The Oldie June 23 issue 427

The Wizard from Oz

by Roger Lewis, Nicholas Garland and Bruce Beresford

Features

10 Grumpy Oldie Man

Matthew Norman

12 Olden Life: What was a thankyou letter? Susannah Jowitt

12 Modern Life: What is second-screen content? Richard Godwin

40 Mary Killen’s Fashion Tips 42

Regulars

Editor Harry Mount

Sub-editor Penny Phillips

Art editor Jonathan Anstee

Supplements editor Jane Mays

Editorial assistant Amelia Milne

Publisher James Pembroke

Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer

At large Richard Beatty

Our Old Master David Kowitz

95 Competition Tessa Castro

102 Ask Virginia Ironside

Books

58 Yorkshire: The North Riding, by Jane Grenville and Nikolaus Pevsner

Martin Vander Weyer

59 An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals, by Polly Toynbee Roger Lewis

61 The Jewel Box: How Moths Illuminate Nature’s Hidden Rules, by Tim Blackburn

Caroline Moore

63 The Story of the Brain in 10½ Cells, by Richard Wingate Dr Theodore Dalrymple

63 Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists, by Laura Freeman Huon Mallalieu

65 One Fine Day, by Ian Marchant Nicholas Lezard

67 Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations, by Simon Schama Ivo Dawnay

Arts

72 Film: Still: A Michael J Fox movie Harry Mount

73 Theatre: The Motive and the Cue William Cook

73 Radio Valerie Grove

Oldie subscriptions

To order a print subscription, go to www. subscription.co.uk/oldie/offers, or email theoldie@subscription.co.uk, or call 01858 438791, or write to The Oldie, Tower House, Sovereign Park, Market Harborough LE16 9EF.

Print subscription rates for 12 issues: UK £49.50; Europe/Eire £58; USA/Canada £70; rest of world £69.

To buy a digital subscription for £29.99 or single issue for £2.99, go to the App Store on your tablet/mobile and search for ‘The Oldie’.

74 Television Frances Wilson

75 Music Richard Osborne

76 Golden Oldies

Rachel Johnson

77 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits

79 Gardening David Wheeler

79 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld

80 Cookery Elisabeth Luard

80 Restaurants James Pembroke

81 Drink Bill Knott

82 Sport Jim White

82 Motoring Alan Judd

84 Digital Life Matthew Webster

84 Money Matters

Margaret Dibben

87 Bird of the Month: Sedge warbler John McEwen

Travel

88 A trip through breakthrough European art Nick Trend

91 Taking a Walk: Mum’s last walk Patrick Barkham

96 On the Road: Ann Widdecombe Louise Flind

Advertising For display, contact :

Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or Rafe Thornhill on 020 3859 7093

For classified: Jasper Gibbons 020 3859 7096

News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk

Cannon on Ball page 14 Max Wall by Kenneth Cranham page 32

The Old Un’s Notes

In 1941, John Betjeman became British press attaché in Dublin.

To begin with, he disliked his time there, but increasingly he loved his three years in the country and took to signing off his letters, ‘le meas mór, do chara dhílis, Seán Ó Betjemán’.

And now a new book, Betjeman in Ireland, by Dominic Moseley, covers his visits to the country, from his first in 1925, as an Oxford undergraduate. Over 50 years later, he made a charming BBC programme, John Betjeman’s Dublin.

Betjeman wrote many poems in Ireland – and amusing letters, too. In 1943, he wrote to Myfanwy Piper, wife of artist John Piper:

‘Still do you run barelegg’d across the yard?

Still would you pillow with athletic curves

My bald, grey head upon your breasts?

Your stalwart body still excites me much

The thought of you, now spring is coming on,

Requires that I should exercise control.’

Though modest, funny Betjeman always played down his achievements, it’s clear he was good at the press-attaché job.

When he left Dublin, the Irish Times declared, ‘He took the highest possible view of his duties as press attaché and looked upon it as his duty not only to interpret England to the Irish, but also to interpret

Ireland sympathetically to the English, and if any English pressman or visitor went away with an unsympathetic view of Ireland, it was not the fault of Mr Betjeman.’

Lots of oldies were to the fore at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre recently, when the estimable Dame Eileen Atkins took the lead role as a nonagenarian New York grandmother in Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles.

The run ends on 10th June, five days before Dame Eileen’s 89th birthday. It was directed by Sir Richard Eyre, a mere stripling of 80.

Regarding the play’s grandparental theme, Eyre reflected that he knew only one of his grandparents, the others having died young. His father’s father was a curmudgeon who ‘presided over meals with an air of

Among this month’s contributors

Bruce Beresford (p18) directed Oscarwinning Driving Miss Daisy (1989). A friend of Barry Humphries for 60 years, he directed him in The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972).

Nicholas Garland (p19) and Barry Humphries (right) illustrated and wrote Private Eye’s Barry McKenzie cartoon strip.

Oliver Pritchett (p23) wrote for the Sunday Telegraph for 40 years. His son Matt(also p23) is the renowned Telegraph cartoonist.

Kenneth Cranham (p32) starred in Oliver!, Shine on Harvey Moon and Hatton Garden. A friend of Joe Orton, he was in Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot He will be in Angel with Rafe Spall.

silent disdain interrupted by eruptions of volcanic severity’.

One day, Eyre’s ten-yearold sister said someone had talked to her on a train. Eyre recalled, ‘My grandfather slammed his fist on the table, shaking the glasses and the cutlery, and shouted, “No one’s ever spoken to me on a train, thank Christ!!”’

Grandpa Eyre, one suspects, might not have approved of those inane ‘See it, say it, sorted’ announcements on today’s railways.

A new biography by Alicia Foster, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, shows quite how rich our regional galleries and museums are, in lovely pictures.

Gwen John and her brother Augustus John grew up in Pembrokeshire. Augustus John’s talent was first spotted by a tutor at a Tenby art school, Edward Joseph Head, a Royal Academician.

Gwen John (1876-1939), born in Haverfordwest,

John O’Betjeman

Richard Eyre: 80 years young

Important stories you may have missed

Soldiers spotted during huge military exercise in Wiltshire Wiltshire Times

honed her skills in Tenby, too. She started painting Landscape at Tenby with Figures (pictured) when she was 19. The figure of the woman in the hat was modelled by Winifred John, Gwen’s younger sister.

Drug dealer branded ‘a risk to pigeons’

The Leader

Mystery after missing guinea pig is returned Aberdeen Press and Journal

£15 for published contributions

NEXT ISSUE

The July issue is on sale on 28th June 2023.

GET THE OLDIE APP

Go to App Store or Google Play Store. Search for Oldie Magazine and then pay for app.

OLDIE BOOKS

The Very Best of The Oldie Cartoons, The Oldie Annual 2023 and other Oldie books are available at: www.theoldie.co.uk/ readers-corner/shop Free p&p.

OLDIE NEWSLETTER

Go to the Oldie website; put your email address in the red SIGN UP box.

HOLIDAY WITH THE OLDIE Go to www.theoldie.co. uk/courses-tours

The only surviving picture by Gwen John of Tenby, it’s now in the Tenby Museum and Art Gallery, in the shadow of the castle, overlooking the sea. Tenby Museum and Art Gallery also has two pictures by Gwen’s mother, Augusta, an amateur artist.

What an artist’s colony Tenby was in the late-19th century, consisting entirely of the John family!

One of the annoying things about the House of Commons is that the anger is often so palpably fake.

A moment from Jamie Stone, Lib Dem MP for Caithness, Sutherland, and Easter Ross was a telling contrast.

Gordonstoun-educated Stone, 68, is a pukka gent who is almost always genial. He is widely liked at Westminster, most MPs being aware that he acts as carer to his disabled wife. But when he rose at Prime Minister’s Questions to complain about Edinburgh’s marine-protection proposals, Scottish National MPs started heckling him.

The result was remarkable. The mild-mannered, softlyspoken Stone combusted into fury, bawling that he would ‘not be silenced’ and that the policy mattered greatly to his constituents.

The very rarity of his anger meant it stunned the Scot Nats into silence and was met with cheers from elsewhere. Rage is at its most effective when deployed by gentle souls.

It’s quite a coup to be shot down by the Red Baron – and survive.

That was the fate of Tommy Lewis, the last and 80th man to be shot down by Baron von Richthofen, on 20th April 1918.

Flying a Sopwith Camel from 3(F) Squadron RAF in northern France, Tommy Lewis survived the crash landing with only minor burns.

The story is told in a charming new memoir, Beating About the Bush: The Memoir of a District Nurse, by Audrey Head, who nursed Lewis in later life.

Lewis kept a framed

‘I realise it’s a weeping willow, George, but there’s weeping and there’s weeping’

Gwen John’s Landscape at Tenby with Figures (1895-8)

Dog ght: Red Baron (above) and Tommy Lewis (below)

photograph of the Red Baron over his bed and exchanged Christmas cards with the von Richthofen family for the rest of his life. The Red Baron himself was shot down and killed at Vaux-sur-Somme on 21st April 1918, only a day after Tommy’s close shave.

Don’t be surprised if you see a film crew lurking outside the National Liberal Club the next time you’re in London at the weekend.

The historic Victorian club, overlooking the River Thames, closes to members at weekends.

That’s when dozens of TV dramas and movies have been shot there: from Downton Abbey to The Crown, and The Constant Gardener (2005) to the Christopher Nolan-directed sci-fi thriller Tenet (2020).

Entering the club is like stepping back in time to another era. Filmmakers are attracted by ‘the ornate, 19th-century interior which offers the perfect setting for period dramas’, says club member Seth Thévoz.

The club has doubled as everything from a gentleman’s club to a lecture hall, and a hotel to a restaurant.

One room was even recently turned into Harrods Food Hall for A Thousand Blows, a forthcoming Disney+ period drama.

Television and movie companies pay good money to film scenes at the club – which hosts the Oldie literary lunches, as it did the Oldie lunch for the Queen’s 75th birthday last year – and the additional revenue stream is ‘very welcome’, adds Thévoz.

Look very closely in the background of some shots of the club and you might see the portrait of Jeremy Thorpe, the disgraced Liberal leader. With admirable bravery, the club has kept the picture hanging, despite Thorpe’s downfall.

Watch out for Simon Collins’s new book, The Little Boke of Woke, which cleverly imagines examples of woke behaviour in the old days. Pictured (below) is an example – of a virtuesignalling vicar 70 years ago.

‘Are you wokeing from home again, Henry?’

Barbara Ker-Seymer (1905-93) was one of the great photographers of the 20th century.

And now a new biography, Thoroughly Modern, by Sarah Knights, tells the story of the pioneering life of the bisexual photographer.

Among her sitters were Evelyn Waugh, Margot Fonteyn and writer, heiress

and activist Nancy Cunard (pictured).

Ker-Seymer’s friends spanned the generations. Her younger pals included the painter Beryl Cook (1926-2008).

Ker-Seymer became one of her models, too, appearing in Cook’s Bar and Barbara (1984) and Bermondsey Market (1987).

Cunard lines: Nancy Cunard by Barbara Ker-Seymer

A Simon Collins cartoon

‘Do you have an olive branch?’

The King and I

What a Coronation! There were lots of loos, Emma Thompson saved a choirboy – and I stole Lionel Richie’s seat

Our new king is a Shakespeare buff, so quite familiar with the famous line spoken by Francisco on the ramparts at Elsinore at the beginning of Hamlet: ‘For this relief, much thanks.’

This line was repeated by quite a few of us oldies lucky enough to be invited to the Coronation as we arrived at Westminster Abbey and found the ancient building almost surrounded by portaloos.

There had been a rumour that ‘facilities’ would be in short supply at the royal peculiar. People were upping the pre-crowning bladder panic by repeating apocryphal tales of ‘accidents’ that had occurred at the last Coronation in 1953. The Daily Mail called me to ask if I would contribute a feature they were hoping to headline ‘The Royal Wee’.

I declined, and how wise I was. Every aspect of the Coronation was brilliantly organised. The Dean and his ever good-humoured and consistently courteous team had thought of everything. There were ramps for the wheelchairs, smelling salts for the faint, defibrillators in the side chapels and clean and classy, unobtrusively placed toilets at every turn.

When things went awry on the day, it certainly wasn’t the fault of the organisers. We were invited to take our places from 7.30am and advised that we shouldn’t expect to leave until 1.30pm. I cut it a bit fine arriving at 8.30am and took what I thought was my place – only to be told, moments later, by the great Lionel Richie that, actually, it was his.

In the event, amazingly, I found myself seated at the end of a row of hugely distinguished old soldiers – all recipients of either the George Cross or the VC – and just behind the actress Dame Emma Thompson, who deserves an extra gong for services rendered on the day.

As the 14-year-old Child of His Majesty’s Chapel Royal, Samuel

Strachan, began to address the King, someone halfway along Dame Emma’s row began coughing. And went on coughing. Loudly. And more loudly still.

Emma reached for her handbag, found her packet of Bronchostops and passed them down the line.

Happily, I don’t think there were any medical emergencies on the day. Had there been, there were plenty in the congregation ready to come to the rescue.

After the service, walking towards Victoria Station, I fell into step with one of them. She was a retired nurse, she told me – and then, seeing her medals, I realised she was Dame Elizabeth Anionwu, the UK’s first sickle-cell specialist nurse and the first nurse to receive the Order of Merit since Florence Nightingale. An hour before, she had been carrying the Orb of Sovereignty in the Coronation procession. Now she was walking on her own along the Embankment in the rain with me. I felt proud to be British.

I felt proud, too, of my buttonhole.

To my surprise, it was the only one I noticed in the Abbey. It was made up of four miniature, cream-coloured roses I had pinched from a beautiful arrangement of flowers the day before and kept fresh in the fridge overnight.

My Coronation buttonhole came from Coronation Street. Truly, it did. I am a

regular on ITV’s This Morning and, naturally, our Coronation Special came from Salford, from the set of the longestrunning soap in the kingdom.

At the end of the broadcast, as William Roache (aka Ken Barlow), 91, who has been in the series since it started in 1960, led us in three cheers for King Charles.

I discreetly dismembered the floral arrangement that was decorating the bar of the Rovers Return.

I have been partial to a buttonhole since I was a boy.

One day in the mid-1950s, as I was walking along the Strand with my father, we caught sight of an elegant gentleman getting out of a London taxi and stepping in to the Savoy Hotel.

‘That,’ said my dad, ‘is the great Nubar Gulbenkian – he wears a fresh orchid in his buttonhole every day.’

He also wore a monocle, a long bushy beard and (can I have invented this?) spats. Born in the Ottoman Empire in 1896, he was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, inherited a fortune and made another one, did good stuff for British intelligence during the Second World War, and behaved as he felt an English gentleman should.

My dad called Gulbenkian ‘the Armenian Noël Coward’ and collected his quips. Gulbenkian owned two converted taxis and said of them proudly, ‘They can turn on a sixpence –whatever that is.’

He enjoyed fine dining, claiming ‘The best number for a dinner party is two – myself and a damn good head waiter.’ He was married three times: ‘I’ve had good wives, as wives go, and, as wives go, two of them went.’

On Coronation Day, I channelled my inner Nubar.

Gyles is at the Edinburgh Fringe in August: www.assemblyfestival.com

Right royal day: Emma Thompson; Norroy and Ulster King of Arms; Gyles

I’m fed up with feedback

Why should I review my new toothbrush?

In contemplating the toilet-plunger ordered this week in response to a blockage, as so cordially invited to do by Amazon, the mind flashes back to the quagmire football pitches of lateVictorian England.

On reflection, I’m not convinced that the above makes any sense. It could well be that I’ve been at the magic mushrooms, and am in the midst of a mildly hallucinogenic reverie.

If it isn’t the ’shrooms, the point may perhaps concern the touching tale of the Corinthian Casuals football team and the penalty kick.

The Casuals, the story goes, were so outraged by the unfairness of shooting unchallenged from 12 yards out that in protest they deliberately missed all penalties.

I mention this vignette from the glory days of British amateurism only because those days, hugely against the odds in a mercenary era, have returned.

We’re all of us amateurs now in the singular field of written criticism.

I write with the bitterness of snooker star Shaun ‘the Magician’ Murphy, complaining a few years ago that a young Chinese who beat him had no business being on the green baize at all since he was an amateur.

For decades, I covered a slew of disciplines (radio, TV, restaurants, movies) as a professional critic. The career was exquisitely tailored for one as unremittingly idle and mediocre as myself. Those who can do, as someone clever almost expressed it. Those who can’t skulk behind a computer screen sniping facetiously at those who can.

For occupying this very bottom rung of the showbiz ladder, the ultimate ambition being mildly to entertain a commuter for a maximum of two District Line stops, I was well-paid.

Criticism was not only lucrative back then, but easy. For the reviewer of daytime

telly, for instance, it was no tougher challenge 30 years ago to ridicule Eamonn Holmes and Anthea Turner than it has lately been to mine the captivating saga of Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby for mirth and merriment.

These days, the work is both unpaid and infinitely harder. What in the name of sanity are you expected to write?

The requests come by email, from one firm or another, all the time. ‘Your opinion matters to Spotlight Oral Care,’ reads the subject line of one recent droplet among the Niagaran cascade. ‘Thank you for your recent purchase. We hope you love it as much as we do.’

Do I, though? How am I to know? And, even if I do, should I? Wouldn’t it be presumptuous at best, and at worst positively creepy, for the mere buyer of an electric toothbrush to love it as much as its creators? Isn’t that just as unnervingly weird as loving a stranger’s child as much as its parents?

You wouldn’t want to admit to that in a review. To confess to an unnatural besottedness with a toothbrush would double as a formal application to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

Still, duty calls. So for what it’s worth, while sidestepping the question of love, my opinion is this. The electric toothbrush works fine.

But that’s not going to win any prizes, is it? New Yorker magazine filmreviewer Anthony Lane might be the finest critic writing in the English language today. Even he would struggle to chisel a Pulitzer nomination out of a toothbrush.

‘Hey, M J Norman,’ goes another

request, this one about drinking glasses, ‘will you please take a minute to share your experience?’

A minute indeed. It would be the work of months, or years, or a lifetime, to unravel whether, to quote one of various questions, ‘the product meets your expectations’.

On the surface, it does. One expectation was that these tumblers would hold liquid without leaking – and they do. Until the email arrived, I naïvely assumed this to be the sole expectation.

Evidently, however, given the plural, there must have been others. Did I subconsciously expect the tumblers, if rubbed in a certain way, to unleash a genie? Or to be the catalyst for a neobiblically alchemical reaction that transforms water into malt whisky? I simply do not know.

‘Hi M,’ begins another of today’s communiqués, this from Amazon, either flirting with over-familiarity or confusing me with the late Bernard Lee, or possibly Judi Dench, ‘your package has been delivered. How was your delivery?’

How was it? Well, it wasn’t The Godfather, or the tasting menu at L’Enclume in the Cumbrian town of Cartmel, or Brideshead Revisited. It wasn’t even Phillip and Holly desperately faking mutual tolerance on the sofa.

It was identical to the last 973 deliveries. Some wildly over-pressurised, minimum-wage work slave rang the doorbell, and scarpered back to his van within the 3.27 seconds before I answered the bell, charitably leaving the parcel on the doorstep as an enticement for any passing tea leaf.

As for the plunger mentioned in that faintly psychedelic first paragraph, beyond reporting that it worked as advertised, I find myself in grave need of a psychic version to clear the feedbackwriter’s block.

matthew norman

The finest critic would struggle to chisel a Pulitzer out of a toothbrush

what was a thank-you letter?

The earliest surviving letter from Winston Churchill was a handwritten note to his mother.

In 1882, aged seven, he wrote to thank her for his gifts of ‘soldiers, flag and castle’.

The painstaking italic penmanship of the very young Churchill later gave way to the easy, flowing script of a man who dashed off handwritten thank-you letters most days of the week, as can be seen among the million items in the Churchill Papers.

Handwritten thank-you letters have made their mark in every civilisation. Persian Queen Atossa wrote the earliest surviving one in about 500 BC.

Before a national postage system and the launch of the Penny Black first stamp in 1840, the cost of receiving any letter had to be borne by the recipient, rather dimming the thoughtfulness of any thanks-giver.

By the 1860s, the penny postal system was booming. With up to 12 collections each day in Victorian London, you could

what is second-screen content?

Second-screen content is stuff you watch while simultaneously looking at your phone. According to one report by Google, three-quarters of British people – and 93 per cent of young people – now watch TV in this way.

Or should that be don’t watch TV? It’s more common to use, say, Keeping Up with the Kardashians as general room ambience, something to have on while you scroll through TikTok. Or a Premier League match as mood music while you place bets on other, more exciting matches. Nothing has our undivided attention any more.

Don’t shake your head. I bet you’ve become embroiled in the family WhatsApp as slugs mate slimily on Wild Isles. Or looked up an interesting rose varietal featured on Gardeners’

write to thank your hostess of the night before, sprinkle the note with lavender water and have her reading it, scent still fresh, by the time she sat down to midmorning coffee. Even with the invention of the typewriter in 1868, it remained infra dig until well into the 1930s to type any personal correspondence, perhaps especially a thank-you letter.

As a nation, we used to write thankyou letters for everything: a Christmas present, a dinner party the night before, or even just a thank-you for a little favour. Like the simple two-liner from Marilyn Monroe to a German swain in 1962: ‘Thank you for your champagne. It arrived, I drank it and I was gayer. Thanks again. My best, Marilyn Monroe.’

Nowadays, most people under the age of 30 wouldn’t know how to start tackling a handwritten thank-you letter. My 21-year-old daughter would, because she had a cruel and unusual mother who forced her to sit down every Boxing Day and write to thank relatives. The main

rule was to ‘get over the page’. As a result, she has beautiful, huge and loopy penmanship.

In 2022, an M&S poll showed that only nine per cent now send handwritten thank-you letters, compared with 20 per cent ten years before. Email, WhatsApp, SMS and other digital methods have erased the pen. There are even apps that can now ‘hand-write’ for you.

Still, in a busy world, that same 2022 poll showed we are ever more alive to the ‘pro-social wellbeing benefits’ of gratitude. What says thank you more eloquently than the ritual of finding paper/ card/ envelope/ stamp/ pen, crafting your best copperplate, sprinkling some wit and sincerity, getting over the page, sealing it with a loving kiss and walking to the post box?

InApril, when the price of a stamp went over £1, the final writing was on the wall for the posted thank-you. Still, consider the investment. £1 and a few minutes’ writing to thank someone for a gift will reap exponentially better presents from the giver in the future.

Susannah Jowitt

World, only to become lost in the thorns of Instagram. Or perhaps you cannot watch Question Time without tweeting about how annoying Fiona Bruce is.

It’s not your fault. The finest minds of a generation have worked extremely hard so that we all exist in a state of permanent distraction and are thus more susceptible to their malign moneymaking schemes.

It’s surprising just how invested many TV producers are in the idea of this multi-front assault. You’d imagine that if you were, say, Netflix, you’d want people to watch Netflix. Apparently not. ‘What the streamers want most right now is “second-screen content”, where you can be on your phone while it’s on,’ one screenwriter complained to the New Yorker recently.

She is one of thousands of Hollywood TV writers who recently went on strike in America over low pay, intolerable

conditions and a general feeling of being messed around.

The so-called Golden Age of TV that produced high-quality shows such as Mad Men and Game of Thrones is over. The streamers have figured out that most viewers don’t want novelistic complexity. They want something that isn’t too hard to follow, while you’re bidding on eBay or completing a Wordle.

That’s why the streaming giants (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Disney+ etc) pay top dollar for classic 1990s shows such as Friends, Seinfeld and The Simpsons. And it explains innocuous Netflix fluff like Emily in Paris. It’s non-event TV. It’s ambient TV. It’s second-screen content.

Meanwhile, you just know some Californian money man is currently looking at those striking screenwriters and wondering, ‘Why not get AI to do the writing and be done with it?’

Richard Godwin

Good manners: Marilyn

We used to love people talking rubbish, from Edward Lear to Monty Python. It’s time for an absurd revival, says Piers Pottinger

Do talk nonsense

Throughout history, the British have revelled in nonsense.

In 1846, Edward Lear published A Book of Nonsense, which captured his readers’ imagination. Lewis Carroll wrote the most famous nonsense poem, Jabberwocky, in 1871.

Almost a century later, in 1948, Stefan Themerson founded an eccentric publishing firm, Gaberbocchus. He maintained this was the Latin rendering of Jabberwocky. He published the first English translation of the absurd play Ubu Roi by Frenchman Alfred Jarry, which sadly appealed only to a tiny audience. Stefan remained loyal to all forms of nonsense until his death in 1988.

In the 1960s, nonsense came into its own, championed by the great Spike Milligan. Oldie-readers will fondly recall The Goon Show, the epitome of radio nonsense. Spike had more to offer with his seminal Silly Verse for Kids, and his brilliant television adaptation of The World of Beachcomber, featuring Dr Strabismus and the Filthistan Trio, which consisted of three ‘Persians’ and a plank.

Strabismus would try to test the truthfulness of proverbs: for example, ‘When one door closes, another opens.’ He set up 30 front doors in a field, closing one and waiting for another to open. It never did.

I loved the actor Michael Redgrave declaiming random names from the weekly list of Huntingdonshire Cabmen. Sadly, only one episode of this wonderful series still exits, and it hasn’t been shown of late.

Stanley Unwin (1911-2002) invented a nonsense language, Unwinese. It featured in many television programmes, even in Carry On films. He claimed he had learnt his unique gobbledygook from his mother, who would talk of ‘falolloping’ (falling) down the stairs and grazing her ‘kneeclabbers’. Unwin continued talking nonsense as a career into his 90s.

In 1963, Michael Codron produced a show at the Comedy Theatre called An Evening of British Rubbish, featuring a custard-pie machine and an Oriental orange joke. It ran for a year and featured the great duo the Alberts.

Bob Blackman (1926-96) had a unique

act, singing Mule Train while repeatedly hitting himself on the head with a tin tray. That was it.

I once spoke to him, after he’d given the act up. Many years of battering his poor head had caught up with him, and he was forced to look for something new. He told me he had created an act where he climbed a stepladder he’d set on fire, singing I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles. Sadly, this act never made it to the stage.

One of the most nonsensical people to bring us joy was the self-styled Prince Giorgio Carbone of Seborga (1936-2009). He declared Seborga, a village in Italy with a population of 247, to be a legitimate principality, citing evidence from 954 AD. Carbone was in fact a florist from the village, but he awarded himself the magnificent title of His Tremendousness.

The villagers endorsed him, and the previously unknown Seborga became a minor tourist destination, generating good local income. Carbone received an annual sandwich and a weekly coffee in recognition of his service to the community. He was my favourite example of glorious nonsense.

Monty Python began to build its huge following in the late sixties with sketches full of magnificent nonsense, still revered today.

Then we waited until 1990, when Reeves and Mortimer’s Big Night Out gave us a proper dose of hilarious nonsense. Regular features included the two ginger-haired aromatherapists

whose catchphrase was ‘You have to smell to be well’. It initially baffled the Channel 4 viewers, but soon won an enormous following, leading to ever more memorable programmes including Shooting Stars

On the radio, Count Arthur Strong, created by Steve Delaney, first appeared in 2005. Despite threatening retirement, he will be touring British theatres in 2024. The BBC have abandoned him, but he remains a popular peddler of ludicrousness.

After Carroll, Lear and Milligan, it is hard to think of great examples of nonsense in literature today, or even in the theatre or television (Count Arthur Strong apart).

In architecture, there are plenty of visible examples. The tradition of the folly is alive and clearly evident in many great British gardens, as well as in Italy, where the tradition goes even further back. The Sacro Bosco, featuring the Villa of Marvels in Bomarzo, Lazio, was created by Prince Vicino Orsini in 1552. It fell into neglect for many years until surrealists such as Salvador Dali rediscovered this most bizarre of follies and heralded its revival and restoration.

Today, nonsense is more obvious and less funny in some of the wokery we all endure. It is normally political and, more often than not, polarising. There is little pure nonsense to raise a smile.

Isn’t it time for a nonsense revival?

Piers Pottinger is a public-affairs consultant and funster

Shut up, Eccles! Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe rehearse The Goon Show, 1963

Loose Cannon

Is there anything quite so melancholy as a bereaved straight man, soldiering on as a solo turn after the funny half of the double act has died?

Ernie Wise cut a lonely figure after Eric Morecambe died – and Tommy Cannon, without Bobby Ball beside him, I feared might be much the same.

I needn’t have worried. It’s nearly three years since Bobby died, aged 76 (a cruel combination of pulmonary disease and Covid). Though Tommy still misses him terribly, he seems content and self-assured. His bright eyes twinkle with fun and laughter – he wears his 85 years lightly.

Still, it’s impossible for me (and countless other Cannon & Ball fans) to meet him without thinking about Bobby. I’ve met Tommy twice before, both times with Bobby, backstage in Blackpool and Skegness, and both times they were hilarious. Bobby was like a big kid; Tommy was like his elder brother.

Meeting him this time in York (where he lives with his second wife, Hazel – the mother of three of his five children), I find he’s still terrific company. But I can’t help staring at the empty space beside him where his double-act partner ought to be. ‘Sixty years together – it’s like a marriage,’ he tells me.

Tommy always thought he’d be the first to go, simply because he was six years older. ‘I can never forget him. He’ll always be in my mind. I’ll always be thinking of him.’ Sometimes he watches old clips of their act on YouTube. ‘I sit there, and I think to myself, “My God, you were so damn funny.” ’

He’s currently preparing a one-man show – quite a challenge for someone who spent over half a century as half of one of Britain’s best-loved double acts.

He’s not a natural comic, like Bobby (‘He’s always had funny bones,’ says Tommy, slipping into the present tense), but I’m sure he’ll make a success of it. You’d want to spend an evening with him – and from September

you’ll be able to, in An Evening with Tommy Cannon.

‘When Bob passed away, I was sort of at a loose end,’ he says. ‘And then suddenly I thought to myself, “I can do the life story of Cannon & Ball.” How we met, how hard it was in the early days…’ It sounds like a great idea for a show.

Thomas Derbyshire was born in Oldham in 1938. ‘It wasn’t the best place – it wasn’t the worst by a long way,’ he says, stoically – but to me his childhood sounds positively Dickensian. His dad was a miner – he left home when Tommy was six. His mum worked in the local mill, ten hours a day. ‘The noise in the

cotton mills was horrendous – she was stone-deaf,’ he says. ‘They were hard days.’

Tommy was an only child. Their house (‘a one up, one down’) was next door to the Yorkshire Penny Bank. ‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ he told her. ‘I’ll rob the bank some day and we’ll be rich.’

When his mum remarried, his stepfather moved in, bringing four children with him. ‘Tin bath, outside toilet – all them people in that house was a nightmare.’

Kind neighbours used to give him broken biscuits. ‘Everybody was an auntie or an uncle – there was a lot of lovely, warm people, but there were also

Three years after Bobby Ball died, Tommy Cannon, his bereft comedy partner, is back on stage. He talks to William Cook

a lot of people who were hard, because they had to be.’

Education was no respite. ‘I was Tommy Thicko at school,’ he says. ‘I had dyslexia, which was unheard of in them days – the only thing that saved me was sport.’

His PE teacher predicted he’d be a professional footballer, but it never happened. He left school at 15, drifted from job to job (‘I went down the pit for two weeks – it petrified me’) and ended up welding in a local factory, where he met an infectiously funny bloke called Robert Harper.

Bobby had always been an entertainer. When he was a kid, he appeared on the hit radio show Workers’ Playtime, with his sister. Now he was playing local pubs and clubs. He asked Tommy along, they hit it off, and Bobby asked him to join him and form a double act.

‘Aye, all right,’ said Tommy. He didn’t take it too seriously. He thought it might be a way to earn a bit of extra brass.

Unlike Bobby, Tommy had never considered a career in showbusiness. Before their first gig together, he was so

nervous that he threw up in the dressing room. He never could have done it on his own, but Bobby’s confidence sustained him, and he soon discovered, to his surprise, that he had a lovely singing voice. Playing the northern clubs night after night with Bobby was a great way to learn the ropes.

They started off singing ballads, but the banter went down better than the songs. So they ended up as comics – on the club circuit, comedians got more money. Tommy’s deadpan delivery made Bobby’s clowning twice as funny. Renamed Cannon & Ball, the act finally took off. After a week’s booking at a club in Wales, they decided to give up welding and go full-time. It was the first time they’d left Lancashire.

Playing those working-men’s clubs was the toughest (but by far the best) apprenticeship.

‘They were hard men,’ says Tommy, but if you could please them, you could please anyone. ‘You’d have an audience come in at lunchtime which would be men only – they’d be very judgemental.’

If they came back in the evening with their wives and girlfriends, that was always a good sign. ‘But there were many, many times when we didn’t even see the evening performance, because we got paid off.’ They died loads of times but, as Bobby used to say, if you don’t die, how are you going to learn?

They finally got their own TV series in 1979, after 16 long years in clubland. Tommy was already 40. They both had wives and children. By now they were earning two grand a week playing the clubs – so they weren’t desperate for stardom.

They came across as two old friends having fun together, and the punters lapped it up. In 1980, they sold out

Blackpool Opera House: 3,200 seats, two shows a day, for 18 weeks. There was nothing innovative about them, but they understood their audience and they had the common touch. ‘We termed ourselves as a working-class act.’

Cannon & Ball were peak-time TV stars throughout the 1980s. ‘Twenty million viewers, every Saturday night –there weren’t a lot of stations, the way there is now.’

When the TV career tailed off, Tommy and Bobby went back on the road again. I saw them live a couple of times and they were fantastic. The jokes had beards, but no one cared. Like all good double acts, it was about the relationship between them.

The thing that made them so popular was their empathy with their audience. ‘Most of the people who grew up with us came from a similar background – there was always a warmth from an audience for me and Bob.’

Like Morecambe & Wise, their act was fuelled by affection – for their fans and for each other. Viewers felt they knew them. They were the last sentinels of a bygone age, when comics could still draw on a common pool of shared experience. We shall not see their like again.

Of course, seeing Tommy performing on his own won’t be the same, and he isn’t pretending otherwise. ‘I haven’t got funny bones – I haven’t. I wish I had, but I haven’t.’

He’s too modest. It will be an uplifting, life-enhancing show and, in these fractious times, that’s a blessing. I’ll be in the stalls, loving his happy memories of Bobby. See you there.

An Evening with Tommy Cannon is touring, 21st September 2023 to 11th May 2024

Solo act: Tommy Cannon, 84, today

The way they were: Tommy Cannon (left) and Bobby Ball in 1990

Writer Roger Deakin belonged to the lucky generation, who missed national service and rejoiced in 1960s freedom. By

Patrick Barkham

Born to be wild

The train that carried Roger Deakin from London to his Suffolk farmhouse passed his four small fields before stopping at Diss station, five miles north.

With his advertising executive’s gift for persuasion, Roger persuaded the driver to slow down on the fast straight outside his home, so he could hop off at his own personal request stop.

Like so many of his generation, Roger made the most of his freedoms. He is best known today for Waterlog, an entrancing account of swimming via rivers, lakes and lidos through Britain, beginning in the spring-fed ‘moat’ beside his house.

Published in 1999, it has become a nature-writing classic, and a compelling assertion of the individual’s freedom to swim in Britain’s (often private) rivers.

Roger would’ve been 80 this year; he died of a brain tumour in 2006. He was a notable member of a memorable generation who missed national service by months, came of age just when the Lady Chatterley trial and the Beatles invented sex, and then enjoyed postwar prosperity, affordable property and accessible global travel.

What fortune! What freedom! But Roger’s life shows how liberty had to be fought for.

Unlike today’s specialists, Roger was a generalist in an era when it seemed possible for anyone (at least those with ‘acceptable’ accents or skin colour) to turn their hand to anything.

The one constant in his life was a notebook in which he jotted poetry and philosophy. On visiting the wealthy family of one ’60s girlfriend, he observed of the ‘Churchillian’ father, ‘My God – what a huge difference between our two generations – complete chasm!’

Looking back, I think his generation could be the most distinctive that ever lived. In retrospect, the social and cultural transformations they engineered appear inevitable, but at the time there was no guarantee of success. It’s never easy to shrug off decades of ossified ways of doing things.

Roger was born in Watford, the bright, only child of a railway clerk and a secretary. With London on one side of his modest bungalow and countryside on the other,

he ran wild through fields and copses. He hated confinement. Even so, he had to run home for tea when his mother stood in the garden and rang a bell.

The state paid for a scholarship to Haberdashers’ which led to Cambridge and then to copywriting in Soho just as London swung. Plenty of voices still demanded conformity to old norms, but Roger embraced the new rebellion, growing his hair long and rejecting suburbia and the traditional family. He set up home with an extended ‘family’ of friends in a cheap rented flat in thenshabby Queen’s Gardens.

Roger could’ve stuck with a conventional advertising career but there were so many other freedoms to enjoy.

He moonlighted by scouring rural auction houses for stripped pine,and imported pottery from La Bisbal in Spain, whither he sped on fun-filled adventures in his open-topped Morgan.

He inveigled flatmates into helping him upcycle kitchen chairs into rocking chairs, selling them to the ‘trendies’ on Portobello Road market. His notebooks record one sale to Judi Dench.

There was sexual freedom, too. The pill was ‘the greatest invention of modern science – along with penicillin!’ enthused 24-year-old Rog in a 1967 notebook. He married (and had a son) but his freedom-

seeking didn’t stop, and an affair ended his marriage.

While his freedom-seeking made for glorious beginnings to relationships, his refusal to countenance constraints – or compromise – created romantic turmoil. Freedom had its cost.

In 1972, Roger devised the National Coal Board’s ‘Come Home to a Real Fire’ campaign (a slogan gleefully adopted by second-home-scorching Welsh nationalists of the day).

But he remained a maverick, who illicitly kept live chicks in his agency’s basement screening room and swanned off to his Suffolk farmhouse when he should’ve been at work.

Like many of his generation, he seized the opportunities provided by cheap property, restoring the ruined 16thcentury house he’d spied in the summer of ’69 and persuading the farmer to sell for £2,000.

After dabbling in self-sufficiency, he became an English teacher at the local grammar school. He played Joni Mitchell in lessons, organised classroom ceilidhs and, on discovering his sixth-formers couldn’t identify an elm, while teaching Howards End, spirited them out of school to admire one.

When school became too stifling, he became an early freelancer, devising Save the Whale! concerts for Friends of the Earth and co-founding a charity, Common Ground, which championed the local nature of hedgerows and orchards.

Later on, he made films and became a music impresario, bringing folk and rock to Benjamin Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival.

While researching Roger’s biography, I was inspired by meeting so many of his generation. It wasn’t simply age that liberated them to speak so honestly about the joy and pain of life alongside him.

Openness has become a habit of a lifetime. At 80, many of Roger’s friends are as vital, cussed, questing and freedom-seeking as they have ever been. They are worth celebrating.

More timid subsequent generations might learn something from them, too.

The Swimmer: The Wild Life of Roger Deakin by Patrick Barkham (Hamish Hamilton, £20) is out now

Free spirit: Roger Deakin (1943-2006)

Bruce Beresford mourns his friendBarry Humphries. Cartoon by Nick Garland

Goodbye, possums!

Ifirst met Barry in London in 1963. I’d seen his one-man show on stage in Australia, where he was already well known. Apart from a couple of appearances in small clubs, he had little reputation in London. He did odd jobs (as did I), including breaking old vinyl discs in a record factory.

He dressed conservatively in those days, usually in Edwardian style, with waistcoat and hat. Over the years, his ensembles became increasingly bizarre, with an array of brightly coloured jackets and trousers and, at times, painted shoes.

He never abandoned wearing ties, although in Australia men of all ages amble through city streets in shorts and T-shirts. The only men wearing ties are politicians and those on trial.

There is quite a bit of information about his early years (in fact, all his years) in the autobiographies he wrote: a couple as Barry Humphries (My Life as Me is superb), a couple as Edna Everage and one or two as Sir Les Patterson. I think that Les Patterson’s The Traveller’s Tool is the funniest book I’ve ever read.

It’s delightfully politically incorrect by today’s puritanical standards – probably by the standards of any era. My favourite chapter is ‘My Tool in Your Hand’.

Two books by Barry that I find myself constantly re-reading are collections of poems he values, both privately printed in exquisite binding: At Century’s Ebb (2008) and Poems I Like – an Anthology Responsibly Sourced (2021). Among the latter collection is a poem by John Cooper Clarke (the only living poet included), Things Are Gonna Get Worse

Two of the verses follow.

What, me worry? I should care, Shit for brains, wire for hair, I seen the future and I ain’t there, Things are gonna get worse.

Things are gonna get worse, nurse, Things are gonna get rotten. Make that hearse reverse, nurse, I’m trying to remember everything that I’ve forgotten.

During those years in London – the 1960s – I realised that Barry’s addiction to alcohol was a major career impediment. He amazed me by managing to deliver brilliant performances in Lionel Bart’s Oliver and Maggie May, as well as playing Long John Silver in a production of Treasure Island at the Mermaid.

I realised, when I went backstage one afternoon, that he’d managed to play Long John while totally inebriated, improvising dialogue which had the audience collapsing with laughter.

In 1972, Barry was visited, in hospital, by people from Alcoholics Anonymous after an incident in Melbourne where he was robbed by a couple of pub roughnecks and dumped by the side of a road. The AA people were persuasive –he never drank again.

His quick wit never ceased to astonish me. Edna’s endless bons mots on her TV shows were never scripted by a team of backstage writers but always produced by Barry on the spot.

In San Francisco, I once stayed with him for a week while he was doing a stage show. Every night, his wife, Lizzie, and I would go to pick him up. Invariably, I saw the last half hour or so of his show and was amazed that the jokes and situations – as well as the overall running time – varied considerably from night to night. There was a loose overall structure, but Barry’s irrepressible humour couldn’t be shovelled into a fixed time.

Last year, my wife and I went to York to see the stage show Barry was touring around England. In the dressing room, after the performance, Barry slumped into a sofa and said to me, ‘Why am I doing this, at my age?’

I replied, ‘Because there’s nothing you like to do more than go on stage, tell anecdotes and hear people laughing.’

I was struck, from the first time we met, at Barry’s incredible range of interests – apart from acting. He was fascinated by Oscar Wilde and the Sitwell family, particularly Osbert and

Sacheverell. He collected books, invariably first editions, and had a flair for unearthing many of the minor, or half-forgotten, writers and poets of the 19th and early-20th centuries. He knew every rare-book dealer in England – just as he seemed to know every art dealer.

His art collection must contain thousands of paintings, sketches and lithographs. The works are all figurative, all exquisitely painted. Many are tastefully erotic but, apart from Charles Conder and perhaps Jan Toorop and Jan Frans de Boever, there are few widely celebrated artists.

Barry had little interest in modern popular/punk rock/hard rock music, but admired Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber and George and Ira Gershwin. He appeared on Broadway with the musicologist/singer Michael Feinstein, performing works by many of the great American songwriters of the 1930s.

He was also fascinated by the group of Weimar composers, among them Kurt Weill and Mischa Spoliansky, persecuted by the Hitler regime for their ‘degenerate’ music. His presentation of a number of the Weimar songs was acclaimed in Sydney and London in 2018.

His taste in classical music also tended to gifted but less acclaimed figures. He became friends with the Belgian composer Jean-Michel Damase, a distinguished pianist who composed melodic orchestral pieces. I met him with Barry. Damase, a quiet and gentle man, always seemed to me to be slightly puzzled by the admiration of the tall Australian actor.

Similarly, Barry was a fan of the German composer Ernst Krenek. Krenek’s music was also labelled ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis, which resulted in his wisely moving to America. He lived for some years in Palm Springs and died there in 1991. Barry visited Krenek a number of times in the 1990s and promoted his music in Australia – which led to his celebrated 1920s opera Jonny Spielt auf being presented in Melbourne in 2022.

Barry was surrounded by – and friends with – many celebrities in England, America and even Australia. Unlike many famous actors, he was never obsessed with his own fame, though he appreciated its being responsible for the best table at restaurants.

His courteous, amiable manner was extended to everyone he met and everyone he worked with. Stage crews, as well as actors, returned to his shows for literally decades. In the Sydney hospital, he was visited by a group of Lesettes – girls from Les Patterson’s stage appearances many years previously. The hospital was inundated with phone calls from wellwishers abroad, among them King Charles.

One of my sons, Benjamin, has Down’s syndrome. He has known Barry all his life and saw many of his stage shows and,

of course, the two Barry McKenzie films I directed. When in England, Barry always remembered to contact him by phone or to visit him on the Isle of Wight. They had long conversations on Benjamin’s favourite topics: (a) Fawlty Towers; (b) the Beatles; (c) Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em; (d) Doctor Who.

Benjamin called me when he was told that Barry had died and said, ‘I cried when I heard.’

I’m sure that many people cried. I was somewhat taken aback at the outpouring of positive articles and TV coverage in Australia, as there had been so much talk over the previous year or so about Barry’s political incorrectness (!) and right-wing political views (nonsense!).

With his death – his loss – there has been widespread realisation of the extent of his genius.

Bruce Beresford directed The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) and Barry McKenzie Holds His Own (1974), both starring Barry Humphries.

Nicholas Garland illustrated the Barry McKenzie cartoons in Private Eye, written by Barry Humphries

Dame Edna Contemplating a Bust of Barry Humphries by Garland – after Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer. Below: Garland and Barry by Barry, 1970

Barry’s last words

For 40 years, Barry Humphries wrote to Roger Lewis about John Betjeman, Oscar Wilde – and the Grim Reaper

I’m getting to be like John Gielgud, when he lamented, ‘All my real friends are dead’ – Michael Winner, Bryan Forbes, Barry Cryer and now Barry Humphries.

I knew Barry for about 40 years, ever since I interviewed him for a colour supplement. We subsequently met in odd spots of his own choosing, such as the Freud Museum in Hampstead, where he reclined on the couch – or the National Galley in Wales, so he could point at a picture by Anton Mauve and remark on the coincidental use of mauve paint.

Served a meagre portion of pie in the cafeteria of a veteran car museum in Coventry, he said to the waitress, ‘Has news of my diet reached the kitchen?’

I miss him terribly – he was a sort of father figure, whose approval and admiration I always sought.

‘I enjoy all you put your pen to, whereas my maladroit sentences seem to announce my decline,’ he said to me once.

Far from it – his letters and (latterly) emails I will always prize, and was proud to receive. He also wrote, ‘We’re off to Australia on Wednesday and, like all old men going upstairs or opening the fridge, I can’t remember why.’

Usually, our correspondence revolved around artists and authors. ‘I used to haunt the Gotham Book Mart in the hope of getting a glimpse of Edward Gorey and instead I met Salvador Dali.’ Or ‘I went to Hove with John Betjeman to meet Bosie, who talked of the races. We couldn’t divert this stream of turf talk.’

Wilde often turned up in out chat. Barry didn’t appreciate Rupert Everett’s biopic. ‘It was all about the agony and

Barry Humphries at his Hampstead home, 2021

ecstasy of pillow-biting. A few of Oscar’s quips chucked in and a few totally apocryphal scenes, like in the pub where he sings The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery to a spellbound audience of Frogs in fancy dress. It’s shithouse.’

He was good at being caustic, like this on Victoria Wood: ‘The worst work I’ve ever done was when I was trying to be liked. I’m not good at it, but I’ve fooled a lot of people. Victoria was exceptionally likeable. That epithet would be a posthumous insult if it ever cropped up in my obituaries. So would be “delightful”.’

He was highly attentive to language: ‘Have you noticed the current modish word is “unprecedented”?’

Another expression he hated was “to be honest”, “perfectly honest” or “absolutely honest”, which Barry thought portended dishonesty, mendacity. ‘Oh and what about all those inclusive TV commercials? They are so conspicuously inclusive, you wonder why they don’t include Eskimos or Kalahari bushmen. Racism, I presume.’

Political correctness, of course, set him off. He’d not be told by anyone.

When he was notoriously cancelled by the Melbourne Comedy Festival a few years ago, he told me, ‘The Barry was always a silly name for a comedy award. Perhaps the Lezzo has a more accurate ring.’

He signed petitions in support of J K Rowling, who was in the soup with the transgender mob. ‘It is pitiful we have to go out on a very dangerous limb to defend the truth. By condemning the Stasi who excoriate JKR, we are now on the blacklist.’

Yet Barry never stopped working. There was, for example, what he called a ‘non-event’ with Rob Brydon at the Palladium, where he had to discuss his favourite cinematic comedy moments, introducing clips. ‘I can’t think of any, except the cabin scene in A Night at the Opera or the dwarf in Don’t Look Now. I thought the pram and governess scene in Battleship Potemkin might be risible and the green-chunder scene in The Exorcist.’

I recommended Shelley Winters swimming underwater in The Poseidon Adventure. ‘Thanks to you,

the subaqueous Shelley made an appearance,’ he reported the next day. ‘That Sheila can certainly hold her breath.’

During lockdown, Barry dodged the curfews and went to Cornwall, ‘to Zennor, where I fell off the cliff in March 1962. The helicopter rescue made the national news.’ All the rules and restrictions made him nervous. ‘Skulking about does make one feel a bit Jewish, like dodging the patrols in Vichy France.’

He never liked the sound of Hastings, where I’ve lived since 2018. ‘What’s at the end of your pier? A derelict theatre? A palm-reader? Michael Kitchen and Honeysuckle Weeks? It’s not for you, Roger. You might bump into Inspector Foyle, but otherwise it’s a depressing place, like all those other sinks on the South Coast, full of cheap B and Bs and whiffy retirement homes, reeking of old roasts, cabbage and rarely changed Depends … You’d be better off in Sidmouth.’

He then added, ‘Sydney Harbour looks very grey this morning – so I think I’ll give Larkin’s letters a miss.’

Then, in January, the bad news came. ‘God has touched the pause button on my life. Various ills and inconveniences have assailed me since before Christmas. I ended up in Sydney being devoured by an enormous Siemens scanner. The company that funded Hitler’s election had discovered tumours in my spine.

‘This desolate news is just for you. I felt somehow I should tell you. They have zapped me, and the doctors are hopeful. I’m surrounded by little nurses from Galway and Manila. The doc says I can’t go back to London until late March, but who’d be in a hurry to go back there anyway?’

In April, he said, ‘Just entered my fourth month in hospital. They say I’m nearly out, but I’ve heard that before. I loll here like an odalisque watching old TV shows – London as it was a couple of years after I got there. Not much traffic, pretty and forgotten dolly birds, sideburns, flared pants and impossible baddies. Wonderful action stuff really performed by the actors.’

It got worse. I had a heart attack; he broke his hip. ‘I’m horrified to hear your desolate news. Now is not Our Time. What a pity we’re not in the same institution. The supernatural is all we have to rely on and it never lets us down and even if it does, we are completely unaware of it.

‘With love to you and dear Anna. Your bedridden friend, Barry.’

‘The worst work I’ve ever done was when I was trying to be liked’

A card for Roger, Dieppe Opera House, 1977

Neighbour from Hell

Mr Collins was a Victorian spec builder, responsible for thousands of redbrick villas in north London’s Metroland. One of them, since 1981, is ours.

The Mr Pooters of the 1890s were proud of their vernacular features: lofty, corniced ceilings, pillared porticos, stained glass, marble fireplaces, Puginesque tiled floors.

Having a large family, we needed the space. After stripping the hall wallpaper, we found the pencilled draft of a notice:‘This House can be completed in 10 days. Decorations to suit Owner or Tenant. Apply J Collins, Athenaeum Court, Muswell Hill, N.’

We chose our Cole & Son wallpapers according to the precise date: 1896.

Sadly, no such respect had been accorded the detached houses that had stood across the road until 1969. They had been replaced – pre-‘conservation area’ label– by a high-rise block, Eleanor Rathbone House: flats for 62 elderly Jewish refugees.

Miss Eleanor Rathbone, Independent Labour MP from Liverpool, championed Holocaust survivors. In her name, this chimney-like, monolithic, flat-roofed tower of pre-cast concrete panels had risen while residents watched aghast. Storey piled on storey: 12 in all, obliterating sunlight.

Visitors to our house would say, ‘Nice house – ghastly building opposite!’

Then, one day in 1987, I heard that its architect was still alive: Walter H Marmorek, aged 75, from Vienna. He agreed to an interview for my Sunday Times column –àpropos the Prince of Wales’s ‘monstrous carbuncle’ views.

He was absolutely charming and so was his historic office in Gray’s Inn Square, its date etched in stone on the lintel over his door: 1667. But above his desk was a framed image of his monstrosity, photographed from the south: pristine white, gleaming in sun, amidst trees. Nothing like our rear vision

of its damp-stained, grey concrete lift shaft, a blot on our landscape, visible for miles.

Dr Marmorek had never been back to see his handiwork.

‘This was how we built in 1969,’ he shrugged. ‘High, and economically.’ It came in within budget (£270, 487).

‘Did it please you as much as the 17th-century buildings around you now?’ I asked.

He laughed and said that was a leading question. He even said, ‘Architects have a disadvantage, compared with doctors. We cannot bury our mistakes.’

Quite. Reinforced concrete and galvanised steel in inappropriate places can’t be forgiven, like a passing, ugly fashion: they are unavoidably visible, for all time. Architects’ names should be prominently displayed on every building. ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice,’ says Christopher Wren’s epitaph (‘If you

seek a monument, look around you’). Today, we ask desperately, ‘Quis fecit?’

‘Who did it?’

Dr Marmorek sent me a Christmas card every year thereafter. The first residents of his building have all gone, as has he – aged 100, in 2013. He was childless but his legacy lingers.

Last year, the current owners, a property firm, started rebuilding the low-rise annexe to his original tower. Our objections to their planning application were fruitless. In came the bulldozers, diggers, scaffolders and flappingplastic sheets – a year of noise and disruption.

Two storeys are now five. So we watch as another featureless slab blights our life and blocks our view.

I hear the writer Robert Byron’s words: ‘Of all the arts, architecture is the nearest to the most people, affects their happiness most closely, obtrudes on their sight most often…’

For 40 years, Valerie Grove has lived opposite a modernist horror – and now it’s spawned an extension

Valerie’s view: Eleanor Rathbone House, London N6, built in 1969, plus extension

Why are accidents so amusing? Oliver and Matt Pritchett have the answer

I’ve often wondered what members of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) do for a bit of fun.

How rollicking are their Christmas parties? I am sure they are not a patch on the larks we have at SPoMA, the Society for the Promotion of Minor Accidents.

We were founded to celebrate the joy of grazes, bruises, trips, twisted ankles and barked shins, which can, let us admit, be funny to witness and even better to talk about later.

The black eye, the exaggerated hobble, the arm, in a sling or the larger-than-necessary plaster will always get the conversation going. It can be a particularly rewarding pastime for the elderly to share. A much better topic than, say, the unseasonal weather. You can always delight your friends with your swollen upper lip and the story to go with it.

My own special party trick is to squirt one of my pills from its blister pack, then spend a minute or so crawling round on the floor looking for it, bump my head on the furniture as I haul myself to my feet, then get a dizzy spell and lurch about the room. My ungainly skating across the kitchen on a stray ice cube, ending in a collision with the stove, has also been much appreciated.

Comedy would be all the poorer if there were no minor accidents. Life would be drab if no umbrella was ever blown inside out and no pedestrian was ever drenched by a puddle and a passing car.

I am not sure if a banana skin has ever actually upended a pompous gentleman, but there is still hilarity to be found when your (or someone else’s) flailing downfall is brought about by damp autumn leaves or a discarded slice of pizza on the pavement.

New members are always welcome at Mishap House, the headquarters of SPoMA. You will feel at home as soon as

you arrive in the quaint, dimly-lit, low-beamed and highly polished entrance hall and you are sure to get a warm greeting from our Hon Sec Mrs Hardacre, known affectionately to all as Butterfingers.

Membership entitles you to join in our many risky activities, such as pulling a muscle or stubbing a toe in the Tuesday Unfitness Class. Or you may choose just to have a relaxing drink in our licensed bar, Spillages, down the steep staircase in the basement.

On many occasions, you will hear the familiar sound of cutlery, plates, saucepans and assorted vegetables hitting the floor as Mrs Hardacre holds one of her ‘drop-in’ mornings.

And on the last Friday of every month, we celebrate Minor Burns Night, a ‘show and tell’ occasion for people who have blisters from their cooker or their iron. Noteworthy scalds are also a feature.

Join SPoMA today and get a free gift. For men, it’s the society’s tie with its attractive gravy, toothpaste and raspberry-jam motif. For women, it’s a stylish, leaky pen.

So take care – but not too much.

Oliver Pritchett wrote for the Sunday Telegraph for 40 years. His son Matt is the cartoonist on the Daily Telegraph

From the next issue, The Oldie will be £5.25 - still great value but it’s even cheaper if you subscribe

Bletchley reject

By Tim Whitaker

This spring, Bletchley Park celebrated World Poetry Day by recalling notable poets who served there. Among them were Herbert Read and Vernon Watkins, who turned their creative talents to codebreaking during the war.

One poet firmly rejected was Philip Larkin. Sixty years later, he’s still firmly persona non grata at Bletchley.

How Bletchley recruited staff remains a mystery. It was informal and eccentric – essentially down to whether you were ‘right’ for the job. Larkin should have fitted the bill – public school and Oxford, with intellectual and librarian attributes.

Larkin (1922-85) was at Oxford when his compatriots were enlisting in the services. Declared unfit for service on grounds of bad eyesight, he was left in a career quandary. The natural route was the civil service.

He applied as a ‘temporary assistant principal’, saying, ‘I don’t know what it entails, and I don’t much care … the job will probably be loathsome’.

Rejected, Larkin explained, ‘I’ve not got a civil-service job. I went for an interview, and I suppose they didn’t like the look of me. That’s fine, because I didn’t like the look of them either and had been dreading the arrival of some footling 9-6 job in an out-of-theway place.’

But Larkin made an impression.

Writing to Kingsley Amis on 1st September 1943, he revealed, ‘I got a letter on Thursday, saying I had not been recommended for appointment. This makes me think I must have offended them terribly in some way…

‘Soon afterwards, another letter came saying they had sent my name etc to the Foreign Office who wanted people for a branch – “40-50 miles from London”.

‘This will be hackwork of the worst order, I imagine, but there’s no interview attached to it – which is just as well, for at interviews I must obviously show them that I don’t give a zebra’s turd for any kind of job, and which militates against me.’

Explaining more to a friend, he wrote, ‘They have forwarded my name to the Foreign Office, who sent me a form to fill up this morning, enquiring what languages I knew. Ha ha. I’ve got a good mind to put Anglo-Saxon down. Trouble is, I don’t even know that.

‘Or perhaps I might arrogantly reply that a man who is master of his own language needs no other.’

Describing his Bletchley interview to Kingsley Amis, he said, ‘Anyway, I saw some Admiralty people who were very nice, and gave me teas and a cigarette, but couldn’t promise anything. Pity.

‘Then on Wednesday I went to Bletchley and heard about the work you do there. “Of course, yah’re workin against the clock all the tahm … one day orf everah seven … one week everah three months … Christmas, Eastah, Bank Holiday – they don’t exist… Billets … evah been billeted? No… Very difficult … overcrowded … spread out all ovah the countryside … special ’buses and trains to bring you in … we work shifts. 12-9, 9-4, 4-12 midnight. Think your eyes can stend workin’ by artificial light…

‘Salary £260 [the Admiralty had been £300 plus war bonus] min. We’ll let you know within the next few days.’

Larkin came away singularly

unimpressed, ‘I’m not sure I want to know. I think I should very soon want to go away from that place and not go back to it again. In fact, I felt like that when I went away from it on Wednesday. I felt that soon after I started work there, I should be put in a wooden box and lowered into a hole dug in the earth.’

His rejection spurred mixed emotions, outlined in a letter to Kingsley Amis: ‘The reasons for this gloom are several … they include receiving a letter saying that Bletchley doesn’t want me.

‘Now of course this is of course very fine as far as it goes: as I said before, I didn’t want to go to B, but there is something humiliating about being turned down a second time.’

Chased by the Ministry of Labour, Larkin landed a job as the librarian for Wellington, Shropshire.

When Larkin’s centenary was celebrated last year, I thought this story might interest Bletchley Park for its glossy magazine, Ultra. But this was clearly very much off brand.

My rejection letter stated there were ‘more positive and informative stories to include, instead of an article in which Bletchley Park is being described in such a negative way by a well-known poet, who only briefly visited the site’.

Worse still, ‘he fundamentally did not want to work here.’

We don’t have the notes from Larkin’s interview – only his letters. Of course, it’s the curmudgeonly Larkin with very contradictory views about work. But we’ll never know whether he’d have been a Bletchley success story, cutting years off the war.

For the time being, anyway, there won’t be a display board at Bletchley featuring him and other rejected notables.

Tim Whitaker is a member of the Larkin Society and the Friends of Bletchley Park. His mother served in Hut 3 from 1942 to ’44. Letters are taken from Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985, ed Anthony Thwaite Enigma machine: Philip Larkin

During the war, Philip Larkin was keen to become a code-breaker. Despite his brains, he didn’t make the grade.

In the swim

How to build a swimming pool this summer for under £1,000.

By Matthew Faulkner

Morning dips, leisurely lengths, reading on the lilo, evening cocktails… Everyone needs a swimming pool every now and then.

But even if you have the space for one, the installation costs can be punishing and the costs of heating the thing crippling. To add insult to injury, a swimming pool doesn’t even add much to the value of your house; a measly seven per cent according to commentators (much less than a tennis court, apparently).

Small wonder that what starts out as a good idea all too often ends up in the Maybe One Day file – and we opt instead for a fortnight abroad, where we can enjoy someone else’s pool with none of the downsides.

That’s what I thought last year – but then it started to eat away at me. ‘How hard can it be?’ I thought and, not being someone easily deterred, I set to it. What could possibly go wrong?

With wife and children indulgently rolling their eyes, I took the metaphorical plunge and contacted our local Man with Digger. We broke ground where once there had been a vegetable patch – three raised beds which over the years had produced scarcely so much as a potato salad and a few bowls of borscht. Even if the whole project were to fail, the veg would not be missed.

Half a day later, we had a hole in the ground. Not enormous, but long enough for a few good strokes, and the rest was left to me. Next, the heavy lifting of posts and railway sleepers to build up the sides.

A rough application of Pythagoras’s theorem ensured all the corners were right angles, more or less – easy enough – but keeping it level was more of a challenge. Without fancy lasers or even a long spirit level, water spilling off one edge was a constant possibility – and an infinity pool was not part of the plan.

Enter the water-filled transparent hose as a spirit level; a rudimentary device but accurate pretty much to the millimetre. A few bags of Postcrete and a

quantity of bolts later and it was done: square and level.

Keeping the water in the pool was something of a leap of faith. While you can buy a proper ‘bag liner’ for £800 or so, this went against the spirit of the enterprise. I went for a large, heavy-duty tarpaulin, the sort of thing you might use to cover a caravan, capped with a course of decking.

An assortment of carpet offcuts from the tip – some far too nice to be buried in the Dorset clay – provided essential protection against roots and stones.

And now for the tech bit. All pools need a plughole. The installation of a single pipe and valve did require a bit of head-scratching – once it was covered up, there would be no going back.

The local pool company sold me the necessary pipework for £50 or so, wishing me well and pushing their full-service brochures on me. I ignored these, totting up my savings while asking myself yet again whether all this was a good idea.

The cognoscenti will note with alarm the lack of filter and pump. True, without them there will be bugs galore checking in and not checking out. But the upsides are compelling: a few minutes every day with sieve in hand will revive your hunter-gatherer instincts and reacquaint

you with joys you last experienced when pond-dipping at school.

Should neither of these qualify as attractions, don’t be deterred: pumps and filters are not prohibitively expensive – but installing them will definitely affect the bottom line and add days to your build.

And what about algae, scourge of pools and ponds from time immemorial? They are organisms that thrive on sunshine and still water. Left to their own devices, algae can turn water from clear to dark green in months, if not weeks.

Until the Floatron was invented, that is. Using solar power, this amazing gadget floats around ionising the water in a way that’s lethal to algae and its photosynthetic cousins.

Don’t ask me exactly how it works but, with half a can of chlorine thrown in every now and then, our water remained crystal clear for the whole of 2022. Genius!

I don’t expect our new pool has added even one per cent to the value of our property, but we love it. It is not a flashy affair; it is a bit chilly once the summer heat wanes. You can do only six full strokes per length and you may meet a bug or two mid-stroke.

But we have a pool. Construction costs were under £1,000, and it costs nothing to heat and next to nothing to maintain. Now for the tennis court…

Matthew (above) after building his Dorset pool (left)

Teenage anxiety and depression are soaring. Charlotte Metcalf applauds a new programme that looks into the causes and cures

Growing pains

We might grumble, somewhat ignorantly, about the dismaying effects of social media and mobile phones on the younger generation. But oldies are fully justified in being alarmed by soaring levels of anxiety and depression among their teenage children and grandchildren.

Even if you’re rich, there aren’t nearly enough therapists equipped to deal with anorexia, self-harm, addiction and other serious illnesses and problems.

For those unable to afford private health care, the NHS has CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services). Having attempted to navigate them myself, I know waiting lists are lamentably long. Fewer than 40 per cent of young people can access mental-health support.

This severe, nationwide crisis has escalated partly because UK health research allocates just 5.5 per cent of its budget to investigating it, four times less than it does to cancer research.

And treatment for young people is based mostly on research in adults. No one has the answers or even seems to know the right questions to ask. The current curriculum fails to address the problem in the classroom.

There is, however, cause for hope with a new initiative, reassuringly led by scientists at Oxford University.

BrainWaves, run by a Scientific Steering Group, chaired by John Gallacher, Professor of Cognitive Health at Oxford, is a creative, transformative response to the crisis.

It comprises the largest, most comprehensive ever study of wellbeing of 50,000 students aged 11-19, hosted by the University of Swansea. Any oldies frustrated by incomprehensible and ineffectual waffle will be relieved to see such sturdy academic foundations, summed up by the BrainWaves strapline, Healthy Young Minds through Science.

The programme has been developed

Henry Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton

in tandem with The Day, the leading publisher of news and critical literacy content for secondary schools. Again, how heartening that an outfit that genuinely cares about literacy is involved. The Day publishes an online daily newspaper for young people, encouraging debate about serious contemporary issues.It also creates teaching resources and lessons, which it delivers to schools – as the name suggests – daily.

The BrainWaves remit is to gather an unprecedented amount of reliable data on teenagers in a thoroughly ethical way. It then uses all Oxford’s scientific might to analyse it and produce effective, empirical, therapeutic interventions and educational resources at scale.

They will create lessons, free to every school, that will include analysis of the teenage brain, sleep, nutrition and diet, stress and anxiety, resilience and the role of research.

The result will be a research-based curriculum, firmly rooted in science, that provides important knowledge about wellbeing and mental health.

The ultimate aim is to build a complete programme of free mentalhealth education, firmly rooted in science, ensuring that schools become environments in which students can thrive emotionally as well as mentally.

In September, full recruitment for the study begins. But it’s already taken three years of painstaking research and academic groundwork to launch this ambitious project.

It’s been possible only thanks to funding raised by a group of founding friends and many concerned parents, led by Princess Dora Loewenstein, herself an Honorary Member of the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford. In just a year, private individuals and family foundations donated £1 million.

Now these friends have rallied and laid on on a spectacular fundraising dinner, at Bridgewater House overlooking Green Park, attended by an array of politicians and concerned individuals.

The house has been in the hands of the Latsis family since 1981 and is not open to the public, though its well-known façade has appeared as Marchmain House in Brideshead Revisited and Grantham House in Downton Abbey.

Sarah Montague, long-time presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme and The World at One, spoke movingly at the event. As a mother of four girls, she is well aware of the challenges facing the younger generation and how they seem to be struggling with an epidemic of anxiety and depression.

As she says, ‘Something is happening with our children. We need to know what. That’s what BrainWaves is about – providing research that is long overdue.’

So far, there have been no solutions or adequate co-ordinated responses to the dramatic escalation of this crisis. But now the technology, experts and scientists are in place and poised to begin the next phase of the research process.

The dinner raised close to half a million and if money continues to be raised, this could be the breakthrough that transforms the entire teenage mental-health landscape.

We can only welcome and applaud such a concerted, gigantic step – not before time – that our top scientists are finally taking.

Music hall’s last act

In the winter of 1974, aged 29, I was playing Archie Rice’s son in The Entertainer, directed by the play’s author, John Osborne.

Max Wall, then 66, was playing Archie. We had to wait in the wings, stage left, during the interval. As the play started again, the lights came up and the dialogue started. Max told me he had a headache.

He was smaller than me, although, on his own on stage, he could look huge. I held the nape of his neck gently in my right hand and rubbed his temples on either side between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand.

The skin on his forehead rippled slightly and Max closed his eyes. It was like holding the head of the Sphinx.

We heard the cue for our entrance and walked upstage towards the light. As we were about to enter the scene, Max muttered wearily, ‘Course, the trouble with this game is you’re only as good as your last performance.’ He paused. ‘It’s a bit like marriage, really.’

And then into the light and our stage family – the only family he had at the time.

In 1966, I’d also worked with Max in Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry at the Royal Court, designed by David Hockney. Max was Ubu, the King. I played his parasolbearer and my task was to replicate whatever Max did with his legs.

He was 56; I was 21. I was hardpressed to match his contortions. John Cleese happily admits to Max’s being the inspiration for his Ministry of Funny Walks in Monty Python.

The idea for The Entertainer came out of an illustrious meeting in 1957. While Marilyn Monroe was filming The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier, Arthur Miller let Olivier know he wanted to see Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court.

Olivier had already seen it and hadn’t liked it, but arranged to go again with Miller. After the performance, Osborne

met Miller and Olivier, who asked Osborne if he could write a play for him.

The Entertainer was the outcome. It gave Olivier a new lease of life. The great classical actor became a great modern actor. He triumphed as Archie Rice in London, on Broadway and then in a great 1960 film directed by Tony Richardson.

I loved The Entertainer. It brought back memories of my grandfather. He came from the East End and was full of

references to George Robey and Fred Karno and his travelling comedy troupe, part circus, part music hall, which took Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel and a stilt-walker called Cary Grant to America. Three geniuses.

As a schoolboy in Camberwell in the 1950s, I saw the last days of this world. Music hall became variety and a handful of the comics had spots on the television. There was Beryl Reid, who played a

When Kenneth Cranham starred with Max Wall, he became friends with the great tragicomic clown of the age

‘Nobody’s eyes were sadder’: Max Wall and His Image, 1981, by Maggi Hambling

Brummie schoolgirl who kept mice in her knickers. And Terry Scott, as an awful schoolboy who scowled at the camera, saying, ‘My dad’s rotten. Our dog had puppies and he drowned them… He wouldn’t let me drown any.’

And then there was Max Wall as Professor Wallofski. These performances enlivened a world where television was intermittent and Sundays were endless.

All three of them were influences on me. In 1975, I was the last of Beryl Reid’s Mr Sloanes

(pictured, above right) in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane

My grandfather admired my imitation of Terry Scott. And I perfected the art of extending my wrists to reach the piano in the style of Wallofski.

During rehearsals, John Osborne talked of those music-hall legends Marie Lloyd and Max Miller as if they were his adored friends.

Marie Lloyd had looked after Max Wall when he was a boy, and both his parents, Jock and Stella Lorimer, played the halls. Max was born Max Lorimer in 1908, later taking an abbreviated version of the surname of his stepfather, Harry Wallace, to become Max Wall.

Osborne let Max put in a joke of his own into The Entertainer: ‘Take my wife – puh-lease, take my wife!’

John couldn’t stop laughing and it stayed in. The line had a particular echo for Max. His first wife, Marion Pola, and his five children wanted nothing to do with him. He’d taken up with a Miss Great Britain.

Nobody’s eyes were sadder than Max’s. Marie Lloyd was, funnily enough,

entranced by Dan Leno’s sad eyes. When they shared a show, she would always watch him from the wings. Max heard some of Dan Leno’s old records and was startled by the similarity of Leno’s patter to much of his own material.

Max had the good fortune to spend time with the artist Maggi Hambling, who painted and drew a wonderful series of portraits of him.

Maggi is Colette meets Burlington Bertie. She went to his stage shows and even helped him learn his lines for Waiting for Godot, which became her favourite play.

To have a host of Maggi’s portraits and to be buried in Highgate Cemetery – as Max was, on his death in 1990, aged 82 – is grand and apt.

One night in Greenwich, Max and I were alone after the show. It was my 30th birthday and there were no trains back into town. He drove us to Covent Garden in his Hillman Minx. Maggi Hambling told me he once had a goldplated Rolls-Royce.

In Goodwin’s Court, he took me to a Chinese restaurant with a window full of splayed orange ducks. He told me wonderful stories of his travels: as a comic dancer, he found there was no language barrier.

In Paris, he worked at the Casino de Paris in a revue, with Maurice Chevalier. He had a girlfriend, Susie, older than him and gorgeous – maybe on the game. She wore silk stockings and they were lovers whenever he was in Paris.

In Germany, he was free to study Grock (1880-1959), the Swiss clown and physical comedian who mesmerised his

audience. As with Max, his act knew no language barrier. He came to England but when they approached him to claim income tax, he disappeared, never to return again!

Max shared the bill at the Palladium with Frank Sinatra. After the show had been on some time, the management told him he had to curtail his act by six minutes. He worked out at what point to stop, walked to the front of the stage and, placing one foot on the footlights, said,

‘There was a young man from Dundee,

Who got stung on the neck by a bee.

When asked if it hurt,

He said, “Not very much.

It can do it again if it likes.”

Goodnight, folks.’

Dan Leno would have been proud.

Max’s good fortune was that Greenwich Theatre had a panto being rehearsed and, for two weeks after the close of The Entertainer, there was no evening show.

So Max put on a one-man show, Aspects of Wall, which then transferred to the Garrick Theatre and brought him back to the centre of things.

I saw it many times. The last time I took choreographer Eleanor Fazan, an elegant, joyous woman known as Fiz.

After the show, we went to Rules restaurant in Covent Garden, where the staff remembered Max from when he’d been in The Pajama Game at the London Coliseum. Max was very taken with Fiz and she was delighted to be with him. A great night – and the last time I saw him.

Max’s second wife, 26 years his junior, wrote a note when she left him, saying, ‘You will end up in one room, alone, with nothing.’

Well, she was wrong. Max collapsed and died in his favourite restaurant, Simpson’s in the Strand, where he was entertaining two friends and the staff. The last thing he saw was a joyous, loving audience.

I recently saw a documentary on Max on Talking Pictures TV. The last sequence of the film was him on stage, facing his audience in his Wallofski wig, making bourgeois utterances of no meaning whatsoever.

The audience was delirious and vocal, expressing their happiness for him and for the fact that they were present.

Dan Leno would have been proud and Grock would have been mesmerised. The night of the splayed ducks was a highlight of my life.

Kenneth Cranham is in Angel with Rafe Spall later this year

Cranham (second left) with Wall (left) in The Entertainer, 1974; with Beryl Reid, 1975

Top of the bill in 1959

Where’s the corned beef?

It fed the wartime troops and was a ration-book staple – and Trevor Grove’s father used to make it in Argentina

There is a corner of a supermarket shelf that is for ever wartime England.

It is the corned-beef section. There you will find trapezium-shaped tins, each with a small metal key stuck to its lid or side. The label shows a slice of pinky-brown, speckled meat accompanied by a rampant lettuce leaf or, in some cases, a fried egg.

Printed in small letters alongside this not very appetising image, no matter which the brand, are the words ‘Serving suggestion’.

Younger shoppers might be puzzled by the small metal key. Oldie-readers know what to do. You detach the key from its soldered fastening, locate a tiny tin tongue on the side of the trapezium, slide the tongue into the slit at the tip of the key, and then turn. As you turn, a thin strip of metal rolls up on the end of your key until, hey presto, the can is cleft in two. There emerges a slab of what looks like compressed dog food plus a slightly sulphureous whiff.

Why do the corned-beef producers of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina all feel the need to stick so exactly to this formula?

Possibly it is a marketing ruse, a canny(!) example of retro chic. It suggests unchanging quality and traditional values. But my guess is the manufacturers believe this is a food product on its last legs, aimed at a dwindling band of consumers on theirs. The loyalty of the latter is the former’s chief selling point.

In its heyday, Fray Bentos promoted itself boldly, if not very imaginatively, as ‘The beef with the delicious flavour… Choice beef scientifically cooked.’

But I can’t remember when I last saw an ad for this wholesome, nutritious and relatively cheap foodstuff – surely just the thing for the hard-pressed folk of food-bank Britain.

Historically, salt beef in its unminced, unboiled form was the staple of seamen under sail and slaves in the West Indies.

In the last century, cooked and canned, it fed the troops in both world wars. It nourished ration-book Blighty.

And it’s still good value today. A 340g tin of corned beef sells at about £3. It’s almost pure protein – just beef and salt. The word ‘corned’ comes from the treatment of the beef with large-grained rock salt, also known as corns of salt.

I can vouch for these qualities because my father used to make the stuff. Most of the beef exported from the Frigorifico Anglo plant in Buenos Aires, which he ran during the 1950s and ’60s, was chilled or frozen. But the market for tinned, corned beef, which had developed during the First World War, still flourished. Cans of it shuffled off the assembly line in hundreds per hour.

I remember as a boy in Argentina going round the plant and staring fearfully into colossal vats of bubbling bits of beef that had, only half an hour earlier, been a herd of lowing steers, just off the trucks and trains from the Pampas. It was not the horror of living animals being reduced to this simmering stew that struck me. It was the fear of falling in and ending up as the centrepiece of some distant English family’s high tea.

For the truth is we never ate it ourselves. And most Argentines didn’t even know what it was, since they had more fresh beef than they could eat.

But, years later, when I was sent over here to boarding school and had to live on a diet of extreme awfulness, I grew to think fondly of corned beef: it was one of the few foodstuffs the school kitchens were prepared to leave alone and serve, so to speak, au naturel

True, back in 1964, an outbreak of typhoid in Aberdeen (which caused three deaths) was traced to a contaminated tin from my homeland. But, as an

impoverished undergraduate, I was not put off my corned-beef and mustard sandwiches.

The problem with cooking corned beef is that it tends to break up and go mushy. But then there are occasions, such as a wet camping holiday or a children’s winter supper, when a hot, quickly prepared meal of broken-up, mushy meat is ideal.

The best-known corned-beef dish is hash – a good descriptive word for a simple fry-up of corned beef, chopped onions and diced potatoes. You don’t really need a recipe.

Constance Spry, co-inventor of coronation chicken at the last Coronation in 1953, has two variations for what she calls ‘a good American classic’. One proposes the addition of pickled walnuts, the other pickled mushrooms. The Jamaican version, known as bully beef, includes garlic, sweet corn and Scotch bonnet peppers.

My own twist? Cumin seeds, sultanas and chopped parsley.

That’s what I call serving suggestions.

Trevor Grove’s memoir, No One Taught Me to Tango: Memories of Anglo-Argentina (Eyewear Publishing), is out now

We’ll eat again: serving suggestion

End of the road

The last episode of On the Buses aired 50 years ago. Andrew Roberts salutes its mixture of cheap sets, nylon shirts and marital angst

On Boxing Day 1973, a visit to the cinema often meant faded velour upholstery, reeking of Benson & Hedges, and ads for a restaurant offering ‘a taste of the East only five minutes from this cinema’.

Finally, after an Austin Allegro commercial and the B-film Fear Is the Key, came the main attraction: Holiday on the Buses

London Weekend Television first transmitted On the Buses (OTB), an everyday story of Reg Varney’s driver Stan Butler, in 1969.

It initiated a franchise that included comic strips, board games, singalong LPs guaranteed to empty a room – and three films made by Hammer.

The studio was then in considerable financial difficulties – On the Buses, the first of the films, had a budget of a mere £97,000 and an almost guaranteed market. The production supervisor Roy Skeggs informed Hammer’s MD, Sir James Carreras, ‘I can’t stand the thing on television,’ only to be told his options were On the Buses or dismissal.

Hammer released On the Buses in August 1971, but decided against a press screening. It was a wise plan;the Monthly Film Bulletin referred to the script’s ‘idiot sexuality and rabid anti-feminism’.

However, it made more than £400,000 in just five days, eventually exceeding £1 million in box-office receipts. The popularity of OTB resulted in two sequels, 1972’s Mutiny and Holiday; they were all prime examples of that semi-forgotten 1970s cinematic trope –film versions of situation comedies.

The 1950s marked several radio and TV film adaptations, but the genre really dates from 1969. The success of the cinematic Till Death Us Do Part led to several spin-offs over the next 11 years, with the attraction of viewers’ being able to see their favourite characters in colour.

By 1970, most comedy shows were broadcast in the full spectrum, but black-and-white sets remained the norm until 1977.

OTB focused on the Butler household and workplace in an atmosphere of utter grimness. One of Hammer’s poster ideas

was ‘From Telly Laughs to Belly Laughs’, but the reality was the hideous marriage of Olive and Arthur Rudge, Stan’s sister and brother-in-law.

As Oldie contributor Roger Lewis described their relationship, ‘How did people laugh at this? It is Strindberg.’ Yet cinemagoers paid 50 new pence to revel in Technicolor visions of domestic abuse.

Hammer released the OTB films for the Christmas and summer holiday markets, although their visions of marital angst, bleak postwar housing estates and rusting Vauxhall Victors seem the antithesis of jollity.

With Mutiny on the Buses (1972), Kevin Brennan’s manager is a study in barely suppressed hatred. A safari-park sequence features a dispirited lioness considering the indigestion consequences of eating the cast.

Holiday on the Buses (1973), like several sitcom films, has a vacation setting. But the location work, at Pontins of Prestatyn, only accentuates the picture’s sheer cheapness.

The film stock looks as though it was Sellotaped together, but it is wholly fitting for a nightmare vision of Bri-Nylon shirts, Jason King hairstyles and an air of forced enjoyment. The scenes in the Butler chalet rival Mike Leigh for sheer bleakness, and the Italian chef’s attack on the smaller and much older Varney has all the inherent comedy of Get Carter

As with the worst of the Carry On

series, the cast’s expertise saved the OTB pictures from being entirely unwatchable.

Varney’s starring role in 1972’s The Best Pair of Legs in the Business, as an ageing holiday-camp entertainer, makes one regret no one cast him as Archie Rice. As Stan’s mother, Doris Hare brought decades of theatrical experience to Buses. Bob Grant and Stephen Lewis, who played the conductor Jack Harper and ‘Blakey’ the inspector, were actor-writers from Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop.

Most notably, the talents of Anna Karen and Michael Robbins made the Rudges a horrifically plausible couple.

A further key to the films’ popularity is wish fulfilment. Christopher Fowler referred to Jack and Stan’s adventures as ‘sex farces about two gargoyle busmen trying to shag hefty “dollies” ’.

But if female leads in Holiday could fall for Varney and Grant’s unconventional-looking heroes, then, with luck, that applied to any middleaged male cinema patron.

Nor did On the Buses make the error of siding with the management. A British Board of Film Classification examiner wrote, in mild incredulity, about the first film, ‘It does not appear you often have time to drive a bus, but, if you do, you prove expert at throwing passengers off the bus or leaving them behind.’

By contrast, Carry On at Your Convenience (1971), released within months of the original Buses picture, supported the Establishment and initially lost money.

Hammer planned the possibly ironically titled Fun on the Buses, but it never reached fruition. Holiday proved the least popular of the trilogy, partly because the television series concluded in May 1973 – 50 years ago.

The films continue to surface on the small screen, but Holiday on the Buses should be viewed in a crumbling ABC cinema, with a bored Diana Dors lookalike usherette selling lethal hot dogs.

Only in such an environment can you appreciate ‘comic’ scenarios that are not so much telegraphed as signposted to the audience. Plus the unforgettable sight of Reg Varney in woollen swimming trunks.

Bus boy: Reg Varney with Sandra Bryant

Prince Harry’s got one but the King and Prince William haven’t. Liz Hodgkinson says men shouldn’t wear wedding rings

The ring cycle

Should married men wear wedding rings? At the Coronation, an interesting game to play was spot the wedding ring on the male participants and guests.

Among British royalty, King Charles, Prince William and the Duke of Edinburgh weren’t wearing one but Prince Harry, the royal rebel, was. The late Prince Philip never wore a wedding ring either.

Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, husband of Princess Anne, doesn’t wear a ring, but her daughter Zara’s husband, Mike Tindall, sports a big, thick band.

When it comes to male heads of state, the situation is mixed. President Macron wears a wide wedding ring, as does Barack Obama, but current and past American presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump have left their ring fingers bare.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has a wedding band, but Boris Johnson doesn’t.

In my youth, you rarely saw a wedding ring on a man. It was considered common, working-class or, at best, a northern or foreign custom. You never noticed one on professional, middle-class or upper-class men who, if they wore a ring at all, wore a signet on their little finger, as does King Charles.

Otherwise, jewellery on men was considered vulgar. It never for a minute occurred to my husband to wear a ring when we married in 1965. That would have seemed extremely naff.

Wedding rings on men were pretty much a class-indicator until the 1960s and ’70s, when British men began wearing chains and bracelets, copying their Continental counterparts. This was the era of the dreaded ‘medallion man’. Male wedding rings followed the fashion for men to be loaded down with jewellery of all kinds. When Prince William declined to wear a ring at his 2012 wedding, it made national news.

David Miller, director of etiquette guide Debrett’s at the time, said, ‘It used

to be uncommon for men to wear wedding rings, but it is now becoming accepted practice.’

That is true. I see wedding rings on men of all ages and classes, including men who should know better. It is now rarer for a man not to advertise his marital status in this way.

Some family men, including my two sons (among them The Oldie’s Town Mouse), are holding out. Will, my younger son, reckons that a wedding ring on a man says, ‘I may be ghastly, but somebody wanted me.’

Perhaps my age is showing, but I still feel queasy when I see a big, fat wedding ring on a man – especially a very ugly man, as it makes me wonder what on earth his wife saw in him in the first place. If he isn’t wearing a ring, such thoughts never enter my head. I find wedding rings on men a distraction and a sign that they are under the thumb and consigned to petticoat government.

It was always different for women. In the olden days, a wedding ring was a symbol of ownership – you had been ‘bought’ by a man. It also, crucially, indicated that your children were legitimate.

A pivotal moment in Margaret Drabble’s 1965 novel, The Millstone, has the unmarried heroine, Rosamund,

having just given birth, looking round the maternity ward to see which of the other new mothers is wearing a wedding ring. She is astonished to find that one young mother, who looks about 16, is married, as shown by her ring. Wedding rings dated back to the days when married women enjoyed a higher status than single women. It was a moment of pride for a young woman to flash a shiny engagement ring at her friends. When the wedding ring was clamped on her finger and she became a Mrs, her triumph was complete. Marriage then was an important rite of passage. Now couples live together for five years or so before getting married, and single mothers are no longer stigmatised.

Since gay marriage became legal in many countries, gay men often exchange rings at their weddings, although I’m told they are frequently worn on the third finger of the right hand rather than the left. Wearing the ring on the left hand goes back to the days when it was believed that the vein on this finger went directly to the heart.

When marriage was supposed to be for life, the ring was a sign of permanence in a relationship. In these days of divorce and multiple marriages, wedding rings may be put on and taken off several times. One man friend, on his second marriage, said, ‘No to rings, especially if you have to cut off your finger to remove it from a previous marriage. You can always put a ring on a chain round your neck if you have to be reminded that you are married.

‘Men’s rings are just daft things to keep jewellers in business.’

I can’t help agreeing with him.

Lord of the Ring: newly married Prince Harry, 2018

Handbags – as crucial as glad rags

As a little girl, you have a pencil case. It is a source of unalloyed pride and joy. And then you become a bigger girl and you have a handbag, and this more often delivers status and separation anxiety.

Status because the choice of bag speaks volumes about our finances, and some women care about this. And separation because it would be a disaster if the bag went missing. We need everything in there.

We may need fewer things in our handbags than we used to need. The iPhone can perform the wallet, the camera, the diary, the address book, the reading matter and the mirror functions. But we still need to carry make-up and keys at the very least, and often intimate hygiene requisites and vapes or cigarettes.

So we have to keep wondering where our handbag is, as well as whether it is an appropriate bag – and not one that will finish off your social ambitions at a stroke.

That’s what happened with the ‘ludicrously capacious’ Burberry bag carried by cousin Greg’s potential girlfriend, Bridget (pictured), in Succession. It was so badly judged that it was enough to damn the girl outright as an unsuitable addition to the family.

It’s much more elegant to be seen carrying the minimum of stuff. Zara Tindall was one of many at the Coronation carrying the minuscule Strathberry clutch (£550 from Saks Fifth Avenue), which comes in a variety of colourways and has a chain so you can use it as a crossover bag so it’s hands-free.

The trouble is that many partygoers need a capacious bag. We need one to carry a change of shoes, for one thing. Anyone who makes the mistake of wearing painfully high shoes to a party, without taking a change of shoes, does it only the once. As soon as you are out of sight of the party zone, you make the

switch into ballet pumps or other flatties for the journey home.

If we are not able to drive, we need to carry gym kit, laptops, chargers, toothbrush and -paste, cleansing cream and pads, to say nothing of sun cream and sunglasses. Large, roomy bags are also ecologically friendly – you can put groceries in there without having to use a plastic bag.

But how can we avoid looking like bagwomen?

The 1960s It Girl heiress Suna Portman was the first girl to carry a basket rather than a handbag. It was

more casual and showed she was unstuffy. Baskets made from sisal or beautifully-woven, recycled plastic from Nairobi rubbish dumps have been popular.

But now statement – or bankstatement – capacious handbags have made a comeback. Women know how much some of these bags cost – the new Mulberry costs £1,500, the price of an entry-level statement bag.

Who would flaunt something that costs more than the average person spends on their electricity bill for a whole year? The subliminal message is that either they or their husband must be successful and therefore worth doing business with.

You can lay down a limited-edition handbag, like wine in a cellar. Twenty years later, it will have matured into something worth substantially more than you originally paid for it.

There is no such thing as the perfect handbag. It needs to be lightweight yet not flop over limply. It can’t be leather because leather is heavy and can’t be washed. The best bag I have ever had was my father’s top-hat box made of super-elegant, reinforced leather. It allowed me to carry all the impedimenta I needed, and best of all it could double as a seat.

There is another option. Friends of mine went to a party given by a superrich host in a rented architectural folly. They were amazed that it had been so badly organised that there was no cloakroom or anywhere to leave their bags and coats.

As they stood outside smoking, they realised why. Most of the other guests swept up in limos and stalked into the party carrying only a mobile phone. They left everything else in the limo – to be summoned back by mobile when the partygoer had had enough.

The ultimate accessory – the car that doubles as a handbag.

The more you spend, the smaller they must be

Too big for her boots: Bridget’s faux pas

You can lay down a limited-edition handbag, like wine in a cellar

Do mention the Mughals

Narendra Modi, the Indian PM, is censoring a great civilisation

Narendra Modi seems to have been reading his Orwell.

You can imagine the Hindu Nationalist Indian Prime Minister underlining the slogan from Nineteen Eighty-Four ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past’ – and nodding in agreement.

Thus the recent announcement that Indian history textbooks, under the direction of the government, have been reissued with some alarming cuts.

Previously, the editorialising had focused on softening the role of Hindu extremists in the assassination of Gandhi. It played down the remarkable fact that, after his death, communal violence actually decreased, as if the newly independent India had stared into the abyss of civil war and drawn back.

The latest interventions focused on the Mughals, the dynasty (we used to call them Moguls) who ruled India from the 16th to the 19th century. While reports that the Mughals have been ‘left out’ of the new curriculum are exaggerated, their historical role has been diminished.

This sounds like pretty bad history. It’s hard to overestimate the importance of the Mughal dynasty in India – and even in global terms. The descendants, via Babur, of the great Mongol conqueror Timur (made famous for English speakers in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great), the Muslim Mughals ruled a territory that stretched from Afghanistan to the Bay of Bengal.

Rulers such as Akbar (1542-1605) became fabulously wealthy through a combination of military strength, intelligence and political flexibility. It was to the Mughals that James I sent his first ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe. He was

duly overwhelmed by the magnificence and munificence on show at their court.

The most famous relic of the Mughal age is the Taj Mahal, the monument to his wife from Akbar’s love-struck – and grief-stricken – grandson, Shah Jahan.

The idea of leaving all that out – or even allowing it to play second fiddle to a myth of Hindu purity – seems crazy.

The physical relics of the Mughals are impressive enough. As well as the Taj Mahal, there is Delhi’s Red Fort (another Shah Jahan commission) and Akbar’s lost city of Fatehpur Sikri, with one of the largest mosques in India.

Historian Sunil Khilnani compares it to a ‘tent encampment, except that animal skins and wood frames have been replaced with the permanence of stone and marble, carved with great skill by local craftsmen. It’s like touring the physical manifestation of a mind.’

But, just as important – and perhaps this is why Akbar and his successors get Modi and his lieutenants’ backs up – is the Mughals’ tolerance. Khilnani writes, ‘His [Akbar’s] reign is often used as a rebuttal to Hindu nationalist arguments that Muslim rule in India was an unremittingly dark age for Hindus, and as a reminder to conservative Muslims of Islam’s capacity for enlightened accommodation.’

Those two last words aren’t often applied to India’s current regime, which depends more on divide and rule.

British dealings with the Mughals underwent a complete reversal over a period of nearly 200 years. While Thomas Roe was a patronised petitioner at the court of Jahangir, the trade permissions he did negotiate were the beginning of British encroachment and eventual conquest. The British kept the

Mughals as nominal rulers, always preferring empire by proxy if possible.

But when Bahadur Shah got mixed up in the Indian Mutiny in 1857, he was removed to exile in Burma, and the great ruling dynasty ended.

Any British observer speaking up for keeping the Mughals in India’s story, it follows, is hardly an imperial apologist.

The Mughals’ interaction with the Europeans, and with Britain in particular, tells the whole sorry story of the humbling of a great power by a ruthless interloper. Not that the Mughals themselves would have complained, as that was how they had come to rule India, too. But to leave them out or reduce their impact is to falsify the whole narrative of Indian history.

You might think that one thing worse than politicians interfering in history is foreign journalists pontificating on other nations’ ways of teaching that history.

But I use the Mughal case as an egregious recent example of something we’re grimly familiar with here, too. If Indian ministers shouldn’t be rewriting their country’s history, nor should British ministers be doing the same at home.

I may have views about the reliability of critical race theory, for example, but I don’t want the arbiter of its use to be the Secretary of State for the Department for Business and Trade. I don’t want the Secretary of State for Education to rewrite the history curriculum as Our Island Story

And if there needs to be a conversation about ‘decolonising’ the curriculum, I’d rather academics, educators, parents and pupils had it, rather than being told what to think by politicians.

We don’t want to end up back with Orwell. He said his historical education was ‘a series of unrelated, unintelligible, but – in some way that was never explained to us – important facts’.

There’s more to history than that.

david horspool

Akbar the Great

Town Mouse

London’s overpriced, golden streets

tom hodgkinson

The Labour Party recently claimed that a child born today has a 30-per-cent chance of owning their home when they’re 50. No one can see into the future, but this makes a valid point.

The way they worked out this statistic was straightforward. Over the last ten years, the percentage of middle-aged homeowners has fallen from 74 to 65. Keep going down at this rate and you’ll reach 30 per cent in 2071.

So where does this leave the poor little mice? Can you buy anywhere in the UK for £100,000?

Well, yes. According to Zoopla, you can get a two-up, two-down for £100,000 in Doncaster, Bradford or Huddersfield.

In the days of remote working, it would surely make logical sense for the population to spread itself out around the country. All the little mice would move out of the capital, to somewhere affordable, install a home office and set up hipster cafés.

Get out of the Great Wen, escape the machine and keep your monthly payments down to a sensible level.

Or why not live abroad? In the 1920s, the young Aldous Huxley moved to Italy for financial reasons: his money went four times further there, he calculated. Being a writer, he could work from home.

‘On the same income on which I just kept alive, uncomfortably, in London,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘I live in a large house, with two servants and a nurse, keep a small car, travel quite a lot and save money to boot.’

When I was a very small mouse, we lived in a two-up, two-down cottage on the outskirts of London. My young parents, then 27, had just moved south from Newcastle, where I was born.

I have hazy memories of our time in that cottage: I was four. I do remember walking out of the door on my own one day and walking up the road to the place that sold ice creams. As I had not reached an understanding of money, I expected the lady behind the counter to give me an ice cream for nothing. Toddlers wandering the streets … parenting was clearly pretty hands-off in those days.

Granny Mouse, my mother, took things a little further than most: she was never the most maternal person. Grandfather Mouse told me later she was known locally as ‘the woman who hates babies’.

Now that my own Mini Mice are in their early twenties and contemplating leaving the nest, I have taken a new interest in house prices.

Maybe the young ones might also consider a two-up, two-down on the outskirts of London as their first

purchase. I looked up the price of a similar cottage to the one that housed my parents’ young mouse family. To my horror and astonishment, the estate agent is asking £925,000.

That leap is quite extraordinary. My parents bought their house for £8,000 in 1970, when their joint income was £4,500 a year (around £50,000 today).

In those 50 years, wages have gone up ten times while property prices have gone up 100 times. Buying your own nest is practically impossible unless you’re a banker or corporate lawyer. To be in a similar financial position, that young couple would need a joint income of £500,000, which would put them in the top one per cent of British earners.

In a sane world, where property prices and wages had risen in tandem, Granny Mouse’s starter cottage would today cost around £100,000.

Admittedly, though the cottage was built for humble labourers in the 1870s, it’s in The Alberts in Richmond, Surrey, one of the most desirable locations in the country. Still, a hundredfold increase in 50 years is quite something.

This can happen today, if you travel a little further. I have a writer acquaintance who would be hard-pressed to put a 50-per-cent deposit down on a cottage in Richmond but lives in high style in Delhi.

Huxley lived life like one of today’s young digital nomads, who work anywhere they like.

‘Seeing that one practises a profession that does not tie one down,’ he wrote to his father, when announcing a round-theworld trip, ‘I feel that one ought to see as much of this planet as one can.’

One agrees entirely. If one does not want to move to Doncaster, perhaps one should be roaming the planet with a laptop, working anywhere. That might well be preferable to subjecting oneself to the grind of London Town.

But London pulls millions of souls into its orbit. It’s a giant magnet, overcrowded and absurdly expensive but very, very attractive. The nests here might be smaller but, for a full life, it’s irresistible.

It looks as though my Mini Mice are bound to stay in London – and either become billionaires or live with Mrs Mouse and me for eternity.

Country Mouse

I’m retired and moving house? Fake

news!

giles wood

‘Gogglebox Duo could be on the Move.’

That was the headline of the story on page 30 of our local newspaper.

Chinese whispers were to blame for the erroneous report. Mary, in our new book about life in the country, speculated that non-drivers, like herself, would do better to move to London for their declining years.

This was on the grounds that most Britons would be more incentivised to visit an old friend who could offer a spare bedroom in London than to trek to see them in a remote village without transport infrastructure.

But the rumour escalated. Now everyone local is asking, ‘Are you really moving out of the grottage?’

I wasn’t particularly keen on the second misunderstanding that appeared in the local paper: ‘Unlike Mary, who has worked as a busy journalist for decades, Giles, a painter, retired at the age of just 21.’

I could have done without this calumny – it will not please my mother. But I will not be contacting my solicitor for a full-page correction and apology. It’s all grist to the publicity mill.

The rumours also spread into the next county. Later that day, we were walking with the Bertrobes, hobby farmers of many years’ acquaintance.

‘But you can’t move to London, Giles,’ posed Mr Bertrobe. ‘Mary, yes – but you love the countryside.’

Countryside? Bertrobe was standing, as he spoke, on a piece of steep agricultural land that any fool could see should not be used for growing corn.

The bare chalk was thicker than the corn, which was struggling, owing to unusual rain patterns and despite massive applications of bag nitrogen, to gain a foothold.

To give him credit, Bertrobe, like many hobby farmers now being

pressured by moralising Gen Z children, has started to attend conservation study days, with modules on subjects such as farmland birds.

‘It is all a question of getting the balance right, as the late Duke of Edinburgh used to say,’ he intoned. ‘The balance between generating food production and preserving the natural landscape and its wildlife.’

He’s right – but who determines this red line in the sand? Sand would be an apt word for what used to be soil but has not been manured for 30 years.

‘The bits of countryside I’m interested in,’ I answered, ‘are the rough lands, where there’s a bit of cover for birds like the whinchat, or the grey partridge, now both rare in Wiltshire, once an abundant species.’

I then teased him: ‘I understand your whole valley is to be turned over to half a dozen free-ranging, hardy, rare-breed cattle for rewilding. But I expect there might be a grant in it for you!’

Bertrobe chuckled nervously, unsure of his facts.

Meanwhile a Turnerian vortex of further rain was towering over a vast enclosure of oilseed rape. A clap of thunder sent us scurrying home – but not before I got a whiff of the characteristic

deodorised nappy-sack odour of the crop, which will mature, later in the summer, into the stench of boiled cabbages.

The colour of the crop could have come straight from a Winsor & Newton tube of cadmium-yellow paint.

Closer to home for this ‘former landscape artist’, as Mary calls me, there has recently been the rare chance to employ the shade of rose madder. As a child, I made drawings of kestrels and now I am seeing them hovering each day over a field I have come to call the Docklands.

The purple stems of the docks – a classic rank weed species – have been left unmolested and stand proud against bleached tall grasses. They allow the eye to behold some much-needed variation in the otherwise monochromatic palette of the croplands – or ‘Green concrete’, as the environmentalists have dubbed it.

When Constable painted Suffolk landscapes, he used a tiny brush loaded with gamboge to paint a distant sliver of a field of agricultural mustard. Back then, wildflowers such as poppies, convolvulus, corn marigolds and corncockle would grow, intertwined with the corn. Those days would have suited an artist better.

To traditional farmers, the Docklands are an emblem of abandonment. But it is a wildlife success story and has cost the landowner nothing.

Next afternoon, Mary urged me to come inside, to listen to a live radio broadcast she had stumbled on. ‘It’s so exciting – they’re talking about a country where everything has been fixed and the oceans are teeming again and the birds are singing and there are seagrass meadows on the coastlines. Which country could it be?’

Poor Mary. Rather like those who were taken in by Orson Welles’s 1938 The War of the Worlds thought experiment and believed Martians were invading, Mary thought this paradise under discussion actually existed.

It was an Inside Science production on Radio 4. The thought experiment envisaged what our country could be like if the ‘30 by 30’ ambition, to protect 30 per cent of our land and sea for nature by 2030, were realised.

The broadcast paints an exhilarating picture of 2030 and holds no fear –except for landowners who may find their helicopter landing strips subject to compulsory purchase orders.

Compulsory not for development, but for nature.

Country Life: A Story of Peaks and Troughs (Ebury Spotlight, £17.99) by Giles Wood and Mary Killen is out now

‘They say you’re only as old as you feel. Behold the oldest women on the planet’

Don’t get angry over the famine – get rich

If you’ve ever heard the Irish ballad The Fields of Athenry – mawkish but tuneful, available on YouTube – you will know that the villain of the piece is one Sir Charles Trevelyan, Bt (1807-86).

There’s this poor Irish victim being transported by prison ship to Botany Bay, because he ‘stole Trevelyan’s corn/So the young might see the morn’. The Irish had been reduced to consuming rotten potatoes.

Trevelyan was the Treasury official blamed for not halting the dreadful Irish famine of the 1840s. He is marked in song and legend.

So I was expecting kind, tenderhearted Laura Trevelyan – who has paid £100,000 in compensation to the descendants of Caribbean slaves because of her family’s link with slavery – to suggest compo to Ireland for the potato famine. And indeed the former BBC journalist – and Sir Charles’s descendant – has now offered financial reparations to Ireland for her ancestor’s actions.

Sir Charles was charged with planning famine relief, but evidently failed to provide it, owing to his view of ‘providentialism’ – governments shouldn’t meddle with the course of natural events. He called the potato famine ‘a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people’.

He hoped that the Great Hunger, in which a million perished, ‘would teach the Irish a lesson’.

Yet the funny thing is that Ireland doesn’t need the dosh now, because the country is rolling in money. This year’s budget surplus announced by the Minister for Finance is nearly £9 billion. Next year, it will be more than £14 billion.

The Economist repeatedly cites Ireland as one of the richest countries in the EU, with the highest GDP growth.

Much of this revenue derives from American investment. Famine victims emigrated to America, where they often made good and gained political power, and some 30 million American voters now call themselves Irish (like Joe Biden).

It sometimes seems that history’s cruelties eventually correct themselves. ‘Don’t get mad – get rich,’ could be an apt motto.

Sir Charles Trevelyan might be surprised to see just what lessons have been learned from the potato calamity.

A pleasant benefit of life in Ireland is that senior citizens travel free of charge anywhere on Irish railways (and buses). When I meet my old school pals for lunch in Dublin, they have come from Cork, Galway, Limerick and Athlone, paying nothing for their railway tickets – and with no restrictions whatsoever.

When I take the train from Deal in Kent to London, I pay £36.25 for a day return, even with a concessionary senior railcard, and under restrictions as to hours of travel. When I recently needed to arrive in London just before 10am, a train ticket cost me £71.50, even with a senior concession for the return journey. If I’d gone a little earlier, the fare would have been over £80.

But the Irish oldies trip merrily around the country, at any time of the day or night, absolutely gratis. This encourages older people to travel more, socialise, often meeting in groups, and have ‘great craic’, as one of my pals put it.

Grannies have been known to transport themselves a hundred

miles, just for a babysitting night, enabled by the free travel.

Accompanying spouses can also avail themselves of the benefit – even if they haven’t yet reached the pension age of 66. And the travel pass applies to private buses as well as national networks – the coaches that serve the airports are also free to oldies.

We are often told that older people are more vulnerable to loneliness and isolation – especially since Covid struck. Ergo, surely it’s a jolly good policy to encourage our cohort to get out and about, going everywhere for free. An enlightened use of a budget surplus!

King Charles and Queen Camilla’s Coronation was a splendid national event, such as only Great Britain can orchestrate – and only a monarchy can dignify.

But Republican France still retains its historical pride in its own monarchy, and a nostalgic attachment to the memory of its kings and queens, some of whom were so heedlessly guillotined.

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the foundation of the Palace of Versailles, started in 1623. And this June, Marie-Antoinette’s gorgeous private chambers will be opened to the public, restored and renewed with loving care.

The last Queen of France designed the décor of these apartments herself, starting in 1774. Perhaps her reputation for extravagance was prompted by her covering the walls of the Gold Room in ‘rich silk hangings, embellished with flowers, arabesques and gold medallions’. She is credited with having had exquisite taste, and ‘a passion’ for interior design.

She was, according to the French Minister of Culture, a ‘vivacious young woman with an innate taste for independence’ and she arranged her living quarters with elegance and harmony.

No praise is too high for the nowcherished French queen.

The Irish have come up with the ideal riposte to British blunders – loads of money.

By Mary Kenny

The Cleethorpes Guide for Single Men

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fties, is ve foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he shares with his parents…

Newly separated friends are like musicals. I love them but they always go on far too long.

Halfway through a story, you know exactly how it’s going to pan out. You pretend to listen but, secretly inside, you’re just making plans, trying not to nod off and wondering if Sainsbury’s own-brand Serrano is half-decent.

I drifted off when my newly separated college pal Johnno explained the early ‘warning signs’ in his marriage: almost a decade earlier, Wendy, the wife, had refused to go on a day trip to Doncaster to watch exterior filming scenes for the TV show Still Open All Hours.

As he’d explained,‘You’re seeing David Jason act for free and there’s a Spar right opposite that does a preprepared salad for a pound.’

From then on, I had a hunch that the story would end with Wendy, years later, making a connection with someone else.

It turned out to be a made-up mystic, Ryan, who ran ‘firewalk therapy’ sessions on the beach. ‘Firewalk to a new you’ was his promise. ‘Firewalk to Ryan’s boxsized maisonette, dye your hair trafficlight red and be seen some months later sniffling in Iceland as Ryan’s business credit card is refused’ was thereality according to a friend of Johnno’s.

A new wave of modish exercise classes has led to liberated ladies realising husbandless hours were their favourite times of the week. In my own social circle, there have been four splits due totheReebok Step massacre, two to spinning and one to Zumba.

This is not a critique of exercise classes or firewalking Wendy. Faced with the choice of watching David Jason’s stunt double up a ladder or running into the arms of a charismatic figure in neon leisurewear, who wouldn’t prefer samba steps?

The newly single then hound me on

how to live the bachelor life. How do you pull off an outfit bought solely fromitems bought at Peacocks? Which fast-food restaurants can you dine alone in without youngsters’ throwing sugar sachets at your ears?

Two Roberts who lost their long-terms to spinning ended up living together in an Odd Couple set-up. They left me alone to my blissful box-setting and other hobbies beloved by the loaferati. That’s my new solution: pairing up the lovelorn.

Johnno was still banging on about his ex-wife: ‘She won a meat raffle but gave it all to her sister’s dogs. No consultation with me – just a meatless fridge. I sat in the downstairs toilet and cried for the first time in weeks over that.’

All I could think was how he would be a good match for Gavin. Gavin had recently come home to a note which the poor sap found ‘actually quite nice – cos she normally just texts me if it’s bad news’.

Both men loved talking about French cuisine, but they were less keen on the cooking element. Looking at their BJI (body-to-jelly index), I could see they were walking the tightrope of time towards an inevitable diabetes diagnosis.

I asked them both to come round and get a McGuffin off a high shelf for me. I am a short man, currently on a locally well-publicised stepladder ban – on a trumped-up charge my mother cooked up: ‘verticular ineptitude and reckless endangerment of least useful parent’.

The two men smelt no rats. They were soon sipping an impromptu Bovril and sharing love-and-war stories.

My plotting came to nothing. When I asked Gavin what he thought of Johnno, he texted back the two most painful words available in the SMS universe: ‘Not keen’.

Gavin had a point. Johnno did go on a lot about his endlessly postponed charity walk to save the beavers (don’t know if it’s furry ones or pretend scouts). He also refused to do a bit of light dusting while fiddling about with my top shelf. I thought it was good practice for the recently wifeless.

Still, the two Roberts’ bromance has gone from strength to strength. They have both retrained as hot-yoga instructors. The poachers have turned guru gamekeepers.

They are currently preying on the low-hanging fruit of the 11 o’clock Seniors Stretch into the Weekend class.

When my friends are dumped, they ask me for advice on the singleton’s life

jem clarke

Sophia Waugh: School Days

Death threats in the classroom

We are all meant to love a bit of technology. It’s all part of the modern world, of course, and makes everything so much easier. In theory.

I have seen many technological changes that have indeed made my working day easier: online registers, setting homework online and even, I suppose (although I hated it) teaching online. Since GCSEs no longer involve coursework, the big threat of the online world to fair results has been removed. We should be safe.

This is not the case. A few years ago, a boy made a website called I Love Miss Waugh, using a photograph of me from the internet. It was supposed to be my website, which made it oddly named. It was more than a little spooky. Another child came to me and told me about this site. Parents were informed, advice given about ‘appropriate’ behaviour, and the website taken down. That, it seemed, was that. However, things have now taken a nasty turn – it is a surprise it has not happened before. One of the features on the site we use to set homework also has

a function whereby the children can message the teachers.

So far, this has been entirely useful and entirely innocuous. Children send messages about homework. I’ve even had children message me asking me for advice about what to read next.

Last weekend, though, two children who were presumably bored by the Coronation and other spring pleasures laid on for their pleasure (the rain was falling like a monsoon, to be fair) decided to spend their weekend messaging teachers.

These messages were unbelievable in their nastiness. They were then photographed and shared more widely on other social media. They ranged from various curses and obscenities to threats to kill. They were wide-ranging in their attacks (I did not receive any myself and I’m not sure if that is a compliment or otherwise) and vicious in their language. Many of the teachers who received them were genuinely shaken by the vitriol and the deadly details of the threats.

Some of those who received death

threats reported them to the police, but nothing much seems to be happening.

The school disabled the messaging part of the app – but what about the miscreants? They both claim their accounts were hacked and, with a lack of evidence to the contrary, they were just given a day’s internal seclusion.

Not much for something that has become the talk of the school and shocked staff and students alike.

The real problem lies deeper than this one situation. It suggests an underlying, unrepentant nastiness which can be carelessly fuelled through the easy access to social media from brains too young, and possibly too stupid, to understand exactly what they are doing.

None of us really believes that either of the students really intends to bring a weapon into school and attack teachers – we’re not in America, after all. But those of us who were targeted will not be able to help looking over their shoulders for a while.

Meanwhile, maybe we should all step back from the technology.

Quite Interesting Things about … lunch

Nobody knows where the word lunch came from.

Dr Johnson’s dictionary de ned lunch as ‘as much food as one’s hand can hold’.

Milton Friedman’s book of essays on public policy There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (1975) won the Nobel Economics prize in 1976.

The free lunch was made illegal in New York in 1897.

To help local restaurants, Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies are banned from providing free lunches at their HQs.

The average FTSE 100 CEO makes more money by Wednesday lunchtime each

week than the average worker earns in a year.

The French work a 35-hour week and nish their tasks by Thursday lunchtime.

A survey of 2,000 Britons in 2017 found that 77 per cent of them had exactly the same thing for lunch every day.

The most popular lunch in Britain is a ham sandwich.

During the Second World

War, Churchill often breakfasted in bed and sometimes stayed there till lunchtime with a secretary typing at his bedside.

JFK ate his lunch in bed and then slept for one to two hours in the afternoon, with Jackie. He was not to be disturbed for any reason.

Ronald Reagan liked to say he never drank co ee at lunch because it kept him awake for the afternoon.

Theodore Roosevelt’s favourite lunch on a long hunting trip was elk tongues.

husband of Nelson’s mistress Emma Hamilton, liked to go up to the rim of the crater of Vesuvius, where he picnicked naked, lunching on pigeon roasted on molten lava.

The rst airline passenger lunch was served in 1919.

In 2018, a man paid $3.3 million at auction to have lunch with Warren Bu ett.

The average British lunch lasts 17 minutes.

JOHN LLOYD

222 QI Answers to Your Quite Ingenious Questions is out now

Ham fans: the British

Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803), British Ambassador to Naples and

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

Evil tales of human bondage

We recently had a lecture from a bishop. He was a member of the board of the Santa Marta Group, an organisation founded by Pope Francis in 2014 to help oppose the modern slave trade.

Its aim is to influence the influencers and to ensure that bishops worldwide are in touch with law-keeping forces. It goes a long way to ensure that Church and State are of one mind.

I told the bishop that, to my great surprise, I had recently met an ex-slave. He told me my surprise was totally uncalled-for: slaves are all too numerous in this country.

In my ignorance, I had assumed that, in Britain at least, slavery belonged to that time before Wilberforce did so much to abolish this horrible trade. I was wrong. With illegal drugs and arms sales, human trafficking is one of the three largest international crimes in the world, worth $150 billion per year. At the time of writing, about 50 million slaves exist, and the number is rising – now higher than at the peak of the transatlantic slave trade.

The anti-slavery movement has nearly as long a history as the slave trade itself.

It began after the legalisation of Christianity in the Roman Empire in 313 AD. By the end of the medieval period, the enslavement of Christians had largely been abolished in Europe, and by 1800 the Church reached a consensus in favour of the abolition of slavery.

The new Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, published in 1994, specifically forbids any acts or enterprises that lead to enslavement of human beings. They are not to be bought, sold or exchanged like merchandise in a heartless disregard of personal dignity.

It is not acceptable for one human being to own another as if he or she were a consumer durable: to be relentlessly and ruthlessly used while in working condition and then abandoned,

without a backward glance – fly-tipped like a brokendown fridge.

I believe in living in the present, and I find myself wishing that more of the energy used to ferret out the slavery of bygone ages were given to stopping human trafficking in our own day.

No Oldie-readers are active in the slave trade, or so I hope. But perhaps some of them, and here I include myself, are too possessive, domineering and oppressive in the way they treat others.

If this is the case, steps need to be taken. Instead of our arrogantly ordering other people around, a polite tone of voice goes a long way towards tempering our sense of entitlement and ownership.

And so do the magic words ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, whether addressed to husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, children or employees.

Memorial Service Dame Hilary Mantel (1952-2022)

The Very Rev Andrew Nunn, Dean of Southwark Cathedral, welcomed guests to celebrate Hilary Mantel, author of the celebrated trilogy Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light Bill Hamilton, her agent, revealed she’d been working on a new novel, Provocations, ‘a mash-up’ of Pride and Prejudice and other Jane Austen novels, seen from the point of view of Mary Bennet. Actor Aurora Dawson-Hunte, who was in the stage adaptation of The Mirror and the Light, gave a reading from the unfinished novel. Her editor, Nicholas Pearson, recalled how she began her career by writing for Auberon Waugh at the Literary Review before becoming film critic of the

Spectator. She could spend two hours reading a single newspaper, leaving it ‘like a drunk had been at it’. Inspiration for her books came from Shakespeare – and the ‘Flats to let’ section in newspapers’ small ads.

Actress Lydia Leonard, who was in Bring Up the Bodies, read from Eyeing Up the Queen (Royal Bodies), Mantel’s piece on seeing the Queen at Buckingham Palace: ‘The Queen passed close to me and I stared at her. I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones.

‘Such was the hard power of my stare that Her Majesty turned and looked back at me, as if she had been jabbed in the shoulder; and, for a split second, her face

expressed not anger but hurt bewilderment. She looked young: for a moment, she had turned back from a figurehead into the young woman she was, before monarchy froze her and made her into a thing, a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at.’

Mantel’s childhood friend Anne Preston recalled how they had been entranced by Shakespeare as children, reading the parts from either side of the fire. Mantel, she said, had a ‘muse of fire within her’.

Zadie Smith read from How I Began Writing, Mantel’s Reith Lecture. Actor Mark Rylance read from Wolf Hall

Mantel’s brother Brian Mantel said, ‘Words to my sister were like a piano to Mozart or a paintbrush to Picasso –or Holbein.’

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

A slave by Josiah Wedgwood

Ignore Wallis Simpson’s health tip

It’s curious and not altogether reassuring to discover in your retirement that some of the things you told your patients for 40 years were wrong.

I would tell any fat person suffering from osteoarthritis of the hip that he or she should lose weight. I won’t go into the question of whether saying this ever had any practical effect on anyone: I rather doubt it.

But it turns out that even if the advice had been followed, it wasn’t very good, at least with regard to pain in the hip.

A study of 2,752 patients with radiologically proved osteoarthritis, of either the hip or the knee, showed that those who lost five per cent or more of their weight suffered just as much pain from their hips as those who didn’t.

Some of my honour was spared by the fact that those with osteoarthritis of the knee suffered much less pain if they lost weight. In fact, it often disappeared entirely. Not all my advice was wrong.

On the matter of losing weight, Wallis Simpson was quite wrong when she said that you could never be too thin. As for being too rich, I have no experience.

A study of weight loss in healthy people over the age of 70, with an average weight of 75kg, showed that weight loss in the elderly was not a good sign. This is not exactly news: it used to be drummed into medical students that weight loss was a sinister sign and should always be enquired into. But it seems that, with the fattening of the population, which has brought with it an

ever greater and more forlorn desire for slimness, the lesson has been forgotten.

More than 16,500 healthy people over 70 – ‘healthy’ meaning with no known disease likely to cause death – were followed up for an average of four years and five months. Men who lost five per cent of their weight in the interval had a third higher chance of dying, and women a quarter higher chance. Men who lost ten per cent of their weight were nearly three times as likely to die as those whose weight held steady, while women were more than twice as likely to die.

Relative risks must always be treated with caution because a high relative risk is perfectly compatible with a low or trivial absolute risk.

But, in this instance, it is not so: the risk of dying after the age of 75 is not trivial, and a two- or three-times-greater risk is not to be disregarded. Of each 100 men of those who lost ten per cent or more of their weight, 30 died within four years and five months.

So far, so clear: but, as usual, the message is slightly less clear than it appears at first sight to be. There is no distinction in the figures between those who lost weight deliberately and those who lost weight involuntarily. However, since few people manage to lose ten per cent of their weight deliberately unless they have a very pressing need to do so, which these people did not have, this is probably not very important.

There might also have been subgroups within the population in whom weight loss might have been a good thing, in some sense or other.

The paper does not, unfortunately, tell us whether the huge effort necessary to lose weight, if crowned with success, prolongs life or shortens it – or merely makes it seem longer.

The paper had one interesting locution new to me: mortality event. So much more accurate, don’t you think, than that loosest of terms, death?

She was wrong – you can be too thin dr theodore dalrymple

‘Is there a doctor in the house? For my sake!’

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

The milkman cometh

SIR: I was astonished to read (Spring issue) that Hunter Davies believes he may be the only person left in the UK who has milk delivered in glass bottles every morning. Oop ’ere in t’north, we have milk delivered in this way. We also have Ringtons Tea delivered, from a dinky van, once a month. Not only that: our daily newspaper is delivered from a local newsagent every day.

I still have my copy of Mr Davies’s marvellous The Beatles: The Authorised Biography, from 1968. Yours faithfully, Alastair

Jones, Wilmslow, Cheshire

Car on a hot tin roof

SIR: Although never myself guilty of such behaviour [as in Piers Pottinger’s ‘RIP practical jokes’, Spring issue], I can never forget the prank played on a master at my old school, the Friends’ School, Lisburn, Co Antrim, by the sixth-form boys at end of the summer term in 1958, when I was a mere fourth-former.

Our physics master, Mr Jess, was a popular young master who’d been a pupil there himself but a few years before, and also coached the rugby team – a role for which he was well suited, having the muscular, heavy build of a prop forward.

It was always amusing to see him unwind from his car, an early model with cycle wings of the three-wheeled Bond – a somewhat incongruous choice for such a big man, but road tax then was much cheaper for a three-wheeler.

The boys’ changing rooms were in the basement of the older Georgian building and were lit by clerestory windows, protruding about three feet above the surface of the small quad, with a flat concrete slab roof reminiscent of an air-raid shelter.

On the last day of term, Mr Jess went to depart in his trusty Bond only to discover it was not in its usual spot. A perambulation around the corner of the building in front of which he used to park revealed that his little car had been hoisted onto the flat roof of the changing room by a team of sixth-formers.

Happily, he was a man with a sense of

fun and laughed heartily at the jest.

The boys concerned were of course in hiding to see what might transpire and so were able to restore it to ground level, allowing him to depart for the hols.

Sam Stewart, Diss, Norfolk

Dog’s dinner

SIR: Piers Pottinger’s article on practical jokes (Spring issue) omits many of the pranks he has played on his own friends. He was a legendary host. I remember a dinner he hosted during the Cheltenham Festival (horse-racing, not literary, obviously) where his guests were served individual steak-and-kidney pies, alongside the finest claret known to mankind.

The pies were of the finest quality –apart from one that had been specially prepared for a well-known Fleet Street political editor, which was instead filled with Pedigree Chum. The pie was gratefully devoured with comments about how Piers’s chef had surpassed himself that year.

lights, and folded loo paper. I would go further. When staying in hotels, especially if travelling alone, I want to relax! I am usually just having a few days’ break, and when going out want to leave clothes on a chair, shoes on the floor, personal items on the dressing table, and so on, without them being tidied up. When returning in the evening, I do NOT want to have to remake the bed as I like it.

So I usually tell reception that I do not need the room to be serviced, leave a large note to this effect on my table and hang the ‘Do Not Disturb’ card outside the door. If I need more tea or coffee, I collect it from Reception.

I realise that not everyone would agree with this but, in my busy working life (many years ago), I just went along with usual practice. In retirement, life should be easier.

John Pigott, Ringmer, East Sussex

Worst hotel in the world

SIR: To Prue Leith (ref ‘My Hotel Hell’, Spring issue):

You may think you know a nation, With a dreadful reputation For the worst hotel or inn, Where comfort is a mortal sin.

Saumarez Smith, Bloomsbury, London

I could add further stories about noses being painted blue in the middle of the night, itching powder placed in underpants and dog treats being served as pre-dinner snacks, but that might perhaps pre-warn future Pottinger guests. Yours etc, Joe

Prudential Prue Leith

SIR: I do so agree with much of what Prue Leith says about staying in hotels (‘My Hotel Hell’, Spring issue), and especially about blankets rather than duvets, night

But you don’t, if you’ve not stayed At Hotel Moskva, in Belgrade. Sincerely,

David Halley, Whitton

Patrick’s underwater walk

SIR: I fully understand how Patrick Barkham has cleverly ensured that the walk (Spring issue) from Trimingham to Overstrand and back will always remain ‘Norfolk’s best-kept secret’.

Patrick tells us, ‘One reason the beach is so quiet is that the cliffs are intimidatingly high.’

He then tells us, ‘Another reason for the absence of people is that these sands aren’t always exposed at high tide, and so you need to know the tide times’.

‘You didn’t think calling me Boy was in any way gender-prescriptive?’

But then he gently slips into the delicately nuanced, captivating prose something so devious, so cunning, and yet so subtle as almost to not be noticed at all: ‘We turned north-east’!!

Some in-depth research aided by my AA Concise Road Atlas Britain clearly shows that someone setting out in this direction and who was, for some entirely unknown reason, either wearing arm bands or prepared to hold their breath, sink to the bottom and run terribly fast would probably end up in Denmark.

Don’t worry, Patrick – your secret is safe with me.

Yours sincerely, Richard Langridge. Hundon, Suffolk

Santa flies to Malta

SIR: Memory Lane in the March issue sparked a memory I have from the late ’60s, when I worked as cabin crew for British European Airways.

We were taking boarding-school children to their parents on Malta for the Christmas holidays.

It was a night flight on a Vanguard aircraft, which had large, oval windows. The children were excited and obviously not going to sleep. I ‘borrowed’ some spray shaving foam from the steward’s overnight bag and we had great fun decorating the dark windows with snowy Christmas scenes.

I wasn’t very popular with the cleaners in Malta.

Jenny File, Folkestone, Kent

Bum steer

SIR: May I respectfully suggest that the comfort of a thong (ref Mary Killen’s Fashion Tips, May issue) is directly proportional to the size of the buttocks it dissects.

Mrs Bee, Alresford, Hampshire

AN vs DJ

SIR: I was astounded by AN Wilson’s vitriolic ad hominem attack on DJ Taylor in his review of Taylor’s new book on Orwell (Spring issue). Wilson starts by expressing his personal view of ‘why Orwell matters’, singling out Animal Farm as his own favourite, and then proceeds to dismantle Taylor’s book according to the extent to which it follows that personal view.

The first half of this ‘review’ is Wilson’s own view of Orwell, after which he proceeds to fire off progressively snide remarks about Taylor’s style (‘mixed metaphors and sloppy phrases’; ‘pettifogging chitchat’) and ends by calling Taylor a ‘Grub Street drudge of an author’.

Such playground yah-boo directed at a

‘You are not going on a jouney’

distinguished author, critic and Orwell expert is not worthy of any critic, whatever level of personal dislike may exist. To suggest that instead of Taylor’s elegant phrase ‘highly unflattering view’ of Southwold, when quoting A Clergyman’s Daughter, it would be better to write ‘Orwell hated Southwold’ is simply laughable. Yours, Brigid Purcell, Norwich, Norfolk

Gri ’s grifters

SIR: Matthew Norman’s article in the Spring 2023 issue reminded me, and it was then confirmed by Griff Rhys Jones, that the collective noun for the leaders of some of our financial institutions is a wunch. As in a wunch of bankers. Faithfully yours, Geoff Margison, Edenfield, Lancashire

Joy of washday

SIR: How lovely to have clothes props revisited (Olden Life, Spring issue)! It brought to mind other washing-day accoutrements – the dolly tub in which you soaked the clothes, the posser with which you pounded them clean, the wash board on which you scrubbed them, the mangle that wrung the water out and the good old maiden, a North-Western term for a clothes horse.

My grandmother draped clothes around the coal fire if the weather was too rainy to hang them outside. I can still recall the sweet aroma that the drying clothes exuded until you smelt the faint whiff of singeing as they came under the hiss of the flat iron, heated in the oven at the side of the fireplace.

Ah those Godly days!

Sue Tyson, Bramhall, Stockport

A policeman’s lot

SIR: An interesting article concerning police notebooks (Spring issue). As a

retired police officer, I used these essential books every day. The imperial measure on the cover is there for officers to measure ‘bladed points and articles’ that may contravene the law.

As the books are evidential, it was essential to comply with the mnemonic NO ELBOWS:

NO Erasures, NO Leaves torn out, NO Blank spaces, NO Overwriting, NO Writing between lines, Statements in direct speech (CAPITAL LETTERS).

It was also absolutely essential not to leave your pocketbook lying about unattended, for if you did, then you would discover that a giant phallus had been drawn over two blank pages. Bearing in mind the above, much embarrassment could ensue if the book were perused in court.

Once, on parade at my nick, a young female Inspector decided to inspect ‘officer’s appointments’. Needless to say, she chose my pocketbook, complete with obligatory huge cartoon phallus. She viewed it and returned it to me without a blush or comment. Well played, ma’am, I thought.

Michael Gordon, Shepherdswell, Kent

Play up! And play the game!

SIR: Peter Bowen-Simpkins (‘Imbibing with Coleridge’, Letters, Spring issue) will find tonk defined in Chambers Dictionary as he remembers it from his cricketing days of yore.

He should also read, if he has not done so, Sir Henry Newbolt’s Vitai Lampada, a splendid poem which uses cricket as a metaphor for decent conduct throughout life. ‘Play up! play up!’ etc.

Mike Morrison, Whetstone, London N20

Sister Teresa’s botany class

SIR: It is unfortunate that, owing to either human error or an excess of technology, the relevant picture I send to The Oldie to illustrate last month’s God column failed to appear.

It should have depicted Rhododendron maddenii, which grows wild on the Tibet-Upper Burma border. It was somehow replaced by Lapageria rosea, the national flower of Chile, from the other side of the world.

Emma Tennant is a stickler for correct nomenclature and will most probably have been surprised by the caption ‘Emma’s rhododendron’. Yours faithfully, Sister Teresa, Norfolk

Emma’s rhody

John Hurt

It’s 45 years sinceI met John Hurt (1940-2017) on a snowy February night in a pub in Nottingham.

John Hurt had always been a bit of an obsession for me and my best friend, Kathryn. It was 1978. While other girls obsessively worshipped Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones, we adored John Hurt.

Then we heard the wonderful news. He was appearing at Nottingham Playhouse in Sean O’Casey’s Shadow of a Gunman.

We lived in Leicester – but John Hurt was only 20 miles away, in Nottingham! Train tickets and theatre tickets were booked in record time. To be honest, I think we would have walked there.

It was a bitter cold night when we got off the train. We slipped along quite happily to the theatre and got there early. There was a warm pub not far from the Playhouse, and we went in for a drink before the performance.

We both sat facing the door and sipped away, happily talking about what it would be like to see him in the flesh on stage. We didn’t have to wait long. The pub door opened and John Hurt walked in.

We sat in silence, too stunned for words, clutching our glasses of warm shandy. ‘What shall we do?’ Kathryn said. I shook my head. All I knew was that we would regret it for ever if we let him slip out into the night without speaking to him.

He headed for a table where his fellow actors were sitting. We stood up and edged towards him. We lurked about near the jukebox and pretended to be unaware of him. But we were watching his every move and waiting to pounce.

John got up and headed to the bar to get a round of drinks. We moved in like heat-seeking missiles. At the bar, we flanked him. It was now or never.

‘Excuse me, Mr Hurt,’ I heard a voice say – and realised it was mine.

He turned, to be confronted by two beefy young women who couldn’t blink. He looked a bit alarmed. We asked him for his autograph, and he seemed relieved.

Then Kathryn simpered, ‘We loved you in I, Claudius.’

We had him backed into a corner. John Hurt was a small, slim man. Wearing four-inch heels, we loomed over him.

‘Oh, thank you so much,’ he said. To our delight, he started to tell us about all the make-up he’d had to wear as crazy Caligula and what fun he had had with the production team.

He told us he was working on ‘something at Shepperton Studios’. We later found out this something was Alien. We listened rapt and laughed in all the wrong places.

He was finally rescued by his fellow actors who were beginning to wonder where he was. He said goodbye and hoped we would enjoy the play. We shrieked thank you wildly and sat down again, flushed with success.

We can’t remember the play. We hummed with excitement. The train was late. We’d missed the last bus from the station. We walked home through the snow, not even feeling the cold. That John Hurt glow remained with us for a long time.

The day he died, I thought of that night and how much he meant to me. I watch his work again and again. Miss you, John.

Jennifer Florance

Sweet end to rationing, 70 years ago

As schools go, Liverpool’s Westminster Road (Emergency) Junior Boys left much to be desired. The real school had been destroyed in the Blitz. So two classes were housed in a local scout hall.

pounds’ worth. It wasn’t even one pound’s worth, but I was too excited to quibble. I had won 20 sixpenny bars, each with a di erent lling – more chocolate than I’d ever seen outside a sweetshop cabinet.

certi cate commemorating my achievement.

Seventy years ago, in 1953, after 11 years, sweets came o the ration. I was nine.

To save on transport costs, shops could sell sweets produced only in their own region. Thus the north had become used to Rowntree’s products, made in York.

To counter this, Cadbury’s announced a competition for schools: pupils had to write an essay on chocolate production and draw a cocoa bean. The prize, we heard, was a million pounds’ worth of chocolate.

Half the boys faced one way, taught by one teacher, while the other half faced the other way, taught by another. There was a gap of three yards between the two back rows, with 84 boys over the two classes and two teachers armed with only a stick and a will of iron.

One afternoon, my teacher announced the winner of the great chocolate competition – me! He invited me out to the front of the class, opened his desk and showed me the prize.

Sadly, it wasn’t a million

With half an hour of school to go, Sir escorted me to the door with the instruction to go straight home, stop nowhere and speak to no one on the way. When I arrived, my little brother, aged four, burst into tears at the prospect of so much unrationed pleasure.

The number of my friends was considerably diminished the next day, but a few weeks later I won them all back again. Cadbury’s had made an error, and a second parcel arrived, along with a

In an uncharacteristic gesture of generosity, I told the teacher to share out the prize – the certi cate was reward enough. Every boy in the class received a half-bar –three penn’orth – of chocolate. As there were 42 boys and only 20 bars, simple arithmetic suggested that Sir must have supplied the extra bar.

My classmates were all delighted. It was the other class who beat me up.

By Terry Morgan, Withern, Lincolnshire, who receives £50

Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

Hurt: what a darling!

Books

Yorkshire gold MARTIN VANDER WEYER

Yorkshire: The North Riding

By Jane Grenville and Nikolaus Pevsner

Yale University Press £45

‘The North Riding of Yorkshire was abolished on April Fools’ Day 1974’ is the emphatic opening to this revised edition of the original 1966 Pevsner volume.

But the fools who redrew England’s administrative map half a century ago count for naught in Pevsner-land, where the ancient northern division of God’s Own County still runs, in the present tense, from the Derwent to the Tees.

And what joy to find everything that made the North Riding – landscape, history and religion as well as buildings – captured in this beautiful book, as resolutely retro in design as it is in its choice of boundaries.

Leipzig-born Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-83) came to England before the Second World War and created his multi-volume series The Buildings of England between 1951 and 1974. His North Riding fieldwork was completed in five weeks in the summer of 1963; his wife, Lola, did the driving (but died soon afterwards) and the result was dedicated to ‘those publicans and hoteliers … who provided me with a table in my bedroom to scribble on’.

Jane Grenville, an archaeologist and former university administrator, took six pandemic-disrupted years to repeat the exercise. And what a remarkable job she has done, respectful of Pevsner’s voice, judgement and scholarship while interjecting her own on post-1966 additions and changes.

Here, for example, is the convent of Stanbrook Abbey at Wass – designed by Feilden Clegg Bradley in 2015 to become

‘the major architectural contribution of the early C21 to the North Riding’. The effect of light through its tall windows casting diagonals across rough-plastered white walls is ‘mesmerising’.

In contrast, the 1988 postmodern Central Building of nearby Ampleforth College by Ellis Williams – squeezed between Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s abbey church and the older school – is ‘astonishingly discourteous towards its distinguished neighbours’.

Likewise, Grenville casts a discerning

eye over the indulgences of the wealthy. The two-faced Hartforth Home Farm near Scotch Corner is one that earns praise and a pair of photos in the handsome plate section. Built in 2009 for a local baronet (by Digby Harris, from an idea by Yorkshire’s leading postwar Georgian revivalist, Francis Johnson), it presents a classical villa on one side and a decorative Gothick front on the other.

Not so successful is the neoclassical Ravenswick Hall at Kirkbymoorside (Adam Architects, 2021; commissioned,

Beach boy: Pevsner goes to Scarborough

though Grenville doesn’t say so, by a Teesside industrialist), ‘a vast palace … remarkable only for its scale’.

Not that there’s snobbery in Pevsner’s and Grenville’s work. They record irregular village greens and the county’s typical wide verges in front of humble cottages; market towns are as well described as stately piles; no hamlet church omitted.

In that last category, I enjoyed the entry on St Aidan’s, Carlton (near my own hometown of Helmsley), by Temple Moore, 1885-6. ‘On the way to the moor, it afforded Pevsner a sense of physical and spiritual shelter; now it provides holiday accommodation.’

It does so thanks to the addition, by Leeds Environmental Design Associates in 2012, of a rectangular extension clad in pre-weathered zinc which local folk thought looked like a dumped shipping container – but, for more kindly Grenville, it ‘successfully presents a clear break between old and new’.

There’s kindness also in her inclusion of jobbing architects such as my late friend Tony Burns – a modernist hardly ever allowed by planners to build as he would have wished – commended here for ‘an excellent contemporary intervention, mindful of [local] building traditions’ in the Esk Moors Lodge care home – and a ‘thoughtful’ extension to Helmsley Arts Centre, of which I happen to be a trustee. How proud he would have been to find himself in Pevsner.

Can I find fault with Grenville’s work? Well, I’m obliged to point out that Helmsley’s parish church is All Saints (formerly St Matthew’s), not Holy Trinity.

And I can’t help feeling that a full survey of today’s ‘buildings of England’ ought to take in the new housing estates – the works of Barratt and Persimmon – that have attached themselves to every town and commutable village. It seems insufficient, for example, to say of Strensall that it has a nice war memorial and has ‘grown into a satellite suburb of York’. Perhaps Grenville should have explored its sprawling closes and byways in search of something worthy of comment.

But overall this is a magisterial work of reference, a joy to browse and a handsome artefact in itself. Yale University Press deserve a medal for perpetuating the Pevsner project. The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art deserves another for supporting them.

Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of the Spectator. He lives in the North Riding of Yorkshire

‘Oy, Posh-Pants!’ ROGER LEWIS

An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals

By Polly Toynbee Atlantic £20

I’d always thought Polly Toynbee was one of Craig Brown’s brilliant creations, like Bel Littlejohn or Wallace Arnold.

Her condemnation of Auberon Waugh in the week he died as ‘a reactionary fogey whose sneers damaged this country’, for example, is a remark making sense only as satire. Appalled when Bron described a wine as smelling like ‘a bunch of dead chrysanthemums on the grave of a stillborn West Indian baby’, Polly was quite unable to appreciate she was conceivably being confronted by a joke.

As is clear from her dynastic memoir, humour is absent from Polly’s inheritance – classics professors, historians, archaeologists, colonial administrators and Queen Victoria’s ear specialist (or otolaryngologist) –several of them buried in Westminster Abbey – all, we are assured, felt ‘shame at class embarrassment’, ‘tussled with questions of class’ and evinced ‘that same old class guilt’.

It was certainly a posh lineage. The Earl and Countess of Carlisle were Polly’s great-great-grandparents. The Glenconners are somewhere in the background (except, as their peerage dates only from 1911, the Tennants are virtually trade), as are the Mitfords and Bertrand Russell.

One relative may have married a governess in Australia, but at least her uncle was Sir W S Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame.

Having established that her ‘liberal ancestors agonised over the excruciating moral embarrassment of social class’, Polly, for whom everything is a cause, takes us through potted (and convoluted) biographies of these well-meaning bores.

Toynbee Hall, where Profumo

expiated his sins, was founded by one of them, for example, in 1884 as a playground, library, washhouse and lecture hall for the poor of Spitalfields. Lenin spoke there in 1902. ‘Nowadays the area is mostly Bangladeshi.’

Polly’s great-grandfather was Gilbert Murray, the translator of Latin and Greek and ‘public intellectual’, whose daughter, Rosalind, never stopped hankering for Castle Howard, where her mother had grown up.

Though she is called by Polly ‘my obnoxious grandmother, Rosalind’, she is the only person in this book whom I liked. She wrote racy novels and banished her children to remote reform schools, finding them dull, which they were.

Rosalind, who eventually ran off with an ex-monk, said that because she was upper-class, she’d meet the Blitz with fortitude. Polly is appalled by this haughtiness – but, again, might it not have been a jest, the sort of remark made by Joyce Grenfell or Margaret Rutherford?

Arnold Toynbee, Rosalind’s ‘awkward, socially clumsy and emotionally repressed’ husband, was a prolix historian, decorated by the Emperor of Japan. One of his brothers was bitten to death by an ape in Gibraltar, ‘while lying in a drunken stupor’.

For one of the problems among these people, who night and day were filled with ‘personal guilt over privilege’, was that Polly’s family were prone to a lot of alcoholism – or alcoholism, manic depression and (often) suicide.

Polly’s father, Philip (born 1916), whose brother killed himself at the start of the war, was permanently drunk and endured ‘prolonged and agonising depressions’. A notorious Fleet Street hack, Philip went in for ‘bouts of provocatively outrageous behaviour’, such as vomiting out of taxi windows, urinating in lifts and sliding down banisters naked.

He took Polly on an Aldermaston march, but they never got further than a pub in Knightsbridge. Though his best pal was Donald Maclean, he never noticed he was a spy. Philip ended up growing a beard and finding God in a commune on the Welsh border, ‘a horror scene’, deliberately without water, electricity or other amenities, because they were luxuries, hence representative of ‘moral inadequacy’.

Which brings us at last to old Polly, traumatised as a child when somebody common shouted out, ‘Oy, Posh-Pants! Bet you think you’re better than us!’

In fairness, she has spent a lifetime trying not to be superior, and is commendably honest about herself, saying how, though she once interviewed a welder and spoke to a milkman, ‘we bourgeois leftists’ are ‘too firmly entrenched in the world of privileged security to really take flight and abandon everything’.

Somewhat chillingly, she confesses she’d have been the sort of person to fall for Stalin: ‘Would I have overlooked Soviet atrocities, eyes tight shut for the greater good? I fear I probably would.’

Born in 1946, and to this day a member of the ‘left-wing middle classes’, Polly says ‘most writers are absorbed by the pain of social class’. Really? I’m not – never give it a thought. But then I am self-made. I started with nothing and look at me now. If, for Polly and her pals, ‘the seismic culture shock’ was the rise of Margaret Thatcher, the reason they hate her is that she, too, was a self-made person, and this is their snobbery coming out.

Polly, typically, mentions the working-class habit of calling luncheon ‘dinner’. Her ancestors would never wear scent that wasn’t French, nor ‘touch custard or mayonnaise that was not homemade’, ie whisked up by their cooks. For dads to turn up outside Polly’s boarding school at the wheel of a Jaguar or for mums to be in a fur coat was unspeakably vulgar.

Pontypool-raised Roy Jenkins is sniggered at for enjoying claret, for his ‘assumption of slightly comical upperclass manners’, and generally for his taste for a high life he wasn’t born into, that wasn’t his entitlement. Everything Roy achieved in his career was achieved by merit, which to Polly’s mob is unbecoming.

Everything was handed to Polly on a plate, from the ‘grand, stuccoed house in Pelham Crescent’ to her ‘easeful life of well-paid London journalism’ (£106,000 a year).

She’s rather smug about ‘our clean hands, well-rewarded in cash, esteem and status’, and the chief iniquity was her access to education. Despite her failing her eleven-plus and O Levels, ‘my social class guaranteed I would never be sent to a secondary modern’.

Indeed, like her father with his scant qualifications, she was offered a place at Oxford, though left without graduating, her style understandably cramped by the thought of all those dreary dons in the family tree.

The book contains one truly alarming story. Pregnant, Polly went to see a

friend, whose newborn baby was writhing on a rug, screaming and being so thoroughly obnoxious that Polly immediately went and sought an abortion. The baby on the rug grew up to be Boris Johnson.

Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor by Roger Lewis is out later this year

Moth mosaic

CAROLINE MOORE

The Jewel Box: How Moths Illuminate Nature’s Hidden Rules

By Tim Blackburn Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20

I belong to a group who obsessively log and report migrants. And we have a magazine, Atropos, with a skull in its logo.

But the death’s head is on the furry thorax of the Hawkmoth Acherontia atropos. And the mothing community is perhaps the only on-line group to celebrate both migrants and colonisation.

The ecologist Tim Blackburn highlights the ‘vital’ role played by migrants in the natural world. ‘Much of the planet would be bare rock if it wasn’t for migration’, as he writes in The Jewel Box.

His ‘jewel box’ is his moth trap, which he runs both in London and in Dorset. There he can find rubies (Ruby Tiger), pearls (Rusty Dot Pearl) and emeralds of many kinds (Common, Small Grass – but he would have to be lucky to meet Sussex, Essex and Jersey). Gold and silver abound – Golden Twin-spot, Gold Spangle, Silver Hook.

Their names suggest the glistening beauty of a freshly-caught moth. A moth’s wings are covered in minute scales, like a layer of glittering dust.

Every scale is pigmented to create a mosaic of coloured patterns, and each is a nanostructure that also diffracts light, creating an alluring extra shimmer of iridescence. But the dust is easily rubbed off: their beauty is fragile and evanescent.

Those who possess moth traps – I inherited mine from my grandfather –themselves become ensnared.

We are lured into becoming moth addicts by marvelling at not only the beauty and intricate delicacy but also the sheer variety of the species that come to our mercury-vapour lights (the moths are released unharmed the next morning). This makes moths precious for an ecologist, a diamond mine of data.

‘Martha, did you invite people over for dinner this evening?’

Moths are gloriously diverse – far more so than butterflies. There are over 2,500 species of moth on the British list, and only 59 species of butterfly. Only two are likely to be found, as larvae, munching on your jerseys – the best cashmere for preference, because this is more digestible.

Some 850 of these are the larger moths or ‘macromoths’, whose size and exquisitely distinctive wing patterns can usually be identified by amateur recorders.

And there are plenty of us out there. The National Moth Recording Scheme has collated over 34 million sightings of moths across the UK since 2007.

My own list shows that, over 25 years, I have logged 891 species of moth in just one inland Sussex garden, 73 of them Nationally Scarce. By which you will guess that I have passed from the ‘gateway drug’ of the macromoths on to the hard stuff – the miniature marvels of micromoths.

Their diversity is a gift to ecologists; and they differ because every species has come up with a different solution to ‘the question of how to be a moth’.

They colonise different habitats, eat different parts of many different plants, including lichens, fungus and mould slimes (a few feed on animal detritus). They are preyed on by diverse predators – birds, bats, lizards and snakes, small mammals such as hedgehogs and shrews, insects like wasps (parasitoid and vespid), hornets, spiders and beetles.

Moths are an internationally recognised marker of biodiversity; for Blackburn, his ‘moth trap is ultimately a tool for sampling the environment.’

Diversity and identifiability are important; but the fragility and mobility of moths makes them especially revealing. Blackburn, like all trappers, knows of the enormous fluctuation in moth abundance, even when trapping in the same place, not just from week to week, but also from year to year.

There are ‘boom’ years and dud ones; populations peak and plummet.

The moth dynasty is ‘one of the most successful branches of the tree of life’, comprising ‘one in every nine known species’ (160,000 worldwide, including butterflies). But they are highly susceptible to random natural disasters, chiefly weather-related: all trappers know that cold, wet and drought knock back numbers. A hot and humid night produces a full moth trap, as well as sticky bed sheets.

They are also especially vulnerable to man-made hazards. Urbanisation and changes in land management, destroying and fragmenting habitats, create ever smaller and more fragile populations.

This is where migrants play a vital role, revitalising small and failing communities; and why, like a London taxi driver droning on about celebrities he’s had in his cab, I want to tell everyone about the Great Dart I found in my trap. And the fact that the Clifden Nonpareils I find, with underwings like silky Old Etonian ties, may not be migrants at all.

This beautiful Blue Underwing was hunted to extinction by Victorian collectors and became a rare immigrant; but it has recently established breeding colonies in Sussex.

And I had that Zelleria oleastrella in my trap recently, all the way from the olive groves of southern Europe…

Just pay your fare, quickly, and buy the book.

Brain men

DR THEODORE DALRYMPLE

The Story of the Brain in 10½ Cells

By Richard Wingate Wellcome Collection £14.99

Nearly 50 years ago, I took a taxi to a psychiatric hospital in London.

The driver remained silent during the journey: maybe he thought that he had a dangerous lunatic in his cab. But no, he had been cogitating. As we arrived, he turned to me and said, ‘You know, mate, there’s something very mental about the brain.’

Quite so – but what, exactly? It is the ultimate goal of neuroscience to find out. I hope it will never succeed, for it is certain that the knowledge gained will be confined to only a few who will use it, if human experience is anything to go by, to exploit the rest of us.

Nonetheless, one cannot but be impressed by the progress that neuroscience has made since its origins in the 19th century. This short book by the distinguished neuroscientist Richard

Wingate is part memoir of his personal career as a scientist, part history of the science and part explanation of where it has got to now.

Few books that I have read convey so succinctly the combination of care, determination, obsessiveness and imagination that scientists in a field such as neuroscience require to make an advance in knowledge: an openness to failure, for example, and a willingness to start again.

No one could do other than admire the immense accumulation of technique that allows neuroscientists to inject a single neuron with dye under a microscope, the result of astonishing, and continuing, ingenuity.

As this book conveys very well, scientists are not the bloodless calculating machines of the imagination of non-scientists. They vary enormously in temperament and character, and they are passionate in defence of their ideas. They quarrel, scheme and reconcile, as people do in practically all fields of human endeavour.

We now take it so much for granted that the brain is composed of distinct cells that communicate with one another that we forget that this had to be discovered. The Spanish doctor Santiago Ramón y Cajal first put forward the hypothesis in the 1880s; until then, it was thought the brain was composed of a network.

This remained the view of the Italian Camillo Golgi, the discoverer of a way in which brain cells could be stained so that they could be seen under a microscope.

The two men were awarded the Nobel prize in the same year, 1906. But in his acceptance speech, Golgi continued to attack Cajal’s ideas, even though Cajal, in his acceptance speech, gave full credit to Golgi for his work, without which his own would have been impossible.

It is probable that many people think the brain is composed largely or entirely of Hercule Poirot’s little grey cells. The

ten and a half cells of the title (a reference to Julian Barnes’s novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters) will correct any reader’s false impression.

Included in the ten and a half is the generic type of neurone, an archetype, which children learn about in their biology lessons, but which does not exist in reality.

The elements of autobiography in the book are valuable. They convey to us the almost fantastically painstaking nature of most scientific discovery, in a way that nothing else could. There is a toleration of boredom in pursuit of what would seem to most of us a minor discovery, but one that might lead to many others.

The author spent years teasing out and studying one kind of brain cell, so that knowledge of its structure, connections and function might be advanced. If scientists are not devoid of ambition and personal quirks (as the author makes very clear), there is also something selfless about their work.

There is almost nothing in this book about the way brain cells communicate with one another; or about neurochemistry, the chemistry of which people speak when they tell one another that they have a chemical imbalance in their brains, which is why they behave so badly and are not completely happy.

But a short and exhilarating book about an aspect of neuroscience cannot contain everything that is known, and in this brief book there are many surprising facts. How many of you knew that the polar explorer and philanthropist Fridtjof Nansen was a neuroanatomist of such distinction that he might have won a Nobel prize for his scientific work, had he not gone off exploring polar regions?

Dr Theodore Dalrymple is The Oldie’s doctor

Ede’s Eden HUON MALLALIEU Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists

By Laura Freeman

Jonathan

Cape £30

My only regret at having attended Cambridge is that I never had the chance to visit Jim Ede at Kettle’s Yard while I was an undergraduate.

He created that magical place from four cottages in Cambridge and lived there from 1956 until 1983, when he left for Edinburgh, having given the house and his collection to Cambridge University.

Each afternoon, he would welcome

any visitors who turned up, making them feel ‘expected’, opening their eyes and minds to art and offering them tea and toast. Students were particularly welcome. It was an experience that changed many lives.

As a preface to her tour of the lives of Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists, Laura Freeman allows us to experience such a visit, as it might have happened in Michaelmas term, 1970. She quotes Elizabeth Simpson, a natural scientist at Girton: ‘He had a patter, but if he saw you were into it, he left you alone; left you to look.’ He didn’t change the way she looked just at pictures, but even at slides under a microscope. He taught her ‘to see patterns and connections’.

That was, and is, the essence of Kettle’s Yard. It is a gallery and cabinet of curiosities combined. Beauty may be found anywhere. A vital component is the pebbles Ede and friends picked up over years. They had to be the most perfect pebbles. The poet, gardener and artist Ian Hamilton Fraser inscribed on one that the collection was ‘the Louvre of the pebble’.

Pebbles like these had their small part in modern British art history. In his biography Drawn from Life, the sculptor John Skeaping wrote of a Norfolk holiday in 1931, when his marriage to Barbara Hepworth was crumbling: ‘Henry [Moore], Barbara and I used to pick up large iron-stone pebbles on the beach which were ideal for carving and polished up like bronze.’

Laura Freeman expands this to tell us that Ben Nicholson joined the party, and how, ‘between the sea and the shingle, Ben and Barbara were drawn together’.

Rather than working to a strict chronology, Freeman has organised her book as just such a cabinet, moulding each chapter around a work of art, in the manner popularised (though not invented) by Neil MacGregor in his A History of the World in 100 Objects.

Ede’s own study of Henri GaudierBrzeska, Savage Messiah, was ‘something in between’ a conventional biography and fiction; so is this deeply researched book. It is an approach that has the advantage of telling us about Jim Ede’s artists as well as himself.

The Kettle’s Yard artists were not a school like the Newlynites, nor a set, like the Bloomsberries. He drew them to him in friendship, when he found ‘some quality of light and life and line’ in their work.

That, rather than a style, is what won Henry Moore, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Joan Miró, David Jones,

History man

NICHOLAS LEZARD One Fine Day

By Ian Marchant

September Publishing £20

Ian Marchant’s books are an utter delight, but I have occasionally wondered how to pigeonhole him. He is sui generis, although you can turn him around and discover different facets.

He would not relish the idea of pigeonholing anyone, especially himself. So his potted biography at the end of One Fine Day begins, ‘Ian Marchant is Reader in the History of Technology and Culture at the Imaginary Free University of Radnorshire.’

This is a whimsical way of putting it, but it will do. In fact, as he puts it himself very early on in this book, ‘whimsical psycho-topography is my genre, after all’.

Alfred Wallis, Christopher Wood and Gaudier their places at Kettle’s Yard. Also, leaf skeletons, 18th-century glass rummers, a Queen Anne silver teapot, flowers and Egyptian beads.

Ede was a fixer and facilitator, a collector and dealer, a curator and – to his slight embarrassment – a critic.

He was also an interpreter and educator, who believed that art should be enjoyed as widely as possible. He had begun, naturally enough, with the early Italian masters. Although contemporary art came to excite him most, he was never proscriptive, mixing old and new art if they were happy together. After all, at Kettle’s Yard he was creating a home with a collection in it, not an art gallery.

He’d had enough of gallery life as an assistant curator at the Tate from 1921 to 1936, where he was frequently at odds with the hierarchy. That was in part because of his campaigns to broaden what was the national collection of British art to include Continentals, such as Picasso, Brancusi and Gaudier.

For all his charm and reputation as the nicest of men, he cannot have been the easiest of colleagues. At one point, he was almost ousted, but was saved through his friendship with Lawrence of Arabia, whom he had dismissed as a warlord before reading Revolt in the Desert and sending him a fan letter.

Friendship is the great theme of this book. As Freeman concludes, ‘Jim’s proudest title wasn’t curator or director or resident, but “friend to artists”.’

I’ll get back to the whimsy later. The bare bones of the book are this.

He discovers that his seven-timesgreat-grandfather was a diarist in the first part of the 18th century. He finds his great-great etc’s diary. And he mines it to discover what he, Ian, can discover about what life in those days, the last before industrialisation, was like – what it was really like, from a quotidian perspective – and how this reflects on our lives, too.

So we learn what it was like to run a farm, vote, feed carp and be married, from a male and a female perspective. And you’ll find out what it was like to be a Christian at a time of religious and political upheaval, watch a cricket match and grow your own underpants from flax.

Marchant uses that last line about underpants himself for effect. He knows how divorced we have now become from the process that surrounds us with the things we have.

His ancestor, Thom Marchant, knew the provenance of his underpants because he grew the plants that, after various time-consuming processes which Ian M guides us through, eventually became the ancestral shreddies.

He asks us to look about ourselves and wonder whether there is anything within our line of vision or indeed memory about which we can say the same. At one point, he makes himself a mug of coffee. How was the mug made? How did he get the coffee? He clicked a link on a website – but how does he have the credit?

How are the glass jars the coffee comes in made? How is the spoon with which he pops the foil lid with made? Who grew the coffee? The blurb on the jar says it comes from the ‘Inca

‘I wish our lives were as exciting as those movies’

Huon Mallalieu is The Oldie’s art critic

‘You look like you haven’t lost weight’

heartland of the PERUVIAN ANDES’. He asks, ‘How in the holy name of Viracocha does it come to be here?’

In the society we now live in, the huge trading machine, we no longer know anything close to the full picture in the way Thom Marchant and his contemporaries knew pretty much all there was to know about what they were putting in their mouths. These days, we may well know about one link in the chain – and that’s it.

For Marchant’s part, he looks at the coffee label, and says, ‘I do know what it’s like to be a penniless hack knocking out nonsensical copy for a pittance.’

There is no limit to Marchant’s curiosity, nor to his ability to engage us with the fruits of his research (and his wife’s: she helped him a lot with the family history).

This is the kind of book of which I can now confidently say, using a word I have never used before and will almost certainly never use again, you will not like this book if you are a strict antidisestablishmentarianist. He can make alive subjects that made generations of schoolchildren, myself included, go boss-eyed with boredom.

And, anyway, you will like this book if you are a strict anti-etc., because this book is too engaging, in both senses of the word, to be anything but loved. I Marchant is inspired by T Marchant to take the long view. This includes contemplating his own mortality, which is brought home sharply to him by a diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer.

He addresses this with honesty and occasional humour (but not so much humour that you think, ‘That’s weird’). Elsewhere, there are many jokes, quite a few of which will have you laughing aloud. He is a master of the deflationary footnote – yet also the instructive footnote and the ‘Blimey, what a coincidence’ footnote.

He throws a rope to the past and lets it teach us things we would do well to remember. Neighbourliness; civic virtue; decency in the form of honesty.

This book is wonderful.

Nicholas Lezard is author of It Gets Worse: Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury

Virus revisited

IVO DAWNAY Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations

By Simon Schama Simon & Schuster £30

If not a curate’s egg, Simon Schama’s new book is certainly a curiosity. From its subtitle, you assume this will be a learned history of pandemics, delivered with orotund, if not verbose, panache.

With a heavy heart, you imagine that this arduous 400-page journey will begin in the Black Death, canter through the modern era, halt awhile at the post-Great War Spanish flu and end with some robust opinions around government incompetence over Covid-19.

Certainly it starts that way, leapfrogging the Middle Ages, and opening like a sky-diver landing in the lap of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, formidable, intellectual wife of Edward, HM Ambassador to the Sublime Porte in Constantinople in 1716.

It was she who discovered in the seraglios the ancient Middle Eastern practice of inoculation, performed by the Circassian concubines to preserve their looks from the ravishes of smallpox.

Ever practical, she brought inoculation to England, and hence began Western Europe’s adoption of a medical trick first devised in the Orient.

From there, like a Parisian parkourist, Schama leaps to Marcel Proust’s father, Adrien. Unlike his flâneur son, burly, bearded Dr Proust was a global scientist and medical diplomat, an action man with a life of touring Europe, Russia and the Middle East in a relentless war against cholera. His singular achievement came in the 1890s, when an International Sanitary Conference he convened in Venice agreed the first ever multinational regime of measures.

It is here that Schama settles on the book’s hero – a Jewish Russian from Odessa whom we first meet as a resistance fighter against the bloody pogroms that scar his early life.

Waldemar Haffkine is also a scientific prodigy, a bacteriologist who goes on to create and deliver vaccines against smallpox and the bubonic plague that save the lives of millions.

He does so largely in India. There he pits his wits against the jobsworths of a British Raj, populated by a cartoon crew of moustachioed snobs, anti-Semites and sunburnt soldiers.

The combination of Haffkine, brilliant globalist man of science, and the likes of

Lord Curzon is a feast on which Schama’s priestly liberalism falls with famished glee and not without some justification.

After the early successes, Haffkine’s Anglo-Saxon enemies unjustly charge him with a medical cock-up that sets back the vaccination campaign and more or less ends his career in the field.

It also provides the central theme of the book – the eternal war of the ‘expert’ against the prejudices of well-entrenched civil services – liberally soused in national interests: institutional barbarism, ‘the sovereignty of the ignorant and the lazy over the persevering and the learned’. A conservative Blob.

Schama’s moral outrage at the handling of the Bombay bubonic-plague outbreak takes no prisoners. He brushes lightly over the sacrifices (and deaths) of many white-skinned do-gooders and the multiracial, multifaith Justices of the Peace who vainly if sincerely apply the wrong solutions to the unfurling crisis.

Instead, he suggests that their cack-handed efforts to save lives were motivated largely by a self-interested struggle to save the Raj.

And so to today. It being published post pandemic, one assumes that journey’s end will be our own contemporary idiot-faced administrators. But not even Matt Hancock, Chris Whitty or Kate Bingham is given the time of day.

Apart from a brief peroration about the outrageous martyrdom in the US by the Trumpist Right of Dr Anthony Fauci (with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson playing the role of Lord Curzon), Professor Schama seems less interested in the recent epidemic. Instead, he ends with a Biblical warning about Big Pharma’s exploitation of the horseshoe crab, the dangers of zoonotic infections and the unity of all life forms.

What is this all for, if not just another display of the polymathic historian’s giddy brilliance – this time for a wellinformed rootle around the science lab?

And you can’t help asking yourself, again and again, why is the author of the magisterial Citizens doing this to us?

Schama always reminds me of the boy in the front of the class, with his hand permanently raised, saying, ‘Me Sir, me Sir,’ as the teacher poses a question and the rest of us at the back pick our noses.

There are perhaps three or four long London Review of Books essays in here – but none one fears the non-specialist reader would want to read.

Ivo Dawnay was Washington Bureau Chief for the Sunday Telegraph

I love everything that’s old: old friends; old times; old manners; old books; old wine.

Oliver Goldsmith

The makings were neatly laid out on a side-table, and to pour into a glass an inch or so of the raw spirit and shoosh some soda-water on top of it was with me the work of a moment. This done, I retired to an armchair and put my feet up, sipping the mixture with carefree enjoyment, rather like Caesar having one in his tent the day he overcame the Nervii.

Bertie Wooster in PG Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves

That calm sense of mastery – mastery over himself and others known only to those who are doing what they were born to do.

Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep

The French say, ‘To know all is to forgive all.’ Well, one can never know all, and one cannot in one’s heart forgive everything but one can appear to do so and then, eventually, one forgets.

Brooke Astor

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

Alfred North Whitehead

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to

us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.

Karl Menninger

If you’re having a party, invite only people whose presence at it will make you happy, because these are the people who will have a good time.

Andrew Solomon, A Stone Boat

His mates at the University of Sydney became so concerned by his fondness

I DON’T WANT to pay for every single little item –every co ee, newspaper and bag of crisps, when I suddenly feel peckish – with my bank card.

for female company that they formed up and huskily asked him straight out if he was homosexual.

Christopher Hitchens on Robert Hughes

There’s nothing so empty as an empty playground.

Andrew O’Hagan, Be Near Me

People long for something to report as an excuse to get in touch with those they love.

John Stubbs, John Donne: The Reformed Soul

Pierre was one of those people who, despite the appearance of what is called weak character, do not seek a confidant for their troubles, but work them out alone.

Tolstoy, War and Peace

On the whole, those who have taken drugs copiously and habitually over many years strike me as a great deal more boring and stupid than those who have not.

But to say that drugs have made them boring and stupid may be to confuse cause with effect. Most of them were pretty grim company even before they stuck that first rolled-up tenner up their noses.

Tom Kemp, Daily Telegraph

As rude as he was, he could not credit anyone else with politeness.

Julian Fellowes, Snobs

Cash-free society I am boycotting certain shops and cafés for refusing to accept cash.

The trouble is, losing money from one oldie like me will make no di erence whatsoever to these places. They cater to the young, and now increasingly the middle-aged, who never carry cash and tap-tap-tap away merrily at every card reader.

I am an oldie, and cash is tight. Everything is expensive, and I have to budget. I withdraw a certain sum from my bank every month, and I want to make that sum last until the next month. I also have an obscure fear that the more I use my card, the greater my chances of falling victim to fraudulent use of my details.

What these cash-free companies won’t admit is that refusing cash simply makes life easier – for them.

No cash in tills means no cash to count and no chasing-up of an incorrect balance. For those averse to cash machines, banks are making the withdrawal of money more and more di icult.

During the Covid lockdowns, some banks saw a golden opportunity to

SMALL DELIGHTS

downsize. They refused counter service – and then later claimed that branches were closing because hardly anybody used the counter service.

So I am trying to ght back. If I walk into a café, order an overpriced co ee, brandish a crisp new 20 and then am told, ‘We don’t accept cash,’ or, as a barista recently screamed at me, ‘Cards only!’, I do not obediently get out my bank card. I say, ‘OK,’ turn on my heel and walk out.

Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

If these companies want to lose a sale, ne. I’ll take my money elsewhere. Join with me, oldies, on my crusade to Keep the Cash!

JULIE CRUICKSHANK

Breathing on coins rejected by a parking meter, re-inserting and having them accepted.

MARK RANDALL, ROYAL TUNBRIDGE WELLS, KENT

Wooster & Jeeves, Strand Magazine, 1922

Jonathan Swift vs Taylor Swift

Modern publishers prefer pop singers to brilliant writers a n wilson

G K Chesterton said the art of journalism was to interest the readers in the fact that Lady Jones was dead, when they had not previously known that she was alive.

It is not impossible that many Oldiereaders have spent the last innocent six, seven or eight decades utterly unaware of the existence of Taylor Swift. Dean Swift, of course. His surreal, undiluted misanthropy seems ever more sane to us. Indeed, every matutinal newspaper perusal, finding new evidence of the bizarre antics of our politicians, celebs and church folk, feels like reading Gulliver’s Travels

And we have fond memories of Clive Swift. Married to Margaret Drabble once upon a time, he was the put-upon husband in TV’s comedy Keeping Up Appearances, with Pat Routledge as Hyacinth Bucket, pronounced Bouquet. At a pinch, some of us might have heard of Graham Swift. But Taylor Swift? Hmm.

Popular entertainer, m’ lud. American.

A rumour recently swept through what some of the newspapers are calling ‘the literary world’. This world is not, as you might think, a world where everyone is curled up with Plato’s Republic or Racine’s Phèdre; where talented poets and prose-writers are published even though they write, like a character in Ivy Compton-Burnett, ‘for the few’.

On the contrary, it is the brash and almost boundlessly philistine world of commercial publishing, shored up by TikTok, Amazon and social media.

The spectre that’s haunting this strange world is a memoir, released on 13th June, by Flatiron, an imprint of Macmillan. The working title is 4C Untitled Flatiron Nonfiction Summer 2023. Costing £35, already it is top of the Barnes and Noble pre-order chart. It is second on Amazon. Why? Because the rumour was that this unenticing title is the work of the phenomenally popular singer-songwriter Taylor Swift.

The book is already destined to

outsell Spare, the memoirs of that esteemed man of letters the Duke of Sussex. At a rumoured 544 pages, it is also considerably longer than the work of His Royal Highness. The fans of Ms Swift, clearly the kind of nerds who believe in conspiracy theories as well as being simply idiots, have calculated that 5 + 4 + 4 = 13; and 13, as is common knowledge, is Ms Swift’s lucky mumber.

So hundreds of thousands of people were prepared to shell out the price of an average restaurant meal for a book they have not read, and which would, quite indubitably, have been written not by Taylor Swift, whoever she is, but by a ghost writer. In fact, as was leaked about a month before publication, this nonbook was not by Taylor Swift at all, but by a boy band calls BTS.

Presumably they have their fans – but perhaps the publishers thought they’d sell more copies of the book by implying it was by the legendary Taylor Swift.

The old argument about bestsellers was that they paid for the good books on a publisher’s list that sold less well.

A publisher would be prepared to take a punt on some volume of verse, or some experimental novel, because they made their money publishing some celebrated tearaway success, such as Agatha Christie or J K Rowling.

This might have been the case once upon a time. The bestsellers, such as Christie, were proper books. But the modern bestsellers are not strictly speaking books at all. The world of publishing, dominated by conglomerates, has been taken over by total barbarians who do not care about books at all.

Cyril Connolly, in Enemies of Promise (1938), wrote that ‘Popular success is a palace built for writers by publishers, journalists, and professional reputationmakers, in which a silent army of termites, rats, dry rot and death-watch beetles are tunnelling away, till, at the

very moment of completion, it is ready to fall down.’

Every autumn, in time for the ‘Christmas market’, they churn out a bunch of ‘celebrity’ memoirs, the ghosted recollections of singers, politicians, has-beens of stage and screen, most of which will not make a fraction of their advance. The moronic belief that such ‘books’ will keep the ‘industry’ alive actually deters publishers from daring to publish innovative or interesting stuff.

The editors who have a real feel for books will inevitably, in such a world, be sidelined. Their voices will be drowned out by the sales teams who have nil interest in books; who think the job of a good publisher is to bring out the autobiographies of Taylor Swift or Prince Harry.

Wisconsin bookshop Blue House Books offered a refund to their customers if, as it transpired, the forthcoming memoir was not by Taylor Swift but by some other celebrity.

It sounds handsome of them, but one wonders why they bothered. One of the features of bestsellers, as opposed to proper books, is that they are bought by millions, but read by – one suspects – no one.

I have never met anyone who was able, plausibly, to tell me that they had read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. And I have long suspected that the reason Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses rebounded so catastrophically on the author was that it had not been read even by the publishers. I’ve tried about five times, and it really is unreadable, as are nearly all the bestsellers, whether misery memoirs, ‘airport’ thrillers or self-help books about well-being and mindfulness.

The paradox would not be lost on Swift. Dean Swift, that is.

Publishers believe themselves to be saving the book trade by selling prodigious quantities of books that are not written, but ghosted, and which cannot, strictly speaking, be read.

FILM HARRY MOUNT

STILL: A MICHAEL J FOX MOVIE (15)

You don’t have to be a fan of film star Michael J Fox to be moved by the tale of his Parkinson’s disease.

Fox was at the height of his powers, aged only 29, with the Back to the Future films under his belt, when the disease struck.

‘How could I have this old people’s disease?’ was his reaction.

For seven years, he kept the news quiet from the movie studios – and his fans. Now, though, the films he was in then have an added poignancy. He could mask the Parkinson’s if he held his limbs still or carried something – that’s why he’s so often holding his wrist, looking at his watch or grasping a bottle.

The disease started slowly – ‘The trembling was a message from the future,’ as he wittily puts it – before becoming the all-encompassing horror it is now.

You see him walking down the streets of Manhattan, bent over and scuttling, before an agonising fall on the pavement when he turns to say hello to a passing fan. He struggles to squeeze toothpaste onto a toothbrush.

Parkinson’s is a nightmare for anyone, and particularly for an actor. It’s sometimes hard to hear him speak and he’s forever breaking things in falls –including his hand, arm and cheekbone.

Now 62, he is admirably vanity-free and open to the most direct of questions from the director, Davis Guggenheim.

With his quick, self-deprecating wit, Fox tries to take the edge off his horrible predicament. At one point, he talks about the public reception to the news about his condition and says, ‘I find it extremely moving – no pun intended [given the vigorous shakes he can’t control].’

Arts

When he admits, ‘I’m in intense pain,’ he immediately smiles, to avoid appearing gloomy or self-pitying.

Interspersed with the unremitting progress of his disease is his life story. A happy childhood in Canada was unusual only in the detail of his diminutive height. The shortest in his class, he grew to five foot three and then stopped. Acting – in ‘cute elf’ roles, as he charmingly puts it – was his salvation.

The slightly clunky re-enactions of his youth show his desperate bids for stardom: first appearing on screen at 15, and moving to LA aged 18. He finally got his big break in 1982, on the NBC show Family Ties. And then came the megabreak in 1985 – as Marty McFly in Back to the Future.

Fox became one of the great stars of the ’80s – the sex thimble every American Mom wanted their daughter to marry.

Everything went right – he married his Family Ties co-star, Tracy Pollan, in 1988. Family Ties ran from 1982 to 1989; the Back to the Future trilogy from 1985 to 1990.

You remain painfully aware of what awaits Fox, even as you see the pictures of the Ferraris of his youth and the shots of chat shows when he was the Boy Prince of Hollywood.

It began to go wrong in 1991, with the Parkinson’s diagnosis. Fox concealed it until 1998, even as he embarked on another hit show, Spin City

He continued to act for over 20 years, not least in a funny cameo in Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, where he cheerfully mocks his Parkinson’s.

But he knew all these years he was acting on borrowed time. In 2021, he retired, defeated by the struggle to smile and the blank countenance of the Parkinson’s-sufferer.

This could have been a schmaltzy feelgood film. But in fact it’s so honestly done that it’s genuinely moving. Yes, Fox has a lovely supportive wife – ‘In sickness and in health,’ she whispered on hearing the Parkinson’s diagnosis – and four adorable children.

But it remains a feelbad film. There is no cure for Parkinson’s, however rich or famous you are. As Fox says, ‘You lose this game. You don’t win this.’

Fantastic Mr Fox: Michael J Fox now, aged 62

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK

THE MOTIVE AND THE CUE National Theatre, London, until 15th July

In 1964, Richard Burton played Hamlet on Broadway, directed by John Gielgud – the finest Shakespearean actor of the century directing the most exciting actor of his generation. Burton’s recent marriage to Elizabeth Taylor was front-page news. Commercially, this new Hamlet couldn’t fail.

Artistically, though, the pairing was a thorny proposition. Gielgud’s approach to Shakespeare was cerebral and intellectual. Burton was passionate and instinctive. Gielgud played him from the neck up. Burton played him from the gut.

Their Hamlet was a clash of styles and generations – the gentleman actor of the old school versus the angry young man of the jet age.

This Kulturkampf is the essence of Jack Thorne’s thoughtful new play, crisply directed by Sam Mendes. Unlike in a lot of backstage dramas, its main focus is the rehearsal process. Thorne’s play concludes as the curtain rises on the first night.

Two of Burton’s supporting actors (William Redfield and Richard L Sterne) wrote whole books about these rehearsals – so Thorne has a lot of historical detail to draw on. There’s bound to be a fair amount of artistic licence, too. However, it’s not very important how much of this is fact and how much fiction. The only thing that really matters is: does it work as drama?

The show is graced by two superb performances: Mark Gatiss as a delicate and graceful Gielgud, and Johnny Flynn as a brooding, virile Burton.

It’s perfectly possible to sit back and just enjoy these uncannily accurate portrayals, yet I found myself watching them with a mounting sense of frustration. Although each individual scene is an elegant, eloquent set piece, Thorne is too kind to his characters and his play suffers as a result.

At 38, Burton was too old to play Hamlet. A lifetime of hard living (which was to finish him off at the age of 58) was already starting to catch up with him.

Johnny Flynn, who plays him here, is 40, but while Flynn looks ten years younger, Burton looked at least ten years older. There’s a scene where he turns up to rehearsals drunk and is rude to everyone (especially Gielgud), but – like the awkward issue of his age – the conundrum of why a man who had it all

should choose to drown it in a sea of drink is never adequately addressed.

Likewise, Thorne’s Gielgud is far too saintly for my liking. Just as great footballers rarely make great managers, great actors rarely make great directors.

Gielgud infuriates Burton with his micromanagement, but the rest of the cast adore him, even though his reluctance to countenance a Hamlet different from the one he played is terribly self-obsessed.

Ditto Elizabeth Taylor. Tuppence Middleton’s Taylor is charismatic and alluring, but I found it hard to believe the most famous (and gorgeous) actress in the world would be quite so content to hang around mixing cocktails for her husband’s workmates. Maybe she really was that polite in real life, but it hardly makes great theatre. I was hoping for a few more fireworks.

The biggest problem, however, is that the whole thing is so self-referential.

What if you’ve never heard of Gielgud or Burton? What if you’ve never seen Hamlet? Would this play within a play make any sense, or would you be utterly befuddled? The rehearsal scenes feel novel to begin with, but I ended up wishing I was watching these actors playing Hamlet for real.

Things become a lot more interesting when Thorne’s characters escape from the rehearsal room: Burton boozing in his hotel suite; Gielgud with a male escort. I would have loved to see more of this, and a lot less ‘What’s my motivation?’ I’m in a minority. This audience adored it. There are already rumours of a West End transfer.

This is an accomplished production of

an accomplished play, but it’s a sign that theatre is retreating into introspection.

1964 was the year of John Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence and Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane. Osborne and Orton were writing about the modern world. They weren’t writing about Edwardian interpretations of Shakespeare.

Gatiss and Flynn are terrific as Gielgud and Burton, but I’d rather see them as Polonius and Hamlet or, even better, in a new play about the world today.

RADIO VALERIE GROVE

‘So, what was your best takeaway, from the whole shebang?’ as a BBC podcaster put it.

Was it the sweet chorister’s opening welcome to the king, the ‘gobsmacking’ Zadok, or Penny Mordaunt’s biceps? A nostalgia-fest ensued, until fatuity and banality set in.

All vox pops invite clichés. Those who got coronation mugs and silver lockets in 1953 recalled monochrome first sightings of a flickering 12-inch screen, the launch of the television age. Seventy years on, earphones in, I started out loyally tuned to Radio 4’s commentary, stayed to hear Jim Naughtie pick up the baton – but then gave in. The box won again.

I was glued to the optics: Charles’s worryingly gaping tunic, Camilla’s instinctive desire to guide the Archbishop’s hand so he didn’t mess up her hair. It was totally involving, intrusive and televisual.

The play’s the thing: Gielgud (Mark Gatiss) and Burton (Johnny Flynn)

At this point, enter my daughter Lucy, an English teacher. Her school is already dealing with baccalaureate students using ChatGPT to write their essays. Even Lucy finds it useful (if fallible) to create simple tests. ‘Try it,’ she said.

‘Two hundred words,’ I ordered, ‘comparing the BBC Coronation coverage on radio and TV.’

Zip! In a nanosecond, the required wordage appeared on-screen, relating how radio dominated households in 1953, ‘when TV sets were still rare’.

‘But what about the 2023 Coronation?’ I asked.

Zip! Another nanosecond and the bot retorted, ‘I’m sorry, but I cannot compare coverage of the 2023 Coronation. Queen Elizabeth II is the current monarch of the UK and there have been no announcements about a future hypothetical ceremony.’ Ha! This bot, created in 2021, is stuck there. We laughed. But I was also astonished.

After Jeremy Bowen’s Frontlines of Journalism series, we were left wondering whether we really wanted the BBC’s impartiality guidelines upheld after all. Bowen’s father, Gareth, was not impartial, reporting the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. Nor was Richard Dimbleby, entering Belsen in 1945. Jeremy Bowen: ‘The truth does not lie “somewhere in between” opposing viewpoints. The truth lies right there, in a box.’

The historian Peter Hennessy, b 1947, rose from a family on benefits to the House of Lords, blessed by grammar school and a history master named Eric Pankhurst. On Desert Island Discs, he admitted a journalistic blunder (naming the wrong Fourth Man in 1977). He also declared, ‘I wish my generation had been able to do better for our country.’ With all our post-1945 advantages, we should have made a better world, he said. He is hopeful. ‘I’m Pollyanna to a fault, and the country’s brimming with good people. We are better than this.’

I wanted to agree, but then I heard Helen Lewis’s dismaying series The New Gurus, with its bleak vision of young men in thrall to ‘life coaches’ – not just Andrew Tate, but ‘a Love Island candidate and former nightclub promoter’, preaching a toxic lifestyle to 200 million downloaders.

And David Aaronovitch’s The Briefing Room – on the Online Safety Bill – did not reassure. These morning slots – Woman’s Hour included – seem designed to instil pity and terror. It’s a relief to find Ed Reardon (now an ‘ambassador to the planet’, while Jez has ‘taken the HS2 shilling’) still satirising contemporary life. Or The Oldie’s A N Wilson,

wonderfully non-impartial on Times Radio, declaring that over-70s should be denied the vote, as they are ‘too set in their ways, and will be dead soon anyway’.

For his 80th birthday, Michael Palin’s Desert Island Discs was revived from 1979. ‘I’m sorry to say you only got a second at Oxford,’ Roy Plomley said. ‘You seem to have frittered a lot of time with Terry Jones. What was he supposed to be reading?’ ‘He was reading Frittering,’ deadpanned Palin. All right, Terry read English. ‘And did he get a second, too?’

‘Yes, he only got a second,’ said Palin. ‘Poor Terry.’

Quite lost on Plomley, who had NSOH.

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON

The BBC is currently going Down Under, and what an education it is.

Ten Pound Poms (BBC1), Danny Brocklehurst’s new Sunday-night drama, begins in snowy Stockport in 1956, where Annie Roberts (Faye Marsay) spots the ad for £10 tickets to Australia on the newspaper she is using to soak up her drunken husband’s vomit. Things haven’t been right with Terry (Warren Brown) since he was captured in the war.

The next time we see them, they are heading for the harbour. ‘We can have our tea in the garden,’ says Annie to the kids, Pattie and Peter (Hattie Hook and Finn Treacy). ‘Coconuts for breakfast,’ adds Terry, who has promised to give up beer. It is Empire Windrush in reverse.

Six weeks, three days and 14 hours later, the Roberts family disembark in Sydney where a Chinese couple are being turned away by the port authorities. ‘Whites only,’ explains the customs officer. ‘Rules.’

Pattie looks stunned, as though racism were an entirely new concept. Annie will

be similarly astounded when, the following week, an Aboriginal woman is sent to the back of the queue in a shop.

One and half million people from Britain and Ireland were seduced by the Australian government’s Assisted Passage Migration Scheme, including Mr and Mrs Gibb and their sons Barry, Robin and Maurice, who left on the same boat as the parents of Kylie and Dannii Minogue.

Given that Ten Pound Poms is primarily a social history of the migrant experience, it’s a pity that postwar England is presented as more colourcoordinated than a Benetton advert. Pattie and Annie Roberts will presumably have heard plenty of references to ‘Pakis’ back in Stockport, and seen the signs saying, ‘NO BLACKS, NO IRISH’. What’s new is that they are now themselves at the bottom of the pecking order.

Instead of being handed the keys to a spanking new bungalow with a beach view, the family are deposited at a temporary housing complex, which looks, says Terry, ‘like a prisoner-of-war camp’. Watchtowers loom over vermininfested shanty huts; inmates scrub their backs beneath outdoor showers.

‘This place is a dump,’ Pattie says to J J, the sadistic hostel manager (played by comedian Stephen Curry).

‘And you wonder why,’ replies JJ, ‘we call you whingeing poms. You come over here, soak up our sunshine, take our jobs, and all you do is complain.’

Other whingeing poms in Camp Cockroach include the sultry Kate (Michelle Keegan), who left her fiancé behind in Liverpool, and Bob, a dodgy English businessman whose wife, Sheila (I know!), is miserable enough to be shagging J J.

These subplots distract from – rather than blend in with – the central story,

Pom alert: Peter, Pattie, Anne & Terry (Treacy, Hook, Marsay & Brown)

Ed McLachlan

first half, a famously challenging transcription by composer and piano virtuoso Ferruccio Busoni of Bach’s mighty chaconne from his D minor Partita was followed by what many believe to be Robert Schumann’s greatest work for solo piano, his C major Fantasia

After that, we were transported back to the 20th century’s two world wars and works by Ravel and Prokofiev which Grosvenor had tellingly juxtaposed.

Walls have ears. I remember the late Robert Tear recalling his time as a choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, where he sensed ‘instant echoes of old, long-gone notes, deposited in the stone crannies’.

It must be the same in Wigmore Hall. This matchless venue for chamber music and song was designed and built by the Bechstein piano company. It was confiscated from Bechstein in 1916 under a somewhat dubious amendment to the Trading with the Enemy Act. Ravel and Prokofiev both appeared there, as did Busoni, who played at the hall’s inaugural recital on 31st May 1901.

‘Oh no – the gerbils have escaped again’

which is how the Roberts family will make a silk purse out of this sow’s ear. The Aussies, swivel-eyed psychos, see the Poms as top-hatted pansies nibbling on cucumber sandwiches. Things really are upside-down here!

The two nations are also divided by a common language: ‘How do you get an elephant into a refrigerator?’ J J asks a terrified Peter. ‘Open the door and push him in.’

Terry, a skilled builder, finds himself digging trenches alongside Dean (David Field), the most lethal man since Freddy Krueger. ‘You have Blacks in Britain, don’t you?’ says Dean, having tried to squash Terry beneath an avalanche of rolling steel pipes. ‘Well, over here, you’re the Black. Go and piss in the bushes.’

A later rant from Dean about the ‘Abos’ being subhuman leaves Annie and Terry agreeing to find nicer friends. This is after Dean has run over an Aboriginal boy, leaving him for dead.

For light relief, turn to BBC2 iPlayer where Colin from Accounts, written by and starring Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall, is pure heaven. Strangely, the plot also hinges on a car accident in Sydney. This time, it’s a stray dog (Colin) who is hit, and Gordon (played by Brammall) covers his medical expenses

and takes him in. Now with wheels instead of back legs, Colin looks like a children’s toy. Why did Gordon run over Colin? Because he was distracted when Ashley (Harriet Dyer) flashed her tit at him as she crossed the road.

‘Was it your party tit?’ asks her friend, Megan. ‘No’, says Ashley, ‘it was the small one.’

Now that’s a joke poor Peter could laugh at.

MUSIC

RICHARD OSBORNE

BENJAMIN GROSVENOR AT WIGMORE HALL

There was a handful of empty seats for pianist Benjamin Grosvenor’s Coronation weekend Wigmore Hall recital.

It may not have been entirely wise to schedule so high-profile an event on the same evening as the royal concert, televised live from nearby Windsor. Still, though the size of the audience was a fraction of that of the Windsor throng, there could be no denying the pedigree of the artist, or the range and durability of the music he’d chosen to play.

Grosvenor is the finest English pianist of his generation, and his programme was a thing of epic proportions. In the

Grosvenor’s decision to launch the recital with a lapidary account of the Bach brought with it more than a hint of the idea of Moses bringing the tablets down from the mountain. All the evening’s music owed a debt to the keyboard works of Bach, not least the Schumann.

There’s no greater love letter in all music than the three-movement Fantasia which the 26-year-old Schumann composed during an enforced separation from his wife-to-be, the 16-year-old Clara Wieck. Yet the work’s origin goes back to a fundraising commission from Franz Liszt to help raise money for a Beethoven memorial in Bonn. Beethoven revered Bach.

More to the point, there’s that haunting nine-note motif, a direct quotation from Beethoven’s song cycle To the Distant Beloved, that’s embedded deep within the fabric of the Schumann.

Following in the footsteps of Sviatoslav Richter, whose 1961 HMV recording of the Fantasia redefined our sense of the work’s expressive reach and impact, Grosvenor pulled on seven-league boots of his own. He unleashed great cataracts of tone, yet taking silence itself captive in moments of sudden quiet and contemplation.

The recital’s second half landed us in very different territory: Gallic not German, more emotionally detached –beyond personality, you might say – and driven by a distinctively 20th-century brand of keyboard virtuosity.

Ravel began his suite Le Tombeau de Couperin with ‘Forlane’, haughty and witty after the manner of Couperin,

albeit decked out with outlandish harmonies which caused some of Ravel’s contemporaries to cover their ears in disbelief.

That was in 1914. Then the war came and the work was set aside until 1917, by which time many of Ravel’s friends were dead.

Again, there were those who were shocked by the surface brilliance of the work Ravel finally completed. ‘The dead are sad enough in their eternal silence’ was Ravel’s reply.

Grosvenor was less disingenuous. There was a touch of anger in his rip-roaring account of ‘Rigaudon’. The movement was dedicated to the memory of two brothers, Pierre and Pascal Gaudin, who’d been blown up by the same shell on the day they arrived at the front in November 1914. And there was a deep undertow of melancholy in his playing of ‘Menuet’, dedicated to Jean Dreyfus to whose family Ravel had long been close.

This, and the sardonically dazzling toccata with which Le Tombeau ends, might seem impossible acts to follow, but Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata, written in 1942, takes expressions of outrage and disbelief to new heights.

It, too, concludes with a rocketing toccata. Vladimir Horowitz, in his 1945 world-première recording, treats this with a certain consideration; elegance even. Not so Grosvenor, whose performance, not inappropriately, suggested a ‘to Hell with it all’ mood.

There was menace too in his playing of the slow movement, with its parody blues

tune and passages that sound like the chiming of distant bells.

Do those same bells continue to chime over Prokofiev’s newly shattered homeland? It was a question this beautifully calibrated reading made it impossible not to ask.

It had been some recital – rounded off with a lovely performance of Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, the river god smiling as the waters played about him.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON CLASH OF THE TINAS

If you have been on the Tube recently, you can’t have missed those posters proclaiming ‘TINA’ and picturing the hoofer from Tennessee in full cry.

They’re promoting the five-year anniversary relaunch of the recordbreaking eponymous musical at the Aldwych in the West End, impeccably directed by Phyllida Lloyd.

‘Set to the pulse-pounding soundtrack of her most beloved hits, experience Tina Turner’s triumphant story live on stage as this exhilarating celebration reveals the woman that dared to dream fiercely, shatter barriers and conquer the world – against all odds,’ the programme says.

The production is a collab with Mrs Turner herself and it’s an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza interrupted only by brief intervals of hitting (Ike on Tina). The greatest hits – River Deep, Mountain High, What’s Love Got to Do with It?, Nutbush City Limits, Let’s Stay Together and Private Dancer – are all given proper size-12 welly.

Whenever I see the poster, the journalist in me, as opposed to the Oldie rock critic, can’t help wishing that the life of another Tina was being celebrated too, despite the ads boasting ‘There is only one Tina’.

That is Tina Brown. We met when I was at Oxford and she blew in – she was editing Vanity Fair and Olivia Channon had just died of a drugs overdose in the Christ Church rooms of Count Gottfried von Bismarck – and took a bunch of undergraduates, including me, out to lunch to get the goss for a mag piece.

‘I liked the editor of Isis, a sparky blonde,’ she said in a diary afterwards, which remains the only nice thing anyone has ever written about me.

I have been her devoted slave ever since.

This May, she was in town to host a summit for her Sir Harry Evans Memorial Fund. At a reception for it at the US Ambassador’s residence (where drinks started at the record early time of 5.30pm, and at 7pm I couldn’t even get a glass of water as they had ‘closed the bar’), Tina said a few words. The crowd included Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. All I can say is her gift for nifty phrasemaking has if anything advanced with age (she hailed the couple as ‘the Mick and Keith of journalism’).

So, please, Phyllida Lloyd, how about doing a rock opera about the girl from Maidenhead who bewitched men of letters, edited magazines, founded magazines and so on?

Tina Brown is the Tina Turner of journalism. She too is ‘simply unstoppable’ (as the posters put it). She is ‘simply the best’ – and a rock star in her own right.

Sergei Proko ev in 1950

Tina Brown – the Tina Turner of journalism

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU LAVINIA FONTANA

National Gallery of Ireland, to 27th August

The subtitle of this exhibition is Trailblazer, Rule Breaker – and that certainly applies to Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614).

There had been female artists before but, in the words of Dr Caroline Campbell (herself the first woman to direct a National Gallery in the British Isles), those we know of had worked within ‘the rarefied confines of a convent or court’.

Sofonisba Anguissola, the older contemporary whom she credited as an inspiration, was one who flourished at courts, but Fontana was the first documented female artist to run her own workshop.

She was lucky in her place of birth. Bologna, probably the oldest university in the world, awarded its first degree to a woman in 1237. As one of the more loosely controlled papal states, the city was ruled by 40 families rather than just one, and artists could be at least minor aristocrats.

Furthermore, her family were actively supportive, with her father, Prospero, not only teaching her but negotiating a remarkable marriage contract, which is in the show. Her husband, Gian Paolo Zappi, was happy to be her business manager.

An equally remarkable exhibit is the record he kept of the baptisms and frequent deaths of the 11 children she bore during her working years. It is notable that the three survivors, and Zoppi himself, changed their name to Fontana.

Fontana outstripped her father and in turn became the family’s support when he fell ill. She built up a formidable practice as a portrait-painter in Bologna, especially of ladies. It is hard to think of any

Clockwise from below:Assumption of the Virgin with Saints Peter Chrysologus and Cassian, 1584; The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon, 1599; Galatea and Cherubs Riding the Stormy Waves on a Sea Monster, c 1590; Portrait of Carlo Sigonio, c 1578

contemporaries who could match her genius in painting, fabrics and jewels.

I spent at least five minutes in close study of the queen’s dress in the NGI’s own Solomon and Sheba. Every gold thread seems tangible, and the hundreds of pearls three-dimensional. That painting dates from Fontana’s later years when, freed from pregnancies, she could produce larger works, and the family moved to Rome. Despite the ban on women studying from life, she even produced striking nudes, some for cardinals.

A feature of her portraits, particularly but not only of children, is the direct look many of her sitters give us, their audience. Other than in self-portraits included in crowds for promotional purposes, that is very rare in Italian painting of the period.

This is a most impressive show of just 66 exhibits, including documents and objects to give context, and it plays a fascinating light on Fontana’s methods.

Pursuits

GARDENING DAVID WHEELER BORDER CONTROL

Call it May Madness if you like.

A hare seen spiralling around an adjacent field seemed similarly afflicted, as giant machines made silage, disturbing its equilibrium and, possibly, nearby nest.

My madness was of a different cast – the making of long herbaceous borders which I know full well someone else will have to maintain. Despite chronic back pain since major spinal surgery in 2018 and a life-changing cancer op just before Christmas last year (and trying to forget I’m approaching my ninth decade), I remain an incurable garden-maker – a creator, not a curator.

Hence the new borders –56ft of them, seven feet deep.

May Day proved a timely moment to lift the turf. The overall length is broken in the middle to form a grass path into the newly planted apple orchard. And each half has a central break to accommodate a south-facing bench – sitting awhile now being increasingly important.

The design makes four rectangular beds – a less daunting prospect than one unforgiving, lengthy monster. I have had two of them roughly dug, ahead of being turned to a fine tilth after an initial weeding. The other two are subject to a no-dig regime, in an unscientific attempt to gauge the pros and cons of both methods.

For height (unpruned, they’ll tower above my now round-shouldered six feet), I have planted two strong-growing, upright roses – Rosa moyseii ‘Geranium’ and its equally delightful kin ‘Highdownensis’. As the borders overlook a nascent collection of Japanese maples, chosen for their spectacular autumn

foliage, the roses were selected more for their conspicuous late-season hips than for their early-summer flowers.

But the main reason for the borders is to billet my Siberian irises, hardy, easygoing, reliable, floriferous, variouslyblue-shaded (other colours are available), clump-forming herbaceous plants which give of their best in late May and June. They like damp ground, which southwest Wales bestows freely. Usefully, their flower stems (upwards of three foot in some varieties) are taller than their leaves.

Aulden Farm in Herefordshire (open days in June and September), close to where we lived until two years ago, held a National Collection of Iris sibirica. It was an annual treat to see its almost 200 different kinds, huggermugger, in regimented beds – where size and hue were assessed. Most of my plants came from Farmyard Nurseries at Llandysul, in the hills behind Carmarthen (open every day) and from the Gobbett Nursery near Kidderminster (by appointment or at numerous plant fairs until mid-September –see planthunterfairs.co.uk).

With so many sibirica varieties to choose from, I must forsake a completist’s approach. My preference is for those of an unfussy countenance –plants of ‘typical’ form, leaving the fancy, frilly-petalled ones to other buyers.

I have my favourites. Pale-blue ‘Papillon’ copiously graced our previous garden and a slip from one of its clumps is increasing here pleasingly. Of other blues, I treasure cerulean ‘Perry’s Blue’, velvety ‘Caesar’s Brother’, yellow-throated ‘Cambridge’ and greyish-blue ‘Sea Shadows’. To lighten the confection, there’s green-veined

creamy ‘Chartreuse Bounty’, chalkywhite ‘Gull’s Wing’ and the 1970s-bred, bicoloured ‘Butter and Sugar’.

To avoid the dangers of monocropping, I must introduce other plants to interweave among the irises and to provide colour and interest, once these beauties have retired.

Sidalceas are a new pursuit and we reckon we have just the right (moistureretentive) soil for the larger types of lobelia – scarlet L cardinalis and guardsman-red L tupa, alongside the butterfly favourite, ‘Starship Blue’.

These summer bloomers will fill the gap nicely until the fabulous array of symphyotrichums (asters to you and me) take over. Stay tuned.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD OLIVES

Britain’s relationship with olives and olive oil began in the 1950s with Elizabeth David’s books on Mediterranean cooking.

As we have continued to associate the growing of olives with the warmer climate of southern Europe, some of us now think that olives should thrive in the changing climate and higher temperatures that are supposedly being experienced in this country.

In fact the British climate is already well suited to growing olives, because the trees need at least two months’ cold weather in winter to produce flowers and fruit.

However hot our summers may be in future years, we shall never produce olives that rival the quality and quantities grown in Spain and Italy. But there is no reason not to have an olive tree in the garden.

It can be planted in the ground now in a small, sheltered garden, but will be

Siberian iris

better off in a large pot which can be sited in a sunny position in summer and moved close to a wall in winter to avoid frost.

Having said that, I came across an olive grove the other day at Mottistone, near the west coast of the Isle of Wight. The trees were growing on a bank exposed to the wind and apparently did not suffer from salt blowing in from the sea.

Olive trees are hardy, self-fertile and pollinated by wind. A young tree planted now should bear fruit after about four years. Leccino is a Tuscan variety which tolerates a wide range of temperatures.

Regular watering, feeding and spring pruning are advised, which I may have neglected with our two olive trees on the terrace; this may explain why we have had no fruit.

I have seen a photograph of a 15-yearold olive tree in Devon, laden with olives which have turned black from green.

When harvested, they should be soaked in brine for several weeks to get rid of their unpleasantly bitter taste. But, even without fruit, an olive tree can be enjoyed for its silvery evergreen leaves, and the fact that it is a symbol of peace.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD JET-SET MEALS

Stay at home this summer with Daniel E Bender’s The Food Adventurers, a gloriously entertaining survey of gastronomic travellers’ tales from Toronto University’s Professor of Food Studies.

The story runs from the mid-19th century till the Instagrammers take over and we can watch from the safety of our armchairs as the late Anthony Bourdain swallows a cobra heart live on TV (sorry, folks!).

The author’s plan, post-Covid, in November 2021, was a round-the-world trip, following the 1922 itinerary of the Cunard Line’s flagship SS Franconia.

Since most of the world was still under lockdown, it didn’t happen. Instead, Professor Bender examines how culinary tourism has shaped the way we now eat.

Most of his informants are female. Lady-travellers notice useful things like dinner, leaving the men to explore important things like battlefields.

In 1852, Ida Pfeiffer witnesses cannibal dances in Sumatra. In 1928, Juanita Harrison sees (but doesn’t eat) grilled centipedes in Guangdong.

Once air travel cracks in with early mass tourism in the 1950s, Myra Waldo bakes salmon in coconut milk for Pan Am, while Conrad Hilton goes Polynesian in Trader Vic’s. Planter’s Punch in a hollowed-out pineapple with a tiny parasol, anyone?

Culinary appropriation was always political. Just as the curry house is a reminder of Britain’s imperial past, so the Dutch commemorate their colonial adventurings with the rice table, rijsttafel. This is a lavish interpretation of Indonesia’s modest midday meal, now considered a post-colonial relic in its land of origin. It’s a minefield.

Play it safe with a recipe for Sumatran chicken from Sri Owen, author of the definitive work on Indonesian cooking.

Spiced coconut chicken

Gentle stewing followed by rapid grilling ensures that a muscular little barnyard bird is juicy and tender. A useful recipe for a summer barbecue, since the basic cooking can be done in advance. Serves 4

1 small free-range chicken, quartered For the spice paste

1 onion, skinned and chopped

2 cloves garlic, crushed

1-2 red chillis, de-seeded and diced

2 tsps chopped fresh ginger

½ tsp galangal powder (if you can get it)

1 tsp turmeric

2 tbsps peanut oil (or other seed oil)

The cooking broth

600ml coconut milk

600ml chicken stock or plain water

1 stem lemon grass, cut into 3 lengths (or lemon zest)

1 turmeric leaf (optional)

2 kaffir lime leaves (or a squeeze of lemon or lime juice)

Salt

Trim the chicken quarters and remove any stray bits of fat and skin.

Liquidise the spice-paste ingredients with a splash of water in a blender, transfer to a roomy saucepan and bubble up for a few minutes. Add the chicken quarters and a splash of the coconut milk, stirring to coat all the pieces. Add the stock, lemon grass, optional turmeric leaf and lime leaves, bubble up, turn

down the heat, cover and simmer for 25 minutes. Uncover the pan, add the rest of the coconut milk and simmer for another 20 minutes. Taste and add salt.

When you are ready to serve, take the chicken pieces out of the sauce and grill or barbecue for about 6 minutes per side, or roast in a preheated oven till brown and bubbling. Gently re-heat the sauce – don’t let it boil – and serve with the chicken.

Accompany with plain-cooked rice, crisp lettuce leaves and a scooping salad of diced cucumber, pineapple, red pepper and tomato dressed with lemon juice, coriander and finely chopped chilli.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE TOP FOOD BANKS

We have long been used to the idea of high-street banks being transformed into chain restaurants with their canned atmosphere.

Yet 110 years ago, the opposite was true: the medieval taverns of London were converted into banks.

The first British restaurant critic, Lt-Col Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, recorded in early 1914, ‘The most famous of all the Johnsonian taverns, the Mitre, was another of the old houses to fall a victim to bankers … and was finally pulled down that on its site Hoare’s new Banking-House should be erected.’

However, a new and more pleasing phenomenon is nigh. The ground floor of the Byzantine pleasure dome that passed itself off as the headquarters of Andersen Consulting has become Toklas.

Andersen, the boys behind the Enron scandal of 2002, became just a little too handy with their paper-shredder: their worldwide clients and name disappeared overnight. Good news for us because those management consultants at 1 Surrey Street enjoyed the most enormous terrace looking down to the river.

I took Mandy, my art-dealer friend, for her birthday and she was blown away by the paintings. Little wonder, given that Toklas is owned by the people behind the Frieze art fairs. They chose the name after Alice B, who unbeknownst to me (and you?) used to host lavish dinner parties with her lover, Gertrude Stein, and published a cookbook in 1954, complete with a recipe for hashish fudge.

I never had our Gertrude down as a gourmand. It’s as unlikely as The Oldie’s discovery that ‘Bomber’ Harris was a fastidious amateur chef, prone to chastising Constance Spry about her soufflés.

Mandy and I launched with their pitch-

perfect starters: artichokes alla Giudia, agretti with tomato and sea bass crudo (all around £10). Mandy eats like a bird. After their best-in-London sourdough, she couldn’t help me out with my rabbit and pancetta. Book a table outside tomorrow and bring a wheelbarrow to load up with their fantastic bread.

My other great find is Yeni, in Beak Street, Soho, whose mother ship is in Istanbul. Its chef/owner, Civan Er, reopened it a while back – but I always cycle by in a rush to Oldie meetings at Polpo. It serves the very best Turkish food you can get in London, in a very sexy, brick-walled, high-ceilinged room, complete with an open fire, over which they’ll roast you some Welsh lamb for £37 for two.

The small plates are where they excel, boasting the longest dish names in menu history. Anyone for ‘bulgur fritters, fresh herbs, macerated grapes, cumin, date molasses’? I certainly am.

Like so many restaurants, they boast a ‘constantly changing’ menu. Of course, I understand the desire for seasonal produce, but some of me (most of me?) yearns for the never-changing menus of yore, albeit with a special (or two) of the day, which gave us our own playlist of favourite dishes across the capital.

The anticipation of cottage pie at the Ivy or spaghetti carbonara at San Frediano would heighten the prelude, and the certainty of the menu also saved loads of time on ordering, especially on a large table. Many punters used to wave the menu away.

The look of those stained, handwritten menus is still with me, the text in a bluish black from over-photocopying. And those glorious Franglais names: ‘mussels marinière’, ‘gâteau cake’.

Sadly, my nostalgia belies the truth: Yeni and Toklas are in a different gastronomic league, and that is largely due to their passion for invention.

DRINK BILL KNOTT CURRY SAUCE

I am not sure whether the Mumtaz Mahal, our local Cambridge curry house in the late 1970s, even had a wine list.

My father, a creature of habit, never wavered from ordering a bottle of Abbot Ale with his meat biriani. Not because he disliked wine – he was a valued customer at the Peter Dominic wine merchant next door – but because beer was what we drank with curry, and that was that.

How things have changed. The country’s best Indian restaurants, several

of them boasting Michelin stars, now employ the gilded palates of wine consultants to compile their lists.

At the much-fêted Gymkhana in Mayfair, for example, you could nibble your chaat with a bottle of Louis Roederer Cristal 2009 (£720), savour a Château Lynch-Bages 1990 (£1,100) with a guinea-fowl pepper fry, and round your meal off with a pistachio and saffron kulfi and a half-bottle of Château d’Yquem 1989 (£620).

What a waste, you might think, and I would agree (unless someone else was paying, of course). Which is to say not that wine cannot work well with spicy food, just that asking your palate to process highly complex flavours from both plate and glass simultaneously is an exercise doomed to failure.

Gewürztraminer is perennially touted as a spice-friendly wine, perhaps because gewürz is the German word for spice, but I have never been convinced.

Partly, perhaps, because it is not my favourite grape. Its heady aroma is often compared to lychees and rose-water, or, as an old-school wine merchant once told me, ‘tart’s boudoir’. But mostly because it lacks the acidity to punch through spice effectively.

Riesling – dry or off-dry – is a much better bet. The bone-dry, lime-scented Rieslings from Australia’s Clare Valley and Eden Valley work especially well, while off-dry German Riesling is terrific with coconut-based curries. Austrian Grüner Veltliner performs similarly well, and dry sherry, perhaps the world’s most food-friendly wine, is always a good choice.

Many spices – particularly the woody ones, such as cloves, cinnamon and star anise – contain hefty amounts of tannin. So be careful when choosing a red, unless you want a mouth-furring double dose.

Avoid older, oaky wines and go for young, bright, fruity reds instead: Beaujolais-Villages is a good option, as is anything from the Loire: a strawberryscented Pinot Noir from Sancerre, perhaps, or a Chinon that has softened in bottle for a couple of years.

But my most exciting recent discovery is Grenache, with its soft tannins and a dusting of spice and cocoa. Invariably blended with other varieties in the Southern Rhône, it has now found its own voice in Spain. Known there as Garnacha or Garnatxa, it is responsible – wholly or partly, sometimes blended with Tempranillo – for a host of newwave, often unoaked reds that can stand toe-to-toe with a dhansak or a jalfrezi. Save the Lynch-Bages for the Sunday roast.

Wine

This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines, none of them with even a whiff of oak: a crisp, seafoodfriendly white from the south of France, a complex, medium-bodied white from the north of Spain, and an unorthodox Rioja, full of crunchy red fruit. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Picpoul de Pinet

‘Ornezon’, France 2021, o er price £12.49, case price £149.88

Deliciously aromatic Picpoul with hints of citrus and peach, perfect with seafood.

Sense Cap Blanc, Celler de Capçanes, DO Catalunya, Spain 2021, o er price £11.20, case price £134.40

Garnacha Bianco and Macabeu from the Catalan hills combine to produce a focused, orchard-scented white.

Gatito Loco, Rioja, Spain 2021, o er price £10.99, case price £131.88

Lively, fruity, new-wave Rioja made from Tempranillo and Garnacha: great with rogan josh.

Mixed case price £138.72 – a saving of £22.19 (including free delivery)

visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD

NB

SPORT JIM WHITE

FOOTBALL'S CRAZY PRICES

A chap I met recently told me he had a season ticket for German football team Bayer Leverkusen.

His explanation was straightforward: he works in Bonn, just down the road, and, as a lifelong fan of Leeds United, simply enjoys watching live football. More to the point, he said, when it costs as little as it does to watch a game in Germany, it seems silly not to take advantage.

When he told me how much, I assumed I had misheard: 250 euros, he said (that’s roughly £215).

For that, he gets to see 17 home matches in the Bundesliga, paying roughly £12 a throw. What’s more, he can stand on the terrace, watching the game with a beer in his hand. You can understand his enthusiasm.

Particularly when you compare what he is paying with the price of sitting through an English Premier League game. The difference is eye-watering. At Chelsea, you fork out £76 for a match, or £940 for a season ticket for 19 home league games. And it gets worse if you want to throw in a bit of hospitality.

At Manchester United, you can pay up to £1,699 plus VAT for a single match ticket, albeit one with a glass of champagne, a pre-match meal and a visit to your table from a former player. Even at Oxford United in League One, I recently paid £25 for a seat. And that was to be largely frustrated and annoyed.

While it is true that everything in Britain, from a train ticket to a pint of lager, is substantially pricier than in Germany, the cost of watching live sport is ludicrously higher. It’s six times more expensive for us to watch a football match than for our German counterparts.

But it doesn’t stop us. Far from it. Crowds at English league games in the season that ended in May were the biggest in seven decades. More people turned up to their local stadium than at any time since 1948. Then, after seven years of war interruption, thousands were once again able to clack through the turnstiles in celebration of escaping from the carnage unscathed.

The upward momentum is extraordinary: average attendance in the Premier League this year topped 40,000 for the first time. When the league was inaugurated in 1992, the figure was 21,215. It is a nationwide surge,

replicated all the way down the football pyramid. In the Championship in 1986, the average attendance was 7,688. This year, it was 18,787.

Even the National League, the professional game’s basement level, things appear rocket-fuelled. There, admittedly bolstered by Wrexham’s unexpected Hollywood intervention, this season’s average attendance has been 3,378. Games in the fifth tier in Germany are lucky to attract one man and his dog. And the dog usually doesn’t bother.

The cost does not deter us. Right in the middle of the toughest economic challenge in a generation, we are still turning out in droves.

Our national thirst to be at the heart of the grand event, which ensures that everything from the Coronation to Notts County against Boreham Wood plays to a capacity crowd, appears in full working order.

My contact in Germany admitted another thing about his cheap and cheerful days on the Leverkusen terraces: the football there is nothing like as good as it is in the Premier League.

However tough it is for us old-timers to admit, we are living in a golden age of live sport in this country. And the crowds are merely a recognition of that. Even if we are obliged to pay through the nose

MOTORING ALAN JUDD YOUR CAR VS RUSSIAN ARMY

Richard Lofthouse, formerly an Oxford don and cultural historian, now an editor and motor-industry guru, is off to Ukraine. Again. This time he’s delivering a Cherokee Jeep.

Last time, it was a 2005 109,000-mile Ford Ranger Wildtrak, one of hundreds of thousands of usable vehicles about to become a victim of the Mayor of London’s controversial ULEZ extension.

Having just sold his year-old Toyota Yaris hybrid for almost what he’d paid for it new, Richard decided to do his bit for Ukraine and stumped up £3,500 for the Ranger.

After a flurry of WhatsApps with Harry Leighton of Yorkshire-based car dealers SUV Prestige, a regular contact point with car4ukraine.com, he drove to Calais. He was part of a convoy with a team from SUV Prestige and four other trucks and their donors: an Irish farmer, an English farmer, a Scot and a property developer.

It was snowing when they set off on their long journey through Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland. The only mishap was a steering-column

seizure on one of the trucks, causing a two-hour delay in Poland. By the time they approached the border with Ukraine, it was dark and snowing heavily.

Other traffic evaporated, leaving them the only vehicles on the motorway. Crossing formalities were efficiently conducted and they soon found themselves engaging four-wheel drive on compacted snow and ice along a lonely road running through snow-laden trees.

Ukraine is about three times the size of the UK. So they were far from the front line, though still within rocket range – and once past the border, they were not insured.

There was a midnight curfew and they were running it close when they reached a military checkpoint. But the soldiers had been warned of their approach and waved them through to their hotel.

The next morning, they were met by one of the founders of car4ukraine.com. He led them to a secret workshop, where volunteer Ukrainian mechanics work 24/7, fitting 10mm armour plating to donor vehicles. A second workshop paints them army green and modifies them to take mounted guns or rockets.

Then they go off to the front line. Once in service, a vehicle’s average life is reckoned to be about three weeks.

Favoured pick-ups are the almost unbreakable Toyota Hilux, followed by the Mitsubishi L200, Nissan Navarra, Isuzu D-Max and Ford Ranger. One Yorkshire gentleman recently donated his almost-new £50,000 Ford Raptor. These trucks are designed for one-tonne loads and can therefore take the extra weight of armour and armament.

SUVs are acceptable for ‘fast extraction’, provided they’re 4x4 and diesel, with Jeeps particularly rated for their strong parts supply. They don’t want any Land Rover models. About 80 per cent of all military movements are conducted in such vehicles with, surprisingly, a premium on British right-hand-drive trucks because they are thought to confuse Russian snipers aiming for the driver.

Richard Lofthouse has been sent a photo of his donated Ranger, now fully armoured and on active service in Bakhmut within a month of delivery. His contribution this time is a 2004 Jeep CRD, 170,000 miles and £2,200.

He leaves with a message for Sadiq Khan, London’s embattled mayor: why not take vehicles from the scrappage scheme aimed at softening the impact of widening ULEZ and send them to Ukraine? Well, why not?

Meanwhile, if you have an old pick-up or SUV you can do without, go to car4ukraine.com.

They’ll be pleased to hear from you.

Hair-raising ticket costs

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Real Intelligence v Artificial Intelligence

Hold onto your hats: the digital world is about to take a giant leap, courtesy of the much-discussed advent of artificial intelligence (AI).

We will see as much change in the next two years as we have seen in the last ten. I hope that I can keep up.

It’s about time we had a bit of progress, anyway. I realised the other day that it is over 25 years since I bought my first internet-connected computer, when the worldwide web was fresh and young. But if I look back, it’s hard to point to any really fundamental change in the underlying infrastructure, beyond its all becoming faster and more reliable.

You might say that websites like

Webwatch

For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

Otter.ai

A benign use of AI – it can transcribe your conversations for you.

Cheaper broadband ofcom.org.uk

Anyone on a pension or universal credit is entitled to cheaper broadband. Go to Ofcom and search for ‘social tari s’

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

Facebook and Twitter, which allow us to interact online, were quite a change, but they’ve been around for over eight years.

Or you might feel that the streaming services – iPlayer, Netflix, Spotify et al – were a significant development, and they were. But they really only reflected the increased availability of faster internet connections. Anyway, they’ve been churning stuff out since 2006 – so they are hardly the new kids on the block. Grandpa Microsoft was formed in 1975, almost 50 years ago.

So we are due something new, and AI might be it. AI is, essentially, software that works on existing computers and can allow them to accumulate and remember almost limitless quantities of data, way beyond human capacity.

It then identifies patterns in the data and uses these patterns to make predictions, decisions, conclusions and recommendations based on questions it’s asked. Or it even (and this is where it gets worrying) takes actions with little or no direct human intervention, such as on an aeroplane autopilot.

However, it’s impressive, even at a very basic level. Have a go at Google’s version called Bard (bard.google.com) and ask it a question. Don’t be shy – ask for something like a summary of the English county-cricket system, a limerick that starts ‘A magazine known as The Oldie’ or a speech to deliver at a friend’s retirement party.

You'll be surprised by the results. The syntax will be excellent and the structure pretty good, if perhaps a little stilted.

However, this masks the danger. Where is the information that it is so smoothly presented to you coming from, and is it accurate? It offers no citations.

Try asking it about something you really know about, and you may find some bizarre inaccuracies. I asked it about my father, and was surprised to learn that he was married to the late Countess of Longford (which he certainly wasn’t). But it was all written in such a confident and convincing way that had he still been alive, I might have been tempted to make enquiries.

As the saying goes, garbage in, garbage out. However good a computer is at processing data, if you give it rubbish to work with, rubbish is what it will deliver. Bard is (I assume) scraping all this stuff from websites it’s looked through, chewing it over and cobbling together some convincing words – but not carefully enough.

No doubt it will become more sophisticated, but I’d be nervous about leaving it in charge of anything with a motor if it makes mistakes at this lowest level of its capacity.

Nevertheless, this sort of mass datasifting and analysis is entirely new, and change is coming, for good or ill – or perhaps for good and ill. It could certainly be useful for operating machines, but it could also be used to spread misinformation and propaganda.

So it’s up to humans to ensure that proper ethics are observed. What could possibly go wrong?

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Pension tension

The older you are, the more interesting pensions become. And the more confusing. Successive governments have promised to simplify the pension system, but usually they succeed only in adding to the layers of legislation ruling our retirement income.

Even HMRC is confused. It has had to repay getting on for £1 billion, an average individual repayment of over £3,000, to pensioners from whom it has taken too much.

These are people who have used pension freedom to withdraw money above the 25-per-cent tax-free limit. The first time you do this, the Revenue imposes an emergency tax code. Instead of treating the withdrawal as a one-off payment, it assumes you will be cashing in the same amount every month for a year, giving yourself a very large annual income, which it taxes accordingly.

You won’t be over-taxed when you take a second payment from the

‘Have you seen the latest electricity bill?’

same pot, but you could be if you take a second taxable slice from a different pension fund.

There will be no dispute about getting the overpayment refunded, but it will take time. If you fail to spot the problem, you will have to wait until the end of the tax year, when HMRC automatically puts you straight. Pension freedoms were introduced eight years ago and HMRC still hasn’t corrected the quirk.

Much else is happening to complicate pension planning. With the current

cost-of-living crisis, many people are reducing their pension contributions or even stopping payments altogether, which might have devastating consequences in later life.

The amount of money you receive from state, company and personal pensions dictates how comfortable your retirement will be. Yet many people do not know how much they will receive, nor even how to find out.

Some still don’t know at what age they become entitled to receive a state

pension. A couple of months ago, the Government said it is reconsidering its plans to raise the state pension age to 68 because life expectancy has not been increasing as fast as forecast. It had intended raising it to this age in 2044-46, with later suggestions that the change might come in during 2037-39, to save the Treasury money. It now won’t review the decision until after the next Parliament.

One certainty remains for those born after April 1960 – the state pension age will rise from 66 to 67 between 2026 and the end of 2028.

A scheme that will help us keep track of how much pension we have – the pensions dashboard – has also been delayed. All your pension information, state and private, will be available in one place online, making it easy to trace odd, small pensions you may have earned from various employments.

Initially scheduled to enrol in 2019, large pension schemes were belatedly going to join the dashboard from next August, with medium and small schemes coming on board later. But the programme was put on hold last March and now no one knows when it will start.

Quite simply, we want to plan our finances, so we know we will have enough money to pay our bills and enjoy life in our retirement. No one is making this any easier at the moment.

Lady Antonia Fraser on Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit Forthcoming dates at the National Liberal Club: 1st Aug, 5th Sep, 17th Oct, 14th Nov, 12th Dec

Joshua Levine on SAS: The Illustrated History of the SAS Angela Levin on Camilla: From Outcast to Queen Consort

The Sedge Warbler

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

No bird species are harder to differentiate than those summer migrants from Africa, the warblers (Sylviidae).

They’re plumaged to blend with invariably dense habitats. Reed and sedge warblers (Acrocephalus schoenobaenus) are typical examples.

The Rev Gilbert White (1720-93), the parson and pioneer naturalist, was the first person to denote a kiss with an x. He was also the first in England to distinguish the sedge from the reed warbler, notably by its ‘creamy white eyebrow’.

Schoenobaemus can be loosely translated as ‘reed walker’, acknowledging the bird’s nimble passing from one stem to the next. But despite the two birds’ similar British populations (250,000) and habitat, the sedge warbler, less confined to reed beds, is distributed throughout the British Isles. The more reed-bound reed warbler predominantly favours England.

Song is the best means of warbler identification. But with these two being cousins and often neighbours, the song is similar, albeit the sedge warbler’s is more varied and has a greater range.

On a tour last year of the Fulton family’s exemplary and privately-run Elmley Nature Reserve on the Isle of Sheppey, I heard reed and sedge warblers singing from the reed beds. Three members of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust who were present were unanimous in rating the sedge warbler’s song far superior to its cousin’s. Males of both species sing to persuade a passing female to be their mate.

Professor Clive Catchpole’s study of the sedge warbler has concluded that the wider the male’s repertoire, the more quickly he attracts a female. Thus virtuosity, full of mimicry so that each declamation is original, has a vital purpose. By comparison, the reed warbler’s more deliberate and regular song announces availability rather than superiority.

On 23rd May 1915, Edward Thomas (1878-1917), in the year he voluntarily enlisted to fight in the war despite the fact

that marriage and age exempted him from conscription, strolled beside the River Meon beyond Warnford in Hampshire.

In his notebook, he wrote, ‘Water crowfoot and marigolds, iris leaf and clear swift combing water but no nymph – only the sedge warblers…’ He produced a poem the same day:

…And sedge-warblers, clinging so light

To willow-twigs, sang longer than the lark, Quick, shrill or grating, a song to match the heat

Of the strong sun, nor less the water’s cool, Gushing through narrows, swirling in the pool.

Their song that lacks all words, all melody, All sweetness almost, was dearer then to me Than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words.

From Sedge-Warblers

Gerry Cambridge (b 1959), with a reference to ‘Edward Thomas’s emblem for untouchable optimism’, adds his poetic tribute:

Diminutive, they need to believe in enthusiasm’s principle, hurrying out their song, its chacks, its churrs, clicks and wheezes, its pebbleclackings, trying the variations, rejigging the riffs, endlessly rephrasing, way past midnight in the May darks, exulting in energy, spruce with their cream eyebrows, all for a plain mate, these solo performers in June’s green pub on the stage of a twig.

From Acrocephalus Schoenobaenus (Aves, Essence Press)

Travel

The shock of the new

In his latest book, Nick Trend unveils the greatest painting breakthroughs in the history of Western civilisation

Art history can be a dry affair – a chronological wade through medieval religious convention, Renaissance portraits, classical precedents and mythological mysteries.

So I have tried to inject a bit of life into the subject by taking a different approach – tracing specific moments when new themes, techniques and ideas first appeared in Western painting, and then charting what happened next.

When did the first artist break away from hundreds of years of tradition and ask a sitter to smile for his portrait? It might seem like an arbitrary question, but the answer – a picture of a young Italian gentleman – paved the way for Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

And what about the first visual joke? Appropriately, my nomination for this was made just before the first smile. It’s a trompe-l’oeil fly, painted on the frame of a portrait of a Carthusian monk. It may serve as a reminder of human mortality; it’s also an amusing demonstration of the artist’s skill. And it kicked off a copycat craze – a meme, you could say – among artists all over Europe.

Then there is Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. It has been famous ever since it was painted in 1485. But the reason for its initial fame – or notoriety, perhaps – has been mostly forgotten: this was the first erotic nude to be painted since antiquity.

We sometimes forget, too, the

importance of William Hogarth’s innovations. His Marriage A-la-mode, in the National Gallery, is comic in intent. It is also, in dramatising the break-up of a marriage, another first and a brilliant insight into human behaviour. Finally, my selection of 30 firsts stretches right into the 20th century and includes the first abstract painting. This turns out to be not by Kandinsky, Mondrian or Malevich, but by the

Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint, who made a series of monumental paintings of strange, floating forms in 1907. For decades, she was given almost no credit for her achievement but – and this is another first – Tate Modern is currently hosting a major exhibition of her work.

Nick Trend’s Art Firsts: The Story of Art in 30 Pioneering Works is out on 15th June

First erotic nude: The Birth of Venus (1485) by Sandro Botticelli, made as a bedroom painting for the Medicis

First marital breakdown: in The Tête à Tête, from Marriage A-lamode (1743), William Hogarth captures the alienation between husband and wife in a way that had never been done before

First joke: with the y on the frame of his Portrait of a Carthusian Monk (1446), Petrus Christus, working in Bruges, started a comic craze

First abstract painting: No 8 from The Ten Largest (1907) by Hilma af Klint marks the beginning of non-representational art

First smile: Portrait of a Young Man (c 1470) by Antonello da Messina predates Leonardo’s  Mona Lisa by 30 years

Taking a Walk

Mum’s last walk in Norfolk

patrick barkham

The Walk is a lovely poem by Blake Morrison, in which the narrator ‘can’t remember what we talked about’ but won’t forget a last walk with a loved one. They don’t forget the place either, or its midges, thistles and cowpats as large as plates of Irish stew.

I don’t remember what Mum and I discussed on our last walk, but I remember every detail. Our weekly walks were in retreat. The six-mile coast walk we did last summer was not possible by autumn. The uneven slopes of Sheringham Park slipped from view by midwinter.

The cancer in Mum’s pelvis was gripping tighter, causing wincing pain. She was a contradictory mix of courage in the face of agony and an allconsuming focus on her health.

Her large filing cabinet became stuffed with a decade of documentation about her failing health; her fine mind bent, laser-like, on perceived imperfections in her treatment, her local surgery and the NHS.

It’s easy for me, the casually pain-free son, to suggest she would’ve benefited from looking outside herself. But she couldn’t. Until she took a walk.

Whenever I quietly mourned the Mum I used to know, I’d be surprised on our walks. Here, she shrugged off anguish and rekindled her former fascination with the beauty of the world and the doings of the seasons.

She’ll send me a thunderbolt for this comparison but it was almost as abrupt a transformation as when I used to carry my screaming children outside and a pigeon would woo-woo and suddenly they were calm. Walking made me a better person too, fortified with sympathy for Mum’s woes.

One sunny day in early February we took a short walk up Skelding Hill.

Norfolk is notorious for its flatness, but its north coast is studded with vertiginous little slopes – eskers, mostly, a gift from departing glaciers. Skelding Hill is half a hill now, its north flank washed into the sea, and it rises with a

short, sharp shock west of the genteel Edwardian resort of Sheringham.

We parked by the boating lake, emptied for the winter, and Mum cruised off with customary determination, her grandchildren skipping like little ships in her choppy wake. To our right, the sea was gunmetal-grey. To our left, golfers braced against the wind.

By the time we reached the foot of the incline, Mum was struggling. She never usually complained about pain on a walk. Now she tottered and gasped. Lisa, my wife, took her arm and shot me a glance, implying, ‘This is mad – we need to take her home.’

Mum sat on a bench to recover.

‘This might be our last chance,’ I whispered. Like mother, like son: we share a compulsion to get things done.

I ran back to the car, drove to Mum’s, picked up the folding wheelchair she’d renounced and raced back. I found she had continued to ascend Skelding Hill, and had reached the next bench.

I assumed she would reject the chair but she clambered in and we continued, Mum now the recipient of my walk. When it got really steep, I enlisted my

children’s help. The three formed a crocodile to push me, who pushed Mum. It made a funny image. And Mum criticised my wheelchair-driving less when the children lent a hand.

We reached the top, took more photos and exclaimed at the view stretching west past the towers of Blakeney Church to the pinewoods of Wells.

What did we discuss? Probably a bit of the state of the nation, the sea, geology, geography. For all I tried, Mum didn’t want to reflect on her life, or dying, or death.

We rolled down the hill, glowing with a sense of achievement. The next weekend, I took her in the wheelchair to admire the snowdrops at Walsingham Abbey. And the weekend after that, she died.

Take a walk with someone you love, while you can. You won’t remember what you talked about but you’ll remember the walk and you’ll remember it was worthwhile.

Skelding Hill is a little hill with a big view just west of Sheringham. An even better, wilder hill, with a bigger view, is Muckleburgh, three miles further west

Across

8 Runs in frantically shaping choice of words (8)

9 Female just after a fling ... (6)

10 ... gutted, but left us expectant at first (4)

11 Conservative, having lost seat and status (5)

12 Measure of beer (4)

13 Sort of apparel that makes people curse? (8)

16 Fake European art’s strangely unknown (6)

18 Couple caught out Bank of Scotland (4)

20 Victory is given to the Spanish singer (5)

21 Exposed duck enclosure (4)

22 Agent set task returning to collect witness (6)

23 Current device succeeded in dispersing rioters (8)

26 Raise game, exhausted (4)

28 Is 20 due for a change? (5)

30 Turner loses hotel, being in arrears (4)

31 Wacky Races must include parking accident (6)

32 Design of lace gave a degree of separation (8)

Genius crossword 427 el sereno

Down

1 The girl Olivier regularly used will be put off (6)

2 Just heard there’s something to eat (4)

3 Motorway traffic broadcast featuring second error (6)

4 Language skills taking a long time (4)

5 Unjustified when beginning to eulogise in praise (8)

6 Dodgy sort of bag with no opening (4)

7 Newly-developed attire eg, that’s worn on the head (8)

14 Take court action and defence’s case becomes material (5)

15 Mars explorer runs no more (5)

17 These may be worn as small gardening tools (5)

19 Economise, seeing ditch with soldiers in the vanguard (8)

20 Celebrated once informed verbally (8)

24 One’s employed by mostly strict worker in hospital (6)

25 Power cut may see resistance lost during scandal (6)

27 Drop rent (4)

29 A grip on immorality? (4)

30 Nothing may be raised during devolution (4)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 28th June 2023

We do not sell or share your data with third parties.

First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25. Two runners-up will receive £15.

NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 427

1 An auld (anag) carriage

(6)

4 Hospital carer (5)

8 Immobilise (car) (5)

9 A desire (7)

10 What things vanish into?

(4,3)

11 Midge (4)

12 Flightless bird (3)

14 Yonks (4)

15 Filth (4)

18 Period

Moron 425 solution: Across: 7 Stanza, 8 Sighed (Stands

1

10

11

Genius 425 solution

aside),

Syringe,

Erase, 12 Axle, 13 Essay, 17 Gaffe, 18 Mojo, 22 Hoist, 23 Redress, 24 Anthem, 25 Crutch. Down:

As usual, 2 Payroll, 3 Ozone, 4 Wine bar, 5 Phial, 6 Adieu, 9 Ceasefire, 14 Castled, 15 Modesty, 16 Borscht, 19 Ahead, 20 Vista, 21 Adore.

Winner: Danuta Rosendor , Coogee, NSW, Australia

Runners-up: Bernard O’Kee e, London SW13; Mrs M James, Rustington, West Sussex

One of the most venerable worldchampion bridge player players was Pietro Forquet of Naples, who died in January aged 97. Forquet was a mainstay of the Italian Blue Team of the 1960s and ’70s, renowned for his accurate cardplay and steely temperament. Watch this piece of Forquet magic from the European Championships in 1975.

Dealer West North-South Vulnerable

Competition

TESSA CASTRO

IN COMPETITION No 293 you were invited to imagine a vegetable at the heart of a murder and write a poem on it, called Vegetable Love

Max Ross’s narrator, reasonably enough, killed his stepmother for making him eat onions. It is curious that the carrot was often the criminal or the instrument, though for Basil RansomeDavies it was the arsenic in the leeks, while for Peter Hollindale arsenic in the peas was countered by drizzled morphine. Kik Piney’s crime was solved by Hercule Poireau.

Commiserations to them, Stefan Badham, Katie Mallett and Erika Fairhead, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to G M Southgate.

The bidding

SouthWestNorthEast

1 PassPass

Dbl (1)3 PassPass

4 5 6 (2)end

(1) Too strong for any immediate spades.

(2) Very well reasoned. Partner seems almost marked with a void club, given that East prefers clubs to diamonds (having passed 3 rather than return to 3 ). Plus, North has four-card spade support and controls in both red suits. Finally, Signore Forquet plays the spots o the cards. Our Neapolitan hero ru ed West’s hopeful ace-of-clubs lead with the ten (no harm in retaining the eight – it could be useful…). He cashed the ace of spades (West discarding a club to reveal the highly inconvenient three-nil split) and led up a diamond. West rose with the ace (ducking doesn’t help) and led a second diamond.

Winning dummy’s king, declarer ru ed a second club with the jack of spades and cashed the king of spades (West discarding a diamond). Declarer now cashed three rounds of hearts, nishing in hand, to leave a four-card ending whereby declarer held Q 8 and 9 7; West held Q J and K J; and dummy held 9 6 and Q 8.

At trick ten, declarer led the nine of spades and West was caught in a squeeze. Discard a club, and declarer overtakes with dummy’s nine, ru s a club, ru s a diamond and cashes the promoted queen of clubs. Let go instead a diamond, and declarer lets the nine of spades win, then ru s a diamond, ru s a club and cashes the long diamond. Slam made.

ANDREW ROBSON

A murder of crows were circling the spinach, Sown just three weeks ago, now coming green.

Pigeons were waddling across the raked surface, Mindlessly pecking where shoots could be seen.

I had in the garage some beetroots, left over From last season’s harvest, I should have thrown out. Though wrinkled, they seemed to be hard as I needed, And fitted my hand. Clutching three, I sneaked out.

In soft canvas loafers I played the assassin, Silently creeping across the damp grass. I bowled at the pigeons as fast as James Anderson, Hitting one squarely. They scattered en masse

Except for the body, the broken neck bending, Which I left as a warning to others who’d steal.

The crows took the point, lifting off for the beech trees, And I set up some cloches, to settle the deal.

G M Southgate

She dined upon a plate of greens, Most elegantly slim and spare, Her silken robe was aubergine, Frisée as lettuce was her hair.

Exquisite pearls around her neck, As shiny white as silverskins, In these she strolled about the deck, While flashing pea-like emerald rings.

She loved to pose for photographs In roles that famous painters painted: Susannah, naked from her bath –Ophelia, too, was recreated.

Ah, destiny, how cruel thy blows! She undertook The Death of Marat –Ironic, then, you may suppose, That she was daggered with a carrot.

Fiona Clark

Had we but worms enough, and thyme, And crumbly compost (old, sublime!) We could have made a veggie stew To die for. But that’s not for you, Is it? You want your crème brûlée, Lashings of sugar every day, You want your steak, your sauce Béarnaise, Scorning my stomach’s long malaise. But you shall have your just reward –(Salad of strychnine, be my sword!)

Don’t offer sex, or Eton Mess: You’ve cooked your final pommes duchesse –

And I have cooked your goose, my dear, You’ll be my ex within the year. My vegetable, love, will grow Nastier than hemlock (not so slow).

Bill Holloway

Brock Tenderstem was tall and lean, Young Caullie short and fatter. Though she was white and he was green, To them it didn’t matter.

‘I love you very much,’ Brock said, ‘So before we’re sent to Tesco’s Let’s settle down in our brown bed And make some Romanescos!’

Between them then came Wendy Weed. T’was jealousy that filled her. But before she set her seed, The gardener came and killed her.

Our lovers suffer yet more stress. Their future’s looking cloudy. For Brock has gone to M&S And Caullie’s off to Aldi.

Rita Duckham

COMPETITION No 295 I quite like negotiating asphalt broken by tree roots in daylight, but not at night. You are invited to write a poem called Roots, in any connection. Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@ theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your postal address), marked ‘Competition No 295’, by Thursday 29th June.

On the Road

Tories can win the next election

Ann Widdecombe doesn’t trust Rishi Sunak, adored Margaret Thatcher and thinks Boris was lost

without Dominic Cummings.

By Louise Flind

Is there anything you can’t leave home without?

My mobile phone and my eyebrow pencil.

Do you travel light?

No, I don’t. I always pack for every last contingency.

What’s your favourite destination?

The cruises to the Arctic, because you’ve got completely unspoiled scenery, and when you’re standing alone on deck at 3am, it’s still light.

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?

After we came back from being posted in Singapore [her father was a Ministry of Defence civil servant and she attended the Royal Naval School, Singapore], we visited relatives in Cornwall and Devon and one holiday we went to the Lake District.

What was Singapore like in the ’50s?

It was terrific. We all swam, sailed and water-skied. Everything was based on the water. I went to school only in the morning; afternoons, I went to Brownies – and swimming twice a week.

Why did you get into politics?

To fight socialism – because when I was growing up, it was the height of the Cold War, and there was a real contest for the future of the globe based on capitalism versus communism.

How did it happen?

I went to Oxford, I was a local councillor, then I was a candidate for Burnley in Lancashire, then for Plymouth Devonport against David Owen – I was 39 and a half by the time I got in.

What did you think of Gyles Brandreth at Oxford?

I didn’t know Gyles Brandreth at Oxford, but he has a lovely imagination and tells a completely false story which has made its way into my Wikipedia entry…

What do you think of the Oxford Union, which is 200 years old this year?

It’s a wonderful institution, one of the few bastions of genuinely free speech left.

What do you think of Michael Howard and his ‘Something of the night’ comment? I don’t think any differently from what I thought at the time.

Who was your favourite PM? Obviously, I’m going to say Thatcher, but John Major was very badly underestimated.

What was your favourite post in the Government?

I enjoyed pensions tremendously, because there were a lot of challenges about at the time, including the Maxwell case.

Why did you retire so early from politics? I didn’t retire early. I was 62 and a half. I’d been there 23 years.

Do you now think Brexit was a success? Yes, but I think the tragedy is that they haven’t used Brexit. We came out in order to be independent, instead of which Hunt and Sunak are shadowing the EU on everything.

What do you think of Rishi Sunak? Ever since he spun the Irish agreement as a great triumph, I have not trusted him an inch.

What do you think of Boris?

What he lacked [later on] in Number 10 was Dominic Cummings, and I don’t like Cummings. When he went, there was no one to say, ‘Shut up, Boris. Don’t say anything until we’ve checked the facts.’

Will Labour win the next election? If there were an election tomorrow morning, the answer is yes. But we’ve got the best part of two years.

Which TV appearances have you most enjoyed?

Strictly Come Dancing, and making documentaries.

Why did you become a Catholic?

I became a Catholic because I was totally disillusioned with the Church of England, which hadn’t a clue what it believed in, and was always trying to appeal to the outside world.

What do you think’s been the highlight of your career?

When I got one of my constituents out of jail in Morocco. By the time his wife came to see me, he had been convicted and sentenced, had lost his appeal and was facing nine years in a Moroccan jail.

Do you lie on a beach?

My beach-lying days are well and truly over.

What about a daily routine?

When I’m doing Jeremy Vine, I’m up at six o’clock. At home, I’ll fetch the papers from the mat and go back to bed with a cup of coffee, and then not stir my big toe until 9.30.

What’s your favourite food?

I love roast lamb with mint sauce and redcurrant jelly, roast potatoes and veg.

What about languages?

I read Latin just about still. I started to pick up French as an MEP quite well, having loathed it at school.

What’s your biggest headache when travelling?

American airports.

What’s the strangest place you’ve ever slept while being away?

In Kenya in 1989 in glamping tents, with animal noises all around.

What are your travelling tips?

Take medication with you preventatively. I always travel with antibiotics.

To advertise, contact Jasper Gibbons on 0203 859 7096 or via email JasperGibbons@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £45+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 12th June 2023

UK Travel Clothing & Bedding Overseas

Clothing & Bedding Video

Charities

Societies

To advertise, contact Jasper Gibbons on 0203 859 7096 or via email JasperGibbons@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £45+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 12th June 2023

YOUR ANCESTORS FOUND

Retired school inspector, Cambridge history graduate, genealogist for 40 years, researches and writes your family’s history. No task too big or small. Phone 01730 812232 for brochure, sample report and free estimate.

Health

PETITE ORIENTAL BEAUTY Stunning Young Slim Classy Elegant and Friendly Lady. 2 mins from South Kensington. Call 020 7581 2144 IN/OUT calls.

UNDERSTANDING ATTRACTIVE CONTINENTAL LADY Offers memorable massage to discerning gentlemen in discreet Marylebone surroundings. 07932644459

MATURE ENGLISH LADY

Offers hour-long massage. Afternoon out-calls only. Pre-booking essential. North west London 07860842975

PAMPER PLEASURE MASSAGE

Relaxation, Stress relief, Attractive Friendly Warm Exotic Lady, Discreet Private tranquil surrounding. Close to Old Brompton & Gloucester road 11am-8pm Amber 07398688462

7096

Why won’t he fight cancer?

QMy husband, who is just 70, has recently found out that the cancer he had 20 years ago has returned. We thought we had beaten it, but now he apparently has secondaries.

I’m 65 and the news is devastating. We’ve been married since we left school. Now my husband, who has to walk with a frame, has said emphatically that it is ‘time to go’ and he’s adamant that he doesn’t want chemotherapy again. He just wants to go into a hospice and ‘fade away’. I, on the other hand, am horrified that he doesn’t want to fight it. But he won’t be persuaded. What can I do?

E W, by email

ASurely there is only one thing you can do – and that is to go along with his wishes. Hasn’t he got enough to cope with, facing up to death, without you challenging him all the way? Chemotherapy is rarely anything but unpleasant – and often the effects get worse as you get older. You may think he ‘owes’ it to you and your family to try his utmost to get better, but you actually ‘owe’ it to him to respect his wishes. I think you’re taking this personally. You’re seeing his refusal as a kick in the face, as if he were running off with another woman.

And you’re just trying to put off the day when he dies, which looks likely, in the circumstances, to be sooner rather than later. You could see a grief counsellor together now – and this would help you both come to terms with his future death.

Great sexpectations

QAt age 75, and four years a widower, I have grown to care deeply for a lady in her midfifties. To my astonishment, she has not

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside

rebuffed my tentative approaches and I am hopeful our relationship will develop. My dark secret, however, is that I’ve always been rubbish at intercourse. I was never, ever predatory or dominant and always rated the tender side of relationships, kissing, cuddling and caressing, more highly than anything else. Affectionate by nature, I’m really looking for close, loving intimacy more than sexual athletics. Also, I have to face up to the possibility that at my age I am unlikely to be able to ‘rise to the occasion’ even if I want to. But I fear that, as she’s still relatively young, she probably wants and expects something more physical than I can provide.

My feelings for her have raised my anxiety about all this to an almost intolerable level. I’m so confused, I haven’t got the faintest idea how to handle this without risking major embarrassment and awkwardness. I don’t know what to say to her, or even if I should say anything at all.

The last thing I want to do is offend or disappoint her, or humiliate myself, but if we are incompatible I think it’s best for us both to find out now rather than later. Name and address supplied

AAll you can do is tell her exactly how you feel. To remain silent would not be a good idea. It may well be that, at her age, post-menopause, she, too, prefers the sensuality and deep affection that come with fondling, kissing and so on. Being frank and telling her the truth is the sign of a very strong character and a brave man. Once you’ve explained your fears, they may disappear.

Surely it’s clear already that she cares for you because you are you – not because you’re some heavy-breathing Lothario who’s always ‘up for it’. However

www.seymour.co.uk

To order a print subscription, email theoldie@subscription.co.uk, or call 01858 438791, or write to The Oldie, Tower House, Sovereign Park, Market Harborough LE16 9EF. Print subscription rates for 12 issues: UK £49.50; Europe/Eire £58; USA/Canada £70; rest of world £69.

old we are, there always ways of giving each other sexual satisfaction, if either of us wants it, without going the whole hog.

Son in the doghouse

QWhile I went away on holiday for a fortnight, my son and his wife moved into my house to keep an eye on it and look after the dogs. I got back to find they had changed my dogs’ feeding patterns – they said I wasn’t feeding them enough. Even worse, they have – or rather, I suspect, she has – rearranged everything in the kitchen. I can’t find anything! They’ve chucked out anything past its sell-by date and moved everything in the drawers and even shifted the furniture around. I am furious.

Should I write and tell them how I feel? I would never presume to do the same in their house if I were staying there!

Vanessa B, St Albans

ANext time – if there is a next time – make sure that you have a vet’s letter confirming your dogs’ feeding regime before you go away.

As for the rearrangement, try to calm down for a while before you say anything. Why not give their new arrangement a try-out? I’m sure they did everything to make things easier for you – and, who knows, some of their ideas may be inspired! After a month, you can assess the situation, retaining the new bits that you find useful and reverting the other bits back to the old patterns. For heaven’s sake, don’t sound off. I feel certain they did all this with the very best intentions.

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.

To buy a digital subscription for £29.99 or a single issue for £2.99, go to the App Store on your tablet or mobile and search for ‘The Oldie’.

All rights of reproduction are reserved in respect of all articles, drawings, sketches etc published in The Oldie in all parts of the world. Reproduction or imitation of any of these without the express prior written consent of the publisher is forbidden.

The Oldie is available in audio and e-text format for the benefit of blind and partially sighted readers through RNIB Newsagent. Telephone 0303 123 9999 or visit www.rnib. org.uk/newsagent for further details.