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cemeteries have less than 20 years’ capacity left. It’s time for us all to start laying off the chips if we want to be buried in our favourite churchyards. Bill Robertson, a Newcastle reader, sent the Old Un the greatest misprint of 2021. The Newcastle Chronicle hailed the opening of a retro launderette, Launder & Press, in Heaton. The paper reported on 28th December 2021, ‘The store offers a full wash and dry service, as well as ironing and altercations.’ Whatever happened to the Establishment? And who actually belongs to it nowadays? Even the origins of the expression are unclear. Henry Fairlie (1924-90) was the journalist who defined the Establishment. In the Spectator in 1955, he wrote, ‘By the “Establishment”, I do not only mean the centres of official power – though they are certainly part of it – but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised.’ And now Fairlie’s son, Simon Fairlie, has written Going to Seed: A Counterculture Memoir, out this February. Simon Fairlie began his life in a pretty Establishment way, at Westminster School and Cambridge. But then he dropped out of university to hitchhike to Istanbul, bicycle through India and establish a commune in France. He has been a labourer, stonemason, farmer, fisherman, shepherd, founder of the Land magazine as well as the co-editor of the Ecologist magazine. He now runs a micro-dairy at Monkton Wyld Court, a charity and co-operative in rural Dorset, and earns a living by selling scythes.
Two Establishments: Henry Fairlie (1924-90) and son Simon
In his memoir, Simon Fairlie writes about his father’s famous article about the Establishment. ‘It is an unexpectedly slight piece,’ Simon Fairlie writes, ‘which does little more than assign a name to the bleedin’ obvious.’ In fact, you could say that, in these green days, Simon Fairlie, scythe salesman, has himself become part of the Eco-Establishment. Oldie Towers is in deep mourning over the death of dear Barry Cryer. As well as telling jokes to
readers, Barry also told us stories. This is his last story, sent a week before he died: ‘Alan Bennett once sent five people out, just to garner some of the things they might overhear people saying. My absolute favourite was this. One of them was in a garden centre and he heard a man saying, “That sundial I bought last year has paid for itself already.”’ Alan Bennett, Barry’s fellow Leeds boy, would often ring up Baz and just say, ‘Joke, please.’ How deeply sad that Barry’s never-ending well of gags has run dry.
prue leith
Bliss on Toast
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Ham hock, caper and parsley with English mustard mayo on grilled bloomer
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