finally got through my defences and left me weeping.

I do know why. This child had been handed to me from another class. I usually manage the unruly element well in tutor groups. I can talk to them; they tend to trust me and know I am on their side.

This boy was trouble lower down in the school, but has slowly and surely

been improving. Instead of rushing off or lashing out, he now comes knocking on my door when he’s in a state, knowing that I will act as his buffer against whatever has gone on. His mother has, repeatedly, thanked me for my work with him.

And now? I felt personally betrayed; it was a pain as sharp as if my own child had turned on me. He was excluded for a day but, when I rang home, he refused to apologise and his mother laughed and said, ‘Oh dear. Well, I have had a word with him.’ The betrayal was doubled.

We shouldn’t allow ourselves to become emotionally involved with our pupils, but I am sure my success rate with just that type of child is because I do mind about them, I do want them to survive school and I do, however babyish and idealistic it might be, hope I can help them not just with sonnets but with emotional intelligence.

And now he’s back, and I will continue to do my best for him. But, even though he may never know it, he has lost himself my fighting edge, and I’m not sure he can get it back.

As for me – it’s probably a bit late for me to learn to be hard-hearted, but let’s hope it’s another 20 years before a child makes me cry.

The story of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue The show, devised by Graeme Garden, started in 1972 – and has never stopped. It’s just been voted the funniest radio comedy of all time by the Radio Times, ahead of Hancock’s Half Hour and Round the Horne. Barry Cryer has been on the show since the year it began Graeme Garden, Barry Cryer, Tim Brooke-Taylor, ‘Humph’ Lyttelton and Willie Rushton I love Clue.

But to rank it above Tony Hancock is odd. Hancock’s Half Hour was a brilliant miniature sitcom. Round the Horne is closer in style to Clue – it’s really loads of sketches. I admit I was on the 44 The Oldie January 2021

judging panel with Graeme Garden! But we weren’t allowed to vote for ourselves.

Graeme devised Clue after ten years of writing another radio series, I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again. The original cast was the same as on that earlier show: Graeme, the late Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie (aka The Goodies) and John Cleese. Humphrey Lyttelton was the chairman.

John and Bill left, to be replaced by me (in 1972) and Willie Rushton. We’re like an old rock band now.

For the latest series of Clue, we recorded two programmes from home, with 100 people watching remotely. It was a bit tricky.

You do a line and have to pause to wait for the laugh.

Clue is joyful – like Morecambe and Wise

behaving like kids. Or Tommy Cooper – a brilliant magician who’s being silly.

Clue is a silly game show that doesn’t need a full script. It’s really grown-up people being silly in a childish sort of way.

Two episodes of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue starring the late Tim Brooke-Taylor will be aired in January

Alice Pitman: Home Front

STEVE WAY

My husband – Surrey’s Geoffrey Chaucer When I first met Mr Home Front 30 years or so ago (neither of us can agree exactly how long we’ve been together), there was a brief honeymoon period when we were in total agreement about everything.

Laurel and Hardy were funnier than Chaplin. Liking Norman Wisdom should carry a custodial sentence. Galton and Simpson were preferable to Pinter. Peter Cook was the wittiest man in England.

Never trust anyone who doesn’t like dogs…

It was a near-idyllic six-month period of near-insufferable mutual regard. We existed in a perpetual state of smug righteousness, relishing our good fortune at having found someone else who held the same splendid opinions.

And then the arguments started. Our rows nearly all ended with the slamming of a door. They were rarely highbrow.

The greatest from the Early Period was about the Bee Gees.

Me: ‘Spirits Having Flown! You Should Be Dancing! Jive Talkin’! The list of great songs goes on and on!’

Him: ‘Disco drivel!’

Me: ‘Rubbish – Barry and Robin are the Leiber and Stoller of pop!’

Other memorable set-tos: Joni Mitchell (Him: ‘Tampax music’); Thomas Pynchon (Me: ‘Unreadable’); Gilbert and Sullivan (Him: ‘Irritating beyond belief’); On the Buses (Me: ‘I thought you were intelligent’).

Over the years, there have been shifts in our positions. I now concede Mr HF was right about the Iraq War (‘illegal’).

And On the Buses can be quite funny (as long as I don’t have to watch six episodes in a row).

But my tally of wins is greater: Saturday Night Fever is now, according to Mr HF, ‘a film with one of the all-time great soundtracks’.

And Joni Mitchell is ‘an extraordinary jazz-savvy experimentalist’ (I suspect he pinched this quote). When I played ageing Joni’s beautifully melancholic version of Both Sides Now recently, Mr HF even covertly Shazamed it to his Spotify playlist. The other day, I even heard him singing along to HMS Pinafore in the kitchen.

I now find he actually listens to what I have to say. For weeks, I was telling him to have SAGE sceptics Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan on the TV politics programme he edits. Lo and behold, I tuned in on two separate occasions and

there they were, via Zoom, articulating their response to the lockdown madness.

‘Did you book them because I told you to?’

‘Maybe.’ I’ve been inundating him with the names of enough anti-lockdown campaigners to stage a Busby Berkeley musical. ‘Oh, and Lord Sumption! Don’t forget him!’

‘Leave me alone! I’m brushing my teeth!’

Needless to say the Thirty Years War is not quite over. One activity still guaranteed to trigger an almighty row is the Family Walk.

The great outdoors has a destabilising effect on the Home Fronts. Our shrieks and hollers over wrong paths taken echo across the North Downs, causing deer to flee and birds to migrate early.

Mr HF once found a book on Surrey walks in an antiquarian bookshop on Charing Cross Road. It was so old, it might have last been used to guide Chaucer’s pilgrims to Canterbury. Then came the dread words: ‘I bet these walks still stand up today. Why don’t we try one?’

The trek near Peaslake started out promisingly (as they always do), but led to a field with an ominous ‘KEEP OUT’ sign. ‘Well, we’ve come this far,’ said Mr

‘The book was last used to guide Chaucer’s pilgrims to Canterbury’

HF. ‘Let’s risk it.’ Halfway across, we were surrounded by a herd of notentirely-friendly-looking bulls.

When they started closing in on us, Mr HF cried, ‘Every man for himself!’

We ran for our lives, making it under the barbed wire just in time (though Mr HF tore his shirt).

Last week, for the first time in ages, we ventured with daughter Betty and dog Destry to the Devil’s Punch Bowl near Hindhead.

Mr HF insisted we follow a three-hour ‘Hidden Trail’ he’d found on the internet.

Within minutes, he’d taken us the wrong way, resulting in our spending the rest of the walk milling alongside dozens of other families.

‘What’s hidden about this?!’ I grumbled.

‘Just make the most of it.’

‘But half of Surrey’s here!’

‘Blame the signposts, not me!’

‘May as well be walking round Sainsbury’s…’

When our sniping reached Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? levels and children were staring, Betty taped us without our knowing and sent the recording to Fred.

‘Wish you were here,’ she said.

Fred revealed all (over Skype that evening) when Betty was upstairs.

‘What a grass,’ said Mr HF. ‘Worse than Nixon,’ I said.

We shook our heads at each other, united in agreement over our daughter’s appalling behaviour.

It felt quite like old times.

The Oldie January 2021 45

sister teresa

My quilt of many colours I entered the Carmelite Monastery in midwinter, and found myself wondering what had happened to all the colours.

Inside the building, everything was of a uniform brown and cream, including the nuns’ clothes. Outside, the Norfolk landscape was at its most forbidding: grey skies, grey woods and dark, ploughed earth with, here and there, a smattering of the dingy green of sugar beet, one of the least attractive of all crops.

I found a rag-bag and in my spare time I began to make a patchwork quilt. It was based on a cheerful pattern of gold stars and it grew satisfyingly quickly.

Returning to my cell after Compline, the last of the hours of the Divine Office, to find it glowing on the top of the plain and featureless, brown, Carmelite bedspread was a nightly pleasure.

Colour (and it is a God-given necessity, not just entertainment) is added to our lives when we witness an act of kindness; this cheers us up and throws light on our existence and its purpose.

Comfort blanket: the joy of stars

I have an old friend who is very tall.

During lockdown, he noticed that Apor, a little Hungarian boy, not yet four, the son of the couple who work for him, seemed sad. He was missing his playgroup, which provided him with an easy way to learn English and the companionship of children of his own age.

My friend offered to give this child English lessons to ensure that he wouldn’t be too far behind when he was able to go back to school. So at the same time every evening the little boy would appear.

There was something very touching about the tall man and the tiny child coming together for this daily half-hour of study. Apor had his benevolent tutor wrapped round his little finger, and more often than not they would leave learning behind for the pleasure of feeding windfall apples to frisky goats in a nearby field. The excuse for this truancy was that many new words were easily picked up during the fun.

The little pupil was being given more than he could possible realise at his young age: the satisfaction of his curiosity, as well as the boon of being able to assimilate a foreign language with pleasure rather than pain. Every week, his mother would give him a small coin with which to pay his tuition fees.

The star at the end of the tunnel of Advent is coming closer for us all. For someone who gives encouragement to a stranger (in the Biblical sense) who is also a little child, it should shine very bright indeed.

Memorial Service

Colonel John Waddy, OBE (1920-2020) Colonel John Waddy, the Arnhem veteran who lived to be 100, served as a parachute commander in Palestine, Malaya, Vietnam, India, the Canadian Arctic and Italy. He was buried at the Church of St Andrew and St Mary in Pitminster, Somerset, ‘a mere grenade lob’ away from his birthplace, according to his cousin Rupert Gouriet, who gave a eulogy.

Waddy was chief military adviser for Richard Attenborough’s film A Bridge Too Far (1977).

‘Although he disliked the film, as American money dictated and distorted the events surrounding the Battle of Arnhem, his name was at least immortalised by Edward Fox, as General Horrocks, addressing his driver as “Waddy”,’ Gouriet said.

Waddy was wounded three times at 46 The Oldie January 2021

the 1944 Battle of Arnhem: once by a German bullet and twice by Allied mortars while on a billiard table used as an operating table.

Prep-school headmaster Titus Mills told how Waddy led school trips to an Arnhem remembrance garden. ‘On many occasions John stood among those children, holding them in the palm of his hand with a history lesson like no other.

More recently, when John was unable to get to Arnhem, our school group stood on the spot where he was wounded in those Dutch woods north of Oosterbeek, and the children rang him in Somerset and talked to him on a loudspeaker.’

James Pockney, grandson of Lt Col Sir

Richard Des Voeux, Commanding Officer of 156 Battalion of the Parachute Regiment at Arnhem, said, ‘His regular visits to Arnhem enabled him to rekindle the great bond of friendship with his Dutch family, as Arnhem became his second home.’

While serving in India, Waddy acquired a lifelong taste for gin with an onion in it. Indian gin was not palatable on its own, he explained.

The Rev Jim Fallon gave an address and led the prayers. Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, Abide with Me, and I Vow to Thee, My Country were played over a PA, with no singing. Masks were worn.

‘He was given a military send-off with the Parachute Regiment acting as pall-bearers and a bugler playing the Last Post,’ said Rupert’s mother, Sarah Gouriet.

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Three vaccines? My glass is half full

I’m optimistic – not exuberant – about chances of a COVID miracle theodore dalrymple Hope springs eternal in the Dow Jones index. It is not surprising that it rose very sharply on the announcement of an effective vaccine against COVID-19 – effective, that is, in raising the share price of its manufacturers.

Whether it will prove effective in the more important public-health sense of the word is not yet clear; there are too many unanswered questions (as of this very moment) for us to be able to say.

Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of the war against COVID, but perhaps not.

The first thing to note about the trial is that it was almost certainly conducted on people who were at very low risk of serious illness in the first place. There was a reduction in the number of cases by 76 in about 21,750 people who were given the vaccine.

The case fatality rate from the disease in this group was probably far less than one per cent. So it is likely that not a single life was saved by giving 21,750 doses of vaccine.

It is as yet unknown how long the immunity conferred lasts: only time will tell. A follow-up period of 28 days is not long, to put it mildly.

It remains unknown whether the results will be reproducible in other age groups. One cannot merely transpose

results from one group to another. It is not yet known whether the vaccine will reduce transmission of the disease as well as the risk of contracting it.

No safety concerns arose during the trial. Still, it was too small to detect rare but serious side-effects that occur in fewer than one in 7,000 cases.

The Oxford vaccine, as far as we can tell, had advantages over the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. It is much cheaper and is far easier to store. It seems somewhat less effective, though a proper dosage regime might reduce the difference. It would not be surprising if nationalism played some part in what vaccine a country chooses to use.

News of vaccines has lifted spirits. If their promise is fulfilled, how long will it be before collective amnesia as to what we have been through sets in?

The vaccine might indeed be the equivalent of the polio vaccine, which has almost eradicated that disease from the world; but, as yet, it is far from certain.

The results are encouraging but only preliminary. For people aged 40 and younger, approximately 250,000 doses of the vaccine would have to be given to healthy individuals to save a single life.

If there were a life-threatening complication in every 50,000 doses,

there would be five times as many such complications as lives saved.

The odds are much better for the elderly – provided the efficacy and safety are the same for them as for younger people. The number of immunisations needed to save one life would be at least 1,000 times lower for those aged over 90.

If the most vulnerable people could be protected, the need for such measures as social distancing and lockdowns would be reduced, if not eliminated.

A vaccine that has to be stored at –70°C and given twice at an interval of two weeks poses the kind of logistical problems our incompetent government does not seem to excel at solving.

There are grounds for optimism, then, but not for what Mr Greenspan called irrational exuberance.

This vaccine is bound to provoke a conspiracy theory: that the authorities, in league with the pharmaceutical companies, seek to poison the population for political or financial ends.

To achieve these ends, they will suppress evidence of the harmful effects of the vaccine, and no argument to the contrary will ever satisfy those who hold to the conspiracy theory.

One can only hope that there is herd immunity to such theories.

The Oldie January 2021 47

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

Defending Donald Wolfit SIR: I have just renewed my brother’s annual birthday subscription to The Oldie, but I fear I would not have done so with such alacrity had I seen the letter you published in the December issue regarding our father, Sir Donald Wolfit.

The story is, of course, well known and oft quoted and as such is familiar to the family. But the way in which it is recounted on this occasion is not only highly offensive but almost certainly inaccurate. Had the voice from the gallery really used such insulting and foul-mouthed language, the tag line of the anecdote would assuredly have been of a different order.

Perhaps the choice of language says more about the repeater of the tale than about the tale itself. In any case, we do feel that an apology from The Oldie is in order.

Yours faithfully, Harriet Graham, London SW15

Polite word for bottom SIR: Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s piece on family private words (November issue) reminds me that as children in our family we referred to the bottom as a ‘situpon’.

Also, when my twin sister and I asked grown-ups where they had been or where they were going, the answer was always ‘Up Shards and back of Jossers.’ A very polite way of telling us to mind our own business, but I have no idea how the phrase originated.

David Holme, Accrington, Lancashire

A horny tale SIR: Your reference to artificial insemination (Old Un’s Notes, December issue) brought to mind the story of the farmer taking the inseminator to his barn with the words ‘…an’ there’s a nail on the back o’ the door to ’ang yer trousers on’.

And (to a tune approximating that of the Eton Boating Song): I’ve just given birth to a heifer, No wonder my udder is full.

But I’m sad to relate that my lactical state Was not brought about by a bull.

48 The Oldie January 2021

No, I’ve never been naughty, I swear it, In spite of the calf I have borne.

Thanks to farmer Giles’s tractor I’m virgo intacta, And I’ve not had a bull by the horn.

Yours, Derek Dunn, Caversham, Berkshire

Return to Ithaca SIR: Further to Nigel Summerley’s odyssey to Ithaca, nearly a century ago the archaeologist Sylvia Benton, who was to excavate the cave sanctuary of Odysseus, paid her first visit to the island. She got into conversation with a local man and discovered that his name was Laertes. ‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘I am looking for your son.’

Yours, Nicola Coldstream, Ascott-underWychwood, Chipping Norton, Oxon

‘I always thought of my childhood home as being bigger’

Times Radio needs time SIR: Stephen Glover asks, ‘What’s the point of Times Radio?’ and goes on to say that ‘not a single person has ever mentioned a Times Radio programme to me…’ Well, I can’t account for his sheltered life, as I can assure you that many of my friends have mentioned it to me.

I think I can speak for them when I say it is a breath of fresh air. Enjoyable, informative, relaxing and nonconfrontational.

Give it time. It does now have advertising (in a non-intrusive manner).

It will become established as an easygoing alternative to the BBC for those who prefer such a radio station.

John Alborough, Syleham, Suffolk

Lehrer, Renaissance man SIR: Francis Beckett’s tribute to Tom Lehrer (December issue) concentrates on the clever and satirical lyrics of his songs, but makes no mention of his music and musicianship – for example the wonderful and rousing Fight Fiercely, Harvard, reminiscent of a Sousa march and now played at half-time at Harvard football matches; the mournful minorkey Irish Ballad, conjuring up images of a smoky pub singalong with everyone joining in the last line of each verse; and of course the four verses of

Clementine with words and music in the styles of Cole Porter, Mozart, bop and Gilbert and Sullivan.

He matched the style of his music so perfectly to the words. And he was a masterful composer and musician, perhaps matched only by Victor Borge, able to sing, play and then link to the next song with wonderful dry humour. With 15 nightclub appearances, 104 solo concerts (the last in 1967) and about 50 songs altogether, his legacy lies, luckily for us, in the recordings of his great and wonderful work.

Yours etc, Richard Gordon, Killinchy, Co Down

The Edward Lear cookbook SIR: I must confess that Dominic Green’s recipe for cooking ’possum (December issue) left me feeling somewhat queasy.

On balance, I prefer Edward Lear’s for cooking Amblongus Pie: TO MAKE AN AMBLONGUS PIE Take 4 pounds (say 4½ pounds) of fresh Amblongusses, and put them in a small pipkin. Cover them with water and boil them for 8 hours incessantly, after which add 2 pints of new milk, and proceed to boil for 4 hours more…

[Further detailed instructions follow, widely accessible on the internet.] Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible.

Yours, John M Milne, North Shields

Mature Victor Mature SIR: In ‘I Once Met Billy Wilder’ (December issue), Anthony Lipmann calls Victor Mature a B-movie star. He must mean B-movies like My Darling Clementine, Kiss of Death, Samson and Delilah, The Robe… Get the picture?

Best regards, Chris Opie, Newport, Monmouthshire

Bloody Macbeth

‘I think Stephen has fallen out with his imaginary friend’

Comprehensively unfair SIR: Roy Shutz (Readers’ Letters, December issue) seizes on the A-levelresults controversy to renew the tired – and here irrelevant – attack on comprehensive schools, saying they penalise the ‘clever poor’, compared with grammar schools.

But what about the many thousands more of ‘unclever poor’ – to use an even more patronising expression – who were thrown onto the secondary-modern scrap heap after failing, perhaps by a few marks, the 11-plus?

Many went on to achieve success after leaving these schools, but many more did not. They are the ones who would have benefited most from a comprehensive education, but in well-run comprehensive schools with good teachers the clever poor will also thrive.

I was lucky enough to go to a successful grammar school before university, but I have always believed the system was intrinsically unfair.

Yours faithfully, Will Martin, Darley Dale, Derbyshire

Hitchcock mystery

‘It seems he was interested only in Trump Tower’

SIR: There’s a theory about Vertigo which suggests that, after the opening chase ends with Scottie hanging from the roof, the subsequent events are all in his mind as he falls to his death. His position appears to render rescue impossible and we never actually see him pulled to safety.

This would explain the barminess of the plot rather well.

Regards, Stephen Haigh, London E1

SIR: Re Diarmaid Ó Muirithe’s excellent article in the Annual (‘Words, an Orcadian selection’), I offer a Shakespearian footnote to his discussion of chaft, ‘a noun often used in the plural, which means the jaw’. He traces it to Scotland and the Kingdom of Fife.

Early in Macbeth, King Duncan learns that Scotland’s hero has confronted the rebel Macdonald in the pay of Norway, and ‘unseamed him from the nave to th’ chaps’ before decapitating him. The scene of this conflict is Fife (‘Where the Norwegian banners flout the sky/ And fan our people cold’).

The irony of one traitor’s head being replaced by another’s at the end of the play must be intended.

Yours, John Davie, Thurleston, Devon

Suits and Thais SIR: I was surprised by James Pembroke’s assertion (Barbados revisited, November issue) that in 1980 Thailand was of interest only to stamp collectors or backpackers.

My wife and I saw that New Year in at a party at our five-star hotel, complete

‘The emperor is wearing the empress’s new clothes!’

with ice sculptures and fireworks, and we certainly didn’t seem to be blazing a trail.

The Thais were charming and hospitable, and while their grasp of English put us to shame, it was not complete. While attending the party, we left our four-year-old asleep in the care of (according to the receptionist who made the arrangements) a ‘baby sister’; and in Bangkok I had a suit expertly made during my visit by a tailor who, offering me a choice of materials on display in the front of the shop, assured me that if there was nothing there to my liking ‘I have many more up my backside’.

Peter Morgan, Elham, Kent The Oldie January 2021 49

I Once Met

MOVIESTORE COLLECTION LTD/ALAMY

Burt Lancaster, Telly Savalas & Jack Palance Nonchalance comes easily to most teenagers and I was no exception.

It was 1970. I was 16 and on holiday in Italy. My family had friends in Rome, dating back to my father’s time serving in Italy during the war. We frequently stayed with them in the splendid house they had built on the Olgiata golf course, just outside the Eternal City. Our home in Scotland was also on a golf course.

Both my father and I were avid golfers.

One hot July lunchtime, I was munching on a sandwich in the Olgiata clubhouse with my friend Jaime when Burt Lancaster ambled up.

He asked Jaime if he would make up a foursome that afternoon. ‘We are playing only nine holes – Telly is a bit wiped out after his night on the town,’ he told us.

Lancaster knew Jaime because Jaime’s grandfather Ercole Graziadei had chaired the judging panel that controversially gave its top award to The Leopard. The film version was arguably Lancaster’s greatest performance. They were also neighbours at Olgiata.

Jaime explained that he could not play as he had a

dentist’s appointment but immediately volunteered me. ‘He’s from Scotland and lives on a golf course – he can play.’

I was surprising myself at how nonchalantly I managed to agree when Burt said, ‘OK, kid, you wanna play?’

‘Who are the others?’ I asked.

‘Telly and Jack. Telly’s staying with me and Jack is a neighbour. Ready when you are.’

I hadn’t even asked who Telly and Jack were, but they turned out to be Telly Savalas (pre-Kojak days) and Jack Palance. I didn’t know of Palance; his career was in a lull and he was making forgettable Italian films at the time.

Burt Lancaster had given Savalas his first major film role in Birdman of Alcatraz, and the two had become firm friends. Palance and Lancaster had starred in The Professionals in 1966.

It still felt an unusual trio. They were very different personalities, with Burt the avuncular figure who, despite a gentle manner, was clearly the boss. Jack was warm and friendly, given to wry smiles and knowing looks – especially every Diamond in the rough: Burt Lancaster

time Savalas announced, ‘I’m gonna put this one real close.’ (He never did.)

As we assembled on the first tee, my nerves did kick in. I’d seen The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes, as well as On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, in which Savalas played Blofeld. To me, Telly was the biggest star of the three. Years later, I came to appreciate it was Burt who was the most accomplished screen actor of the trio.

Savalas introduced his caddie, Sally, to me as his cousin, prompting a knowing look from Palance. As he prepared to tee off, she offered him a putter. Jack turned to me and said, laughing, ‘She has other skills.’

When anyone hit a good shot, Telly would shout ‘Play golf!’ Burt went about his game slowly and quietly. Jack was the best player.

My nerves took a while to settle, but after four holes I hit the best golf shot of my life, sinking a four iron from about 170 yards for an eagle – something I’ve never repeated.

The inevitable ‘Play golf!’ followed from Telly. Jack winked and applauded.

Burt strolled up to me, shook my hand and, with the broadest of smiles, said, ‘You’ll never ever forget that shot, kid.’

He was absolutely right.

Piers Pottinger

Noddy Holder bought our sofa

Thirty years ago, we ordered a new sofa and advertised the old one in a local magazine.

A couple arranged to come to the house to see it. It was in the run-up to Christmas and they told us they had visitors coming to stay. We guessed they didn’t have enough seating to accommodate everyone.

Our sofa fitted the bill – a green Draylon, which back then was quite fashionable. They came back later to collect it.

We had never been followers of popular entertainers and it was only on seeing the name 50 The Oldie January 2021

on the cheque that we realised our buyers were Mr and Mrs Noddy Holder.

He’d obviously had some concerns about this venture, as his wife said to him, ‘I told you it would be all right.’ They had sat outside in the car for quite a while before she managed to persuade him to come to the door.

It turned out they lived very close by – in a village south of Manchester that has always attracted well-known people.

Many Manchester footballers have bought property there, including Wayne Rooney, although he has since moved.

As I was the secretary of the village tennis club, I came across the Holders again when Mrs Holder joined the club and won a pair of

tickets to Wimbledon in the members’ draw.

I always handed tickets over personally, so I called at their house to deliver them. So this was my second meeting with Noddy Holder. He was wisely wary about opening the door to a stranger, and when I knocked he called out in a

somewhat gruff tone, ‘Who is it and what do you want?’

I rather nervously told him, and he opened the door and took the tickets. Unused to dealing with celebrities, I didn’t think to let him know that we had met before.

His appearances on the television, particularly with his famous song when Slade wishes everyone a merry Christmas, always bring back fond memories of that first meeting when Noddy Holder bought our sofa.

By Pamela Dennett, Macclesfield, Cheshire who receives £50

Merry Christmas, everybody!

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

Books Disunited States IVO DAWNAY A Promised Land

By Barack Obama

GARY WING

Penguin £35 It was the 21st century’s first political fairy tale: a gangly black youth from Honolulu goes to Harvard, becomes a secular saint and wows America and the world with his clunky slogan: the audacity of hope.

Luck also played its part and few can claim a more charmed life than Barack Hussein Obama. His golden ticket to the White House came in a phone call from presidential candidate John Kerry’s staff inviting him to give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention.

Not yet even a first-term Senator, Obama had a way with words, a ‘Yes, we can’ optimism and an ability to pluck at patriotic heartstrings that ultimately propelled him into the express elevator to the penthouse suite of the free world.

Little more than four years later, it was Obama, not Kerry, who climbed into the Beast to drive to his inauguration on Capitol Hill.

Even today, President-elect Joe Biden’s much-used stump-speech applause line – ‘No red states, no blue states: just the United States’ – was actually forged by the Kenyan-American from Hawaii on that heady July evening in Boston, 16 years ago.

In his memoir, A Promised Land, Obama recalls the magic of that speech.

‘There’s a physical feeling, a current of emotion, that passes back and forth between you and the crowd … a sense of connection that overrides our differences and replaces them with a giant swell of possibility.’

Then he adds, ‘And like all things that matter most, you know the moment

is fleeting and that soon the spell will be broken.’

And that, too, is the narrative arc of this 700-page volume and its sometimes melancholy mood music. For the new President’s promised land – a vision of a reborn, empathetic town-meeting America, newly united for the common good – runs slam-dunk into its counterpart: the rugged, self-centred individualism of the Wild West.

The first 200 pages crackle along at breakneck pace to his 2008 election triumph. Then the poetry of campaigning grinds into the thick, sludgy prose of government horse-trading in the gridlocked swamp of Washington, DC. Aware that the endless meetings and cobbled compromises that are the day job need to be leavened, Obama deftly weaves in worldly-wise Michelle and his daughters to lighten the story.

In one wonderfully comic episode, a staffer rings to say he has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

‘For what?’ he asks with wholly appropriate self-deprecation, before telling his dozing wife the news. ‘ “That’s wonderful, honey,” Michelle said; then rolled over to get a little shut-eye.’

These little asides, pen portraits of people, foreign trips and the sheer weirdness of the Office are what makes the book fun – our own fantasy ride into the day-to-day life of being President.

The endless meetings and toing and froing on legislation reveal the downside.

British readers still wedded to the notion of a special relationship will feel the book disappoints. In the account of the post-crash 2009 London G20 meeting, Gordon Brown is credited with being thoughtful and responsible but not the saviour of the global economy as some have claimed. David Cameron is granted ‘the easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life’.

Quite clearly to the President, the

The Oldie January 2021 53

‘My son needs a prom date’

views of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy – ‘a figure out of a ToulouseLautrec painting’ – had more weight, though at times the Frenchman’s emotional outbursts and the German’s eye-rolling appeared to be almost a comic double act.

There are insights too into the long, dark nights of the soul that dampen the President’s Pollyanna-ish tendencies. In Prague, Václav Havel warns, like an Old Testament prophet, ‘You’ve been cursed with people’s high expectations. It means they are also easily disappointed.’

In these first months of his presidency, intimations of the limits of power come frequently and early. Obamacare is passed; a Recovery Act tackles the financial crisis; the auto industry is saved.

But dogged, relentless and often subliminally racist opposition also takes hold. Obama’s Manichean tendency to see the world as a struggle between good and evil gives way to a growing realisation that similar passions are mirrored on the Republican right.

When Donald Trump began proselytising the ‘birther’ myth – that Obama had not been born in America and therefore could not legally be president – he simply ignored it, more amused than worried. But at the midterm elections in 2010, Obama’s majority in the House collapsed.

Hardly surprising, then, that to lift our spirits he ends this first volume of his memoirs on a note of triumph. Only a few hours before the helicopter-borne SEAL teams clattered into action to kill Osama bin Laden, the President is playing it for laughs at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington with his nemesis in the audience.

Now the birther issue was resolved, he said, Trump could concentrate on what really mattered – ‘like did we fake the moon landings?’

Volume Two of the Obama fairy tale will have to explain what exactly happened to the audacity of hope – as a red, Republican tide in 2014 sweeps through Congress, carrying Senate and House before it.

Ivo Dawnay was the Sunday Telegraph’s Washington correspondent

Queen of Dollywood TANYA GOLD Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics

By Dolly Parton and Robert K Oermann Hodder & Stoughton £35 The standard criticism of Dolly Parton is that she is unreal: named for a doll and trying to outdo it.

This rebuke is inspired by snobbery – misogyny does the rest – and I wonder whether Songteller: My Life in Lyrics is her response to this. She always says, ‘If you want to know me, hear my songs.’

Here she publishes the lyrics of some of the 3,000 songs she has written, with commentary and photography, and I wonder if people have been listening at all.

She was one of 12 children born to an illiterate sharecropper – ‘Daddy’ – and a home-maker – ‘Mama’. Mama sang in a ‘haunting voice’ and feared winter, because her children might die. Daddy was illiterate but knew the value of everything.

There was no indoor plumbing or

electricity. In winter, they slept in their clothes. She was mocked at school for a home-made coat, which she honours in Coat of Many Colors: ‘And, oh, I couldn’t understand it, for I felt that I was rich.

And I told them of the love my mama sewed in every stitch’.

Her family encouraged her to sing; her uncle bought her a guitar, which she felt ‘was a piece of my body’. She moved to Nashville the day after she turned 18: ‘In the fountain at the Hall of Fame/ I washed my face and I read the names’.

Parton excels in narrative storytelling, and not just her own; she is the closest thing Tennessee has to a poet laureate.

She was a songwriter before she was world-famous because her songs didn’t match her face; they are so much bleaker.

She writes about the Vietnam War (‘God give me the courage to tell them/ That Daddy won’t be home any more’) and all the permutations of poverty and loss: prostitution; suicide; arson; alcoholism and drug addiction; abandonment; the torture and death of children; imprisonment in mental institutions.

She calls herself, ‘morbid. When people say, “Oh, you always look so happy,” I say, “Well, that’s the Botox.” ’ I wonder if Dolly’s appearance is her disguise: if you look like she does when you sing to Middle America, you can get away with anything; and there is an addictive element to plastic surgery. She is obviously a workaholic, too.

Another criticism is that she has refused to call herself a feminist. But, if you examine her lyrics, she does not have to: ‘My mistakes are no worse than yours/ Just because I’m a woman’; ‘You want me like I was before/ But I’m not like that any more.’ And, in 9 to 5, ‘Tumble outta bed and I stumble to the kitchen/ Pour myself a cup of ambition’.

It’s telling that she allows To Daddy – a song in which a woman leaves her husband – to be described as a ‘feminist saga’: ‘She never meant to come back home/ If she did, she never did say so to Daddy’.

‘I can say what I need to say,’ she writes in the commentary, ‘without having to march in the streets.’

Her own romantic life is shrouded here. I suspect Dolly is enough of a professional to know when to stop talking. The obvious question is why does she write so well about heartbreak if she is so happily married, to the semi-invisible Carl Dean whom she met on her first day in Nashville? Here is the buried answer: ‘I don’t admit or deny anything. I have been everywhere, and I have felt everything.’

In this book, the central relationship is with her career, manifest in Porter The Oldie January 2021 55

Wagoner, a ludicrous ‘country superstar’, who made her famous and tried to control her.

Eventually, she wrote I Will Always Love You to persuade him to release her.

Now she says that the line ‘I would only be in your way’ should have read ‘you would only be in my way’. It became, after Whitney Houston recorded it, one of the bestselling songs in history. She spent some of the proceeds on her literacy charity: for Daddy.

Here, then, is a serious, clever and gifted woman, secure behind her absurd and soothing façade. I thought it was impossible to like Parton more than I did when I picked this up, but I do.

Strong’s weakness NICOLA SHULMAN Types and Shadows: The Roy Strong Diaries 2004-2015

By Roy Strong Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25 Roy Colin Strong was born in Middlesex, the son of a hypochondriacal travelling hat salesman. The only book in the house was a medical dictionary. He grew up feeling like the family changeling. But, in a few clean bounds, he climbed clear of his parents’ milieu, becoming the director first of the National Portrait Gallery and then, at 38, of the V & A. Foaming with sixties velvet and frills, and mounting alarming exhibitions, he made a conspicuous and divisive figure on the curatorial circuit. In 1973, to the astonishment of all who had met him, he met the queen of British set-designers, Julia Trevelyan Oman, and in his own words ‘eloped’ with her.

It was the beginning of a mutually adoring marriage. Together, Strong and Trevelyan Oman bought a house, The Laskett in Herefordshire, and created a large, now famous private garden there: an allegorical construct of monuments and symbols, the vegetable embodiment of their entwined lives.

These diaries begin in 2004, a year after Julia died of pancreatic cancer.

Strong is 70 and a knight of the realm.

His task is to emerge from sorrow’s underworld and start a new passage in life. ‘I must move on.’

To this end, he follows the traditional paths of faith and reality TV, appearing as a server in Hereford Cathedral and as a mentor on a mesmerising TV series called The Diets That Time Forgot. Fat poor people are made to undergo slimming regimes from the past, overseen by Sir Roy in a 19th-century tailcoat, ‘as though I was born to it’.

We also find him putting his house in order, making alterations for the single life, sorting Julia’s papers and trying to effect her last wish: that their garden should go to the National Trust.

There is a problem here: The Laskett’s charms are by their nature more manifest to its creators than to anyone else, though Strong has never had time for divergent views on its merits. He can’t imagine a criticism unmotivated by spite or envy. Consequently, negotiations with the Trust, dragging its feet in a manner instantly readable as a ‘no’ to anyone other than him, are vexed and fractious.

Strong is in some ways a realist. He sees his diaries as ‘the jottings of a self-employed writer observing a scene in which he is no longer a central figure’, and he’s not sure how much they’ll appeal. That’s over-modest. By now, Strong is more than that: he has acceded to the pantheon of the officially Great and Good – a rare consummation of a life.

Anyone who wants to know what it’s like up there, on the stretch of the greasy pole nearest to heaven, could do worse than enquire within.

Greatness and Goodness in this country is a strange condition: more of an apotheosis than a promotion, associated but not concomitant with celebrity or distinguished public office.

You have to work at it and be the Right Stuff: to love ceremonial and regard dullness in your fellow man as a virtue.

Then you will find yourself queuing to attend the kinds of events that figure here: the Coastal Command Memorial; the Queen’s Diamond Wedding; a supper at Westminster Abbey; the funeral of Billy Tallon, Page of the Back Stair at Clarence House, who liked to greet the Queen Mother’s guests with a full curtsy and died of sclerosis of the liver.

Hosts of senior thespians and junior royalty appear in your social round; and your journals, with their lists of names and hats, may develop symptoms of

‘You’re going to be fine but the car’s a write-off’

Jennifer’s Diary, late of Harper’s & Queen magazine, albeit cattier: ‘Princess Alexandra, beautiful as always, was impeccably attired in dark green velvet and diamonds. Others … fell short.’

Strong had given up his diaries until a friend persuaded him to resume, saying he was ‘this period’s Mr Pepys’. Pepys?

It’s a poor analogy for a diarist with dwindling respect for and dying curiosity about this world’s novelties.

There are, of course, passages of impressive penetration and wit: an unimprovable description of an Indian dinner party as ‘hours of alcohol and starvation’, or the critique of the Duchess of Northumberland’s controversial garden at Alnwick Castle: ‘The mistake she made was to bill it as a garden. It’s the modern equivalent of Vauxhall or Ranelagh, pleasure grounds in which things happen.’ A lifetime of discrimination is compressed in that remark.

But the general tone is of perceived decline: ‘Everywhere one looks, it is down, down, down’; ‘We lamented the absence of any great people.’

Where are the great men? Doing The Diets That Time Forgot, perhaps.

Regency streets KATE HUBBARD The Time Traveller’s Guide to Regency Britain

By Ian Mortimer Bodley Head £20 ‘My living in Yorkshire was so far out of the way that it was actually 12 miles from a lemon,’ said the Rev Sydney Smith in the early 1800s.

Lemons may be more widely available today, but this still seems a good gauge of remoteness. In terms of sensibility and taste, we are not so different from our Regency forebears. Much of their culture – architecture, furnishings, music – is still with us.

Social concerns – women’s rights, social justice, race – that were being debated then are still debated now. We laugh at the same jokes. By the end of the Regency period (defined here as 17891830), society, writes Ian Mortimer, was ‘recognisably modern’.

This book is the latest in a series.

Previously, Mortimer has ‘time travelled’ back to medieval and Elizabethan England and Restoration Britain. His conceit is to act as a relaxed, genial guide, showing the reader what Britain looked like and how people lived.

You might be sniffy about what appears to be a formulaic and The Oldie January 2021 57

unserious approach to history – a kind of Horrible Histories for grown-ups – but you’d be wrong. Admittedly, Mortimer’s tone of jokey familiarity – ‘Frankly, it is difficult to keep up with who is sleeping with whom among the well-to-do’ – can be grating but he succeeds, rather brilliantly, in making a mass of information accessible and entertaining.

He soon discovers that, compared with earlier periods, Regency Britain is complicated. As Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, put it, ‘The spirit of contradiction is the character of the nation.’ Sodomy was still a hanging offence, yet Anne Lister, who merrily set about seducing her fellow Yorkshirewomen, went unremarked.

Cross-dressing was not unknown, notably in the case of James Barry, who, born a girl, dressed as a boy in order to read medicine at Edinburgh University and become a doctor. Barry, his gender still disguised, performed the first Caesarean where the lives of both mother and child were saved.

Mortimer makes good use of Regency writers, wits and diarists. Southey and Smith and Lister are joined by the country parson James Woodforde, the playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Elizabeth Ham, a farmer’s daughter.

But much of the enjoyment of this book lies in the detail. It rained more in Regency Britain (hard to believe). In the absence of GMT, one of the first things you did on arriving in a new town was check your pocket watch against the public clock.

Tin cans, hairbrushes, flushing loos, soda water, placement (men and women

seated alternately rather than grouped at either end of the table) and women’s knickers all made their first appearance.

Towns no longer vanished into the darkness, thanks to gas streetlights.

For £2, you could buy yourself a new set of real human teeth, taken from the corpse of a hanged felon. In London, bridges were built over the Thames, Hyde Park had no trees, the National Gallery opened and the air was thick with soot.

We learn of many unsung heroes, from humanitarians to inventors to prodigies. Sir Samuel Romilly led the campaign against the death penalty and a posthumous Act in 1823 removed it from over 50 offences. In 1816, Francis Ronald rigged up eight miles of wiring in his garden in Hammersmith and sent the first electric telegraph message.

Crazes for gambling and feats of endurance came together when 17-year-old Captain Barclay won 100 guineas for walking six miles in under an hour. And bets were placed on Billy the terrier – could he dispatch 100 rats in ten minutes? He came in at nine minutes, 15 seconds.

It’s oddly surprising, and pleasing, to find Beethoven hard at work. The Philharmonic Society premiered his Fifth Symphony in 1816 and repeatedly begged the great man to come to London to direct a performance. He declined but, in need of money, he accepted a commission.

Beethoven’s Ninth was the result. ‘If there is one concert in Regency Britain that you should attend it is the performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on Monday 21 March 1825, in the Argyll Rooms on Regent Street.’

‘Ah, Mr Connery. I’ve been expecting you’

RIP the truth MATTHEW NORMAN News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World

By Alan Rusbridger Canongate £18.99 ‘Who on earth,’ asks Alan Rusbridger in the arresting opening line of his preface, ‘can you believe any more?’

The timing of this faintly despairing enquiry verges on the exquisite. On the day I read the book, Barack Obama was speaking about how ‘you can’t put the genie back in the bottle as to how people get their information … Truth doesn’t even matter … Not having a consistent baseline of facts is the greatest threat to democracy.’

Many more lives will turn on how they answer Rusbridger’s question, as many have already been sacrificed on the altar of tragically misplaced credulity.

Some who trusted Boris Johnson’s cheery defence of hand-shaking during that visit to a COVID-plagued hospital will have died as a result. God knows how many Americans committed suicide by blind faith, by trusting Fox News and Donald Trump, the Nobel laureate in Bleachology, over CNN and the infamous huckster Dr Anthony Fauci.

At the time of writing, the President continues to claim victory in defiance of such pedantries as the vote count. Some 50 million Republican voters apparently share his stated conviction that Ernst Stavro Biden, languidly stroking the white cat in Delaware while his minions fixed Detroit polling machines, stole the Oval Office.

The threat posed by misinformation – to the survival of individuals, democracy and the planet itself – is nothing new. It has whispered at us since social media first began bringing together those we once casually dismissed as Jasper Carrott’s nutter on the bus. The megaphone has amplified the whisper to an eardrum-shattering shriek.

So what in sanity’s name is the answer?

Rusbridger, who edited the Guardian for 20 years (and was my boss there for 15), is too smart and nuanced a cookie to offer glib reassurance that there is one.

But nor does he succumb to the defeatism on show during a lunch back in the mid-Noughties, when he summarised the future of printed newspapers in the elegant two-word projection ‘We’re fucked’.

What he does, in an engagingly readable and thoughtful A-Z guide from ‘Accuracy’ to ‘Zoomers’, is mingle portraitS of serial anti-truth offenders with The Oldie January 2021 59

mini-tutorials – targeted at young and would-be journalists – on how to establish and present facts.

The greatest offender, that Dalek Supreme of manipulative misinformation, is treated with judicious restraint. Rupert Murdoch, the author acknowledges, has spent hundreds of millions sustaining newspapers (and the careers of countless fine journalists) when no one else would.

But he also dwells on Murdoch’s poisonous influence over various governments, most notoriously Tony Blair’s, and the nakedly deceitful reporting used by those working for the Führer to enable such triumphs as British involvement in Iraq and later Brexit.

Ranting about Murdoch is a futile exercise best devolved to dummies like me.

Rusbridger is no dummy and no ranter, though he does drop the odd bucketload on some of our age’s premier buffoons.

That said, James Delingpole’s bespoke take on climate change is of less concern to Rusbridger than what it reveals about declining standards that such supposedly mainstream outlets as the Spectator, Mail and Telegraph have seen fit to publish Delingpole’s articles.

For centuries, the English corruption has been the relationship between politicians and those tax-shy proprietors who deploy their titles as weapons of bribery and blackmail to further their commercial interests.

Rusbridger writes as well and succinctly about the anciens régimes as about the ethical quandaries facing the titans of new media. As both a longserving print editor and the guy who pioneered giving it all away online, he straddles the two worlds.

If some of his more technical stuff reads like an instruction manual for undergrads, they represent the future and will find it useful.

The problem, with respect to his ambition to help shape that future, is that he is preaching to the choir. Almost everyone who reads this book will already broadly share his perspective.

So how do you reach those who remain adamant that climate change is a lefty tax-raising scam, that migrants caused the 2007-8 financial crash, that Boris Johnson has a clue what he’s doing or that President Bonespurs won the recent election BY A LOT? I guess you could tour the Appalachians, Borat-fashion, giving recitals in the hope of a mass epiphany.

But the folks in the MAGA caps know whom they can believe, and nothing on earth – not even their own dying breaths from COVID – will disabuse them of that.

Thomas Gainsborough: The Portraits, Fancy Pictures and Copies after Old Masters has been announced as the winner of the 18th annual William M B Berger Prize for British Art History. By Hugh Belsey, Yale University Press, £150

Literary weather report HAMISH ROBINSON Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology Edited by Alice Oswald and Paul Keegan Jonathan Cape £14.99 Alice Oswald and Paul Keegan have saddled themselves with a problem in Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology.

The weather is not a theme like any other – it is the background to everything, even if it is not itself in the foreground.

There is scarcely a conversation, letter or diary entry that does not make mention of the weather; scarcely a poem, story or novel that does not contain some allusion to it. There are many that handle

it extensively, if they are not in fact dedicated to it.

There’s the opening of Bleak House (in this book) or Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (out). You’re soon overwhelmed by possibilities.

Mark Twain, in his novel The American Claimant (in), has the narrator aim comically at writing a book ‘without weather’ – ‘Nothing breaks up an author’s progress like having to fuss-up the weather’ – only to mention a ‘breezy fine morning’ in paragraph two.

In haikus, an allusion to the season, most often via the weather, is de rigueur.

It’s no surprise to learn from their preface that Oswald and Keegan spent five years compiling their anthology and were left with a pile of excluded extracts a yard high. With the weather, one need never get anywhere near the bottom of the barrel.

The Oldie January 2021 61

That said, even with only 200 or so pages to play with, they sometimes come close. They include a superb page from Audubon on the vast flocks of pigeons that once crowded the sky near the Ohio River; their droppings are momentarily likened to falling snow. You could argue that, like a biblical plague, the pigeons had become weather. But is this really weather when there is so much indisputably unmetaphorical weather to hand?

In their preface, the compilers plead for the widest possible understanding of weather, including eclipses, meteors and the night sky: all that exists aloft and rains down influence.

Considerable space is given to Native American chants and shamanistic texts from ethnological literature, two pages to a ninth-century Chinese court allegory of the sun and moon, and a page to rain charms from The Golden Bough.

They seem eager to avoid anything that might fall under the rubric ‘the four seasons’ or smack of the calendar image.

There is more Frank O’Hara than Philip Larkin, the last great poet of the English summer. We hear from Auden as the translator of Norse verse, but not from the Auden of A Summer Night.

Hölderlin appears as a letter-writer, rather than as the writer of poems positively electric with weather.

Another idiosyncrasy is that the texts come, as the preface terms it, ‘hatless’: without titles or ascription. The names of the authors appear in strips at the bottom of the page, and sources, notes and the occasional gloss are relegated to an index.

The idea seems to be that the various voices should join to form one long, polyphonic weather day. This technique was successfully deployed by Oswald in her long poem Dart, but the voices are too various and uncorralled for this story arc to be anything but notional.

All well and good. Anthologies may drift and fail as projects, but their riches remain intact to be salvaged by the reader.

SHORT STORIES OF THE MONTH

Hazzard warning CRESSIDA CONNOLLY Collected Stories

By Shirley Hazzard Virago £14.99 Shirley Hazzard was born in Australia in 1931 and moved to New York with her parents during the early 1950s. Her adult life was divided between the Upper East Side and long periods in Capri, France and Naples.

This is worth stating, because the

‘This is difficult for me to explain – so I brought a prop’

world of her short stories – of her first and best collection, in any case – is very much of its time and of such places.

A certain cultural milieu is evoked and tacitly expected of the reader. Her people take siestas in the afternoons and read or write poetry; they have a good working knowledge of Latin. They visit archaeological ruins with the Guide Bleu in their pockets. The women dress well, often in linen, and try not to be too imploring. The men are short-tempered and self-involved and wish their girlfriends wouldn’t be so emotional.

There’s a lot of looking out of windows feeling wistful. In Europe, these windows are in villas or hotels. In America, it might be the windows of a car through which a jilted, tear-stained girl looks out.

Almost everyone talks at cross-purposes and the more crucial a conversation is to their future happiness, the worse this tendency gets.

At their best, the ten stories originally published as Cliffs of Fall (1963) have the astringency and observation of John Updike’s finest. Hazzard (a linguist in real life – so she must have had a good ear) is brilliant at dialogue: ‘I hate the way you keep saying “Oh”.’

He saw, in the mirror, her eyes deflect.

‘And the way you keep agreeing.’

‘Agreeing?’

‘Humouring me.’

Or: ‘The things is,’ he went on, ‘that I need you. You know that, I suppose?’

‘And you resent it.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘of course. But it could be worse, couldn’t it? I mean, I don’t shout at you or anything.’

Or: ‘Marriage is like democracy – it doesn’t really work, but it’s all we’ve been able to come up with…’

Often the trouble is infidelity, but sometimes it’s just boredom. Ordinary

exasperation snowballs into an always very self-consciously dramatic rage.

People can’t, or won’t, say the right thing.

They sulk and quote lines from Louis Aragon or Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Being in love is ghastly, like an ailment.

In bright contrast, two or three of the stories from Cliffs of Fall, and another couple from the previously uncollected stories, take place in rural Tuscan pensioni. These have a wider, more amusing cast than the lone, warring couple who often find themselves under the microscope elsewhere. They are marvellous, like tiny versions of A Room with a View. Had I been Shirley Hazzard’s editor, I’d have urged her to make a whole book of them.

The present editor, however, has done Hazzard no favour by putting the material from Cliffs of Fall together with a later collection, People in Glass Houses (1967). Sometimes, there is a good reason why a book is out of print.

This second collection must have seemed like a good idea at the time: a group of eight tales, all taking place within the offices of a thinly disguised United Nations.

But nothing dates like modernity.

Details that must have seemed daring at the time – mimeographed papers; sheet-glass windows; abstract sculpture; drip-dry! – seem only dingy now. It’s hard not to feel that Hazzard finds the African, Dutch and Greek names comedic in themselves.

Stylistically, too, these stories are weaker. Even among the pleasures of her earlier work, Hazzard can be a little too mannered. In these office-based stories, this tips into a clunking archness.

Spinster secretaries; droning bureaucrats; office politics and affairs; the mind-numbing dullness of committees… They are all described with a sort of knowing wink in the reader’s direction. It’s as if she’s saying, ‘Sophisticates such as you and I know how trivial and small these lives are.’

Tucked away at the end of the book are a further ten previously uncollected or unpublished stories, and some of these are a delight.

Hazzard is especially good at unrequited love. Comfort, a tale in which a lovesick girl goes to seek solace from a man who is in turn pining for her, is a little gem. There are more travels in Europe.

But, after the unwelcome teasing of the central section, it is hard to trust the author entirely. You keep wondering if she’s going to peep out from behind a pillar with a knowing look and spoil the fun.

The Oldie January 2021 63

Media Matters

The Press has risen from the dead

Quality papers are thriving – thanks to their digital editions stephen glover A few years ago, many thought the national Press was doomed. Newspapers would survive on the internet – where most of them would be free – but not, in the long run, in printed form.

Things haven’t worked out quite like that. It’s true that the print circulation of all titles continues to decline, a process that has accelerated during the pandemic because of the forced closure of some shops. But there has been a surprising development which will save at least some newspapers. A growing number of people are paying good money to read them on their tablets or smartphones.

Although some figures are a bit murky because publishers are increasingly secretive, it’s clear that several titles are now selling many more digital than printed copies.

Print sales of the Financial Times are around 100,000 a day, while it has about a million digital subscribers. The Times sells around 300,000 in print and has roughly 400,000 digital buyers. Figures for the Daily Telegraph are about 330,000 digital and 200,000 print.

While the print circulation of all titles has been badly affected by the pesky virus, the digital sales of several of them have risen during recent months. In some cases, the digital gain makes up for the print loss.

Digital, which used to be a dirty word for publishers, now brings a smile to many faces. It turns out that people will pay to read papers on a screen, provided that they resemble what they used to hold in their hands. Digital has, in an unexpected way, perpetuated the traditional form of newspapers, albeit in a different dimension.

The economics are attractive to publishers since in the digital world there are no printing, distribution or newsprint costs. Once you break even, the money flows straight to the bottom line. Imagine a digital title becoming profitable with

200,000 subscribers. If you double that number, your costs of production will remain unchanged since you don’t have to employ more staff, buy paper or incur distribution charges. Profits will therefore soar. It is a good business to be in.

Not all titles are benefiting equally.

Largely because they are free on the internet – their business model being to build up vast audiences which generate considerable advertising revenue – the Daily Mail and the Guardian have been slower than other titles in attracting digital subscribers.

On the other hand, the Mail (for which I should remind readers that I write a column) is a beast very different in print from online. From a slow start, since the beginning of the pandemic the paper has doubled its digital subscribers to about 80,000.

So far, the red-top tabloids – the Sun, Daily Star and Daily Mirror – are not cashing in on the digital bonanza. They all have cheaply priced digital editions which have attracted relatively few subscribers. The main reason for their lack of success is that they, and similar publications, are free online.

Potential readers are reluctant to pay for material that is free in abundance on the internet.

What this means is that quality titles (with the exception of the Guardian) have been the main beneficiaries of the paid-for digital revolution. The Mail and the Guardian, which have largely put their faith in free websites, lag some way behind. The red-tops bring up the rear.

‘No one can say how much longer the printing presses will continue to roll’

The lesson is that it’s hard for a paper that is free online to build up large numbers of digital subscribers.

Those who forecast the demise of the national Press in the internet age were over-pessimistic. All print titles will almost certainly continue to lose circulation, though once the pandemic has receded the rate of decline should be less steep. No one can say for sure how much longer the printing presses will continue to roll. Whatever happens, though, newspapers have some sort of digital future.

What an odd newspaper the Guardian is.

It champions freedom of speech. Except when it comes to its own journalists.

Suzanne Moore, who was one of the paper’s leading columnists, has resigned. As a feminist and leftist, she conformed to most of its ideological beliefs. But she has strong views in the ‘trans debate’, believing that gender is biologically predetermined.

According to her account on the news website UnHerd, whenever she referred to the issue in her column she was ‘always subbed out’. When she was finally allowed to write on the subject last March, her piece attracted a letter of complaint to the Guardian’s editor, signed by 338 colleagues.

She had protested that people who campaigned for ‘women to have separate spaces and distinct services on the basis of our biological sex’ were being ‘no-platformed’ and smeared as ‘transphobic’.

As she pointed out on UnHerd, when he worked for the paper Seumas Milne reprinted a sermon by Osama bin Laden.

That was all right. But when it came to expressing a mainstream view that is probably shared by 95 per cent of the population, Ms Moore was censored and then rebuked.

As I say, an odd newspaper.

The Oldie January 2021 65

History

Three hundred years of prime time

Fifty-five PMs – from Walpole to Boris – have climbed the greasy pole david horspool Benjamin Disraeli, with characteristic brio, was the first to admit it.

‘I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole,’ he proudly declared on first becoming prime minister in 1868.

Before then – and possibly afterwards, for those who deplored Dizzy’s barely clothed ambition – wanting to be PM was not something an MP admitted to.

Robert Walpole, the first prime minister, came to power 300 years ago on 3rd April 1721. The present occupant of No 10 points out in The Prime Ministers, a new book edited by Iain Dale, ‘In 1741, Robert Walpole “unequivocally” denied that he was Prime Minister (despite having been so for 20 years).

After three centuries and 55 incumbents, I think it’s fair to say that the coyness about owning up to being Prime Minister is finally beginning to fade.’

The office of prime minister came about through accident and personal ambition. Walpole shrugged the title off as an insult but ensured the political world in which he operated (small, cliquey, backbiting – so unlike our own) got used to the idea of a single minister in charge through his own competence and longevity.

Owning up to wanting to be prime minister is still frowned on. As with the announcement of a currency devaluation (or a national lockdown), the timing of admitting a desire for the top job is crucial.

If the sitting party leader is fighting for their political life, being cast as one of the assassins doesn’t improve one’s image.

Harold Macmillan managed to do it and succeed Anthony Eden, but Quintin Hogg’s attempt to pull off Robert Walpole, Britain’s first PM

the trick and follow Macmillan made him look bumptious and ambitious – which he was. Alec Douglas-Home got the job instead.

Then again, if ambition is closeted too long, it loses its shine. Iain Dale’s book is filled with those, from Hugh Dalton to Michael Heseltine to John Smith, who, through bad luck or bad judgement, missed their chance.

Does an overview of 300 years of prime ministers make the job seem worth all the anguished striving?

Well, compared with most jobs, it doesn’t tend to last very long. Disraeli teetered at the top of the pole for only nine months on his first ascent. He shinned back up again to add a respectable six more years from 1874 to 1880. That cemented a place in political history, as much for his general boosterism of ideas – about the Crown, the Empire and (moderate) reform – as for anything he actually did.

Among the 54 other prime ministers, by far the most common length of time in office is under two years.

Some of those brief candles, like poor George Canning, dead of pneumonia at 57 after only three months in the job, were unfortunate. Most, like Viscount Goderich, ‘the blubberer’, who had to be informed of his resignation by a wellprepared George IV – he had a handkerchief ready – were simply not up to the job.

But what exactly is the job, and has it changed much over the centuries? Johnson points out the continuities: the house, the Cabinet room and the Parliament he answers to. But if one takes the long view, the differences are equally apparent.

First, there is the relationship with the monarchy. Though you wouldn’t know it from

our continuing obsession with the Royal Family, their political role today is comprehensively circumscribed.

For the first century of the role, the relationship between prime ministers and the monarch was the most crucial.

No 10 Downing Street was the gift of a king, George II. But it was its first recipient, Robert Walpole, who made sure the house was attached to the office of First Lord of the Treasury – that’s why that title is inscribed on the letter box.

In that decision lies the germ of the idea that power would be no longer personal, but institutional. By the time Disraeli pursued his fatherly relationship with Queen Victoria, the ceremonial side of monarchy had taken precedence over its politically powerful side.

After the monarch ceased to be the prime minister’s boss in anything but name, it was the turn of the people to be in charge.

Still, until after the First World War no prime minister had to serve in what we would understand as a democracy.

Over the last century, the PM has increasingly become not a chair of a Cabinet of decision-makers, but the person held responsible for making all the decisions.

You could blame Churchill, who made a show of trying to run the war singlehanded, although in fact he was a great delegator who questioned his appointees mercilessly.

It’s typical of the relative affections we have for sport and politics that ‘the impossible job’ is more often used to mean that as manager of the England football team.

We might do future prime ministers a service – and quell the ambitions of those unsuited to the rough and tumble – if we used it for the role of the occupant of No 10 Downing Street instead.

The Prime Ministers: 55 Leaders, 55 Authors, 300 Years of History, ed Iain Dale, is out now (Hodder & Stoughton) The Oldie January 2021 67

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

My favourite Christmas crackers For 50 years, the approach to Christmas meant the arrival of a slender booklet of verse, letters and unclassifiable snippets collected by John Julius Norwich.

In 2018, just before he died, this man of arts and letters put the year’s Christmas Cracker together as usual. It was published posthumously and, to widespread delight and surprise, an unfinished draft was found that rounded off the series in 2019 as the 50th Christmas Cracker. Now the supply has stopped.

It will take someone braver and better than me to attempt a revival (Harry Mount pays tribute to the Crackers on page 22, while not attempting to revive them). The miscellany that follows is not meant to take the place of a Christmas Cracker, but just to catch in some small way its spirit.

First, therefore, an extract from a letter written by a would-be screenwriter, Robert Pirosh, in 1934, which was included in the 2015 Christmas Cracker: ‘I like words. I like fat, buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady.

I like solemn, angular, creaky words such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory… I like suave V-words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, sullen words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.’

Modern job titles provide absolutely zero insight into what someone does for a living.

I recently looked at LinkedIn, the job website.

I have no idea what a Global Neuro-Diversity Strategist is, or what an Engagements and Alternatives Lead does. This is despite this website’s supposedly informing people

Pirosh sent his letter to any bigwig in Hollywood who might give him a job.

One did, at MGM. I like words, too. I like -enty words such as corpulent, virulent, truculent, pungent, plangent, astringent. I also like scumbled, lukewarm, fungible, beetling.

I like bafflegab (long-winded imprecision), slubberdegullion (slovenly person) and crinkum-crankum (fussily over-decorated objects).

I like houyhnhnm, though I can’t pronounce it. (It is meant to convey the neigh of a horse in Gulliver’s Travels.) I like ullage, which ought to mean the gunk at the bottom of a bottle of wine, but actually means the amount by which the bottle’s contents are missing. I could add smilet, Shakespeare’s word for a little smile, and chatterbox, lullaby, lickspittle, macaroon. And did you know that a nobbler is a thimble-rigger’s confederate?

As a child, Churchill thought Madame Tussaud’s was Madame Two Swords.

Correspondence in the Times in June 2020 established that the longest non-technical word in English was not floccinaucinihilipilifiation (‘the estimation of something as valueless’), but pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a lung disease better known as silicosis.

An inspired modern invention is FOMO. This term for ‘fear of missing out’ has been around since 2004, when

about these things. If you are ‘managing a Freelance Executive Director portfolio’, what exactly are you doing on a Wednesday morning?

I have to ponder why employers nowadays feel the need to give job roles grandiose and unnecessarily convoluted titles. It’s as if they are trying to convince each role-holder of their unique importance. Not only is it an exercise in ego massage; it also screams of insecurity and actually confuses people.

My own workplace is not excluded from this. For some bewildering reason, the complaints department is known as the Client Services Team, and Human Resources has been rebranded as the People Team.

Patrick McGinnis, a student at the Harvard Business School, put his finger on this common infirmity.

But the word moved from finger to lip – everyone’s lips – only during last spring’s lockdown, when fortunate people realised their unexpected peace of mind was a result of the absence of FOMO: no parties for anyone meant no anxiety.

McGinnis’s other coinage, FOBO, describes the paralysing ‘fear of better options’. It is less popular, perhaps because in a pandemic few people have any options, good or bad.

Black students at the University of Southern California’s business school protested last August about a professor’s choice of words in a lecture on public speaking. Pointing out that repeated filler words like ‘um’ and ‘er’ interrupt the speaker’s message, the professor mentioned similar words in other languages. Mandarin-speakers, for instance, often say nèige, nèige, nèige (a word meaning ‘that’). The students accused their professor of racism and harming their mental health since the word sounded ‘exactly like nigga’.

Lastly, I offer a collective noun. Have you noticed that professors are everywhere? Official statistics put their number in the UK at 20,550 in 2016-17, though that was ‘probably an undercount’. By several million, I’d say.

Together, I rate them a ‘profusion’.

Now nobody has any inkling who deals with complaints, or to whom to speak if they have a gripe to raise. Even the finance department has got in on the act, albeit halfheartedly, calling themselves Financial Solutions.

The best jobs, those that garner the most respect in this world, are the ones with titles that instantly

SMALL DELIGHTS Looking up a word in a fat dictionary and opening it at the right page first go.

TED LANE, MAIDSTONE Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

tell you what someone does.

Policeman. Doctor. Soldier.

Usually one or two words in length, the names of jobs that people should aspire to provide immediate recognition and appreciation of that person’s profession.

Paramedic. Author.

Plumber. These are jobs with the sort of community standing and longevity a Head of Customer Journey Insight can only dream of.

At what stage did most of the world’s professions get so vapid and boring that we had to start trussing them up with unnecessarily wordy titles?

No one ever grew up wanting to be a Senior Creditor Liaison Policy Officer.

I should know. I am one.

ADAM BURGESS The Oldie January 2021 69

My brilliant year In 2020, Dame Edna Everage chatted with the Queen, began her dazzling memoirs and had an MOT from her celebrity gynaecologist

‘Before you ask, I still look gorgeous’

70 The Oldie January 2021

Year’s resolution to stop helping others.

Most celebrities and female high achievers run around like scalded cats doing charity work in the hope of becoming a dame or even a baroness! But I’m a dame already – so it makes sense for me to slow down on tiring and, let’s face it, unconvincing acts of kindness.

I’m not even sure I want to be a dame when you see some of the nonentities who get the honorific.

The Queen told me in the strictest confidence that sometimes, with the sword in her hand, she looks down at the kneeling figure before her and thinks, ‘You’ve got to be joking!’

This horrible lockdown thing has led some people to think I’ve retired. No way, Jose!

People say, ‘How can you do so much, Edna?’

To which I reply, ‘How can you do so little?’

I have a royal friend who lives in a very large, detached home in central London with an enormous backyard overlooking the nearly finished Peninsula Hotel, who is still working flat out, and she is significantly older than me!

Unfortunately, I can’t do stage work at present and the NHS has told me they get a lot of patients

suffering from EDS (Edna Deprivation Syndrome). I just hope the next generation will get a chance to see me in the flesh one day.

Before you ask, I still look gorgeous, and my gynaecologist, Rick Stein – yes, the same, Possums! – looked up the other day and told me I was at the height of my powers!

He is a famous chef as well – so he’s always washing his hands, bless him.

When I told him that I had an opening for a gynaecologist, he jumped at it.

Now I’m looking back on my wonderful achievements over the years and starting work on my Trilogy.

It’s only one book but my literary agent, Jonathan Lloyd, tells me people love trilogies, and who am I to argue?

It’s pretty Proustian, actually, and I was nibbling a scrumptious sponge finger one day when it all came flooding back.

The triumphs, the heartache, the applause, the standing ovations and the safe-distancing ovations.

You will read about my lunch at the Spectator (a periodical of the period) with the American statesman Spiro Agnew. My stint in the Falklands War when I fearlessly sent my bridesmaid Madge Allsop over the top to look for land mines. My virtual adultery with Salvador Dali. My long years of selfsacrifice during my husband Norm’s illness, and how I established my worldwide charity, Friends of the Prostate.

On these pages, you will meet my mother, before I had her caringly relocated in a facility for the bewildered, and read about the legendary night we burnt my mother’s things.

It’s been a year for reflection, for taking stock; a watershed, if you will.

Throughout all this, my son Kenny (an influencer) has been at my side, as has his same-sex wife Clifford Smail (a children’s entertainer and video essayist).

Yes, I’ve at last publicly acknowledged Kenny’s fluidity, which has been a lesser cross to bear than my husband’s fluidity.

I needed this break, this intermission in my life, this ‘me time’… But fear not, Possums, I’ll be back!

LISA MAREE WILLIAMS/GETTY IMAGES

H

ELLO, POSSUMS! I’ve been called a comedienne by some people, but I’d rather be a nice Australian woman whose meditations on things like climate change, same-sex marriage, cultural appropriation in hairdressing and Mr Trump are so ‘on the nail’ that people just gasp.

A whole audience gasping with amazement and admiration at my insights and aperçus can sound like laughter to an untrained ear. Let’s face it, Possums, who’s heard enough laughter lately to know what it sounds like?

These days, comedians don’t have to be funny anyway – they just have to IDENTIFY as funny. A source close to the Comedy Industry tells me there’s a deep sense of relief amongst many ‘stand-ups’ that they don’t have an obligation to be funny any more. A lucky few said it came naturally. Anyway, they need time to focus on getting as many ‘f’ words as possible into a sentence.

Over the past year, I’ve been keeping a safe distance from the UK and Australia on board my luxury yacht, the Sea Widow.

And I’ve kept up my New

Arts NETFLIX HARRY MOUNT

monumentally unsuited to each other.

Diana says her fairy-tale wedding was ‘the worst day of my life’.

As with Senna (2010), the compelling documentary about the racing driver, the drama is paradoxically increased by our knowing its tragic end.

Diana, talking in 1991, was strangely prescient about her future. She thinks she will last ‘12 or 15 years as Princess of Wales’. She ended up lasting 15.

She talks, too, about how the press ‘haunted or hunted her’. During their engagement, there were four members of the press outside Prince Charles’s house; she had 34. She refers to herself as the ‘sacrificial lamb’ and the ‘lamb to the slaughter’.

And she talks about ‘lots of [press] chases. I made sure I was going through just as the light was going to red.’

Harrowing, chilling stuff.

THE CROWN DIANA: IN HER OWN WORDS The fourth series of The Crown is a travesty.

Writer Peter Morgan’s big trick is – as Charles Spencer, Princess Diana’s brother, has said – to take a few facts and then hang fictional, dramatic storylines off them. You end up with a very enjoyable, well-acted, trashy drama – with little relation to the truth.

As my columnar neighbour Roger Lewis says, the stand-out star is Emma Corrin, who plays Diana.

She’s nailed Diana’s accent. Her sentences end with a long, final, moaning vowel and a tentative uplift that seeks approval and shows empathy. With a little tweak, it morphs into flirtatiousness – overpowering when combined with Corrin’s / Diana’s gaze upwards from under those Kohl-soaked eyelids, flapping like bat’s wings.

But why watch The Crown when you can see the real thing? Diana: In Her Own Words originally appeared on Channel 4 in 2017. Now clever old Netflix has realised what gold dust these original recordings of Diana are.

In 1991, a friend of Diana’s, Dr James Colthurst, taped her on behalf of Andrew Morton in preparation for his 1992 bestseller, Diana: Her True Story.

The audio recording is played over original footage of Diana, combined with speeches and other interviews – though not the 1995 Panorama interview with Martin Bashir he allegedly secured through subterfuge.

The film lasts just under two hours and it’s utterly one-sided – Prince Charles’s view doesn’t get a look-in – but it flies by. You can see why Diana was so seductive (though none of her boyfriends

RADIO

Pitch perfect: Diana (Emma Corrin) and Charles (Josh O’Connor) in The Crown

VALERIE GROVE

is mentioned). She has an enchanting cocktail of shyness, teasing and absolutely knockout looks.

How those looks change from her 1981 engagement, with her round, heartshaped face, to the long, thin almond shape with accentuated cheekbones and ever-bigger eyes only three years later.

The reason was bulimia – covered in gruesome detail in The Crown and in her own words here. It started in 1981, the week after she was engaged, and raged until 1989.

The bulimia, like all the shocking details in Andrew Morton’s book, is grippingly true. Yes, she threw herself down the stairs when pregnant. Yes, she knew all about Camilla Parker Bowles, and overheard Prince Charles telling her, ‘Whatever happens, I’ll always love you.’

Charles’s affair destroyed the marriage. But the couple were also

Here are just two of my countless favourite radio moments in 2020.

‘I am 92. My golden moment is at 5.30 every day,’ said June on Today, accompanied by her favourite sound at that time, the chinking of ice in glass and the slicing of a lemon. ‘The large measure of gin, the blissful fizz of the tonic.’

Sipping, she counted her blessings: ‘Family, friends, health and Radio 4.’

In another golden moment, Don Bates from Maidstone said, on Any Questions, ‘My darling wife of 63 years, Daphne, died last Christmas Eve. Eleven months on, I still weep as I think of her. This chance to talk to you is an early 88thbirthday present for me. Sometimes I don’t talk to anyone all week.’

The year 2020 was ‘the worst year in history’, said Sadie-Jean, a young actress who lost a plum West End role last spring. She told Grace Dent on The Oldie January 2021 71

‘Some say he was born before his time’

The Untold how hard she found her workless life.

When before did we find ourselves listening with real concern to so many strangers’ voices? Two oldsters, Ben and David, one with cancer ‘creeping up my spine’, were brought together on Any Answers, and were thanked for being ‘so courteous to one another, and so understanding’. ‘Gents, this is why I do this programme,’ said Anita Anand.

That snippet got a spate of replay requests on Pick of the Week. As for Eddie Jaku, TED-talk star and Holocaust survivor, aged 100, who could fail to be inspired by his urging everyone to be happy, helpful and kind?

Radio’s instant intimacy, demanding close and attentive eavesdropping on other people’s lives (without any taint of reality TV), meant a great boost, in this Plague Year, for wireless in general, and for news bulletins reminiscent of the Blitz.

But nothing is gained by adding the pointless adverb ‘incredibly’. All day long, we get reminders of how incredible life is. It’s incredibly annoying. We are all incredibly lucky; the Home Secretary’s diary is incredibly hectic; all stars in the world of entertainment say they were just incredibly lucky – and how incredibly grateful they are. The apotheosis of this in 2020 was the trustworthy MP described as ‘incredibly believable’.

Enough! Once upon a time, things might have seemed incredible – to a rustic hayseed in a smock, open-mouthed at the sight of a motor car. But, in 2021, nothing is beyond our collective ability to believe.

Hardly had I written this when Boris announced that the British vaccine results were ‘incredibly 72 The Oldie January 2021

exciting’! Then Justin Webb added, ‘It is pretty good news.’ A more traditionally English modifier.

Talk radio without musical interludes is bloodless, and possibly doomed.

(Listen up, chaps at Times Radio.) It matters not how brief the music is: Ken Follett’s Inheritance Tracks (Myfanwy by a Welsh male choir; Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Time) on Saturday Live; Don Black’s memoir The Sanest Guy in the Room, a Book of the Week interspersed with Irving Berlin and Cole Porter recordings; an excellent Soul Music on Bill Withers’s Lean on Me. I love them all.

I most appreciated Radio 4 Extra’s Comme Je Suis, a 2013 tribute to the fabulous Juliette Gréco, the kohl-eyed, smoky-voiced, seductive chanteuse. It’s exactly ten years to the day since I saw La Gréco at the Royal Festival Hall, where at 83 she sang Déshabille-moi and Ne me quitte pas. I sat adoring her, alone, having tried to give my spare ticket to any Francophile (Julian Barnes, Posy Simmonds): too late now. Au revoir, sexy Juliette.

Finally – please google the brilliant Dolly Parton parody, Dolly Gets It Done, by the comic sisters Flo and Joan, from an otherwise rather limp Now Show.

Refrain: ‘Not all blondes are bimbos, just the one in Number Ten.’

TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS Our culture is obsessed with copies. It’s impossible to find anything genuinely new. Parody, impersonation and counterfeiting are what television goes in for.

I’ve been watching the Urban Myths

Mrs Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Mrs de Winter (Lily James), Rebecca

series, particularly the one about Les Dawson playing the piano in a Paris brothel. Though Mark Addy is similar to Les in bulk, and did well with the growling, lugubrious vocal delivery, he missed Les’s warmth and twinkle, which can’t be reproduced.

Similarly, Robbie Coltrane as Orson Welles: he was much nicer than Welles, who was an impatient bully. It was a heady conceit, nevertheless, to have Welles at large in Norwich: ‘I hear Norwich is like Las Vegas,’ he boomed.

‘No, that’s Swaffham,’ came the reply.

I’m not sure Welles ever did visit the Anglia studios in person, to shoot his scenes for the Great Mysteries series. I believe the footage was recorded in Normandy, unless that’s another urban myth. Had he encountered Nicholas Parsons, however, who spent years in Norwich making Sale of the Century, that would have had dramatic possibilities – though who could play Nicholas Parsons? Prince Charles?

I was inspired, nevertheless, to watch on Netflix The Other Side of the Wind, the film Welles spent about 40 years failing to finish. So, let’s get this out of the way with little fuss. Despite the vivid images and fancy editing, Welles’s films are heavy-going – this posthumously released one in particular.

There is too little drama. The stories linger, lag, get stuck. The chief defect is a lack of humour. Instead there’s a solemnity and a hollow pretentiousness.

Emptiness is at the heart of Rebecca, too, as the chief character, the first Mrs de Winter, is one we never see, not even in flashbacks. She turns out to have been a nymphomaniac lesbian with a terminal uterine carcinoma. It is never clear, either, whether Max killed her with a shotgun as his version of euthanasia, or whether she taunted him and mocked him with news of her affairs, and it was cold-blooded murder.

Armie Hammer was no help – he was thoroughly blank and stiff, his Max a dull lump. I kept remembering how spry, brittle, cross, exasperated and warily alive Laurence Olivier had been in the role in the Hitchcock original.

The computer-generated Manderley on the Cornish cliffs was insubstantial. It looked less real than the little model Hitchcock used, which, like the hotel and Alpine resort in The Lady Vanishes or the Forth Bridge in The Thirty-Nine Steps, at least had the charm of a toy-railway-track background. A plus point, nevertheless, was Lily James, as the unnamed second Mrs de Winter.

What a beauty she is, with a face like an exquisite squirrel.

Ed McLachlan

Max’s cold treatment of his bride put me in mind of Prince Charles’s behaviour with Diana, if The Diana Interview: Revenge of a Princess was to be believed.

The lesson there, implacably made by talking head Rosie Boycott, was how badly she’d been let down by a succession of ghastly men, not excluding Bashir himself, when he exploited Diana’s frailties and neuroses in the Panorama interrogation of 1995 – a programme, incidentally, that has never been repeated, which suggests the Corporation’s misgivings.

Beauty surrounded by beasts was also the theme of The Crown, series four. We were now in full Gothic-horror mode, with grey, rainswept castles, inhabited by ghouls and goblins – Prince Charles a contorted hunchback, Thatcher a cackling crone, the royal women a coven of conspiring witches. We even had the Bowes-Lyon cousins in their lunatic asylum. Mrs Danvers would not have been out of place.

Everything was drained of colour, except for Emma Corrin’s Diana, a lovely, doomed fairy in a succession of bright

frocks. The way the narrative is being treated, her death, when it comes, is surely going to be dramatised as an execution.

Meanwhile, Tim West and Pru Scales must have fallen overboard, as their place at the tiller in Great Canal Journeys is now taken by Gyles Brandreth and Sheila Hancock. Is Gyles’s fragrant wife Michèle aware her husband has run away from home like this, if at four mph? By the way, had Sheila’s late husband John Thaw married Thora Hird, she’d have become Thora Thaw, which is funnier spoken out loud.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE ON – AND OFF – THE RECORD WITH LEONARD BERNSTEIN ‘During next month’s New Year’s Day Concert, the cameras of Austrian television will pan across the coffered ceiling of the Golden Hall of Vienna’s Musikverein.

How many of the world’s 50 million viewers will be asking who those figures

are on the ceiling of this Sistine Chapel of concert halls?

Not many, I suspect. But it’s a question Leonard Bernstein fired at Charlie Harmon, his gatekeeper, valet, music copyist and itinerant librarian, one autumn afternoon in 1982.

Craning his neck to examine painter August Eisenmenger’s picture of nine women dressed in the robes of ancient Greek goddesses, Charlie guessed they might be the nine Muses. ‘Name them,’ snapped Lenny. He’d got as far as four when Lenny cried ‘Good!’ and vanished to rehearse the Vienna Philharmonic.

Not that it ended there. On the next day, Charlie received a Post-it note from the Rebbe (Rabbi), as he dubbed Bernstein, with a crossword clue: ‘Queer Al, police goddess (8)’. This, he explains for us non-crossword folk in his thrill-apage On the Road and Off the Record with Leonard Bernstein (published by Imagine), comes out as ‘Calliope’.

Bernstein was obsessed with language; everything from grammar and usage (misplace ‘only’ in a sentence and you were dead in the water) to crosswords, acrostics and all known poetic forms. Hunkered down amid the snows of Louisiana, trying to complete his last opera, A Quiet Place, he goes ballistic when the puzzle section in the Sunday edition of the New York Times gets lost at the newsagent, as weekend supplements often are.

Despite the fact that Bernstein’s luggage train, when he crossed continents, countries and even states, was something a medieval monarch might have wondered at, his travelling library was remarkably compact. Current reading apart, the only books Harmon was required to pack were a small Hebrew Bible, the Chambers Dictionary, a set of German, Italian and Spanish dictionaries, a one-volume edition of the works of Lewis Carroll (not the one Lenny inadvertently removed from a Scottish castle) and The Oxford Book of English Verse.

LB, as Bernstein was known to his staff, also knew a vast amount of poetry from memory. Witness the occasion, during an RSC performance of Richard III at the Barbican, when – to the fury of the man in front – Bernstein audibly upstaged Anthony Sher by anticipating every line of Richard’s opening speech.

One of Harmon’s own finest moments comes when he’s told to contribute an Irish song during a St Patrick’s Day party hosted by Ted and Ethel Kennedy which he’s failed to avoid. Since he can’t sing and knows no Irish songs, he recites Yeats’s A Coat. Momentarily struck The Oldie January 2021 73

inextinguishable hope encased in kindness’. ‘You’ll never know until you try’ was her advice to Charlie, one of life’s great self-doubters. How often Lenny must have heard those words in his youth!

Back in Vienna’s Musikverein, Charlie thrills to a gem of a performance of Haydn 88, in which Bernstein conducts a reprise of the symphony’s gamesome finale using his face alone. (You can see the whole thing on a C Major DVD.) Keats thought Haydn resembled a child because ‘there’s no knowing what he will do next’.

That’s what Charlie Harmon loved about Lenny; it’s also what nearly finished him off.

ZUMA PRESS, INC./ALAM

Years of living dangerously: the multifariously gifted Bernstein in 2001

dumb with admiration, Bernstein then upstages his valet with a spellbinding rendering of Keats’s Bright Star…

Why that poem? Was this another outpouring of the appalling guilt Bernstein experienced after the loss of his wife Felicia to lung cancer in 1978 at the age of 56? Unsurprisingly, her ghost is seen by several people in the book, including Harmon himself.

After Felicia’s death, Lenny lived ever more dangerously. ‘Mississippi mud’ was the phrase Bernstein’s long-term financial manager, the appalling Harry Kraut, used to hoist the storm cones whenever Lenny was about to cause a PR crash after drinking too much, falling for the hard-up tale from the wrong sort of boy, or taking too much Dexedrine.

Kraut coined the phrase on tour when Lenny jumped off a Mississippi river boat, slathered his face in mud and resurfaced doing a passable imitation of Al Jolson singing the song of that name.

This from the same LB whose co-hosting of a Blank Panther fundraiser in his New York condominium in 1970 caused him to be pilloried in Tom Wolfe’s satiric put-down Radical Chic.

Harman had his fair share of Mississippi mud to manage. Some incidents are hilarious; others appalling.

But how do you judge a force of nature whose numerous activities helped transform so much? Bernstein, in Walt Whiman’s phrase, contained multitudes.

The only person who outshines him is his elderly Ukrainian-born mother.

‘There was me,’ says Harmon, ‘feckless, overeducated, and lazy,’ – and there was Jenny with her ‘bright eyes’ and ‘an 74 The Oldie January 2021

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON BRUCE IS STILL THE BOSS This hour-long album, Bruce Springsteen’s 20th, starts with the Boss, 71, alone, with his guitar, growling intimations of his own mortality.

There’s a big, black train coming down the track. There’s a red river running along the edge of town. But the chorus to this gateway track that hooks us into this addictive album – for which Bruce got the E Street Band back together for only four days to record it in its entirety – runs, ‘One minute you’re here, next minute you’re gone.’

Indeed. Vita brevis. We at The Oldie know all about that.

After this memento mori, we’re off, but the good news is we’re still back in the familiar Badlands of the Boss. The rollicking, thumping tracks are delivered in the same strong, cracked roar, and against the same pulsing wall of sound,

as if the galvanic horror of 2020 had never happened.

In fact, it all feels reassuringly familiar because no fewer than three of the tracks pre-date Springsteen’s 1973 debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ: If I Was the Priest, Janey Needs a Shooter and Song for Orphans. It is only now that he’s taken them out of retirement for our listening pleasure.

Not gonna lie – I loved this album.

At LBC’s Leicester Square HQ, where I work, there’s a mission statement emblazoned on the wall in reception, saying, ‘Nobody will ever remember what you said. But they won’t forget how you made them feel.’ It’s the same with Bruce.

This is a distillation of feeling into song.

Feelings of loss, change and age, yet with no accompanying sense of decay.

He mourns the death of a bandmate, George Theiss, but you can feel his joy, too, at being still at the height of his powers at 71. He’s having fun this year – the year the music died – which means we do, too.

This is noisy, big-band ensemble playing so alive you feel you are breaking social-distancing guidelines just by listening, the spittle from Springsteen almost spraying your cheek. OK, as one reviewer noted, there’s your full house of Springsteen bingo: rivers, factories, guns, the Virgin Mary, priests, jails and small-town bars. But we would miss them if they were gone.

At the end of the album, which I played three times over, I felt happy. A new President. A new Bruce Springsteen album (and there’s even a Twitter emoji for the Boss). A new year. 2021 could already be worse.

As soon as the Boss is on the road again, I’ll be right there – for this album alone.

The world might be on fire – so is he.

At 71, Springsteen delivers with all the energy and zest of his youth

Cécile Cauterman’s Le méfiant, charcoal, c1934

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU Women Painters of the World What could be more of the moment than the book title Women Painters of the World, from the Time of Caterina Vigri, 1413–1463, to Rosa Bonheur and the Present Day? Nothing, except that the moment when Walter Shaw Sparrow published it was 1905. Then, when women are supposed to have been airbrushed from art history, he was able to detail over 200, admittedly mostly from the 19th century.

Caterina de’ Vigri, otherwise known as St Catherine of Bologna, was a nun, poet, mystic, illustrator and painter, whose uncorrupted body may still be visited. She is a patron of painters but I had not heard of her before Shaw Sparrow’s introduction.

Two 20th-century women who would find places in an updated reissue have been attracting much-deserved attention recently after periods of relative obscurity that cannot be blamed on patriarchal tyranny.

Indeed, any such tyranny in the case

of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (19061996) was matriarchal or self-inflicted.

She was born into a cultured and rich Viennese family with scientists, writers and financiers among its branches.

However, despite the encouragement of her teacher Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka and the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, with whom she had a long affair and friendship, her confidence in her talent was undermined by her demanding mother.

Also she had an aristocratic disdain for the market, and did not need to sell, even when, in Hampstead exile, there

‘Open up, Jennings – Fraud Squad!’

was less money. Despite group shows with international and British stars, such as Picasso, Matisse, Moore, Clough and Freud, and major one-person exhibitions, most recently at Tate Britain, she is still not widely known.

However, the trust managing her estate is acting cannily. The Tate Archive gallery has been renamed in her honour, she is well represented in international galleries and works are being placed on the market judiciously. In December, there were eight portraits, still lifes and landscapes at Chiswick Auctions, West London. More will follow.

Cécile Cauterman (1882-1957) was part of a remarkable artistic flowering in her native Ghent, and between the wars she had a considerable international reputation. Unlike her Symbolist colleagues, she specialised in mixedmedia drawings of the poor, diseased and marginalised, which can be reminiscent of Mervyn Peake’s grotesque work.

The New York dealer Mireille Mosler has just shown Cauterman’s powerful and unsparing pencil self-portrait as part of an exhibition, Face to Face, for the Winter London Art Week (www. londonartweek.co.uk). She deserves to be as well known here as she is in Belgium.

The Oldie January 2021 75

Pursuits

LJSPHOTOGRAPHY/ALAMY

GARDENING DAVID WHEELER GIFTS THAT KEEP 0N GROWING Asked recently what I’d like for Christmas, I hastily replied, ‘A full-time gardener on a ten-year contract’.

I spoke too soon. On reflection, I’d like two full-time gardeners, please, and to make the contract renewable. We are, after all, gardening eight acres.

However, it’s not difficult to choose more realistic presents for gardeners.

The trade burgeons with multifarious manual and mechanical paraphernalia.

Still, some old codgers (myself not included) might be reluctant to surrender a venerable and much-loved fork or spade for a shiny new replacement needing a 20-year run-in.

Gardeners can’t have enough heavyduty gloves, durable secateurs and sharp pruning saws. We physically feeble but determined ones also need long-handled trowels and a kneeling stool, sturdy enough to sit on to admire our industrious handiwork.

There are some handsome plantlabelling kits on the market and, if in doubt, there are always (sometimes much-preferred) gift vouchers. A basket of fragrant flowering daffodils would illuminate Christmas morning – and the bulbs can be popped into the garden when the trumpets have faded.

Even at this low point in the year, garden centres remain crammed with coveted plants, many of which can be transplanted straight into beds and borders in a mild spell when the ground isn’t frozen.

Shops offer a lavish choice of armchair garden reading for those days when it’s just too miserable to work outside.

This year, I’ll be giving The Well Gardened Mind (£20) by Sue StuartSmith and handsome uniform volumes of the thoroughly enjoyable singlespecies botanicals published by Reaktion Books. Selling for around £16 each, there are now more than 30 titles available, including those devoted to roses, oaks, palms, chrysanthemums, lilies, geraniums and bamboos.

I’ve been fascinated by Catherine Horwood’s Potted History: How Houseplants Took Over Our Homes (£9.99), a revised paperback edition of her bestselling 2007 original. She has added a fascinating new chapter on the seemingly unlikely revival of the houseplant business, especially among millennials, who yearn for something green to nurture but have no garden in which to do so. That’s the grandchildren sorted.

Tree-lovers will welcome the new ninth edition of The Hillier Manual of Trees and Shrubs (£20), fully updated by our leading arborist, octogenarian Roy Lancaster, listing brief commentaries on some 14,000 woody plants, many associated with milder regions to suit our changing climate.

I’m lucky to live within less than an hour’s drive of the small ‘book town’ of Hay-on-Wye on the English/Welsh border in Brecknockshire. Many of its 11 (there used to be many more) second-hand bookshops have good Spades need gardening bedding-in selections, enlivened recently by a horde of superfluous book-plated tomes discarded by Sir Roy Strong following his

recent move from The Laskett to a smaller house in Ledbury.

And should you wish your seasonal munificence to be evoked frequently throughout the coming year, there’s no better way than gifting a magazine subscription – to The Oldie, natch, or, if I’m permitted a plug, to my own gardening quarterly, Hortus, now well settled into its third decade. Other periodicals are available.

I’ll end where I began. Assistance is invaluable to older, debilitated or disabled gardeners. The services of a paid co-worker, however occasional, would surely be highly esteemed by all seniors in need of a few hours of obliging muscle to help maintain their verdant creations.

Happy Christmas.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD WALNUTS I don’t know why walnuts are associated with Christmas, as they are at their best when ‘wet’, in October. Chances are that the walnuts on a Christmas table will have come from California rather than from a British or European tree. Which suggests that, with enough space in the garden, it might be a good idea to have some home-grown nuts in future.

Marshalls are offering two varieties of walnut tree, to be delivered around the end of the year. Both are two-year-old trees, self-fertile and about four feet tall.

They will apparently start producing nuts after three years. The cheaper one (£27) is the common walnut which grows to a height of up to 100 feet. The other variety, Broadview, which is more manageable for a small garden or orchard, costs £47 and has a maximum height of 16 feet.

The Oldie January 2021 77

Broadview comes late into leaf and so should not suffer from frost, to which walnut trees are very sensitive.

Do not plant anything else near the tree or beneath its spread, as its roots release a poison which can affect other plants. Fallen leaves should be burned, not composted.

Once the young tree is established, there is little to do except perhaps to give it a feed of bone meal in spring. When the fruits appear, you can decide whether to pick the green husks in July, before the shells have formed, or leave them for harvesting nuts in autumn.

The green husks should be pricked – Mrs Beeton advises use of a silver fork – before being soaked in brine and pickled in spiced vinegar. If left until autumn, the kernels of the nuts should have a skin which is wet and easily removed. Most importantly, wear gloves when the husks are opened, as they produce a stain so strong that it is used to dye fabrics, wood and even hair.

It is a bit of a mystery, remembering the old rhyme, why a walnut tree, together with a woman and a dog, should be better for being beaten.

But any further speculation on this point is better left unmade.

ELISABETH LUARD

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD WASSAILING BISCUITS The feast of midwinter, otherwise known as Christmas, is likely to be a touch short-changed this year.

No matter. There’s a reason northerners encourage the return of the sun with roundness, spiciness and sugariness.

Yuletide wouldn’t be merry without a wassail. And a wassail needs a biscuit.

First, however, take back control of the bread bin with Sourdough Mania, Anita Sumer’s gorgeously illustrated guide to what everyone else was up to during the lockdown(s). The author is Slovenian and it all started on Facebook.

Step-by-step photos and hands-on instructions ensure nothing can go wrong from starter-mother to triumphantly Instagrammed finish. Really.

Couch cronuts (wake up there at the back) will appreciate Miranda York’s The Food Almanack, a literary pick-and-mix by your favourite food writers (including me). Live vicariously with Raymond Blanc on caramelising crab apples, Diana Henry on Portuguese pastéis de nata and Fuchsia Dunlop on Chinese kitchen gods, all illuminated by Louise Sheeran’s deliciously fluid, single-line drawings.

Here’s a couple of rounded, spicy, sugary wassail dippers from the book – 78 The Oldie January 2021

mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. Mix in the fennel seeds and sugar and bring all together into a ball (you may need a splash of cold water). Wrap in clingfilm and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

Flatten the ball a little and lay it between two sheets of baking paper.

Slowly and evenly roll out the dough to a thickness of 2cm. Transfer to a baking tray and remove the top layer of paper.

Bake for 40 minutes, or until it’s a pale gold. Sprinkle with sugar and cut into farles, as they call them north of the border.

suitable to enjoy snuggling under the duvet, with Love Actually on a loop.

Anja Dunk’s tree biscuits A cross between the British ginger nut and the German Lebkuchen, says Anja, these enthusiastically spiced biscuits are very crunchy – perfect for dipping. Makes 50 250g rye flour 250g plain flour 2 tsps each ground cinnamon and ginger 1 tsp ground cloves ½ tsp each ground cardamom and anise ½ tsp fine sea salt 150g unsalted butter 225g light brown sugar 9 tbsps runny honey 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F/Gas 6.

Mix both flours in a bowl with the spices and salt. Melt the butter with the sugar and honey. Mix the wet ingredients into the dry, and add the bicarb diluted in two tbsps of hot water. Beat with a wooden spoon till a stiff dough forms. Roll out to 3mm. Cut out festive shapes and punch a hole in one corner for a ribbon to hang on the tree.

Arrange on a couple of baking trays lined with baking parchment and bake for about eight minutes) till golden-brown.

Leave for a few minutes to firm before transferring to a baking rack to cool.

Meera Sodha’s fennel-seed shortbread Fennel seeds are the active ingredient in gripe water, the miracle cure for windy babies. Just the thing for that post-festive hangover. Makes 8 petticoat tails 1½ tsps fennel seeds, lightly toasted 350g plain flour 250g cold unsalted butter, diced 125g caster sugar plus extra for sprinkling Preheat the oven to 160°C/325°F/gas 3.

Crush the fennel seeds with a pestle and mortar. Sift the flour into a bowl and rub in the butter with your fingertips till the

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE DIVINE SERVICE I’m desperate to be served.

I passed Lockdown 2.0 with a heavy heart. And stomach. Heavy from the continuous lunches and dinners I have been cooking and serving my gluttonous family, I have performed these duties gracelessly and resentfully.

I just kept asking myself, ‘How do waiters do it?’ A third of their customers are sure to be rude, a third indifferent and the final third incomprehensible.

And then they get me, with my lifelong love of waiters. I egregiously suck up to them – even more than I do to my wife and children. I am simply desperate for them to like me. I maintain that the Olympic Gold Medal for Service goes to Italy; Sir George Smith, the former chairman of the Savoy group, concurred: ‘Dans la salle, les Italiens; dans la cuisine, les Français.’

The legendary Peppino Leoni, the founder of Quo Vadis, believed the French were proud because they had been a unified nation longer, whereas Italians had been ‘dominated by foreign countries or native feudal lords… And had learned to be servile without loss of pride.’

However, in that last week of freedom before lockdown when I ate out for lunch and dinner every day, there were some real surprises.

Some of the worst service in Britain is in pub restaurants: disenchanted students and divorcees slam your plates down. Yet Venetia, the owner of the Talbot Inn near Shaftesbury, was born to soothe.

Josephine, John and I had just marched 13 miles across Cranborne Chase and were in bad need of cherishing. Venetia sprang to the door as we came in, put us at a table right next to the huge fire, and came back with our drinks within seconds. Mary Poppins was a slattern in comparison.

I had delicious liver and bacon, washed down with a bottle of Château Bel Air. I rejoiced in this ultimate country

pub until we started to worry about getting back to our beds at the Crown Inn, two miles yonder at Alvediston.

Venetia’s sensors were peaking; she bounded up to us and offered to drive us back. She was the only person serving; so we weakly demurred. But she got her way, and I salute her. How incredibly kind.

My second extraordinary, lifeaffirming moment was meeting a charming English sommelier – I never thought those three words would juxtapose – at La Trompette.

The food there is now stratospheric but just go for Donald. Of course he guided me to wines I can’t afford but I was in love. I would have bought a gallon of Château d’Yquem had he suggested it.

All his choices were excellent: a minerally Muscadet with the oysters and a deep Langhe Nebbiolo with the venison. We treated Louise-who-never-says-thankyou, and even she was beguiled.

My third shock was at A Wong, the best Chinese restaurant in London.

Bonnie, our waitress, took away all the stress from me by choosing all our dishes. She rightly sensed I was a little tired and emotional after celebrating with the editor on the back of the recent testimonial by former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, founder of Air Mail: ‘The Oldie is an incredible magazine – perhaps the best in the world.’ Well, Bonnie, that’s how I think of you.

Talbot Inn, Berwick St John, Shaftesbury, SP7 0HA; tel: 01747 828222; www. talbotinnberwickstjohn.co.uk; main courses £13.50-£16.50. Cottages to rent.

La Trompette, 3-7 Devonshire Road, London W4 2EU; tel: 020 8995 8097; www.latrompette.co.uk; 3-course lunch £35 A Wong, 70 Wilton Road, London SW1V 1DE; tel: 0207 828 8931; www.awong. co.uk; dim sum from £3.50

DRINK BILL KNOTT MULLING OVER MULLED WINE ’Tis the season to be jolly disappointed with the mulled wine at your local pub, assuming it is open.

Mulled wine may smell and taste delicious when freshly made, but – after a few hours of neglectful simmering on the stove – it becomes teeth-stainingly purple and unpalatably medicinal; even worse, the alcohol has boiled away. Its only use is as a sort of seasonal air-freshener.

The solution is to make a spiced syrup first. To mull one bottle of wine – Côtes

du Rhône is a good choice – put the juice and peel of an orange, a strip of lemon peel, a teaspoonful of ground ginger, a cinnamon stick, two cloves and a couple of bashed cardamom pods into a saucepan with 70g of demerara sugar.

Splash in enough wine to cover the sugar and spice, put a lid on the pan and heat it slowly, swishing the pan around to help melt the sugar. Simmer for five minutes, remove from the heat and let the syrup infuse for 20 minutes, lid still on.

Strain into another pan, then add the rest of the wine (with a couple of star anise seeds) and heat through, but don’t let it get hotter than about 70°C or the alcohol will start to evaporate. Or just use a microwave to heat glasses or mugs of wine as required; a dash of sloe gin in each cup wouldn’t go amiss, either.

You can follow the same principle for mulled cider. Wyldwood organic still cider (widely available: around £7.50 for a three-litre bag-in-box) is reliably full-flavoured. It tastes strongly of apples, unlike most commercial ciders.

Substitute a slug of Calvados or brandy for the sloe gin; garnish with a sprig of thyme, should the mood take you.

The history of mulled wine dates back at least as far as second-century Rome, and there is a recipe for it in The Forme of Cury (1390), one of the oldest English cookery books – and the first to mention spices like mace and cloves.

The Victorians were fond of mulled drinks, too. Smoking Bishop – made from port, roasted citrus, spices and sugar – is the most famous, perhaps because it was the drink promised by the newly-benevolent Ebenezer Scrooge to Bob Cratchit towards the end of A Christmas Carol. Variants included Smoking Archbishop, made with claret; Smoking Beadle, made with ginger wine and raisins; and Smoking Pope, made with Burgundy.

My favourite warming winter tipple, however, is hot buttered rum, preferably served in teacups in front of a blazing grate after a long, post-prandial stroll.

In a saucepan, mix together 100ml of a decent golden rum (try Appleton Estate, Havana Club 7-year-old, or Flor de Caña 5-year-old) with 20ml of cider (as above), 30g of softened butter (salted is better, I think), a heaped teaspoonful of demerara sugar, a couple of crumbled cloves, a teaspoonful of allspice and a pinch of ground cinnamon.

Heat everything gently, whisking until the butter is smoothly incorporated, pour into warmed cups and top with a grating of nutmeg. Nothing stops Jack Frost nipping at your nose better than hot buttered rum.

Wine This month’s mixed case from DBM Wines comprises four bottles each of three wines: a vintage cava that knocks spots off many non-vintage Champagnes; a crisp Spanish white from the rocky outcrops of Tarragona; and a kind of baby super-Tuscan that’s drinking very well now. However, if you wish, you can buy 12 bottles of the individual wines.

Cava Brut Reserva, Bodegas Sumarroca, DO Cava 2017, offer price £12.50, case price £150.00 Vintage fizz at a great price: sacrilege, perhaps, but it would make a fine champagne cocktail on Christmas morning.

Celler de Capçanes, Sense Cap Blanc, DO Montsant 2019, offer price £9.50, case price £114.00 A new vintage of an Oldie favourite: hints of tropical fruit and mountain herbs, with a nice grip on the palate.

Dogajolo, Carpineto, Toscano Rosso IGT 2017, offer price £11.99, case price £143.88 Mostly Sangiovese, with a splash of Cabernet Sauvignon. Earthy and ripe: a roast rib of beef would suit it nicely.

Mixed case price £135.96 – a saving of £20.91 (including free delivery) HOW TO ORDER

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For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 25th January 2021.

The Oldie January 2021 79

SPORT JIM WHITE RASHFORD SCORES OFF THE FIELD The bets are off. Whatever the bold claim of Lewis Hamilton, breaking records with the alacrity of a plate-smashing waiter in a Greek taverna, there can only be one Sports Personality of the Year in 2020.

This year Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford has done something not many other sports people have: he has become a political figure of prominence. Never mind personality; the bloke is now a national treasure. The gong is surely his.

Rashford’s heartfelt campaign against child food poverty was born of personal experience. He had known, growing up in inner-city Manchester, what it was like to go to bed with an empty stomach. Now, as an England international and the centre forward for the country’s most renowned club, he wanted to use his position to precipitate change. And how he has succeeded.

And in the process hae has also, inadvertently, shown the efficacy of a new strand of thinking in sports psychology.

The reaction from many a socialmedia wiseacre when he began his campaign was simple enough: ‘Stick to football,’ they counselled. Fortunately for thousands of under-privileged youngsters, Rashford was not listening. He donated considerable sums of his own income as he helped raise more than £25 million for food banks during the first lockdown.

Then, using unfashionable political techniques like reason, calm and politeness, he engineered not one but two government U-turns on the continued provision of free school meals during holidays.

The prevailing view about how to get the best from sportspeople has long been one of sticking to the day job. Gone are the days when a footballer was allowed to spend his downtime in the snooker hall – or, like poor Diego Maradona, hoover up drink and drugs. The modern player is instructed to rest when not training.

As Gareth Bale discovered at Real Madrid, even a round of golf is thought by many to be a drain on resources.

Latterly, however, sports psychologists have begun to wonder if that approach might be counterproductive. Modern young footballers are increasingly spending their downtime onscreen, incessantly checking numerous devices for the latest betting odds or social-media updates. Lonely and detached, vulnerable to the complexities of negotiating new-found wealth, they can face significant mental-health issues as they disappear into virtual rabbit holes.

Far better, goes the growing theory, to 80 The Oldie January 2021

put your downtime to productive use.

Find something engaging to take the mind off the day job, and the rewards will be manifest. That does not mean a return to the prevailing methodology of the eighties and nineties, of extended sessions down the pub. Rather, embrace an educational course, lend your name to charitable work – or even play a bit of golf.

Rashford’s exploration of other pursuits has clearly fed into his sense of worth. As he has grown in political stature, his football has shown no sign of diminution.

Bristling with self-confidence born of the success of his campaigning, with his hat-trick for United in the Champions League against RB Leipzig he demonstrated that he has got even better than he was before he started to challenge the iniquity of the system.

Happy, fulfilled, confident people apparently do well on the sports field.

Who knew?

MOTORING ALAN JUDD FAREWELL, MANUAL WORK As the saying goes, change in human affairs is usually slower and greater than we think. I’m not sure whether the dictum would include automotive affairs.

But a recent example has been creeping up on us almost unnoticed for some time.

Mercedes are to stop making manual gearboxes by 2030. Granted, most Mercedes have for many years been automatics, and it’s almost 70 since you could buy a manual Bentley. But when I started driving, nearly all cars were manual except for large luxury products and almost anything American.

My first auto was a 1960 Daimler Majestic, a big, bulbous beast with a 3.8-litre engine mated to a three-speed BorgWarner box. That was followed by a squadron of P5 Rovers – all, bar one, automatics – and then a flight of Jaguars (ditto).

That seemed the natural order of things – autos were more expensive, used more fuel and, being usually a bit slower, suited the way big luxury barges were driven. Manuals were cheaper to make, faster, used less fuel and gave the enthusiast driver greater involvement.

Yet in the first nine months of this year, 54 per cent of new cars sold were

Are manual drivers in the wrong gear?

autos. A decade ago the figure was about 20 per cent; a decade before that, 15 per cent. Only 10 per cent of new Volvos sold this year were manual.

What has changed? It’s not that we’ve all suddenly got lazy left feet. It’s the technology. The workings of modern cars are computer-controlled, and computerised automatic gearboxes – often nowadays operating via dual clutches rather than a torque-converter – can effect shifts in gear more quickly and economically than we can with our left feet and hands.

They can also manage more gears – who ever heard of eight-speed boxes in the old days? – resulting in quieter, more frugal cruising, as well as being more economical in creeping traffic. And, of course, they make for easier, less stressful driving, especially in towns. I once counted my manual gear-changes between London’s Elephant and Castle and King’s Cross station: 86 – all movements that in an auto I need not have made.

Another recent factor is electrification.

Electric cars don’t have gearboxes or clutches; you simply switch them on, extend your right foot against the throttle pedal and – whoosh – off you go.

But it’s not all up with manuals. Until everything’s electric, they’ll survive in budget cars because they’re cheaper to produce. In 2018, 97 per cent of Dacia sales throughout Europe were manual, as were 94 per cent of Fiats and 86 per cent of Opels and Vauxhalls.

More surprisingly, 75 per cent of Audi UK sales this year were manual, despite Audi’s push for electrification.

Maybe it’s because they’re cheaper to buy. Or do Audi buyers see themselves as sportier drivers?

I’m a gearbox agnostic. I enjoy manual changes, perhaps because it enhances the illusion of control so difficult to sustain elsewhere in life. I like deciding which change to make and when. But I also appreciate the ease and smoothness of a cosseting automatic that does it all for me. Anyway, many autos – my Volvo, for instance – permit clutchless manual changes if you want.

Although it’s easy to find small automatic cars, I still feel that automatics suit larger cars better. It’s partly the way they drive – or the way we drive them – and partly because large, unstressed engines manage it all at lower revs with less fuss and effort. But there are plenty of good, small autos out there, and more to come.

One word of warning, though. If you drive an auto and need a tow home, check your handbook first. Doing it wrongly can mess up your gearbox big time.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Who will check the fact-checkers?

Isaac Newton taught us that every action is met with an equal and opposite reaction.

His law also applies to the internet. As proof, I offer the birth and growth of online fact-checking organisations.

To paraphrase a near-contemporary of Newton’s, it is a fact universally acknowledged that, if websites can publish what they want, whenever they want, unchecked and without restraint, and also make it available to everyone in the world, we must be in need of fact-checkers.

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

How to put correspondents at ease https://www.bartleby.com/27/9.html Jonathan Swift’s A Treatise on Good Manners and Good Breeding.

Twitter users should read it.

Explore and learn with Santa’s elves https://santatracker.google.com/ Google’s Christmas website is full of games and animations – and you can track Father Christmas travelling around the world, COVID-free.

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

Of course, this problem is not new. In America in the late-19th century someone coined the term ‘yellow journalism’, to describe sensational reporting aimed at selling newspapers rather than striving for accuracy. That is now called ‘clickbait’ and it’s everywhere online.

Over 200 years earlier, as printing became cheaper and more efficient, there was a huge growth in the publication of pamphlets promoting outspoken views and sold for profit. Jonathan Swift and Dr Johnson were famous for writing them.

In a sense, they and the yellow journalists were doing just what their successors on Twitter, Facebook and their own websites are doing today.

Like them, they were expressing a specific opinion and provoking comment and argument.

In past centuries, comment came in the form of speeches, newspaper articles and counter-pamphlets. Today, it comes also on Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

There’s little or no restraint on publication now. Even if the regulators of social media notice misleading, dangerous or just plain false postings and delete them, you can still publish such stuff on your own website. It may lead to retribution if you upset someone with deep pockets, or break the law, but it probably won’t.

So I welcome the rise of independent online fact-checkers. They have no power, of course, beyond embarrassing a transgressor and putting the record straight. But if you say something that is

challenged by one of them, you are on thin ice and, if nothing worse, will look a fool.

It’s a tiny industry at the moment. My favourite example in Britain and by far the biggest (which isn’t saying much: there were only 22 employees in 2019) is fullfact.org. It’s a charity and has a fine reputation for holding politicians and others to account for doubtful claims.

Facebook uses it to check posts.

It’s also worth looking at PolitiFact.com, another non-profit organisation, which focuses on politics. I especially like their ‘accuracy gradations’ of statements: they score them on one of six levels, from ‘true’ to ‘pants on fire’.

Of course, respectable organisations already take pains to check facts before publishing anything. I’ve been corrected by the admirable team at The Oldie more than once. News agencies like AFP (factcheck. afp.com) and Reuters (reuters.com/ fact-check) publish fact-checks; so does the BBC (bbc.co.uk/news/reality_check).

We should not think these fact-checkers are beyond reproach. It’s the oldest question of all: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? But their creation is encouraging.

So, for the moment, let’s applaud them. They may be self-appointed, and far from accountable, but they do have reputations to lose. If their fact-checking were ever found to be suspect or biased, they’d quickly wither.

I hope this peril will compel them to act with integrity and probity. It would be cheering to think so, anyway.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

The return of duty-free Duty-free shops are returning to Great Britain’s ports, airports and international rail terminals when the UK drops out of the single market on 1st January.

All passengers will be allowed to carry in their luggage a limited amount of duty- and tax-free alcohol, tobacco and other goods without paying UK taxes.

Duty-free shopping is also returning on international planes and ferries, not only for drink bought to consume on board but also for items to take away.

Two different taxes apply to goods 82 The Oldie January 2021

moving between countries. One is excise duty, which is charged only on alcohol and tobacco. The other is VAT, which is charged on most things, including alcohol and tobacco.

The changes put travellers to EU countries on the same footing as those going anywhere else – as they were before duty- and tax-free sales within the EU were abolished in summer 1999.

After that, you could bring in unlimited amounts of alcohol, tobacco and other goods from the EU without

being liable to additional UK tax, because you had paid any taxes levied where you bought them. Crucially, your purchases had to be intended only for your own personal use or to give as presents. So while there were no absolute limits, there were indicative levels of what was acceptable.

The new limits are lower than that.

People arriving from non-EU countries were still allowed to bring in duty-frees and are now allowed a larger quantity of duty-free alcohol, though tobacco rations stay the same.

The new tax-free limits include three crates of beer, two cases of still wine and four litres of spirits, plus the same amounts of tobacco as before and £390’s worth of other goods – or £270’s worth if you’re arriving by private plane or boat. You must declare any acquisitions above these levels. This does not yet apply to the whole of the UK: the rules for Northern Ireland are still under discussion.

For passengers to non-EU countries, other tax perks are disappearing from airside shops. They will no longer be able to buy VAT-free perfume, electronics and clothing, as there were worries that the tax concessions were not always passed on to customers.

Nor will non-EU visitors to Great Britain be able to claim VAT refunds on their purchases in British high streets if they want to take the goods home in their luggage. They will be able to avoid VAT only if they have the goods shipped to their home address. This concession now includes EU addresses. The government suspected fraud because some visitors claimed a VAT refund but the goods never left the UK. This move has dismayed stores and shopping villages that sell billions of

‘I’m still not convinced click-and-collect is the most convenient option’

pounds’ worth of items to high-spending international tourists because they might switch their holidays to other European countries.

Many airports outside the EU allow duty-free shopping on arrival as well as departure and there are moves to

persuade the EU to adopt the practice.

Outlets at EU airports called ‘tax-free’ in reality sell tax-paid goods with just local sales tax discounted.

If you know what you might buy, check prices before you leave home. Not every tax-free purchase is a bargain.

The Oldie January 2021 83

Getting Dressed

Keeping up appearances

Don’t wear beige or black. Do wear make-up and festive glitter boots Liz Hodgkinson For many women, 2020 was the year that fashion and style passed us by.

Confined to barracks, we slopped around in old tracksuits, never wore make-up and allowed our hair to show two inches of white roots.

Trouble is, if we allow standards to slip, we can risk looking like ancient hags before our time, and there may be no way back. So here are a few tips for looking good over the festive season and beyond, without having to take out a second mortgage.

These days, at the age of 76, I buy my clothes from supermarkets and bung in a new pair of jeans or a T-shirt with the groceries. This is a low-cost way of keeping up to date, and I take my leads from two older women who always get it right: Jane Seymour, 69, and Jane Fonda, amazing at 82.

Never overdressed, these two enduring celebrities add a touch of modern, youthful-looking sportiness to their style and keep it plain and simple, with block colours, clean lines and no ageing florals.

They also cut back on the jewellery count and their fingers are ring-free, as nothing screams ‘old woman’ more loudly than three rings embedded in every finger. Only children’s writer Jacqueline Wilson can get away with it.

It helps that both these women also have fantastic figures – although they do admit that rigid self-discipline, not luck, is their secret. I do my best by pedalling daily on my exercise bike. Being overweight is never a good idea, for either looks or health.

Television academic Mary Beard has a quirky interest in fashion. Although her long-white-hair-no-make-up look works for her, it is not something every woman would want to emulate.

At the other extreme, 80-year-old writer Barbara Amiel wears overfussy designer gear and, in my view, her lip-fillers do her no favours.

One thing I never worry about is being mutton dressed as lamb. Biker jackets and bovver boots can work equally well at all ages, and don’t have to make you look like a Hell’s Granny.

Short skirts with very thick tights or

My oldie heroes and villains: Jane Seymour (69), Jane Fonda (82), Mary Beard (65) and Barbara Amiel (80)

leggings cut a dash if you’ve got the legs.

Otherwise, midi skirts are the answer – but not floor length, as these can give the impression of gliding on castors.

A mistake many older women make – and I admit I’m frequently one of them – is to wear black all the time. It’s best to add a bit of colour, with either a bright jumper or a colourful scarf, as head-totoe black can make it look as though you are in perpetual mourning, as well as draining colour from your face.

The Oldie’s Prue Leith, 80, is an inspiration for vibrant colour.

People think black is slimming but

it’s not. Beige is almost as bad and should be avoided by all but the very young who, let’s face it, can get away with just about anything.

Which brings us on to make-up. In lockdown, a lot of women abandoned cosmetics altogether but I’m of the opinion that lipstick should be compulsory for the over-50s. Otherwise, you can fade right away and look as though you haven’t got a face at all.

Lipstick does smudge on face masks, true, but good old Lipcote effectively seals it, and you don’t want to look like a total washout when you take the mask off.

False eyelashes are out – think Barbara Cartland – but lash-lengthening mascara lifts the eyes when otherwise they can risk disappearing into your head. I also recommend eyebrow waxing and tinting and, if you can stand the pain, microblading once in a while.

Eyebrows tend to go wild with advancing years and may need strict taming and shaping to frame the face. A touch of Botox works wonders and it has stood the test of time. Yes, I’m a convert.

Whenever hairdressers are open, rush to them, because older hair needs a lot of attention. Although grey or white hair can look great, it takes as much looking after as a three-weekly tint. Jane Fonda has gone silver but her hair is always impeccably styled and, actually, expertly coloured as well – not left to nature.

What about Christmas Day? With no parties on offer this year, I’m in favour of all-out glamour: a sparkly top with sleeves – NOT a Christmas jumper with reindeer on it. Then, velvet trousers or a velvet skirt; new, mind, not dug out of the dressing-up box from years back.

Have a Christmas nails manicure – mine are silvery-blue this year – and, for that final touch, don glitter boots.

They will get you lots of attention and compliments, and who wants to fade into the background if you are the hostess?

Do you suffer from tired, old feet?

That’s no excuse – you can get glitter boots in wide-fit.

Liz Hodgkinson was a fashion writer on the Sunday People in the 1970s and, before that, on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle The Oldie January 2021 85

The Goldcrest

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd Sitting by a window one bleak December lunchtime in Notting Hill, I was transfixed by the sudden spark of a goldcrest (Regulus regulus) – Britain’s smallest bird, on a twig, inches away through the pane.

Its mark of distinction is the yellow stripe of the ‘crest’ emphasised by black bordering. Its weight is that of a sheet of A4 paper.

This event made it easy to empathise with the poem by Charles Tennyson Turner (1808-79), an elder brother of the poet (his surname changed to accord with an inheritance).

When my hand closed upon thee, worn and spent With idly dashing on the windowpane…

Oh, charm of sweet occasion! – one brief look At thy bright eyes and innocent dismay; Then forth I sent thee on thy homeward quest, My lesson learnt – thy beauty got by heart: And if, at times, my sonnet-muse would rest Short of her topmost skill, her little best, The memory of thy delicate gold crest Shall plead for one last touch, – the crown of Art. From The Gold-Crested Wren The male’s crest is touched with orange and raised in courtship. Its firecrest (Regulus ignicapilla) cousin’s crest has an additional white colour. The firecrest first bred here in 1962. Wendover Forest, Buckinghamshire, is now its British HQ; the local pub is the Firecrest.

Its 2,000 British population is dwarfed by the goldcrest’s ¾-million, a figure often vastly raised by winter migrants. The goldcrest’s favourite habitat is conifer forest, which explains its growing abundance in Ireland, but it breeds the literal length of Britain, from the Isles of Scilly to the Shetlands.

It is not a wren (Troglodytes) but a separate species, Regulus or ‘kinglet’.

This name derives from the legend, first written down by Aristotle, that the goldcrest won the title King of Birds by hiding in the feathers of the soaring eagle and fluttering above it at the zenith, with the sun crowning its head.

A goldcrest ringed in Denmark in 1990 was caught the next day in Yorkshire – so crossing the North Sea is no obstacle. Boats are a refuge in storms; hence its fisherfolk name, ‘herring nip’.

Like woodcock, goldcrests arrive in ‘falls’ or flocks (15,000 on the Isle of May in October 1982) – frequently at the time of the November full or ‘woodcock’ moon, earning them the name ‘woodcock pilot’.

The goldcrest’s usual call is a highpitched sisi, often too thin to hear. The combination of call, size and usual preference for conifer gloom makes them hard to locate or see. They are monogamous but in winter forage in numbers, often with other birds. This is the likeliest time to glimpse them, especially in gardens.

Losses in hard winters are restored by milder ones and clutches of up to a dozen eggs twice a season. A garden or graveyard yew is often a nesting site, the moss cup hung by cobwebs from the tip of a branch.

The 2021 Bird of the Month calendar is available from www.carryakroyd.co.uk The Oldie January 2021 87

Travel King of the Purbeck Stone Age Treleven Haysom has been quarrying stone on the Isle of Purbeck for over 60 years – now he’s written the definitive book about it

Eleven generations of Treleven Haysom’s family have been working with Purbeck stone in Dorset since 1698.

Still today, his Langton Matravers quarry provides the finest English stone for buildings from Westminster Abbey to Windsor Castle.

I

n late Jurassic times, around 150 million years ago, the sea covered what is now south Dorset with beds of limestone.

First, Portland stone was laid down, followed by Purbeck stone, as the sea turned into a lagoon. The uppermost bed of all was called Purbeck Marble.

Throughout the Middle Ages, hard, polishable stones, as against softer stones, were called marble and the men who worked them marblers. In medieval England, Purbeck was synonymous with marble in the same way Carrara in Italy has been associated with marble since the Renaissance.

Strictly speaking, Purbeck Marble isn’t in fact marble. Today, scientific geology reserves the term marble for a particular

88 The Oldie January 2021

Set in stone: Isle of Purbeck, Dorset

group of metamorphosed limestones.

Still, Purbeck Marble was hugely prized here from the second half of the 12th century. The zenith occurred in the 13th century, before a late-14th-century reduction and an almost complete fizzling out by the end of the 16th century.

The high point is Henry III’s lavish use of Purbeck Marble in his rebuilding of Westminster Abbey in about 1245, complete with the famous Cosmati Pavement and Edward the Confessor’s

shrine, where more exotic types of stone were set in Purbeck Marble.

Purbeck Marble was used at Canterbury, Chichester, Durham, Lincoln, Ely, Winchester, Rochester, Exeter and old St Paul’s Cathedrals. York Minster has Purbeck details that may even be reused Roman work. Later, Purbeck stone was exported as far as Newfoundland and Barbados.

St Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln in the late 12th century, said Lincoln Cathedral ‘is supported by the precious columns of swarthy stone [Purbeck Marble], not confined to one sole colour, nor loose of pore, but flecked with glittering stars and close set in all its grain. Moreover, it may suspend the mind in doubt whether it be jasper or marble, yet for marble of a most noble nature. Of this are formed those slender columns which stand around the giant pillars, even as a bevy of maidens stand marshalled for a dance.’

In 1220, both Salisbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey used Purbeck lavishly. Approximately 15,000 tons of Purbeck were used at Salisbury,

HARRY MOUNT

Mark Haysom with beds of freshly quarried Purbeck Marble. Right: his father, Treleven Haysom, with a dinosaur footprint found on the Isle of Purbeck. The wall of his museum is lined with dinosaur footprints

combined with about 70,000 tons of the local Wiltshire stone.

Although Purbeck went on being used at Winchester until about 1340, Exeter until about 1342, and Westminster Abbey until even 1500, the tide was on the ebb.

Today, we are still using Purbeck Marble for some of the greatest buildings in the country, often in the same places it was used in the Middle Ages. When the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries were opened at Westminster Abbey in 2018, we used Purbeck stone.

Purbeck stone was also used in London’s 12th-century Temple Church.

After the war, my father replaced the ancient Purbeck columns there with modern ones. Each consisted of four separate drums linked at the base, collar and cap, arranged in a circle, supporting the triforium, clerestory and roof of the round nave of the church.

Other great buildings where we’ve

installed Purbeck stone in recent decades include St Paul’s, Windsor Castle, Hampton Court, Dover Castle, Knole and these cathedrals: Ely, Canterbury, Rochester, Salisbury, St David’s, Chichester, Lincoln, Canterbury, Portsmouth, Peterborough and Exeter.

These days, to cut stone, we use diamond-tipped blades, introduced after the Second World War. The blades revolutionised stonework. A yard at Chesil in Dorset was equipped with steam saws by 1877, using sharp sand to cut the blocks, some 30 years or more before Purbeck’s first powered saw.

A telling account of old practices was given to me by a Mr Weeble who began work under his grandfather, Mr Beck, in Winchester in the 1930s. They were still employing hand-sawyers then – mostly army pensioners. The sawyers sat in a little, weatherproof, sentry-box-like shelter, pushing and pulling the saw to

and fro all day, cutting blocks up to six or seven feet long.

Water was fed into the cut from a barrel over corrugated roof sheets laid horizontally, which served to spread the trickle, flushing sharp sand down onto the blade to make cutting more effective.

Their yard had a pub close by. It was said that, on one hot day, a sawyer managed 20 pints of bitter!

In the 19th century, one Charles Edmunds, starting as a boy at Hedbury Quarry on the Isle of Purbeck, became the foreman of masons on Manchester Town Hall – Victorian Gothic at its height.

My father would say, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘They all went away and, if they were any good, they stayed away. If not, they came back.’

Treleven Haysom’s Purbeck Stone is out now (Dovecote Press, £35). His stone is available at purbeckstone.co.uk

St Augustine’s Chair, made of Purbeck Marble, Canterbury Cathedral (early 13th century). Right: Temple Church (12th century) has dark Purbeck Marble columns. Many of them were replaced by Treleven Haysom’s father after the war The Oldie January 2021 89

U

ntil the American election, few outside the island of Ireland could point to Mayo on the map.

Far from the maddening film crowd of West Cork, where director David Puttnam’s and actor Jeremy Irons’s crew hang out, Mayo isn’t favoured by the fashionable.

But now a spotlight has been thrown on this sprawling west-coast county, with over 700 miles of coast. President-elect Joe Biden is proud to be a Mayo man, with his roots in the small town of Ballina, where his great-great-greatgreat-grandfather, Edward Blewitt, emigrated from after the 1847 famine.

And this year’s Christmas Hollywood release Wild Mountain Thyme, filmed in Mayo and starring a red-headed, begorrahing Emily Blunt, is already causing a storm. Her accent and Christopher Walken’s have been bashed for their amateur Oirishness, as Mary Kenny writes on page 40.

Mayo also starred in The Quiet Man (1952), starring John Wayne as an American returning to Ireland.

I recognise this westerly pull. Thirty years ago, I made the four-hour journey from Dublin to the county capital of Castlebar. I didn’t drive back. Now I call Mayo my home.

So what’s so magical about this windswept corner of the Emerald Isle?

The north coast, from the Bellmullet peninsula to the ancient forts of Killala, is a string of small, sandy beaches dipping between unconquerable cliffs, battered by the Atlantic. Even on a pleasant August afternoon, you can travel for over an hour without meeting another car.

It’s elemental and bleak. Yet the wonder of the shuttling sky with its never-still clouds, the constant, white, foaming fierceness of the ocean and the

County Mayo is adored by Hollywood, the US President-elect – and Dea Birkett

Joe O’Biden’s Irish home wind that stunts all trees to no more than leafless bushes are its allure. Teeter on the edge of a grey, volcanic rock, the waves howling below, the salty spray wetting the sweater you have to wear even in the height of summer, and you feel as if all the trappings of the Earth, even the soil, have been stripped back and you’re close to the core of life itself.

Mayo measures history in millennia.

The oldest, walled-field system in the world spreads across the Céide Fields neolithic site by Ballycastle, built almost 6,000 years ago. Megalithic tombs, said to be the burial place of indigenous giants, are scattered over the blanket bogland. There are more than 100 in the fields surrounding the small town of Louisburgh alone.

Perhaps it’s this visceral proximity to

Jamie Dornan and Emily Blunt in Wild Mountain Thyme, Crossmolina, Mayo 90 The Oldie January 2021

the past that’s made Mayo the hideout of artists. Mid-century painter Paul Henry threw his return rail ticket into the sea and remained on Achill Island. Today, Achill, Ireland’s largest island, reached by a land bridge, is still home to artists, including sculptor Ronan Halpin, who runs a gallery.

Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll (1917-85), German author of the The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, also lived there. His cottage is now a writers’ retreat, and an annual literary festival is held each May in his honour.

Being so westerly has its disadvantages. Green may feature on the Irish and Mayo flags, but it’s a colour rarely found on a local dinner plate.

Vegetables don’t thrive in the wind and salt. But sheep and fish do: Achill oysters are farmed along the coast; salmon is smoked in huts beside people’s homes; local lambs are slaughtered; and homemade sausages and white pudding are sold from the award-winning Kelly’s in Newport, run by identical twin brothers in striped butchers’ aprons and white butchers’ hats.

If it’s an almond croissant you’re after, Westport is one of the few places to find one. Voted Ireland’s Tidiest Town and Best Place to Live, it’s the closest Mayo gets to a tourist destination. Its two historic streets, converging at a small clock tower, are lined with quaint shops stocking potpourri and brightly coloured fleeces. (‘Fleecies’ is the local name for incomers, unused to the breezy weather.)

The town also boasts Matt Molloy’s pub, owned by the Chieftains’ musician

PAUL MCERLANE/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

Back to his roots: Joe Biden, then Vice-President, with Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny (second right), in Ballina, Mayo, June 2016

of that name, which holds traditional music sessions every night, sometimes with Matt himself.

Beyond the bars, festivals are a big part of Mayo’s social calendar. No weekend in the year passes without the chance of a public party. In nonCOVID times, Westport holds a Folk and Bluegrass Festival (June), Westival music and performance festival (October) and the Rolling Sun Book Festival (November). Achill Island stages the International Harp Festival (October) and Scoil Acla featuring traditional Irish music, dance and language lessons (July).

The excellent local Mayo News lets you know what’s on, as does MidWest Radio, a fine bit of local broadcasting to tune into on your rental-car radio.

Between Irish fiddle and uilleann pipes, and stomping country-and-western tunes, MidWest features a twice-daily, popular broadcast of the day’s deaths.

Grief and loss are woven into the Mayo landscape like a song. The ravages of the 1847 Great Famine still scar the landscape, with mountainsides scarred by ‘lazy beds’, the ridges planted with potatoes before the blight struck. Below

them lie deserted, crumbling stone houses, once villages, first decimated by famine, then by emigration.

The highest proportional loss from the Titanic disaster of any place was in tiny Mayo village Addergoole, from where 14 people set sail for a better life in 1912, but only three survived.

Pain is born with honour. Reek Sunday, a pilgrimage on the last weekend in July, is considered a good day out – a two-hour ascent of conical-shaped Croagh Patrick, preferably barefoot.

Walkers are frequently helicoptered off the mountainside.

In this wild and windy place, tourist facilities are scarce. There’s one museum of note – the Country Life museum by Castlebar, the only national museum outside Dublin. The Great Western Greenway cycle and walking path follows the track of an abandoned railway from

‘Joe Biden’s ancestor emigrated from Ballina after the 1847 famine’

Westport to Achill Island, passing through mussel beds and peat fields.

There’s lots of Airbnb accommodation but few hotels. The Ice House, overlooking the River Moy outside Ballina, is one of the best. In the late-18th century, when Ballina was Ireland’s principal seaport, wild salmon was preserved here before being shipped to Liverpool.

A few miles up the road, the charming Edwardian Enniscrone hot-seaweed baths opened in 1912, the year of the Titanic, and have been run by the same Kilcullen family ever since.

Biden’s Ballina ancestors were kelp-sellers. A mural of the Presidentelect now shines out across the town.

But he won’t get to see it soon. Mayo’s Knock Airport (recently rebranded Ireland West) is temporarily closed owing to COVID-19. Neither Britain nor America is on Ireland’s Green List; anyone from these countries has to self-isolate for two weeks.

But Mayo, with its long history of suffering, is stalwart. We can wait.

Wild Mountain Thyme is released on 11th December The Oldie January 2021 91

Taking a Walk

A last walk on Suffolk’s crumbling coast

GARY WING

patrick barkham

This is a walk on land that will soon disappear. Hurry, hurry, hurry, while stocks last, as sale adverts say. When it’s gone, it’s gone.

Covehithe, on the Suffolk coast, has gained renown as a place of loss. The North Sea is a perpetual orangey brown here, because of the gulps of sandy soil it takes from the land – up to 20 yards during a single winter storm.

The sea sabotages the tidy, owneroccupied countryside and imposes dereliction on it. Land crumbles away.

Houses, too. Old water pipes poke from the cliff. The road disappears into brambles and oblivion.

We can’t really cope with this ruination; Covehithe bristled with flustered signs of instruction. Danger! No entry! No access to the beach here! Park considerately!

This bin is for dog waste only!

Perhaps a broken, derelict landscape causes people to behave wildly. Or perhaps there were simply a lot of visitors. Even slow-motion disasters attract rubberneckers.

When I came to Covehithe a few years ago, I joined two cars parked by its 92 The Oldie January 2021

magnificent 15th-century flint church (also ruined, but deliberately so – abandoned by parishioners 200 years ago because its upkeep costs were ruinously high). Now this remote hamlet has been comprehensively discovered in an era where walking (‘HANDS, FACE, SPACE … WALK!’) is almost the only state-sanctioned activity permitted.

This autumn, on a quiet midweek day, I parked alongside 35 cars, ignored the signs and paraded along the crumbling cliffs until I found a section that bowed and scraped before the waves and allowed me onto the beach.

The sea was an unsettling gold hue, and looked too close to the land; water infringed on the earth’s personal space.

I walked north towards a distant wood of silver birches. Drawing closer, I saw it was actually a beach of leafless trees, their trunks turned silver by the waves.

Wooden limbs jutting from the sand looked like whale bones – or a sculpture park – throwing themselves in interesting directions. This was the attraction: people picnicked among the sea-slaughtered sycamore and oak.

The newly-hewn cliffs revealed the soil of the former wood in cross-section, like a drawing from a Ladybird book.

There were no signs of earthworms or badger tunnels but the pitiful shallowness of the trees’ roots was revealed; they rarely stretched more than a yard into the soil.

Beyond Benacre Broad, once a wooded lake and soon to be a North Sea bay, a pillbox from the Second World War had collapsed onto the beach. Two slits showed, like eyes, but the rest of its face was masked by the water. The waves, crashing over it, gave it a fleeting hairstyle of white foam.

I turned inland and took a lane back south, shielded by thick woods as if the coast was miles away. I had a green woodpecker, a buzzard, a kestrel and just one passing car for company. Best of all, I met the ancient stump of an oak tree like an outstretched hand, with a young holly tree growing in its palm, suspended three yards up.

Given the absence of walkers here, it was weird to find a forest of signs, repeatedly instructing me that every field entrance was private and I must keep out. As my irritation rose, I was cheered by the most spectacularly tetchy sign.

‘EGGS NOT FOR SALE’ it shouted.

‘We no longer sell seriously fresh eggs from the drive, as people have been taking them without paying. Instead we are feeding them to our dogs!! To those of you who have been honest, thank you – to those of you have been dishonest, you know what you can do.’

Were the sign-makers so angry because, ultimately, the sea was the authority here? The sea was taking the earth we convinced ourselves we could own. Like the land itself, these signs would soon be washed away.

This is a lovely five-mile circular walk.

Be good and follow the signs to the beach. Check tide times – the beach walk is possible only at low tide. OS Explorer Map 231 Southwold & Bungay

On the Road

Pottering around Stoke-on-Trent is the best place on earth for clay, tableware and potters, Emma Bridgewater tells Louise Flind

Is there something you really miss when you’re away?

In the past, that was my kids. I’ve discovered the middle-aged thing of worrying about the tomatoes in the summer months.

What’s your favourite destination?

Sicily and, non-specifically, France and that might just involve getting the ferry over and having lunch in Boulogne or Cherbourg – or a week in the South…

Why did you choose Stoke for your factory?

Because it’s the Potteries. It’s where the skills and traditions were. Although it was already much broken when I went there in 1984, there was and still is a lot of local knowledge – that’s what I was tapping.

What do you most like about Stoke and the surrounding area?

The people.

Do you use local materials?

All the supplies that you need are there in Stoke-on-Trent.

Can the British still make better pottery than rest of world – and if so, how?

We make the best tableware in the world because we have the right clay and highly developed skills and traditions.

How have you dealt with recent deaths of mother and half-sister Nell Gifford, founder of Giffords Circus?

As a family, I think. If you’ve got a lot of siblings, cousins, uncles and aunts whom you adore, you therapise one another.

Where did your creativity come from?

I grew up with a lot of conviction that I was artistic. My great-grandmother was a painter. Granny sketched, as did Mum. And even though I did only O-level art, I knew what I was about.

Any Christmas pottery planned?

We’ve got tons of stuff – an enormous

shallow dish that says, in gold, ‘Possibly the crispiest roast potatoes in the world’.

Are you a traveller?

I travelled for work ridiculously. We lived in North Norfolk and I’d schlepp across to the West Midlands, down to London and back most weeks and that was pretty dreadful. I don’t yearn for foreign climes and I absolutely bloody loathe flying.

Do you like being/working away from home?

These days, it doesn’t have the guilt. If I do go to Stoke for a few days, it’s good fun.

Do you go on holiday?

I love it when I’m on holiday but I’m not someone who lives by planning the next outing. Our best holidays were great big thousands-of-miles drives across America with the children or sometimes we’d camp in Suffolk.

Do you lie on the beach?

I’m more likely to be wandering around markets and churches, looking for a bit of architecture, or reading a book under a tree.

Are you brave with different food abroad?

Yup – I’ll eat anything.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

In the American Midwest, longing for some lunch at a diner in the middle of nowhere, we asked about vegetables – blank. Fruit – total blank. Salad? It was cubes of jelly and marshmallows.

What’s your favourite food?

Toast.

What’s your best experience in restaurants when abroad?

For ages Matthew [her ex-husband] and

I, if we only had two or three days’ holiday, went to Venice. It gets rather bad press, foodwise. I think it’s rapturously delicious.

Have you made friends when you’ve been away?

Yes, I do now – travelling on your own you’re much more likely to make friends than travelling with your noisy children.

Do you have a go at the local language?

Our third daughter, Margaret, lived in Rome in her gap year and said, ‘Mum, you and Dad took us on great holidays to France, Italy and Spain and I thought you could speak those languages and then I realised that you absolutely can’t.’

Biggest headache?

The way airlines’ websites are so dishonest. You have to use a friend’s phone to look up the flight and then your own phone to book it, otherwise they put the price up when you go back a second time.

Do you like coming home?

I’ve got that Mr Mole propensity for suddenly yearning for home.

Top travelling tips?

Maps are really important – there will be clues on a map that you’ll never find on your wretched telephone map.

How are you coping with this second lockdown?

Well, I’m in Norfolk – we bought a house here ages ago and never spent enough time in it and now I’ve moved in and it’s amazingly nice. I can see the sea from the room where I’m working. Norfolk was home for my mum and granny.

Emma Bridgewater designs, including the Chrismas collection, are available at www.emmabridgewater.co.uk or by calling 01782 210565 The Oldie January 2021 93

Ed McLachlan

The Oldie January 2021 95

Genius crossword 395 el sereno All clues are normal, although some books may require research Across 1 Speciality that may see mother involved in murder (6) 4 Submitted and made progress (8) 9 Plan to grab empty till and take stock (6) 10 Feelings generated by European proposals (8) 12 The BBC has many of these courses (8) 13 Claim from student, say, covered in beer (6) 15 Caricature of king in pose (4) 16 see 19 19/16. Credit note’s proof – hope to get exchanged for book (3,5,2,10) 20 Work available in sweatshop, usually (4) 23 Robocop’s dog loses tail catching heartless yob (6) 25 see 24 Down 27 One having no experience around court is doing nothing (8) 28 Trouble providing rejected line as a dutiful son (6) 29 Odds on good service? (8) 30 See 7 Down.

Down 1 Manages to organise credit unions at last (7) 2 Dodgy claim seen as

inspiration in 1916 split (9) 3 Book one’s left with (6) 5 Dirt dished up on a council (4) 6 Money that’s staked on run for Springbok (8) 7/30 Across. Book club’s first more worried with cry that hurt (5,6) 8 Perceive record on English navy (7) 11 A regal display about British subject of class (7) 14 Mostly serious about my mode of transport (7) 17 International pressure in military to be objective (9) 18 Philosopher like this boxes (8) 19 Palpable lie in shreds, supporting diplomacy (7) 21 Unfortunate maxim or saying about ‘Sold out’ (4,3) 22 A wife greeting the French – for a short time! (6) 24/25 Across. British hail the entire American continent – that’s novel! (5,3,5) 26 Witches will need no lid for this cooker (4)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the current coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 6th January 2021. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary 13th Edition and a cheque for £25. Two runners-up will receive cheques for £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 395 Across 1 Wriggle in embarrassment (6) 4 Corridor (5) 8 Adhesives (5) 9 Amount outstanding (7) 10 Claims with no proof (7) 11 Cure (4) 12 Finish (3) 14 Cow shed (4) 15 Dodgy (sl) (4) 18 Small flatfish (3) 21 Deserve (4) 23 Reading stand (7) 25 Speech (7) 26 Wrath (5) 27 Dance hall/

Genius 393 solution music (5) 28 Mildly obscene (6) Down 1 Indicate (6) 2 Normally (7) 3 Relinquished office (8) 4 Askew (4) 5 Frighten (5) 6 Without difficulty (6) 7 Elevate (5) 13 Deny (8) 16 Cargo (7) 17 Endorse (6) 19 Plain-spoken (5) 20 Force; vitality (6) 22 Bellows (5) 24 Dry sherry (4)

The clue to 22 Across reveals writer Tom Sharpe, author of Wilt, which El Sereno read on a plane vainly trying to stifle embarrassing laughter.

The others: Porterhouse Blue, Vintage Stuff and Indecent Exposure.

Winner: Sheila Ireland, Barnsley, South Yorkshire Runners-up: Ian Doak, Kilney, Co Dublin; Jenny Olney, Romsey, Hants

Moron 393 solution Across: 1 Jury, 3 Leak, 6 Air, (Do you really care) 9 Comprehension, 10 Entrance, 12 Etch, 13 Sad, 15 Smarts, 18 Tiaras, 20 Hog, 22 Awry, 23 Plantain, 26 Level crossing, 27 Wed, 28 Tidy, 29 Yell. Down: 1 Jackets, 2 Remit, 4 Ethics, 5 King, 6 Aviator, 7 Ranch, 8 Breadth, 11 Eat, 14 Dimness, 16 Arrived, 17 Sop, 19 Senegal, 21 Glared, 22 Allow, 24 Agile, 25 Flat.

The Oldie January 2021 97

Competition TESSA CASTRO There wasn’t a lot of face-to-face bridge in 2020. However, many people played more than ever. Bridge Base Online (BBO), RealBridge, Funbridge, Bridge Club Live, Trickster – there’s a long list of online sites on which to play. The Andrew Robson Bridge Club has been hosting four online duplicates on BBO every day, with supervised practice on RealBridge.

Here is an instructive deal from one BBO duplicate, illustrating the concept of the ‘30-point pack’: Dealer South Neither Vulnerable

West ♠ AKQ53 ♥J5 ♦85 ♣10 9 8 6

North ♠ 10 9 4 2 ♥ Q 10 7 2 ♦KQ7 ♣4 2

East

♠ J876

♥K964

♦J93 South ♣7 3 ♠♥A83 ♦ A 10 6 4 2 ♣A K Q J 5

The bidding South West North East 1♦ (1) 1♠ Dbl(2) 3♠ (3) 5♣ (4) Pass 6♦ end (1) ‘High fives’. If you’re holding two five-card suits, it is always better to bid the higher, enabling you to follow with the lower next time, enabling partner to pick between them at that same level.

(2) Negative, showing hearts.

(3) Raising pre-emptively to the (nine-card) level of the fit.

(4) Showing her big minor two-suiter.

Why do you think North jumped to Six Diamonds with what may appear a mediocre seven-point hand? The answer lies in the spade suit. With East-West marked with nine spades, North knows South is void. The opposing ten high-card points in spades will take no tricks on defence. Of the 40 high-card points in the pack, only 30 are playing. It’s a ‘30-point pack’.

Declarer ruffed West’s ace-of-spades lead. She crossed to the king-queen of diamonds and returned to her ace, drawing trumps. She then cashed all the clubs, including the lowly five when the suit split no worse than 4-2. Needing a second heart trick, she cashed the ace and led a second heart towards dummy’s queen-ten. West’s knave popped up, so she happily covered with dummy’s queen. East won the king and led a spade, but declarer could ruff with her last diamond and score the final trick with dummy’s promoted ten of hearts.

Slam made.

ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION No 261, you were invited to write a poem called Snapping.

I was alarmed by the number of poems on domestic violence, good though they were, especially Bill Holloway’s and Peter Davies’s. Meanwhile Daphne Lester’s narrator was snapped by a nasty little terrier, Gillian Broadfield’s enjoyed a funny little dog, white and fluffy. Joe Houlihan was snapped by guilt, Pauline Watson’s thrush and frog vied for a fly.

Ted Lane’s dental plate snapped, as did Alan Pentecost’s pea pods and an ulna.

Sue Smalley was a snapping turtle.

Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary of Great Quotations being snapped up by Clive D Brand.

Mother said, below the floorboard, That it was dangerous abroad.

Life wasn’t just a piece of cake, For one’s life and death were at stake.

Under attack in open space You don’t always survive the chase.

A cat’s not difficult to tell, For they give off a special smell.

No. Real danger is food left out, With deadly purpose there’s no doubt.

It looks so tasty on that raft.

To eat, Mum said, would be daft.

Peanut butter, biscuits, hard cheese.

I wonder if it’s one of these Things Mum called a ‘deadly snapper’?

To hell, I couldn’t be happi…

Clive D Brand If only a camera had been on hand To capture scenes from ancient history, We’d witness Socrates with his faithful band Watching him slip from life. The mystery Of pyramid construction might be seen In one fine snap. Caesar would stand in Gaul With humbled Vercingetorix and Queen Cleopatra’s beauty might be viewed by all.

We could catch Alexander posing proud Where Persian King Darius was defeated Or, further back, if Paradise allowed, We might see Moses by the sea, elated.

And had three Kings brought cameras with them We’d have a snap of God at Bethlehem.

Max Ross Holding on, coping, doing really, really well, Meticulously made up so nobody can tell; What she’s actually thinking, what’s the thought behind the inking, Why the sullenness and silence, the muted rebel yell?

Lost in school, no energy, no trouble but no spark, Her fingernails, demeanour and her lipstick all too dark.

Home no place of refuge, unable to distract From dwelling on the missing, the fun and friends she lacked, Her search for now, a second’s peace, rubber taut and stretched, released, This poor man’s slice a substitute, a safer, secret act.

The body free to keep the faith, those eyes so haunted, trapped, A momentary pain subdues the constant one, when snapped.

Gary Smith As COVID snarls and worlds collapse, In between my yawns and naps The hours congeal, but now perhaps It’s time to sort out these old snaps.

Unposed, unframed, the smiles and tears Of childhood friends down the years Come back to me, those burly chaps And curly girls in woolly caps.

But, alas, the past has gaps And blanks like old Victorian maps.

I rummage through the Kodak traces Yet cannot match names to faces.

Yes, going back in time I find Calm of heart and peace of mind, But then, dear Christ, again one feels Foul COVID snapping at one’s heels.

Rob Salamon COMPETITION No 263 It’s funny the way cats like boxes, or at least sitting inside them. For me the interest is not knowing what’s inside. In any case a poem, please, called Open the Box. Maximum 16 lines. This month we cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@ theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 263’, by 14th January.

The Oldie January 2021 99

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Ask Virginia

virginia ironside Neighbour behaving badly

Q

Recently, at about three in the morning, I was woken by a call from an elderly friend who lives alone in a small village 100 miles away. She said first, ‘Who am I?’; then ‘What’s my name?’; then ‘Why am I ringing you?’; and ‘Have you been to my house?’; and on and on like this. I couldn’t get any sense out of her and didn’t know what to do. I don’t know any of her relations – or indeed if she has any living nearby.

She could have been drunk – she does like a drop – and I suspect this might have been the case as she seemed fine the next morning and refused to believe that she’d rung me.

But I couldn’t sleep for worry. What should I have done?

Name and address supplied The person to ask isn’t me, but her. You could rightly sound worried and irritated, particularly if she was drunk. She could give you the phone number of a near neighbour or a relative. If she refuses, then say that, if she continues with these calls, you’ll ring the emergency services. You can’t have this worry – and you’re right to be worried. If there were something seriously wrong and you’d failed to act, you’d be tormented with guilt for a long time.

A

Dad’s been conned

Q

My father, who was a banker, has become involved in a huge internet scam. It started after my mother died a year ago.

Having been promised millions as a result of some strange foreign will, he

has now been told by the scammers – who have milked him of over £100,000 – that they have brought the money to England. Apparently, they have shown the money to him, in a huge box – but it is all black. They say this is because it had to be dyed to get it through customs. Hence the term ‘black money’. Now apparently it has to be ‘laundered’ to get it back to normal – and they want £5,000 to pay for the special chemical to get rid of the black dye. Then, they say, half of it is his. He’s been shown how it works and has apparently seen a black banknote restored to the original. I have rung the fraud squad, begged my father to realise it’s a scam and shown him videos on YouTube of people who’ve been conned like this, but I’ve had no joy and he continues to believe them. Is there anything I can do?

Name and address supplied Bar getting him sectioned – and this would be extremely difficult, as I imagine he seems sane in every other way – I don’t think there’s much you can do. It may be that his bank could help. But unfortunately I fear this will end only when he has no money left.

Bereavement has left him feeling lonely and powerless. The scammers have not only restored his status, perhaps flattering him into thinking his banking advice is helping them in this venture, but also given him a role and a diversion.

Also, if he gives up now, he’ll have to admit he’s been cruelly conned. What about a family intervention? Weeping grandchildren? Mention of how your mother would be turning in her grave?

Saying how brave he’d be if he did the right thing? Promising a proper role within the family in future? Would any

A

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106 The Oldie January 2021

of these help? The truth is that in the end it is his money and his choice.

Crack marksman’s lazy eye

Q

I would very much welcome any advice you may have regarding my problem with the text reading of certain pages in the local press. I have visited an eye specialist for advice on my eyesight: my left eye has been ‘lazy’ since childhood and I can’t read my text letters and printed matter with it. The right eye, however, has functioned properly, enabling me to become a qualified marksman while on army service, as well as handling all my reading and writing! But all my optician has suggested is enlarging the lens so that the right eye has a greater breadth of vision. Or using a magnifying lens. This doesn’t seem to help.

J W, Norwich Nothing can be done about your lazy eye – though it still has its uses, as it provides your right eye with valuable bits of information about the periphery. As far as your genius right eye goes, I’m afraid even geniuses get old, and you’re just losing flexibility in your lens. You need a simple reading lens for your right eye when looking close up. These are not magnifying lenses – they just bring close vision into focus. Of course you can use magnification – you can get magnification on your smartphone – but it’s not ideal. Even crack marksmen can need reading glasses when they get older.

A

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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