My train rage – Maureen Lipman I’ll miss the calm, kind Queen – Roddy Llewellyn Britain’s funniest man – Craig Brown by Robert Bathurst
Roger Moore’s comic genius by Andrew Roberts The Saint at 60
Joy of eccentrics Andrew M Brown
The Saint and Dr No turn 60 Andrew Roberts
Karl Lagerfeld, my heavenly boss Natasha A Fraser
Long live Latin! Harry Mount and John Davie
A son’s suicide Cosmo Landesman
Coleridge’s new statue Drew Clode
Show-off oldies Oliver Pritchett
Allotments are good for you Victor Osborne
The spy who shocked le Carré James Hanning
Failed fogey Henry Oliver
Vera Brittain’s lost letters Mark Bostridge
The Waste Land turns 100 A N Wilson
The Old Un’s Notes
Gyles Brandreth’s Diary
Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman
Olden Life: What were Polish resettlement camps? Liz Hodgkinson
Modern Life: What is BeReal? Richard Godwin
My sad return to Paris Barry Humphries
Mary Killen’s Fashion Tips
Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson
Country Mouse Giles Wood
Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny
Small World Jem Clarke
School Days Sophia Waugh
Quite Interesting Things about ... salt John Lloyd
God Sister Teresa
Memorial Service: Sir Richard Shepherd James Hughes-Onslow
The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple
Readers’ Letters
I Once Met… Kurt Vonnegut Christopher Sandford
Memory Lane Peter J Holloway
History David Horspool
Commonplace Corner
Rant: Train travel Maureen Lipman
Media Matters Stephen Glover
Crossword
Bridge Andrew Robson
Competition Tessa Castro
Ask Virginia Ironside
Harry Mount
Phillips
Jonathan Anstee
Liz Anderson
assistant Amelia Milne
James Pembroke
saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer
large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz
Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis, by Max Hastings Ivo Dawnay
Haywire: The Best of Craig Brown, by Craig Brown Robert Bathurst
Darling, by India Knight Georgia Beaufort
The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome, by Harry Sidebottom Daisy Dunn
After the Romanovs, by Helen Rappaport Owen Matthews
Siena: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval City, by Jane Stevenson Jasper Rees
David Stirling: The Phoney Major, by Gavin Mortimer Alan Judd Arts
Film: Mrs Harris Goes to Paris Harry Mount
Theatre: An Inspector Calls William Cook
Radio Valerie Grove
Television Frances Wilson
Music Richard Osborne
Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson
Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu
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77 Gardening David Wheeler
77 Kitchen Garden
Simon Courtauld
78 Cookery Elisabeth Luard
78 Restaurants James Pembroke
79 Drink Bill Knott
80 Sport Jim White
80 Motoring Alan Judd
82 Digital Life Matthew Webster
82 Money Matters Margaret Dibben
85 Bird of the Month: Bewick’s Swan John McEwen Travel
86 Crete’s Greek gods and British heroes Rick Stroud
88 Overlooked Britain: the Blockley trout memorial Lucinda Lambton
90 On the Road: Roddy Llewellyn Louise Flind
91 Taking a Walk: Staffordshire’s enchanting woods Patrick Barkham
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Front cover Roger Moore in The Saint, 1966. Bettman / Getty Images
The 50th anniversary of Are You Being Served? was rightfully celebrated by Roger Lewis in our May issue.
Sadly, it’s not just the hallowed premises of Grace Brothers department store that are no more. In a new book, London’s Lost Department Stores: A Vanished World of Dazzle and Dreams, Tessa Boase celebrates their heyday.
Boase writes, ‘Today, we have little idea of the sheer dazzle of these “Halls of Temptation” during the golden age of shopping –their theatrical spectacle, assault on the senses, architectural élan. From the Art Deco of Derry & Toms, with its Moorish roof garden, to the startling Moderne lines of Holdrons of Peckham Rye, department stores led the way in fashion and design.’
Derry & Toms, on Kensington High Street,
began life as Toms family grocery in 1826. It was popular with suffragettes. In 1911, the store was advertising ‘Charming Hats for the June 17th Demonstration.’
The store was in its pomp in 1933 when that vast Art Deco building was erected. In 1936, it even had its own roof garden installed, with one and a half acres of soil hauled up to the roof, and a flowing stream and fountains pumped up from the store’s artesian well, 500ft below the High Street. There was even a flock of flamingos.
Sadly, in 1973, Derry & Toms closed. Richard Branson later set up a
nightclub on the roof terrace – closed since 2018.
Mavis Nicholson, the broadcaster, interviewer and former Oldie agony aunt has sadly died at 91.
Oldie contributor Roger Lewis remembers:
‘Mavis Nicholson was one of Kingsley Amis’s student conquests when he was a lecturer in Swansea. They remained friends, and he often visited her and her husband, Geoff Nicholson, a newspaper rugby correspondent, at their house near the Young Vic. Amis’s novel Take a Girl Like You is dedicated to the Nicholsons.’
Mavis became quite famous with her afternoon chat shows, in the early days of Channel 4, having been picked out by Jeremy Isaacs.
Cosmo Landesman (p25) founded the Modern Review in 1991 with his thenwife, Julie Burchill, and Toby Young. He writes about his son’s suicide and his book Jack and Me: How NOT To Live After Loss.
Robert Bathurst (p57) was David in five series of Cold Feet and Sergeant Wilson in Dad’s Army: The Lost Episodes. He starred in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell. He was in Love, Loss & Chianti this summer.
Daisy Dunn (p59) is author of Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford between the Wars. She also wrote Catullus’s Bedspread, In the Shadow of Vesuvius and the Ladybird Guide to Homer
Rick Stroud (p88) is author of Kidnap in Crete: the True Story of the Abduction of a Nazi General. He wrote Lonely Courage about the women of SOE. He’s won an Emmy and was nominated for a BAFTA.
Derry
Toms (1826-1973)
Roger Lewis continues, ‘She had a sort of Welsh motherly air, and everyone confided in her – Elizabeth Taylor, Nina Simone, Kenneth Williams. Eric Morecambe’s encounter with her is lightly fictionalised in his novel Mr Lonely.’
Mavis always hoped that the old VHS tapes, where they existed, would be remastered and put on DVDs.
Roger says, ‘Perhaps people opened up to Mavis because her programmes were broadcast in midafternoon and there was an assumption no one was watching – unlike the altogether higher-profile Parkinson or Aspel.’
Mavis asked much shrewder questions than other celeb interviewers. She cleverly asked Dame Edna Everage, ‘Edna, were you a man, what sort of clothes would you wear?’
Shoppers upset at news of the Co-op cat’s death Aberdeen Press Journal
Roger Lewis says, ‘I knew her at The Oldie, where at the famous literary lunches she mistook me for Robbie Coltrane.’
Mavis suffered terrible anxiety attacks, and removed herself from public view altogether – eventually ending up in the remote countryside near Oswestry.
She also felt Geoff’s death very keenly. She was a nervous person, and the nerves got worse.
Roger says, ‘Mavis was a wonderfully kind and loyal friend, and we clicked in the way only fellow (Englishspeaking) South Welsh persons can. I thought the world of her. Everyone did.’
To commemorate the death of the Queen, historian Lady Antonia Fraser has written a new verse for The Oldie.
‘How many kidneys did your husband have when he came in?’
entertaining some models at a New York apartment when one of them ran in, complaining about Tyson’s attentions.
anniversary, Penguin are publishing a new gift edition of the book, so readers can discover a little-known classic that hasn’t been in print for a while.
Set in a fictional boarding school, the book follows Jim, a pleasant young pupil who has the unfortunate habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, as when two of the school’s silver sports cups are stolen in a burglary.
The Wodehouse ingredients – the gift for inspired turns of phrase and a farcical plot, based on a wrongly accused innocent (see Bertie Wooster in the Jeeves novels, passim) –are already there.
What joy to see the birth of the Master’s genius!
Bumps in short road Times
Gym at Bourton Leisure Centre closes for refurbishment Cotswold Journal
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When a soft white hand Caressed my fur, I knew it was her.
When a gentle slap Discouraged my yap, I knew it was her. I’ll miss the caress. I’ll miss the slap; Most of all The Royal Shoes, Planted so near, Planted so long.
In charge of my fate, Shining and strong, Her dogs, her dears She calmed our fears. We knew from those Shoes That we can’t bear to lose She was our Queen
Learning that Disney TV were running an eight-part biopic of the boxer Mike Tyson, the Old Un wondered whether they would include his encounter with the elderly philosopher Sir Freddie Ayer, which took place in New York in 1987.
Well known as a ladies’ man, Sir Freddie was
‘Do you know who I am?’ asked Tyson, when Sir Freddy remonstrated with him. ‘I’m the heavyweight champion of the world!’
‘And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic,’ answered Ayer. ‘We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest we talk about this like rational men.’
This October marks the 120th anniversary of P G Wodehouse’s first novel, The Pothunters, published in 1902.
To celebrate the
What bittersweet delights are to be found in a new book, It’ll All Be Over by Christmas: The First World War in Postcards, by John Wilton.
Pictured is one by Donald McGill (1875-1962), best known for his sublime saucy seaside postcards.
Wilton writes, ‘During the war years, many cards did not feature the war but town and village scenes and days by the seaside.
‘Others, however, were part of a massive propaganda campaign. The British government’s task was first to
‘They then had to persuade the population that they should fight or support the war effort in other ways.
‘There was also a plan to portray the enemy as both evil and ridiculous. The Kaiser and his son “Little Willie” were singled out for ridicule.’
With 150 illustrations and some rare postcards, it’s well worth a nostalgic read.
Oldie columnist Barry Humphries was the star turn at the recent Lord’s Taverners’ tribute lunch to Michael Parkinson.
Their long friendship began with Parky’s first interview, which ‘put me on the map’, Barry assured the Lord’s audience.
It had nothing to do with
cricket, Barry added: ‘I attribute my great age to the total avoidance of all forms of sport, particularly cricket. If I’d known he had anything to do with cricket, I’d never have spoken to him.’
‘That’s a great question’ persuade the population that the war was just.
After his cabaret performance – a tribute to Parky in verse, wearing a pair of Dame Edna’s glasses –Bazza received on stage the customary thank-you gift bag, containing, as usual, a single bottle of champagne.
Barry raised it aloft. ‘What a perfect gift for a teetotaller,’ he said, with a grimace. ‘Thanks for nothing!’
As the Old Un settles into autumn, he fondly cherishes the highlight of his summer: stumbling across the Shearing Shed at the Royal Welsh Show in Builth Wells.
Nestled between the Cattle Ring and the Angora goats, shearers sweated in the heatwave, competing to be the best in their class.
In the Veterans section (61 years and over), each competitor skilfully sheared three lambs. While he didn’t
win, there was a standing ovation for Barrie Kent – the oldest competitor at 91.
Born on the family farm near Aberystwyth, Barrie grew up shearing by hand before switching to an electric clipper. He left home and eventually ended up working with cattle in Worcestershire.
Still, he always kept his hand in because ‘a day shearing was the equivalent to coming home with a week’s wages’.
After retiring nearly 30 years ago, he bought a few Lleyn sheep so that he could practise on his own flock. Today he keeps 100 breeding ewes.
Anything from two to five days a week, he goes to Pilates or yoga. His teacher is a shearer, too. Together they contract-shear around the county. What’s his secret to such an active life? He’s quite clear about that.
‘Not stopping!’ he says.
Our muchloved deputy editor and patron saint of The Oldie, Jeremy Lewis, died in 2017, aged 75. In his memory, we run the Jeremy Lewis Prize, worth £500. It rewards the sort of writing that emulates Jeremy’s wit and lightness of touch in his books and journalism.
What to write about
In 400 words, recount a memory (similar to our Memory Lane column, on page 54 of this issue). Please begin by saying when the events you describe took place. How to send your entry
Simply email your entry to editorial@theoldie.co.uk by 13th November 2022. Please mark it JEREMY LEWIS PRIZE.
What for you were the most moving moments during the coverage of the Queen’s funeral?
For me it was, probably, the first sight of her coffin being borne on the shoulders of those fine young soldiers – or possibly her groom, Terry Pendry, on the Long Walk at Windsor, standing, head bowed, with the Queen’s pony, Emma, as the royal hearse drove Her Majesty home for the last time.
Because I was part of the BBC team covering it all, every day over the ten days between her death and the funeral, I found myself in London walking from Green Park tube station across the park to the Victoria Monument outside Buckingham Palace where the BBC (alongside scores of other broadcasters from across the world) had set up their makeshift studios.
Meeting the throngs of people, of all types and ages, coming to the Palace to pay their respects – in their thousands, often with tears in their eyes and small bunches of flowers in their hands, and quite a few with little Paddington Bears – was very affecting. The mood was quiet, but friendly.
On the Friday before the funeral, as I was walking across the park, a little boy, aged seven or eight, ran towards me, stopped, bowed at the waist and said, ‘Good morning, Your Majesty!’
Yes, he had mistaken me for the King. (Well, we are the same age.) It turned out his mother had recognised me and exclaimed, ‘Look, it’s that Gyles off the telly!’ and her son had misheard the name and jumped to the wrong conclusion. I confess I hesitated a moment before I disabused the boy.
It’s easily done. At the lunch Joanna Lumley and I hosted with The Oldie in July to mark the 75th birthday of our now Queen Consort, Craig Brown looked across the crowded room and was excited to see Norman Scott (former lover of Jeremy Thorpe, the former Liberal Party
Leader acquitted of conspiracy to murder his ex-boyfriend in 1979) seated in a place of honour right beside Camilla.
It took Craig back to the celebrated dinner (marking Margaret Thatcher’s 80th birthday) at which the disgraced former minister John Profumo was seated conspicuously at the Queen’s right hand.
In this instance, it wasn’t Norman Scott at all. It was the distinguished children’s author, Sir Michael Morpurgo – at 78, four years Scott’s junior. They do both share a love of horses.
When I say it’s easily done, I mean it.
In the BBC’s Portakabin production office, on the night the Queen’s body arrived back at Buckingham Palace from Scotland, I went up to India Hicks, a direct descendant of Queen Victoria and daughter of Pamela Hicks, who as Pamela Mountbatten had been a lady-inwaiting accompanying the young Princess Elizabeth when she heard the news of her father the King’s death in Kenya, in 1952.
Carried away by the emotion of the moment, I kissed India on both cheeks and held her hands, and offered my condolences to her and to her beautiful mother, adding for good measure how well I had known her wonderful aunt, Patricia Mountbatten, and her splendid uncle, Lord Brabourne, and how I had even had the honour of knowing her heroic grandfather, Earl Mountbatten of Burma.
At this point, I glanced over her shoulder and recognised the real India Hicks sitting in a corner texting someone
on her mobile. I realised then that the person whose hands I was clutching so closely was a bemused make-up artist who was there working for the BBC.
I went to three funerals inside ten days: those of my sister, Jennifer, aged 84; my sovereign, Elizabeth II, aged 96; and my friend Theo Richmond, 93, television director and writer, who will be best remembered for his book Konin, published in 1995, still available and a must-read for many reasons.
The book tells the story of a small Jewish ghetto in a small town in Poland – and of Theo’s obsessive quest to discover its fate and find its survivors and to place on record something of what the Nazis had destroyed.
It is an extraordinary book and Theo was a remarkable man, both deeply serious and terribly funny. At his funeral, his widow, the award-winning novelist Lee Langley, told us about the cartoon she and Theo had on a wall at home. It’s of a man sitting up in bed saying to his wife, ‘I thought I’d get up early. Got a lot of worrying to get through.’
According to Lee, ‘Theo often got up early. He was a world-class worrier. A global catastrophist. To paraphrase Philip Larkin, anxiety was to Theo what daffodils were to Wordsworth. I never left the house without Theo’s being sure I’d be knocked down in the street by a bus or a car or even a bicycle.’
This pessimism notwithstanding, Theo felt a day without laughter was a day wasted.
Lee told us, ‘He once said he had a project: we wouldn’t ever say goodnight without his making me laugh. He managed it for as long as he was able.’
If you’re lucky enough to have someone to live with, make them laugh before lights out tonight.
Although my mother had a successful career as a fashion journalist, she missed out on not one but two other vocations.
Those with ungodly staying power will find the second outlined at the end, but the first career for which nature ideally equipped her was that of interrogator. She could break the hardest Lubyanka inmate with nothing more in her arsenal of torment than verbal relentlessness.
‘Have you booked it yet?’ she asked a couple of months ago, the ‘it’ being one of those enticements with which the daytime television audience is unceasingly bombarded.
Joining funeral insurance, recliner chairs and pulsating devices on which Ian Botham places his feet is a commercial for a viral vaccine.
‘Have you booked it?’ she reiterated after the first enquiry was met with sullen silence.
‘Inexplicably,’ I replied, ‘what with it being a few seconds since we became aware of its existence, no, I haven’t booked it.’
The vaccine, plugged during every Countdown advert break, is for shingles.
‘Shingles can be very dangerous,’ she went on.
‘In the name of God,’ I heard myself mutter, ‘not the old wives’ tale about the spots meeti—’
‘If the spots meet around the waist,’ intoned my mother, ‘you can die. And even if you don’t, it’s a nasty, agonising illness. I want you to book the jab.’
During the next ad break, the inevitable ensued.
‘Have you booked yet?’ she enquired.
‘Yes, I have. I booked it while Susie Dent was doing her Word of the Day.’
‘I didn’t hear you.’
‘I did it by telepathy. They give you a 15-per-cent discount for booking telepathically. Takes pressure off the call centre.’
‘Nonsense,’ she declared. ‘Book it
now. I’ll pay. Consider it an early birthday present.’
How could a chap resist? A fortnight on St Maarten, a season ticket for Spurs, shingles jab, Maserati … these are the high-tariff items about which those with a 59th birthday on the horizon tend to dream. ‘All right, I’ll book it,’ I yielded.
‘When?’
‘Soon. I’ll book it soon.’
‘How soon?’
‘Soon enough.’
‘Soon enough to get shingles,’ she bleakly observed.
‘Is this really an emergency? We’ve gone several decades without mentioning shingles,’ I protested.
‘Exactly. There’s not another moment to lose,’ she said, eerily in the tone of Sherlock Holmes offering the hansomcab driver a sovereign to get him to Waterloo by sunset.
‘Can I finish my tea? I’m fairly sure shingles will have the decency to lay off until I’ve finished my tea.’
‘Don’t finish your tea. Book it now.’
My mind turned to Nineteen EightyFour, and specifically to whether O’Brien would have bothered with the rats if he’d had my mother for his Room 101 sidekick.
So it was that, not long after this medical symposium, I found myself in a branch of Superdrug with a rolled-up left sleeve.
‘What made you book?’ asked the inoculator, a witty Glaswegian woman.
‘My mother. She wanted to get me something nice for my birthday.’
‘Well then, if you’re a good boy, and don’t make a fuss, I’ll stick a rosette on the jab area instead of a plaster.’
The good news is that, in the weeks since, I have remained ostentatiously free of any stress-induced chickenpox-related virus.
The less good news is that there is no way, and never will be, of determining whether the vaccine is responsible. The alternate timeline in which I eschewed the jab will for ever be unknowable.
For Doctor Who, it would be easy. He or she, or they, could take the Tardis to the future that developed after my mother never saw the advert, to discover whether shingles struck in that parallel reality.
In the guise of Tom Baker, the Doctor did much the same, albeit in the slightly different context of cosmic annihilation. In Pyramids of Mars, he showed Sarah Jane the results of not acting to prevent Sutekh, the Ancient Egyptian god of destruction, from escaping the Eye of Horus. He took the Tardis to a desolate, Sutekh-ravaged future.
Requiring no such Time Lord technology to be certain, my mother is taking full credit for my continuing shingles-free status. ‘Of course that’s why you haven’t got it,’ she observed a couple of days ago when the commercial made its 149th appearance of the day. ‘If it wasn’t for me, you’d be scratching yourself to death.’
The advert yielded to the walk-in bath, and then the noble Lord Botham, pretending to hobble before the footvibrator thing miraculously restores his athletic prowess.
A thought first flashed to mind like a thunderclap headache, and then spilled into words. What if the roster of geriatric commercials is boosted to the tune of a penis enlargement?
‘I’m not buying you one of those,’ said my mother, elegantly hinting that the other lost vocation was in Carry On scriptwriting. ‘From the way you tolerated that shingles jab, the one thing you do seem able to cope with is a little pr—’
‘If it wasn’t for me,’ my mother said, ‘you’d be scratching yourself to death’
Who would buy a vaccine off a telly ad? My mother
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Interviews with Rula Lenska, the actress now touring with The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel play, often say she was born in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, my home town.
In fact, she was born on 30th September 1947 at the Polish Resettlement Camp at Diddington, a tiny village about five miles away, although her birth was registered in St Neots.
But what were resettlement camps?
After the Second World War, many Polish refugees, including Rula’s aristocratic family, weren’t able to return to their homeland as they had supported the Western Allies. The British government took responsibility for them, founding the Polish Resettlement Corps in May 1946. The only way these people could be accommodated was by putting them into camps and barracks vacated by the Americans and Canadians after the end of the war.
Eventually, around 250,000 Poles
came to the UK to be housed in the camps, often situated in remote locations on large country estates. The biggest was at Northwick Park, Middlesex, which housed a thousand people. The camps were operational from 1946 to 1969.
Rula’s camp in Diddington, like most of the others, consisted of a vast collection of corrugated, rusting Nissen huts. The huts first housed prisoners of war and then became an American military hospital before being requisitioned as a resettlement camp.
I only knew about the camp because I used to pass it on my way to school on the bus and often wondered what went on there as it looked both mysterious and abandoned. I never saw any signs of life or any people.
The camp was in reality a busy place.
Pretty much self-sufficient, it followed Polish customs and the Polish way of life. There was, initially, little integration with the locals who remained suspicious of foreigners in the English countryside.
The Diddington camp had a maternity hospital and more than 1,000 babies were born there between 1947 and 1949.
A secondary school was established, with about 300 pupils and a Catholic church was set up in one of the huts. All the teachers and ancillary staff lived on the site, which had water and electricity, although conditions were rough and ready and certainly very basic.
There was a cinema at the camp, which was just as well as there was absolutely nothing to do in Diddington, a village of only 100 residents with no shops or pubs. Then, gradually, from about 1955, the Nissen huts started to fall into disrepair, as the residents began to leave. Many went to live in nearby Huntingdon. Today, there is absolutely no sign that the camp ever existed and no memorial or plaque to commemorate it – which is sad.
Liz HodgkinsonBeReal is a smartphone application that allows you to share photographs of yourself with your friends and the world at large.
It is the Generation Z social media phenomenon of 2022. By August, it had gained 10 million daily active users, 55 per cent of whom are estimated to be aged 16 to 24.
‘Not another social network!’ I hear you cry.
And, funnily enough, that’s exactly how BeReal pitches itself – as an antidote to the more established photo-sharing platforms. ‘BeReal won’t make you famous,’ it reassures you when you sign up. ‘If you want to become an influencer, you can stay on TikTok and Instagram.’
All BeReal asks of you is to post a single unfiltered picture per day. Well, two pictures actually. It uses both cameras on your phone, front and back,
so that your messy bedroom, school classroom or (most likely) computer screen forms part of your image, along with a small inset of your face. You can’t edit or touch up these images. And you must take your double-portrait at a time of BeReal’s choosing.
Everyone’s phone pings at the same random time – and then everyone has only two minutes to take their photo.
There’s a pleasing happenstance to the results. Depending on the time the ping goes out, you might get a clutch of morning commutes or evening meals. On 5th September, the call arrived at the precise moment Liz Truss was announced as Prime Minister.
‘Just found out about liz truss via bereal how’s your afternoon going,’ complained one Gen Zer.
The internet meme merchants have already got to work imagining what other historical disasters might look like on BeReal, from 9/11 to the Crucifixion.
You can also find mock-ups of celebrity BeReals, imagining what, say,
Harry Styles might actually be doing at 3.17pm on a Thursday. As for actual celebrities, they appear few and far between on BeReal – for the moment at least.
One of the reasons people like BeReal is that it reminds them of ye olde internet – before it became the commercial hellscape it is today.
But does it fulfil that implicit promise – to make us more real? The thing about Instagram is, people only share stuff that’s interesting. It’s edited highlights. BeReal is more like unedited lowlights. If you happen to be riding a rollercoaster, playing pickleball, or making love to your personal trainer when the BeReal notification arrives, you’re likely to miss it.
Hence the app abounds in the mundane: desks, computers, offices, sofas, pavements and playgrounds. If anything, the app has the effect of making people’s lives seem duller than they actually are. Not such a bad thing.
Richard Godwin
What makes for a real eccentric? It’s a question I’ve been chewing over since deciding to pick a new crop of Daily Telegraph obituaries for a book, Eccentric Lives
‘The eccentric’ is the quintessential Telegraph obituary subject, pioneered in the late-1980s by the great Telegraph obituaries editor Hugh Massingberd.
Massingberd’s idea was that our quirks and foibles are what make us truly human. He was inspired by P G Wodehouse and the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, among others.
Aubrey brought sharp and witty observations: the philosopher Thomas Hobbes would sing loudly when he went to bed at night – ‘not that he had a very good voice, but for his health’s sake; he did believe it did his lungs good and conduced much to prolong his life’.
Back in the 20th century, Massingberd uncovered a rich seam of Technicolor eccentrics, such as the 9th Earl of St Germans, obituarised in 1988. He listed his recreations in Who’s Who as ‘huntin’ the slipper, shootin’ a line, fishin’ for compliments’.
Could you get away with that now without seeming to be trying too hard?
I’m not sure. Eccentricity today risks being confused with a kind of elitism. The modern eccentric learns to be subtler. Massingberd himself was an eccentric but, as his friend Craig Brown wrote after he died in 2007, aged 60, he ‘did his best to appear conventional’, ‘like most true eccentrics’.
Not that the attempt was entirely successful. A very big man, Massingberd ‘pushed generosity well beyond the bounds of sanity’, paying for everyone’s dinner even though he was ‘invariably strapped for cash’, and presenting himself, in his newspaper columns as in life, as an 18th-century gourmand – ‘a valiant trencherman’. He was once photographed as a Roman emperor, ‘garlanded with sausages’.
Now there you see two key features of the real eccentric. Massingberd’s ‘two fingers’ to the diktats of 1990s health commissars reveal a spirit that bridled at conformity, and his presentation of himself brimmed with a sense of cheerily not caring what people thought.
That last quality is seen in Johnny Barnes, aka Mr Happy, a Seventh Day Adventist in Bermuda, who for 30 years would wave benedictions at commuters from his spot at a roundabout on the road into the capital, Hamilton.
From 3.45am onwards, he blessed motorists with ‘I love you – God loves you!’ Far from dismissing him as a religious odd bod, locals adored him.
Most of the obits in the book are of little-known figures like Mr Happy; that was part of the point of Massingberd’s transformation of the form. The obitwriter’s spotlight was newly pointed at those who would once not have been deemed ‘worthy’. But a yearning to reject convention is found everywhere – even on the benches of the House of Commons.
The Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe –as prosecuting counsel at his trial for conspiracy to murder put it – was at the centre of a ‘tragedy of truly Greek and Shakespearean proportions’. He also ticks the right boxes for inclusion in our book – the box marked ‘outmoded dress and eccentric headgear’, for example.
While electioneering, Thorpe favoured a brown bowler hat and, as an Oxford undergraduate, ‘frock coats, stove-pipe trousers, brocade waistcoats, buckled shoes, and even spats’.
His obituary spoke of a ‘quick mind’ reacting strongly against ‘bone-headed Establishment snobbery, arrogant management or racial injustice’.
The obit is also clear-eyed about how Thorpe’s ‘mask of the jester’ could quickly give way ‘to a fixed, distant and icy stare’. ‘Far from being a tragic hero,’ it concludes, ‘he appeared … amply provisioned with common human flaws.’
Oddballs: Sathya Sai Baba, guru; Rev David Johnson, prankster; Viv ‘Spend, spend, spend’ Nicholson; Morris dancer and rocket scientist Roy Dommett
Does anything about Thorpe remind you of that young fogey you knew in your youth? Not the murderous, conspiring bit, maybe, but the snazzy waistcoats and the hats? Wasn’t there always at least one who affected 1950s Received Pronunciation and wore a tie and tweed jacket (with accessories – a brilliant undergraduate in my college sported a monocle)?
It’s irrelevant that Dad might be an IT consultant from Peterborough. The son’s tweed jacket and non-mainstream manner is a kind of rebellion. It shows courage to invite the mockery of snobbish peers too scared to diverge themselves. And those outward oddities may be ‘put on’ but, over time, the sillier ones will fall away. The rest will become baked in – real.
What matters about the true eccentric is the mind beneath. Today’s eccentric is the truly ‘neurodiverse’. He or she has a mind that kicks against the homogenising of management training, committees and devices designed to smooth out the bumps.
Real eccentricity is about nurturing an independent spirit, the quality the Telegraph obituary celebrates.
How that spirit manifests itself is infinitely varied. It doesn’t have to be attention-seeking or contrived. The eccentric today may hide his or her light deeply under a bushel.
Look carefully, because you probably know one. Perhaps you are one.
Andrew M Brown, the Daily Telegraph obituaries editor, is editor of Eccentric Lives: The Daily Telegraph Book of 21st Century Obituaries (Unicorn, £25)
On 4th October 1962, ITV aired the first television adaption of Leslie Charteris’s Saint novels.
The star was the 34-yearold Roger Moore (1927-2017), then best known for Ivanhoe and Maverick
When the last adventure aired on 9th February 1969, 118 episodes later, many viewers regarded him as the ideal screen Simon Templar, surpassing even
was made under the auspices of ITC, which specialised in ‘International Man of Mystery’ television series. The producers were the B-film veterans Robert S Baker and Monty Berman. Moore had previously attempted to buy the rights to the novels by Leslie Charteris (1907-93) but found
ITC’s MD, Lew Grade, wanted Patrick McGoohan to play Templar, but Baker and Berman thought he lacked humour.
One early challenge was a car for the Saint. The producers intended to use a Jaguar Mk X, but the company refused to loan a demonstrator and turned down Moore’s offer to buy one, so long was
However, a crew member had recently seen a rather splendid Volvo P1800. So the leading man visited the firm’s British concessionaire in Mayfair. Shortly afterwards, an immaculate white coupé arrived at Elstree Studios. That original P1800 has recently undergone a complete restoration. As the series progressed, Templar acquired updated versions.
Volvo also provided cars for the star’s off-screen use, which proved ideal for his many personal appearances.
In 1963, Coopers of Brompton Road invited their customers to ‘Meet the Saint in Person’, accompanied by ‘a guard of honour’ of the massed band of the Dagenham Girl Pipers.
Templar encountered many a sinister
villain in his escapades across the world. They were portrayed by a regular team of ITC character actors, including Burt Kwouk (Cato in the Pink Panther films).
The Saint also had an interesting approach to continuity, with cars changing model in mid-chase and, thanks to the art of undercranking, Ford Zephyr 4s having the ability to travel at 150mph.
Future stars also enhanced the casts – Julie Christie in Judith, an overacting Oliver Reed as a Greek-American gangster in Sophia, and Steven Berkoff as a ‘heavy’ in The Man Who Gambled with Life. Warren Mitchell played a Rome taxi driver in three stories. Escape Route featured Donald Sutherland making one of his many appearances in 1960s British television. The Russian Prisoner is especially enjoyable for the sight of Yootha Joyce as a KGB colonel and Anthony ‘Tony Blair’s father-in-law’ Booth as her somewhat clumsy sidekick.
ITC promised audiences ‘exotic locations’, although, for most of the plots, ‘abroad’ involved ten-year-old stock footage and driving on the wrong side of the road in Hertfordshire.
Unusually, the two-part adventure Vendetta for the Saint was shot overseas; albeit in an ‘Italy’ dominated by righthand-drive vehicles with Maltese number plates. None of which prevented The Saint from airing in more than 80 countries and becoming Grade’s most profitable export.
The critical element in the programme’s success was the toooften-underestimated Roger Moore.
The TV critic Nancy Banks-Smith contended he had ‘long realised that raising his right eyebrow and turning his left profile to the camera is all that is required of him’.
In the Daily Mail, Virginia Ironside (now The Oldie’s agony aunt) admired Moore’s ‘astonishing hair’ and said that, ‘of his kind of hero, he is one of the smoothest and the best’.
Each week, Templar could be relied
on to cope with shaky back projection, break down balsa-wood doors or crash through ‘border crossings’ that appeared to be made of cardboard.
Most importantly, Moore would frequently demonstrate his considerable light-comedy talents.
Many of the most enjoyable stories had Templar swapping bons mots with Sylvia Syms, Patricia Haines or Ivor Dean as the definitive Detective Chief Inspector Teal. The pre-credits sequence established the mood, with a supporting actor uttering, ‘Why, it is the infamous Simon Templar!’ An animated halo would then appear above Moore’s quiff as he pulled an entertainingly wry expression at the camera.
In 1965, the NBC television network bought The Saint, which meant ITC filmed the last 47 editions in colour. The almost Miss Marple atmosphere of the original episode, The Talented Husband now seemed very remote. The Fiction Makers is the nearest the series came to the Emma Peel-era Avengers, and The Power Artists had Templar encountering a gang of beatnik art students.
Meanwhile, the producers exhausted the supply of Charteris’s original books, and the author was not always impressed by the new narratives. ‘As usual, this script is fit for Junkin(g)!’ he wrote of the efforts of the story editor, one Harry W Junkin.
By the late 1960s, Moore sought new acting challenges, remarking, ‘The Saint, although I’m very grateful to him, is rather a predictable chap.’
In fact, it was Templar, rather than 007, who showcased Roger Moore’s talents – too often derided by Moore himself – not least in the first colour episode, The Queen’s Ransom
It has a villain with a fez and an eyepatch, ITC’s stock footage of a white Jaguar heading off a cliff and Roger Moore at his considerable best.
And the result is eyebrow-raisingly good television.
On 5th October 1962, the first cinematic adaptation of an Ian Fleming 007 novel went on release.
The star was an up-and-coming 32-year-old actor named Sean Connery – yet it might have been Richard Todd, David Niven or Patrick McGoohan uttering the line ‘Bond, James Bond’ to Eunice Gayson.
Throughout the
60-year history of the Bond film, the list of alternative casting choices has varied from the plausible (Oliver Reed, Lewis Collins or Sam Neill) and the intriguing (Laurence Harvey or Richard Burton) to the surreal: the journalist Peter Snow.
In July 1961, the trade paper Kine Weekly announced that Albert R Broccoli and Harry Saltzman had obtained backing from United Artists to film the sixth Bond tale.
One challenge was a budget of $1 million. This may have been a sum beyond the dreams of a Carry
On or a Hammer Horror, but was still not high by the standards of a major Hollywood production.
Another was choosing the right man to play the role of the secret agent, described by Vesper Lynd as resembling singer Hoagy Carmichael.
Fleming had his own casting ideas, including Edward Underdown, a tall, elegant actor – less Carmichael and more John Le Mesurier’s slightly less languid brother. There was little of the ‘cold and ruthless’ spy of Casino Royale.
Underdown’s range mainly encompassed military officers, with the occasional diversion into deadpan comedy and B-film villainy.
There was also the issue that, by 1962, Underdown would have been 54, while 007 was supposed to be in his thirties. Yet, a few years earlier, he might have made an entertaining Bond in the kind of black and white thriller screened by Talking Pictures Television, with Shepperton’s backlot doubling for Jamaica.
The author also suggested David Niven, who, like
James Bond in Dr No
screens in the same week in 1962. Andrew Roberts salutes them
Possible Bonds (clockwise from above): Stewart Granger, Richard Todd, Patrick McGoohan, Richard Johnson, Edward Underdown, David Niven
Underdown, was in his early fifties and considered insufficiently tough by the producers, despite his war record.
A few years later, Niven did play Bond in the spoof version of the first 007 story, Casino Royale (1967) – Broccoli and Saltzman did not option it.
Unfortunately, the picture had the joie de vivre of a public-information short about drains, with Niven’s moustache seeming to wilt in embarrassment.
Fleming also recommended Stewart Granger, who might have made an exciting Bond, had he been 20 years younger, or Richard Todd, who, at 43, was nearer the right age.
He was considerably shorter than Granger, but this mattered less than his screen persona. Todd excelled at depicting stoic sincerity but wasn’t exactly associated with the dangerous protagonist of the books. It is hard to dispel the mental image of his 007 jovially smoking a pipe and upbraiding the fiendish doctor for not wearing a tie.
The producers approached James Mason and Cary Grant, but they were both too old and disinclined to be tied to a long-term contract. Of the younger performers under consideration, Rod Taylor later stated that he spurned the role as beneath him – ‘That was one of the greatest mistakes of my career!’
Patrick McGoohan, who later starred in The Prisoner, was a logical choice, as he was then famed for playing John Drake in ITV’s Danger Man.
However, 007 did not accord with his beliefs. The actor told the press the role had ‘an insidious and powerful influence on children’.
So the search continued, from William Franklyn, the future face of Schweppes commercials, to Patrick Allen, ‘king of the voiceovers’.
The most plausible casting choice was Richard Johnson, an associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company recommended by Terence Young, director of Dr No. Like Connery, he was dark and saturnine, but Johnson used his MGM contract to reject the role.
A low-budget but ambitious spy drama entitled Danger Route gives an impression of how a Johnson 007 could have been more world-weary, cynical and aggressive than the immaculately tailored MI6 agent.
History relates that Connery gained the role, impressing the producers with his physical grace. His fee was also less than that of Cary Grant, a significant consideration, given the limited funds.
The reviews for Connery’s first outing as Bond ranged from ‘Every male will instantly identify with this devastating he-man’ (Tatler) to ‘an Irish-American look and sound which somehow spoils the image’ (Times) and ‘wooden and boorish’ (Monthly Film Bulletin). Box-office receipts in the UK told their own dazzlingly successful story.
Six decades later, overfamiliarity with the 007 franchise can often obscure how revolutionary Dr No appeared in the context of 1962 British cinema.
The studio back projection behind our hero’s Sunbeam Alpine can look unconvincing, and some cast members sound as though they were post-synched by another actor. But Connery’s performance was the critical element in its success. He was not an unknown leading man but lacked an established screen image, allowing him to create the template for the cinematic Bond, against which audiences judged his successors.
That said, Oliver Reed would have been a splendid 007. And Peter Snow might have made the many longueurs of Moonraker enjoyable.
David Niven’s moustache seemed to wilt with embarrassment
K arl Lagerfeld – or ‘the Kaiser’ – was my first boss in Paris.
Though proud of this great feat, I won first prize as his lousiest assistant at the Chanel Studio. It was 1989, the height of the supermodel and the French luxury brand. Chanel’s tweed suits, little black dresses and handbags were whizzing out of their boutiques.
But, being Karl, he thought it was tremendously funny that I was a dilettante. ‘You spent your life on the telephone,’ the German designer later teased me. Hard to believe, but while he was adding pearls, satin camellias and other accessories to the lithe limbs of supermodels such as Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer and Naomi Campbell, I was busy gassing to my dark-haired Notting Hill Gate-based girlfriends, nicknamed ‘the moustaches’ by The Crown’s Peter Morgan.
Occasionally, the then 56-year-old Karl turned in my direction and smiled broadly. Contrary to his sourpuss reputation, he favoured the different and had an infectious sense of humour.
Veruschka – the celebrated 1960s model – described him as a 19th-century gent who wore his immense culture lightly and was both generous and affectionate.
A journalist’s dream, the well-read and charismatic Karl never forgot a name or an insult; he seduced by being witty and outspoken in four languages: English, French, Italian and his native tongue. He also had a tremendous joie de vivre and urge to share.
Reading the new book Hidden Karl and seeing Robert Fairer’s photographs of the Chanel years in the 1990s and 2000s, I was reminded of the euphoria Karl encouraged among his team and the models. ‘Fashion has to be fun –otherwise what’s the point?’ he often said.
True, Karl lied about his age – born in 1933, he knocked off five years – but it’s hard not to agree with Marie-Louise de Clermont-Tonnerre, the retired Chanel executive, that ‘he was a godsend’ for the fashion house:
‘I was working there when Gabrielle Chanel passed away and the bloodless atmosphere was compared to the Kremlin, just after Stalin died,’ says the spritely 80-year-old.
Indeed, Karl’s winning flair, Teutonic discipline and precision revolutionised Chanel. For 36 years, he revamped the house’s heritage and codes and turned Chanel into a must-have brand from 1983 until 2019 when he died at 85, with his boots on.
It was Anna Wintour’s idea that I work for Karl. As was her way, she faxed Gilles Dufour, Karl’s bras droit, in September 1989.
A meeting was arranged but, although every Parisian I met enthused, ‘Karl will looove you,’ I wasn’t so sure. He’d had a much-publicised bust-up with Inès de La Fressange, his former muse.
And then, after two months, it happened. Or rather Anna intervened. That first meeting with Karl took place in November 1989 at the Chanel Studio on the Rue Cambon. The receptionist called to announce his arrival. Among my Chanel Studio colleagues – Virginie Viard, Victoire de Castellane, Armelle Saint-Mleux and Franciane Moreau – I noticed jewellery was added, lipstick was applied and high heels were slipped on. Suddenly, a fleet of white canvas tote bags appeared, delivered by Brahim, Lagerfeld’s then chauffeur (who was eventually fired for flogging handbags on the side).
The ceremony was regal – followed by Karl, who was sporting a forest-green Loden coat. Quite plump and small, he refused to look at me in the eye. Instead, Karl pushed his sunglasses up, peered down and chose to comb through a tote packed with papers, crayons and pencils.
Placing his coloured sketches on his desk, he revealed he’d met my mother (the writer Antonia Fraser) and my grandmother (the writer Elizabeth Longford) at the house of their publisher, George Weidenfeld, cofounder of Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Seasoned to the creative, I instinctively liked Karl. I decided that he was irked by the disruption, being keener to work. Yet, in spite of the mild gruffness, he was touching. When he was leaving, Gilles needed to help him put on his coat. Karl blamed his surprisingly short arms on an unfortunate family characteristic. Of course, I kept such observations to myself. Karl was a king, surrounded by courtiers eager to repeat stories and win favour.
A few days later, Karl looked at my decoupage jewellery and scarf designs. After choosing two pairs of earrings, he focused on my fabric that depicted a teapot pouring out jewels.
Taking an A3 piece of paper and a thick pen, Karl sketched and marked out how the teapots should be placed. The following season, my double-C teapots were splashed across a black satin silk fabric, manufactured by Cugnasca in Italy, and used for Chanel blouses, jackets and skirt linings.
Two more prints followed. One showed hand-drawn double-C cards mixed in with pearls and diamond tears. The final one boasted double-C clocks flying on jewelled wings.
Apart from these three successful yet unpaid endeavours, I was more of a studio mascot than a helpful assistant. Karl described me as ‘a good-natured, belle-époque actress’. Being a keen amateur photographer, he took my portrait several times.
There were magnificent, candlelit dinners – held either at his Rue de l’Université apartment or at Lamée, a country house outside Paris. An enthusiastic collector of the 18th century, Karl was a walking encyclopaedia about the period. He was a skilled host, too, among his soigné and international guests.
Looking back, I see that those soirées captured how high fashion was still wrapped up in Parisian society. Karl straddled both worlds, seamlessly – as did his ex-friend Yves Saint Laurent. The designers had fallen out over Jacques de Bascher, Karl’s boyfriend, and the rift widened further. There was even a sense that Paris was divided between Yves’s camp and Karl’s.
Meanwhile, the only time I was
Karl gave Natasha an 18th-century diamond brooch for her 1997 wedding
Karl used to say that Antonio Lopez had no equal with regard to his fashion drawings. However, Karl was capable of sketching and imitating every single designer’s style. Swiftly achieved, his drawing was fascinating to watch.
Naturally, there were dramas. During the 1991 fall winter couture show, Linda and Christy Turlington brandished Lesage-embellished redingotes and matching, thigh-high boots. Certain flaps had not been closed. Ravishing as they looked, their underwear was revealed. The show was unveiled at the Ritz.
And I remember overhearing Princess Caroline of Monaco joke, ‘Well, I guess, next season we need to show our panties.’
Poor Colette – in charge of the offending atelier – was fired. It seemed odd for such a professional seamstress, and I wondered if the looks had been sabotaged. Karl had never liked Colette.
No question, there was a darkness to Karl. Yet, in general, those days were light-hearted and fun. A twilight period in Parisian fashion, it was a time when individual creativity reigned.
The design of clothes outshone handbags. Parties were spontaneous, raucous and inclusive. Eccentric and/or bratty behaviour towards the press was tolerated.
Four years later, it would totally change. Hubert de Givenchy was the first to retire in 1995. He sold his house to Bernard Arnault – the luxury titan –who had already acquired Christian Dior, Christian Lacroix, Louis Vuitton and Celine. It was the beginning of major money in fashion and major corporations offering Faustian pacts to creators.
cattle-pronged into action – usually by Gilles – was when Karl produced his Chanel shows.
During those periods, Gilles distributed his original sketches to the various ateliers. Two personal favourites were Monsieur Paquito –responsible for Chanel’s couture suits – and Madame Edith, who’d worked with Mademoiselle Chanel and created ready-to-wear flou dresses.
Meanwhile, a lengthy, portable screen was pinned with photocopies of Karl’s sketches. If only I’d photographed them. Each one was delicately coloured with Chanel make-up, while the buttons and trim were accented with a gold pen.
Instead of nose-diving like his nemesis Saint Laurent, who disappeared into a sea of drugs and alcohol, Karl shed 65 pounds and forced Chanel to go global.
Mastering the internet helped his cause, as did spectacular fashion extravaganzas and an addition of commercial collections such as Cruise.
As Robert Fairer’s photographs attest, Karl Lagerfeld was utterly unleashed when he reinvented Chanel for the 21st century.
Karl Lagerfeld Unseen: The Chanel Years (Abrams) by Robert Fairer is out on 20th October
T he word of the decade – here’s hoping it isn’t the word of the century – is a Latin hybrid.
Coronavirus comes from the Latin corona (‘crown’) and the Latin virus, originally meaning a poisonous secretion from snakes – ie a kind of venom.
Used together, though, the words corona and virus these days have only one miserable meaning. Scientists gave the virus the name because those knobbly bits on the surface of the virus are like the crests and balls of a crown.
Once again, even with the worst of modern horrors, it is the Latin language that put it first and put it best – unless ancient Greek got there first, by lending its alphabet to those horrible virus variants like Delta and Omicron.
Latin lives on in some corners of Britain – even where it shouldn’t. Justin Warshaw QC, a family lawyer, still finds Latin useful in his work:
‘The law is a goldmine of great Latin tags. Legal Latin was apparently abolished by Lord Woolf in 1999, acting pro bono. Thankfully, the judgment was interim and, mutatis mutandis, major reforms have been avoided.
‘The forum is still conveniens, habeas corpus invoked, the Carta remains Magna and the guilty has mens rea for his actus reus.’
And there still is plenty of Latin left in everyday, non-legal life; words we use without thinking of them being Latin, so embedded are they in the English language – from doctor to bonus; from major to minor.
We rarely stop to think what extraordinary survivals they are: completely intact words transported all the way from ancient Rome, unsullied by a journey across a continent and several millennia.
Latin isn’t an austere relic to be
worshipped behind glass, at a distance or in a museum. Latin is there to make you laugh, move you to tears and charm you by its beauty and cleverness. But by its pleasing cleverness, not its scary cleverness.
That pleasing cleverness is why
late Queen did it in her speech at the Guildhall in 1992: ‘In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilis.’
Elizabeth II’s ancestor Elizabeth I was even keener on the Latin language.
Amazingly, her Latin handwriting
We all know a bit of Latin – and there are lots more lovely words and lines out there to enjoy. By Harry Mount and John Davie
motto was a charmingly simple one: Semper eadem ‘Always the same.’
It wasn’t just in 16th-century England that Latin was so popular.
Across Europe in the Middle Ages, Latin was the intellectual lingua franca: a bridge language or ‘Frankish language’ – as in the Franks, the word used for Western Europeans in the late Byzantine Empire. So William of Ockham (1285-1349) used Latin for his rule, Ockham’s Razor:
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
‘No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary.’
Three hundred years later, the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) was using Latin for his principle, Cogito, ergo sum. ‘I think, therefore I am.’
Also in France, a little earlier, the philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) was a Latin obsessive, as was his father, who wanted his son to have Latin as his first language.
In his father’s Bordeaux château, servants were ordered to speak to little Montaigne in Latin only, as his mother and father did, too.
Montaigne became fluent in Latin and had Latin and Greek quotes painted on the roof beams of his library.
Among them was this one:
Solum certum nihil esse certi et homine miserius aut superbius. ‘Only one thing is certain: that nothing is certain – and nothing is more sad or arrogant than man.’
Enoch Powell, a Greek professor at Sydney University at 25, turned to Latin, too, for his – very horribilis – 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.
When he declared, ‘Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”,’ he was quoting Virgil. He was referring to the passage in The Aeneid where the Cumaean Sibyl predicted to Aeneas that a war in Italy would turn the Tiber red with blood.
Bella, horrida bella, Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno.
‘I see wars, horrible wars and the Tiber foaming with much blood.’
Virgil, the Aeneid
In Withnail & I (1987), Withnail (Richard E Grant) and Uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths) also use Latin to add spice to their drunken game of poker.
They alienate Marwood (Paul McGann) by speaking in Latin:
Uncle Monty: Nonne solus cedetur? (‘Surely, only Marwood will lose.’) Withnail: Reginae servandae defit. (‘He’s short of the queen that can save him’ – Camp Uncle Monty giggles at the idea of a queen coming to the rescue.)
For all the high-minded pleasure these little bursts of Latin give when they’re dropped into English, the Romans didn’t think it was such a high-falutin’ language. Latin was used by the Romans in the most wonderfully vulgar, low-falutin’ way.
Take this graffiti found at Pompeii:
Lucilla ex corpore lucrum faciebat. ‘Lucilla made money from her body.’
On a nearby wall, someone wrote,
Sum tua aeris assibus II.
‘I’m yours for two bronze coins.’
It wasn’t just rude words they loved to write. In the Domus Tiberiana in Rome,
there’s a crude picture of a man with an oversized penis for a nose. Graffiti artists also drew dogs, donkeys and horses. But they liked phalluses most.
And real, day-to-day Roman Britain comes vividly, graphically to life in the Latin letter sent from warm, southern Gaul to a frozen legionary in Vindolanda, Northumberland, listing the contents of his support package:
Paria udonum ab Sattua solearum duo et subligariorum duo.
‘Socks, two pairs of sandals and two pairs of underpants.’
In other Vindolanda letters, Roman legionaries long for luxury items from back home: Massic wine (a fine Italian vintage), fish and olive oil – the ideal Mediterranean diet. And they turn their noses up at the local Pictish fare: cereal, spices and venison.
There are many mentions, too, of cervesa and callum – that is, beer and pork scratchings, and all 1,000 years before the British pub was invented.
Because the teaching of Latin, so unfairly, has been increasingly restricted to private schools and grammar schools, it’s wrongly thought of as a ‘posh’ language. That impression is deepened by Latin’s use in mottoes and for inscriptions on grand buildings.
But, as that Roman graffiti in Pompeii shows, people swore in Latin; they haggled with prostitutes in Latin; launderers wrote their laundry signs in Latin. And, also, some of the finest poetry ever written has been in Latin.
We all speak a bit of Latin already, whenever we watch a video, go to the circus or follow the media.
And there are lots more lovely Latin words and lines out there.
All you have to do is follow St Augustine’s advice in his Confessions in the 4th century AD:
Tolle lege, tolle lege ‘Take up and read, take up and read.’
* Vivat Latin! – ‘Long live Latin!’
Cosmo Landesman’s son belonged to a tribe of lonely, young addicts who never get started in life before they end it all
When my son Jack was a small boy, I carried him on my shoulders – and I carried him in my heart – everywhere I went.
But then the small boy became the troubled teenager and the troubled teenager became the tragic young man: Jack killed himself in 2015, aged 29.
What happened? Life happened. Somewhere between his teens and his twenties, Jack (my son with my ex-wife, writer Julie Burchill) became one of those Lost Boys who get stuck in a life-long adolescence. They never grow up, preferring to give up on life – before they’ve begun to live.
These are tough times for young men – as the disturbing rates of suicide and the growth in mental-health problems show. Lost Boys like Jack are often depressed, self-destructive, addicted to drugs, lost and lonely. You can see them on the streets begging for money or sleeping rough – these sad Lost Boys with no way home.
It’s funny how one minute you have a sweet boy who fills your life with sunshine and joy. The next, you have this pot-smoking, lazy lump of a son with crazy tats and piercings who sits all day on the sofa doing nothing in front of a computer screen.
And you wonder: where did my sweet boy go?
Time passes. Life changes. But Lost Boys stay the same. Parents tell themselves it’s just a phase they’re going through: no need to worry. Meanwhile, their son’s peers are making progress –going to university, finding partners and finding jobs.
I remember a friend boasting about how his son had got into Oxford – and I boasted back that my son had got into Britain’s top rehab place, the famous Priory.
Black humour helps ease parental worry – until you discover your son is doing heavy drugs, drinking too much
and starting to talk about suicide.
That’s when the dark, fearful thoughts start to turn up – usually around 3am. You know you have to do something to save your Lost Boy; but you don’t know what to do.
Lost Boys are often bright and get a place at university or art school – and then suddenly for no reason drop out.
Parents tell themselves it’s only a matter of time before their Lost Boy finds himself. They don’t understand that he doesn’t want to find himself: he wants to obliterate himself with drink and drugs. Anything to quieten those voices of hurt and self-hate that rage inside his head.
And the parents of these Lost Boys don’t understand what happened to their boy: ‘He was so clever and gifted.’ Lost Boys are very creative when it comes to making music or painting or writing. They often have the dream of playing in a band, and they’re always in the process of ‘getting a band together’, ‘making a demo’ or ‘doing some gigs’. They’re always on the brink of doing something – and end up having done nothing.
These Lost Boys have the dream but not the self-discipline to make it come true. They are too fidgety to focus on a career; too self-centred to work with others. Consequently, they feel like failures – but tell the world they don’t give a f**k. That’s just their hurt talking.
Lost Boys are impossible to live with and impossible to let go of. First they break your house rules and then they break your heart. They beg you for money and a second chance and promise a new beginning.
‘This time,’ they insist, ‘things will be different – you’ll see.’ And it’s always the same.
I confess that I kicked my Lost Boy out of my flat. We rowed so much and his drug usage was out of control. I couldn’t stand living with Jack. I called it ‘tough love’ – I soon discovered that there’s nothing tougher than standing by and watching someone you love screw up their life.
Many Lost Boys become homeless, surfing the sofas of friends, sleeping rough and living on state benefits and their wits. They beg and steal. They buy and sell drugs. And the sad thing is they lose their kindness and then their moral compass.
Lost Boys can be very sweet and charming – but also rude, selfish and uncaring about others.
Parents do the best they can. They get their Lost Boy on medication – and he comes off his medication. They get him into therapy – and he quits therapy. He comes off drugs and goes back on drugs.
And so the cycle of fresh starts and failed attempts goes on and on until you cry, ‘I give up! Sort out your own life!’
If I had a fiver for every time I said that to Jack, I would be a rich man.
Lost Boys are difficult to sympathise with. They are often middle- and upper-class kids who were given every opportunity in life – and managed to screw up every opportunity that came their way.
The good news is that some Lost Boys eventually find themselves and make something good out of life.
The bad news is that some Lost Boys are so lost that, like my boy, they decide to kill themselves instead.
Jack and Me: How NOT to Live After Loss (Eyewear Publishing, £20) by Cosmo Landesman is out now
On his 250th anniversary, a statue of the poet will be erected in Ottery St Mary, his Devon birthplace. By Drew Clode
On 21st October, a statue of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) will be unveiled, 250 years to the day since his birth in 1772.
It will stand in the local church in his small, thriving home town: Ottery St Mary, tucked away in a pocket of countryside in deepest south-east Devon.
The town was his birthplace. It speaks volumes that the church and community are honouring the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan with such a tribute.
The statue, sculpted in bronze by Nicholas Dimbleby – the youngest of the three brothers – will be unveiled at 11.30am, the exact time of the poet’s birth 250 years ago. Pictured below is his clay model of Coleridge’s head.
It will stand, life-size, on the edge of St Mary Ottery’s south wall, staring at the exact spot, not 100 yards distant, where the young Samuel first drew breath.
The statue of the poet will dominate your view as you climb the ancient brick steps into the churchyard and walk up to meet him face to face. At last, he has come home.
Coleridge spent the first nine years of his life in Devon, roaming the banks of the Otter and playing in the churchyard at St Mary’s. He embarked on his prodigious learning in the schoolhouse. It was just yards from the house where he had been born and his father, John, was headmaster.
Coleridge by Nicholas DimblebyJohn was also the village minister, and baptised his youngest and last child at the font in St Mary’s Ottery in December 1772. The church is a glorious edifice –‘lying large and low like a tired beast’, according to Pevsner – modelled in part on Exeter Cathedral.
In 1782, his mother’s fear of poverty following his father’s death drove the young Sam away to school: to Christ’s Hospital, a charity school then situated to the east of St Paul’s in London. He later wrote of his ‘weeping childhood, torn by early sorrow from my native seat’.
During his school days, he returned only three or four times to the village and to a troubled relationship with his mother and siblings. Apart from a near-calamitous attempt at an Otterybased reunion with his favourite brother, George, in 1807, there is no evidence that he ever returned again.
Meanwhile, according to his biographer Richard Holmes, ‘Coleridge had become, in effect, the black sheep of the family, and a proverb among his brothers for profligacy and lack of discipline.’
He died in July 1834 in London’s Highgate and lies with his wife, daughter, son-in-law (and nephew) and grandson in a derelict cellar beneath St Michael’s, the local parish church.
There is no evidence that he ever wished to be buried in what has become the ancestral church at Ottery St Mary. And there’s no evidence that his family there opposed the burial in Highgate – he wasn’t the family favourite because of his opium-taking and, to put it mildly, his eccentric attitude to marriage and family life.
But anecdotes can have a persuasive force all of their own. As late as the 1920s, a member of the family was confiding to a Canadian academic –Kathleen Coburn – that ‘the old reprobate’ was a bit of a disgrace: ‘All those badly written scribblings –couldn’t even write a decent hand that
ordinary people can read – full of stuff and nonsense.’
But this all happened long ago. This October, his descendants and the residents of Ottery St Mary will have brought to reality a 140-year-old dream (the statue was first mooted in 1882).
They have returned the poet to his home town, magnificently sculpted in bronze, standing exactly where he spent so many of his happiest years, reading, moping or occasionally absorbed in Gothic re-enactments of the hundreds of stories he’d precociously read.
It wasn’t easy. Fundraising was an arduous, non-stop graft. Seeking and obtaining the various permissions were exhausting. The church stands on Church of England land, situated in a conservation area. The Diocesan Advisory Committee, East Devon County Council, the church governors and Historic England all had to be convinced of the rightness of the case.
There were endless questions. The sculptor had to be chosen and the best position agreed. There were discussions of how the statue would look – and what was the choice of material and the best type of stone to sit in this particular soil.
All these challenges more than took up the nine years needed to bring this passionate idea to this month’s brilliant, moving climax.
Coleridge’s great-great-great-great grandson Richard, due to become chair of another trust devoted to refurbishing the poet’s tomb, has thanked many people in Ottery and further afield who helped this project through to its conclusion.
Richard Coleridge said, ‘The real tribute, thanks and gratitude belong to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
‘His contribution to our literature, our theology and our philosophy, and the ideas that this man, from this small town, brought to his country and the world are unique and, along with this statue, bear witness to the greatness of the man himself.’
‘Ihave seven grandchildren. They all went to university.’
‘Oh really. I have seven grandchildren, too – three vegans, two transgender, one hunt saboteur and one with a job title of six words, none of which I understand.’
‘I keep calling my wife Molly. That’s our dog’s name.’
‘Well, I frequently call the man in the newsagents darling.’
‘I’m still waiting for my cataract operation.’
‘Sorry – I missed that. You’re talking into my bad ear.’
‘I got up three times last night to go for a pee.’
‘I got up three times and the third time I lost my way back to the bedroom. Found myself trying to get into the garden.’
‘I reckon this jacket will see me out.’
‘See these shoes? I bought them in 2002. Good as new.’
‘Of course, I need subtitles for everything on the telly these days.’
‘I counted. I have to take 11 pills every day.’
‘Me too. I take 11 pills. The doctor has just given me this new one. What do you think of this? Purple and yellow stripes. Like a regimental tie. God knows what it’s for.’
‘My nostril hair has turned white.’
‘It was a shock to discover that my son has been a subscriber to The Oldie for five years.’
‘I had a turn last Thursday.’
‘Well, I had an episode.’
‘I’m on my third new knee.’
‘Really? I’ve lost count of my hips.’
‘Last month, I went to three cremations, a scattering and two memorial services.’
‘I just went to four cremations. The fourth was a mistake; I arrived too early at the crematorium and went to one for a perfect stranger. Rather a good service, actually.’
‘Time for my lie-down.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that. Must have
The Oldie Annual 2023 A4 PB 192pp £6.95
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The cost-of-living crisis will push millions of people in Britain into food poverty. The predictions grow more apocalyptic by the day. Private Fraser in Dad’s Army was right. We’re all doomed. Doomed.
But hold on. We’ve been here before – and in far more threatening circumstances. In two world wars, Germany’s submarine offensives tried to starve Britain into submission.
In both cases, allotments came to the rescue – not completely, but they did make a significant contribution to the nation’s larder. They enlisted civilians in a war effort which was also a great morale-booster, with the pithy slogan ‘Dig for Victory’.
There is no sign that the Government is considering the wartime measures to requisition land for extra allotments. But the National Allotment Society (NAS) is quietly preparing for a huge surge in demand for plots from desperate people who can no longer afford to buy all the food they and their families need. It had a full dress rehearsal when COVID struck and demand soared.
The President of the society, Phil Gomersall, says 60 new allotment sites are going to be provided by housing developments as part of their recreational facilities. Each site can provide up to 100 plots. Many existing sites, including his in Leeds, are considering breaking up standard plots into two or four smaller ones which are more suitable for modern families.
The standard plot is 360 square yards, the size set in Victorian times as sufficient for a working man to feed his family with fruit and vegetables throughout the year. That’s nearly five times the size of a cricket pitch.
Local authorities are becoming more allotment-friendly as they realise their benefits go beyond fruit and veg to
improved physical and mental health and stronger community spirit.
Gomersall says, ‘Councils see these benefits come without a financial or administrative burden on them as allotments are self-financing and we are encouraging them to be self-governing.’
The ad-hoc Victorian allotment movement was formalised in the 1886 Allotment Act, which licensed local authorities to provide allotments.
The number peaked in the Second World War, with 1.4 million plots nationwide. They gradually fell out of fashion afterwards as people became more prosperous, falling to a low point of 265,000 in 1997.
The first event to reshape the allotment world was the BBC comedy The Good Life (1975-8). Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal played a middleclass couple who drop out of the rat race and try to become self-sufficient by turning their suburban garden into an allotment.
The series ditched the stereotype of the allotmenteer as an old, curmudgeonly, cloth-capped working man in favour of the aspirational middle class in search of a purity of purpose. Thousands
enthusiastically flocked back to the land – including me. I started my allotment 45 years ago, in 1977.
In the early 2000s, women began to discover allotments. They were almost completely absent in the old days, but now they came in search of healthier food for their families during a spate of food scares. They often bring their children with them, swathes of colour from the flowers they grow and greater sociability.
The old curmudgeons grumble about noisy children running around as if the allotments are a playground. But they do no harm, and childish laughter is as joyful a sound as the birds’ dawn chorus in spring. They will grow up associating allotments with fun and happiness.
There are now 330,000 plots in cultivation. The number of plots is growing – but so are the waiting lists for newcomers. The average wait is about five years. The longest was 18 years, in Camden in north London, before the plot in question was allocated in 2020.
The NAS estimates that the typical cost of running a standard plot is £247 a year, producing crops worth nearly £2,000 from 203 hours’ work. That averages out at only four hours a week.
I spend only half that time working, so take less in crops. Still, I spend much more time on the plot, pottering about, socialising and relishing the tranquillity.
The future looks challenging but, as Gomersall says, ‘Allotments will always be good for the nation’s health, wealth and happiness.’
I am determined, too, to find an upside to the other existential crisis looming over us; global warming. I’ve sketched a new allotment plant layout for when Britain develops an Italian climate. There’ll be a small grove of olive trees and a fig or a pomegranate under which my fellow plotters and I can gossip and shelter from the sun.
Most importantly, I will have a minivineyard where l will make a delicious and cheeky Vino Osborne. Cheers!
‘To betray you must first belong. I never belonged.’
So said Kim Philby in defence of having secretly thrown in his lot with the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
Certainly his upbringing in India and his cussed father’s disaffection with Britain’s ruling elite made him something of an outsider among Britain’s entitled, but it’s the feeblest of defences.
It was this sort of feebleness that enraged John le Carré, who has far more entitlement to an ‘I didn’t belong’ defence and who, in a crowded field, loathed Philby probably more than anyone did.
His father, Ronnie Cornwell, was a conman and violent, philandering, timeserving rogue, whose wife, Olive, left the family home when David (his real name) was just five. ‘I don’t remember feeling any affection in childhood except for my elder brother,’ he once wrote.
As his longtime lover ‘Suleika Dawson’ has revealed in a new memoir, le Carré was vigorously unfaithful in his search for affection, but politically he has nothing to explain, compared with Philby, whose undercover burrowing cost many lives and countless more friendships.
The young le Carré was a man in a hurry, gifted but often unpopular with colleagues, the benign grandfather figure so comfortable at home on his Cornish clifftop a remote prospect indeed.
And that theme of betrayal, which makes so many Cold War stories sing, is ever-present in the book of his letters, deftly and economically curated by his son Tim (who died shortly after completing the task), although parts of many of the letters had surfaced amidst the painstaking research in Adam Sisman’s biography.
It depicts his progress from Sherborne to Oxford, Eton (where he taught), the Foreign Office, espionage, Germany and into the realms of the world’s great writers.
Of one betrayal, when he spied on a left-wing friend at university, he sought to explain himself half a century later: ‘I was a nasty, vengeful little orphan with a psychopathic liar for a father and a boy-scout image for myself as an antidote.’
He adds ingratiatingly – but
John le Carré in 1965, the year he published The Looking Glass War
speciously (as he admits) – that if he hadn’t greatly valued their friendship, he ‘would have had nothing to betray’. He continues, ‘Judas was a shit not so much because he betrayed Christ but because he loved him.’
We are getting into Graham Greene territory and le Carré, though at one time ‘in awe of him’, was no more comfortable about his relationship with the Sage of Antibes than Greene himself was with the Almighty. Le Carré tells Alan Judd he had ‘surges of fondness for
him and surges of revulsion’, complaining that he ‘never knew anyone who tended his image more carefully than Graham’.
Greene had called The Spy Who Came In from the Cold ‘the best spy story I have ever read’, and le Carré, no dismisser of flatterers, reciprocated by writing to him to rave about The Comedians. But le Carré disapproved of Greene’s late-life radicalism, which could be a good deal wilder than his.
‘Does anyone remember that Greene stood the wrong side of the Berlin Wall and said he’d rather be there than here? He who lived in Antibes and fell in love with Central American dictators? Novelists on the whole make pretty daft politicians, but Greene was in a class of his own…’
Among the novelties in the book are his replies to members of the public. He takes enormous trouble to explain to 11-year-old Mark Wilcocks where his inspiration comes from. He informs ten-year-old Nicholas Greaves how to become a spy. And he tells Stephen James Joyce (‘I am most disappointed and even irate’) why he described a complicated local Swiss delicacy as merely ‘chopped veal’.
Clearly each correspondent has been listened to and considered with respect and kindness – though not without a degree of self-indulgence. Charm is not only for the benefit of its recipient.
Almost as if making up for past misdemeanours, there is enormous tenderness in some of the letters to family – including to and about his wife Jane, his stepmother Jeannie and his lover Susan Kennaway – and to Roger Martin, recently bereaved husband of le Carré’s first wife Ann. Another, a letter to the terminally-ill American author John Cheever, is a model for anyone struggling to compose the hardest of messages.
Indeed, in some respects, the book might serve as a Mary Killenesque etiquette guide, showing, for example, how to invite friends to stay without their getting in the way (‘It is my invariable practice to write for the first hours of each day, so we ask…’).
There is much joyous material in his letters to Stephen Fry, Tom Stoppard, Alec Guinness, Philippe Sands and others, with aperçus, jokes and asides to keep the pages turning.
The power of his writing resides in these letters. There is much that is ‘private’, though those looking for the warts-and-all story should consult Sisman (an invaluable companion to this book); and the moral seriousness, for all the impeccable style, is here in spades.
His rages against injustice are glorious. His reply, following publication of The Constant Gardener, to the insinuating director of a drugs company who invites him to Switzerland to see what nice people they are is a belter:
‘I am not employed by an industry accused, by the most sober critics, of amassing excessive wealth at the expense of the wretched of the earth… Nobody buys my opinions. In your world, that is unusual and perhaps unsettling.’
His anger at Oleg Kalugin, who admitted and later denied having arranged the killing of Georgi Markov, is another sublimely imperious put-down.
But Stanley Mitchell, the communist former friend on whom he spied, remained uncharmed and angry. Having attempted some sort of reconciliation, seeing Mitchell’s closed mind, Cornwell gives him both barrels about the insidiousness of communism and Britain’s need to protect itself. It’s a robust rejoinder to the E M Forster ‘friends before country’ line; and an example of the sort of writing that
kept le Carré’s readers loyal during and after the Cold War – hugely critical of the West, but ultimately on the side of freedom.
The greatest scorn is reserved for another closed mind, that of Kim Philby, ‘one of the biggest shits of the 20th century’. It was le Carré’s suggestion that Ben Macintyre write up the story of Philby’s betrayal of his MI6 friend Nicholas Elliott, a tale soon to appear on our screens in A Spy
Among Friends, with Damian Lewis as Elliott and Guy Pearce as Philby.
Le Carré had planned to write a play, with his friend Elliott’s help, about Philby’s 1963 disappearance from the Lebanon to Moscow. In fact, as one of le Carré’s letters reveals, Elliott was stringing le Carré along, and was having the same conversation with ‘half the novelists/playwrights in London’.
Elliott told le Carré that Philby fleeing to Moscow in 1963 was what MI6 had wanted. Perhaps Elliott self-interestedly wanted to promote that notion, rather than admit it was a cock-up, and hoped the novelist in le Carré would swallow the idea of its being a conspiracy. In any event, le Carré believed, Elliott was just as much a poseur as Philby – ‘just a lot nicer’.
Le Carré never met Philby – whose sexual orientation, even, he disputed. He had the opportunity to make contact in Moscow the year before Philby died, but refused. ‘I must have been a fool,’ he told Philippe Sands 30 years later, ‘but it was more than I could swallow at the time.’
Towards the end of his life, le Carré, though not above playing the ‘I’m an outsider’ card, was well and truly established, financially secure and with a largely contented family around him.
He pays great tribute to the delight that Jane – who toiled mightily as his secretary – and offspring brought him, and it is implicit in this book.
But almost all the letters, even to his last days, tell his correspondent of his current writing and how his most recent works have been received, as if that was what really mattered.
And, to most of us, it is.
The Letters of John le Carré, edited by Tim Cornwell, is out now (Penguin Viking, £30)
James Hanning is author of Love and Deception: Philby in Beirut (Corsair)
Isympathise with Oscar Wilde, ill in his room at the Hôtel d’Alsace in Paris, when he complained that he was fighting a duel to the death with his wallpaper. ‘One of us has to go,’ he decided.
Left Bank wallpapers have not improved, as I discovered last weekend, confined for three days with food poisoning.
It began on the Eurostar, where the food is execrable, especially in first class. They say that the restaurants in Paris, with only a few exceptions, have ‘gone off’, and the Eurostar is only politely preparing us for the gastronomic disappointments that lie ahead. But perhaps Paris itself has ‘gone off’.
However, it wasn’t with Oscar that I identified in my distress, but with Gustav von Aschenbach, hapless hero of Thomas Mann’s love story:
‘Some time passed before anyone noticed the man slumped sideways in his chair…’ – and Aschenbach hadn’t even travelled to Venice by Eurostar.
During that weekend I expected a similar fate. What would the headlines read? DAME EDNA DIES IN PARIS – or CROSS-DRESSING AUSTRALIAN FOUND IN SORDID PARISIAN HOTEL?
My dermatologist, an excellent fellow, has indiscreetly told me the year of my ultimate departure. Wise and witty Adam Kay, who is a doctor, has
My pin-up: Kate Smith (1907-86)written that most doctors have a pretty accurate intuition as to when their patients will expire – but, unlike my no-nonsense dermo, they spare the patient this information.
Well, that most punctilious and old-fashioned gentleman the Reaper is apparently paying me a visit … well, not immediately, but sooner than I would like, and I’ve got to fit in a few more farewell tours before that.
Perhaps it was food poisoning – caused by … don’t ask – that desensitised me to
the charms of Paris, or is the city rebuffing me as well? Did the Eiffel Tower seem to be saying ‘Get me out of here’?
In my childhood, Kate Smith was always on the wireless singing The Last Time I Saw Paris, and that old Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein song still moves me – even though I now know it’s about the German occupation.
But does it move me because it’s about missing Paris, or is it about missing childhood? That little boy crouched beside the wireless in 1940.
I love small, rarely visited, museums.
Ages ago, the Musée Rodin was one of my favourites, along with the Gustave Moreau Museum up near Pigalle.
Now the Rodin has been streamlined. A big fancy entrance with facilities for the handicapped, a milling throng of backpacks and selfie sticks and students of all ages and from the least attractive nations, jostling through the grand rooms gawking at The Kiss and mostly photographing each other.
A spasm of nausea got me out of there just in time. Before I could confront Rodin’s famous sculptural group The Burghers of Calais, the hamburgers of Paris took their chunderous toll.
You can now mooch around Paris without an erotic twitch to disturb you, and without so much as a whiff of Gauloises which once perfumed the city.
The crowds are just as they are in
London: a dismal cavalcade of rucksacks and dejected black-clad pedestrians, like the riffraff who throng Oxford Street or pullulate in Leicester Square.
Chic has left the Seine. In the words of that old song:
The streets are where they were
But there’s no sign of her
The Lido has gone and soon it might be the Crazy Horse, where the Australian showgirls – and there were always a few of them there, and at the Moulin Rouge – would give you a wink if they spotted you at a stage-side table.
Even those naughty little subterranean clubs are dying out too, I am told – the ones on the Left Bank, I presume, with sticky banisters descending to a tenebrous basement bedizened with the threadbare décor of a conjectural bordello.
There, before a small audience of silent and enthralled gentlemen – and, not seldom, their wives and mistresses –young and not-so-young girls from the former Yugoslavia performed unacceptable acts of immodesty.
Or so I have been led to believe.
The best cabaret in Paris used to be
at the Alcazar, on the Rue Mazarine, where the waiters all sang, the tiny stage overflowed with artistes of all colours and genders, the music was loud and intoxicating and we were all part of a kaleidoscopic, riotous show that could happen only in old Paris.
Aristotle Onassis was there at the table next to mine, and Juliette Gréco blew me a kiss – and the tourists were all genuine, old-fashioned tourists who seem now to have disappeared, or moved to Berlin.
Or so I am told.
The most neglected art museum I’ve ever visited was the Jacques-Émile Blanche Museum at Offranville, Normandy. When I last went there, there was no one in attendance and the wooden doors, open to the street, were flapping and banging in the wind.
The pictures, carelessly hung and
all desirable, invited larceny – if your poacher’s pockets were big enough or your raincoat sufficiently capacious. But, back then, in 1976, Blanche, painter of the famous portraits of Proust and Beardsley, was out of fashion.
The Wiertz Museum outside Brussels is probably still the same. You are always the only person there, and the resident curator looks surprised to see you.
Hunger, Madness, Crime (c 1853) is one of its treasures: a large painting of a huge pot bubbling away on the fire, and a dishevelled woman with ‘serious issues’ gleefully keeping it on the boil. Over the black brim of the cauldron poke the limbs of a casseroled kiddie.
It is surprising that this small museum is so seldom enjoyed by art-lovers.
Oh, and in Paris the crime museum closed long ago. How else could I have acquired the eau-de-nil cache-sexe of the Mata Hari?
As to my dermatologist’s prediction, I’m getting a second opinion.
Recommended: Ann Sothern on YouTube singing The Last Time I Saw Paris, from the film Lady be Good (1941)
We were all part of a kaleidoscopic, riotous show – only in old Paris
It’s an inconvenient truth that complexion quality is 70 per cent down to genetics and only 30 per cent down to the effort we put into careful curation.
Still, there is absolutely no excuse for throwing in the towel if your mother looked a wreck. The mothers of today’s oldies simply didn’t know how damaging sunbathing was, nor how dehydrating to wash their faces roughly with soap and water.
Today, we know that sunbathing is ageing and we cleanse our faces with special unguents before gently patting in moisturiser.
In South Korea, where beauty culture is so important, a demanding skincare regime – involving double cleansing, toning, masks, sun protection and moisturisers – begins in early girlhood.
But there is more to looking good than skin curation. Wrinkles are hovering, longing to be formed. To tackle these pre-emptively, we need to correct certain bad personal habits. Chief among these is what is known in the north of England as spalling.
Pause for a while on any high street and sit quietly, watching the passers-by. You will soon observe that most pedestrians, walking alone, are doing so with their faces ‘screwed up’ – spalling. They are either squinting or wearing a rictus grin – the default facial expressions we adopt when walking outside unaccompanied.
There was some truth in that old wives’ warning to children, ‘If the wind changes, your face will be stuck like that.’
Any repetitive contraction of the underlying facial muscles will eventually lead to wrinkle formation and our faces will indeed be stuck like that.
Some of us are also in the habit of constantly raising our eyebrows – not always to denote scepticism.
Then there is lip-pursing and scowling. Turn that frown upside down! Actually, don’t – because repetitive
smiling will also leave its imprint around the eyes.
Any facial contortion, if held habitually, will leave its legacy. When going to sleep, do not squash your face into a heap of comfy pillows. The result in the morning will be facial quilting, which, yes, will disappear as the morning wears on … until one day it won’t.
Nature wants you to use all the facial expressions in the repertoire you were born with – not just one set-in-stone gargoyle face you have got into the bad habit of wearing continuously.
Ten tips for preventative action:
1. Wear mascara only for special occasions. Even when done gently, the action of taking off the mascara is damaging to the super delicate skin around the eyes. The damage will be cumulative.
2. Never rub your eyes: even if you have a really bad itch, just resist the urge. Dampen a cotton pad and place it carefully on your shut eyelids until the itch goes away.
3. Always wear sunglasses when out and
about – even when it’s not particularly sunny. Otherwise you’ll find yourself squinting, and fine lines will form.
4. Wear sunscreen on your face and hands all year round, even inside the house, because the ‘blue light’ coming off your computer screen is now suspected of inflicting the same skin damage as sunlight.
5. Try to limit alcohol intake. It’s dehydrating, and crêpiness will set in if you don’t give your body some days to rehydrate. But we are only human and the rush of exhilaration seems worth it at the time. And it often is worth it – just don’t do it too often.
6. Try not to smoke or vape: pursing the lips is wrinkle-forming. Use nicotine-replacement lozenges or mini pellets instead.
7. In winter, wear a snood or some kind of cashmere scarf all around the face. Cold air and, worse, wind are just as damaging as hot sun.
8. Avoid tech neck: a double chin will form – even if you’re young – if you constantly look down into your screen. These days, Hollywood stars keep their screens on eye-level stands, and beautyconscious younger women send each other voice notes rather than texts. They can listen to and dictate messages with heads upright rather than constantly look down and grow a double chin as they do so.
9. Train yourself out of pulling silly faces when walking along a street. At home, avoid eyebrow-raising, lip-pursing and scowling. Remember that if you screw up your face, you screw up your face.
10. Nature granted you a full repertoire of facial expressions for communication purposes – so don’t have Botox. If the object of Botox is to make more people think you are unwrinkled and therefore attractive, then it backfires.
If others can’t ‘read’ you, they will find your company unnerving and want to see less – not more – of you.
Steer clear of frowning, smiling and ‘spalling’. Repetitive use of facial muscles produces wrinkles
Irecently caught sight of A N Wilson in the London Library. Wilson had kindly helped me with some research into the novelist Elizabeth Jenkins – so I introduced myself. Alas, this was during the heatwave: I was dressed as if I was on a coach tour.
Wilson, by contrast, resplendent in a double-breasted suit, purple flowery tie and buckled patent leather shoes, could have rivalled a magnificent bird of paradise. Gentleman that he is, Wilson made no sign of noticing this contrast and slipped politely off.
There was a time when this would have given me some pain. Wilson (whose memoirs have just been published and who writes about T S Eliot on page 40 of this issue) was once considered to be a Young Fogey.
The type was originally described in the Spectator by Alan Watkins in 1984 as ‘a scholar of Evelyn Waugh. He tends to be coolly religious, either RC or C of E. He dislikes modern architecture. He makes a great fuss about the old Prayer Book, grammar, syntax and punctuation. He laments the difficulty of purchasing good bread, Cheddar cheese, kippers and sausages… He enjoys walking and travelling by train. He thinks the Times is not what it was.’
Many of the Young Fogeys dressed in impeccable reactionary taste. It was a reaction against what Wilson once called the ‘daffodil yellow and coral pink’ of the Sixties.
In my early 20s, I was a Young Fogey. I hated modern buildings, took the train, and read Brideshead straight through three times on my first encounter with it. I was never seen outside brogues or Oxfords. I wore suits all summer, ties at weekends and all too often put on a cravat. For a while, I had a treasured 1980s double-breasted suit.
I had a Barbara Pym phase, drank whisky and used a typewriter. For two years, I had no mobile phone. We kept
ducks. Like all the worst types, I bothered about other people’s grammar.
What started as a preference for properly knotted ties became a habit: habit became belief. Margaret Thatcher biographer and former Telegraph editor Charles Moore (another original Young Fogey) once wrote about his housemaster warning boys not to give in to the temptation of button cuffs. That was a slippery slope to drug use. Not quite my position, but I always wore French cuffs. My moral and aesthetic standards allowed nothing else.
To give in to the heat and take off my jacket would have been to join the parade of decadence. Look around! Things are so bad that people buy ‘easy peeler’ satsumas – what was the challenge in peeling a traditional satsuma?
Oh! How things have changed. I wear my tweed cape when it’s icy, and my all-weather fedora from October to April. But I have descended to soft shoes. My ties and cravats languish in the tallboy. I wear shorts – something I once believed was the incontrovertible sign of an idler or a burnt-out case.
Now 35, I retain uncompromising views on Evelyn Waugh. But my discomfort with atheism is remote. I am learning to appreciate the Barbican. I couldn’t care less about everyone else’s grammar. I will go back to the clothes if I ever have the money. But, although I refuse to eat easy peelers, I don’t miss the strictures of fogeyism.
I read now of a new generation of young fogeys, twentysomethings who visit gardens and drink no alcohol. The journalist Farrah Storr has written about young people mimicking their
grandparent’s lives. One girl went viral on TikTok, posing in her grandmother’s honeymoon outfits. Young fogeyism now seems to be a denial of the world, not a belief in how it ought to be. Perhaps it always was.
Certainly, although it was serious, the Young Fogey idea was a joke. Watkins was teasing A N Wilson and other Spectator writers. He later wrote, ‘I remain flattered that the phrase caught on as it did. But, as an RAF warrant officer I spent three unhappy months under used to say, “Joke over.” ’
And the joke was over. Wilson wrote a review of The Young Fogey Handbook, noting inconsistencies, inaccuracies and not much wit.
‘We have left far behind,’ he said in the Literary Review, ‘the original fogey joke, the “correct” shape of the Marmite jar or telephone kiosk, the old-fashioned locutions.’
Watkins had warned against taking it all too seriously: ‘The causes are mostly good but can become tedious to others if pressed too often and too hard.’
Moore used to convert all prices into old money, for example, a habit he had to drop at the behest of his wife. In 1984, 11-year-old Rory Stewart (later a Tory MP) wrote a letter to the Spectator about liturgical laxity. ‘In my young days, we had the old service, King James the Sixth’s English and no nonsense.’
To earnest outsiders, though, the joke was easily missed.
My time as a not-quite Young Fogey was fun, but I was never up to the late architectural historian Gavin Stamp’s standards of watch chains, waistcoats, and tweed trousers. Still, I took the idea of Young Fogey a little too seriously.
We must accommodate ourselves to the world.
In the late 1980s, while writing the authorised biography of writer Vera Brittain (1893-1970), I decided to try to get a blue plaque erected in her memory.
The omens weren’t favourable. Several years earlier, a plan to put a plaque on the house in Buxton where Brittain was brought up had been fiercely opposed by one of its owners – a Conservative councillor, incensed by the very notion of ‘a socialist’ being commemorated at her home.
The matter became something of a cause célèbre in the Derbyshire town, especially after Vincent Hanna and his TV crew were chased down the driveway by the angry councillor during an episode of Newsnight investigating the affair.
Nevertheless, my idea was warmly received by Victor Belcher, the guardian angel of the blue-plaque scheme. As a suitable address, we chose 19 Glebe Place in Chelsea, where Vera Brittain had written her classic First World War memoir, Testament of Youth (1933). But again we faced an obstacle. The owners were adamant they didn’t want a plaque.
Exploring alternatives, we eventually settled on 58 Doughty Street (pictured) in Bloomsbury. English Heritage, acutely aware of how few women appear on blue plaques, decided that another name should be commemorated alongside Vera Brittain’s: that of her friend, the writer Winifred Holtby, famous today for her novel South Riding (1936).
For it was in the top-floor flat at number 58, to which they moved in 1922, that Brittain and Holtby developed their burgeoning careers as novelists and journalists, and as campaigners for feminism and peace.
It was also here that they cemented
their great friendship, lasting from their Oxford days, just after the First World War, to Winifred’s untimely death in 1935 from Bright’s disease, at 37.
The inner workings of that friendship can now be scrutinised in a new selection of their correspondence (replacing Brittain’s own, heavily censored edition of 1960).
The early letters show two young middle-class women at a significant moment in history.
The vote for women over 30 had recently been won, and Vera and Winifred saw themselves as pioneers. They savoured their independence from ties of home and parents, resisting the automatic assumption that they would settle down and marry, while fulfilling a burning ambition to establish themselves as writers.
Both were dedicated to ensuring that the First World War really would turn out to be the war to end all wars. Both
were intent on living lives that demonstrated women’s hard-won equality with men.
Yet, fascinatingly, these letters also overturn the sentimental clichés about their relationship.
Yes, there was much that was noble about it and that nobility deserves to be celebrated. But like many close friendships, where the underlying intensity suddenly comes startlingly into focus, other less positive qualities were occasionally on display.
Although they offered mutual support in helping each other to develop ideas for books and get commissions for articles, professional envy occasionally raised its ugly head.
This was never truer than when Winifred’s first novel, Anderby Wold, was accepted for publication, while the
A new collection of letters between writers Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby reveals a passionate friendship. By Mark Bostridge
battered manuscript of Vera’s initial effort kept returning to the flat after repeated rejections.
‘Almost I think of you as if you were a stranger; we are not equals any more,’ Vera writes to Winifred – reading the letter, you feel her overwhelming sense of disbelief that Winifred’s book should have been preferred to hers.
Then there is the sudden fear that one of them is withdrawing emotionally from the other.
‘Do I seem cold to you?’ Winifred asks before going on to reassure Vera with soothing words: ‘I believe you know I love you. Do you want me to say I know that you love me?’
The greatest threat to the closeness of their bond was Vera’s marriage, in 1925, to George Catlin (whom she called Gordon), professor of political science at Cornell University. In the end, Vera ingeniously worked her husband into the tapestry of her continuing life with Winifred. Winifred became part of their household and an adoptive aunt to their two children, the younger of whom was the future politician Shirley Williams –‘a rolled tangle of silvery-gold hair and rose-flushed cheeks’, as Winifred described Shirley at four years old.
In these years, it was Vera’s turn to assure Winifred, ‘A world with Gordon
but without you would be much more lonely than a world without Gordon but with you.’ The intimacy between them had led to Vera giving Winifred a blow-by-blow account of her wedding night, ending with her confession that her old ambition had reasserted itself: ‘Much as I love my husband, I would not sacrifice one successful article to a night of physical relationship.’
If it can be said that there are winners in friendships, then Vera undoubtedly came out top in this one. No task, small or great, was too burdensome for Winifred to undertake for her.
In their letters, you see Winifred helping with Vera’s children, appeasing her husband – not least when he objected to being written about in Testament of Youth – and endlessly offering Vera vital support in coping with the rough and smooth of life.
Later, after Winifred’s death, Vera tried to atone for her selfishness by ensuring that Winifred’s final novel,
South Riding, was published successfully, and by writing her biography, Testament of Friendship
The question remains, though, why Winifred was always willing to act so selflessly towards her.
I used to think that there was a clear reason for this: Winifred was in love with Vera, her ‘very small, very dear love’, but managed to suppress her erotic feelings, knowing that Vera did not share them. Now I’m not so sure.
Shirley Williams, Vera’s daughter, denied that the relationship was ever lesbian, and I’m sure she was right. But she was defensive on the subject of Winifred’s sexuality.
Once, in conversation at a literary festival, we talked about her mother’s great friendship and I mentioned my theory that Winifred had suppressed her desire for Vera.
Shirley looked momentarily disconcerted, as if she wished she was 100 miles away, but with a politician’s relentlessness ploughed on: ‘That’s definitely untrue because Winifred had a relationship with Harry Pearson [Winifred’s on-off-on-again boyfriend].’
‘But Harry was gay,’ I replied, having had this on good authority from one of Harry’s friends. There was the raucous sound of laughter as the audience collapsed at this dissection of other people’s sexual proclivities.
Maybe, in searching for a reason for the strength of Winifred’s feelings, one should settle for things at once more certain and at least as profound.
Winifred possessed an obsessive conviction of being a debtor to life. She had an instinctive concern for other people’s misfortunes. In Vera, bereaved and damaged by her losses in the war, she found someone who fulfilled her need to be needed.
There can also be no doubt that Winifred recognised the indispensable role Vera played in her development as a writer, and in forming and guiding her political ideals.
Lying in the nursing home in September 1935, blind and within days of death, Winifred admitted as much to Vera when she told her, ‘You made me.’
Nothing more needs to be said.
Between Friends: Letters of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, edited by Elaine and English Showalter
Vera Brittain: A Life by Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge
Both out on 3rd November (Virago)
Vera gave Winifred a blow-by-blow account of her wedding night
When her daughters, Lilibet and Margaret Rose, were growing up, Queen Elizabeth decided it would be a good idea for them to learn about literature.
She asked her friend Osbert Sitwell to organise a poetry evening for the teenage princesses. Osbert and Edith Sitwell, personal friends of the Royal Family, were flamboyant and entertaining in their renditions of poems from Façade – the half-panto, half-Dada Sitwell miscellany, largely written by Edith and set to music by William Walton.
But then – as the Queen Mother told me when she was recalling the episode – ‘This lugubrious man who seemed like a bank manager got up and read to us from his poem; I think it was called The Desert. I could see the King’s shoulders were heaving, as he tried to suppress the giggles. Then the girls started to laugh and, finally, I just roared with laughter.’
When I repeated this amusing anecdote in print, I was castigated for appalling indiscretion, but it is clearly part of the repertoire of family anecdotes told not only by the Queen Mother but by her daughter Elizabeth II. Carol Ann Duffy, when she stayed the night at Windsor Castle and was entertained by her sovereign, was also told the story when she became poet laureate.
The lugubrious man who looked like a bank manager was T S Eliot, and his poem was called not The Desert but The Waste Land. It was first published 100 years ago, in October 1922, in The Criterion, a journal Eliot founded.
As I was able to remind the older Queen Elizabeth, he was indeed employed in a Bank – Lloyds – at the
time of writing the masterpiece, and had observed his fellow city workers
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There is a special T S Eliot music, perhaps never more melancholy or mellifluous, than in these lines, in which the office workers trudging in from their commuter trains morph into the innumerable dead (‘I had not thought death had undone so many’) seen by Dante in the Inferno.
Incidentally, Eliot was extremely successful at Lloyds and pioneered what are now called hedge funds, ie devising how to improve the value of a portfolio during a bear market by, in effect, gambling on share prices going down.
When Eliot’s old friend from Harvard University days, Conrad Aitken, first read it, he dubbed The Waste Land ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’.
Eliot protested mildly, saying that the poem was not all sad. ‘That’s not what I meant,’ Aitken replied. ‘I meant that your poem, like Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, is largely composed of quotations.’
It is true that Eliot’s work is a cluster of quotations – from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, from Edmund Spenser and from The Spanish Tragedy. Allusions are made to the Upanishads, Arthurian myths of the Middle Ages, the French Symbolists and music hall songs.
And on her daughter, They wash their feet in soda water.
Like Prospero’s island, Eliot’s Waste Land is full of noises, full of different voices, Londoners in a pub, the blind old ambisexual prophet Tiresias, from the Elizabethan theatre and from the opera. Yet, in a mysterious way, these disparate voices cohere and these discordant chords make a harmony.
Burton’s 17th-century Anatomy of Melancholy was a compendium of cranky views from the Latin literature of the Renaissance. Eliot’s quotations, by contrast, have an aesthetic purpose. It is as if we are wandering through the ruins of a bombarded city, picking up stray bits of carvings, the one surviving windowpane of a great church, the torn-off corner of a magnificent tapestry. It is a poem conceived and found in the ruins of civilisation.
Eliot published his book four years after Europe had been smashed to smithereens in the devastating experience of world war: not merely pulverised by bombardments and battles, but culturally exploded.
The Russian Empire was now in the middle of a civil war that would usher in Communism. The German-speaking lands were in rubble. Christendom
A N Wilson celebrates the genius of T S Eliot’s poem – and recalls how it made the Queen Mother roar with laughter
Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro, to whom the poem is dedicated
appeared to be utterly cracked and broken. Christianity was, by many, a discarded creed, impossible to believe, after the brutality and pointlessness of all those deaths in the Flanders mud.
Moreover, these war years and their aftermath had seen Eliot, an emotionally vulnerable American exile in London undergo the trauma of a disastrous marriage, soon to be cuckolded by his supposed friend and fellow-philosopher Bertrand Russell, while watching his wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood spiral into mental illness.
On one occasion, when he went to spend some time alone in Margate and sat in the band shelter overlooking the beach, he would recall
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The utter emptiness, the nothingness – echoing the way that King Lear is confronted first by his daughter Cordelia’s offering him ‘Nothing’ in the opening pageantry of that tragedy. ‘Nothing will come of nothing,’ says the wounded, furious king. ‘Speak again.’
Eliot’s friend, mentor and fellowAmerican exile, Ezra Pound, was shown
the typescript of The Waste Land and realised that a great masterpiece was in the making. Its inchoate sprawl, however, needed to be tightened. Its voice, which drifted off into silences, needed to be retuned.
Pound is described in the dedication to the poem as il miglior fabbro –‘the greater maker’. It was, indeed, a sort of joint effort, and, with it, this masterpiece by the two founding fathers of modernism in Anglophone literature, the modern world may be said to have begun: not just in letters, but in life. With its publication, the reading public grew up.
Those who first read The Waste Land saw that it was a poem about their own generation. Harold Acton declaimed it through a megaphone from his rooms at Christ Church and was debagged by the hearties, and dipped in Mercury in Tom Quad – an incident replicated in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
Waugh himself used a phrase from the poem, ‘a handful of dust’, for one of his own novels. ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’
Like Waugh, Eliot was an intensely conservative thinker who grieved for the loss of the pre-First World War certainties.
Like Waugh, he would become an observant Catholic Christian – though, in Eliot’s case, it was Anglo-Catholicism; in Waugh’s, Roman.
In many ways, though, Eliot’s genius shone most brightly before he had made this transition and when, in The Waste Land, he was giving voice to the utter lostness, the mysterious sense of alienation and the anchorless condition of being modern – in which we still find ourselves.
We can cling, if we like, to what Larkin called a ‘vast, moth-eaten musical brocade’, whether of religion, or –witness the outpourings at the late Queen’s death – of monarchism.
In the end, however, though we can aspire to the peace at the end of Eliot’s poem – ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ –we live in an unreal city, where the routines of work, and the palliative of pub boozing or casual sex ‘makes a welcome of indifference’, but which cannot hide from us the truth – ‘I think we are in rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones.’
The raw truths of the poem are fashioned in a sublime music to which (alas) philistine royal ears were quite deaf – in the anecdote with which I began – but which continue to haunt anyone with the imagination to read the poem, or to look out on the sad, sad world which it so unsparingly reflects.
A N Wilson is author of Lilibet: The Girl Who Would Be Queen (Manilla Press)
Country living is exercise in itself.
Chopping and carting logs, scything meadows, feeding pigs, locking up – and sometimes killing – poultry, weeding the vegetables, kneading the dough for the bread, pruning, planting, digging and all the various other elements of husbandry require a good deal of physical effort.
So it should have come as no surprise that, a couple of years after returning to the sedentary city, I noticed I was turning into a plump mouse.
I was taking no exercise. I sat in offices, sat on underground trains, and sat on the sofa in the evening. Yes, city life was making me fat. I am deeply gym-averse – so pumping iron in one of those hellholes of narcissists was not an option. The fifth circle of hell would be full of weight trainers.
It was time to rekindle an old love from my teenage years: tennis.
Here in Shepherd’s Bush, we are blessed with an enormous number of public tennis courts: Holland Park, Ravenscourt Park, Paddington Rec and Kensington Memorial Park. Queen’s Park is not far by bicycle. May I say thank you to the enlightened councils who build and maintain these parks and provide communal recreation spaces for the
health and wellbeing of the locals.
A visitor from the Soviet Union circa 1950 would surely approve of the low-cost communal amenities provided for the workers.
My first step was to arrange some group lessons with my three teenage children. The boys soon dropped out, leaving just me and my daughter. Progress was slow and painful. I found I ran out of breath after the shortest rally and had to stand there wheezing for a couple of minutes before I could start playing again.
After a few lessons, encouraged by the positive attitude of my coach, I decided I was getting quite good and arranged to play with my old friend Mr Vole. I was full of confidence as I walked out on to the court – but he beat me 6-0, 6-0. I huffed and puffed round the court, worrying I was about to have a heart attack, and I became quite depressed.
Other pals were not encouraging.
My friend Cynical Sidney said that playing tennis with me was like playing tennis against a brick wall with lots of holes in it. I’m not sure what he meant but I guessed that I needed to improve. Another friend compared my serve to the writhings of a dying
swan. And a third openly laughed at my skinny calves.
Then something good happened: my daughter left for university and so lessons with coach Andy were with just me. I loved every second of my one-onone sessions. They felt like paradise to me. What higher pleasure can this world offer than an hour of intensive tennis training? All worldly concerns vanish and you are truly living in the present moment.
I plodded on. I was looking thinner. And my game, in Andy’s words, was growing more consistent. My matches against Mr Vole at Queen’s Park were growing less depressing. From 6-0, I graduated to 6-4.
In fact, Mr Vole grew so angry at my progress that he started to ignore my emails requesting games. He said that my beating him would be a sign of his inexorable physical and mental decline.
No longer a beginner, I joined a regular Sunday-morning doubles game, which is followed by a convivial coffee in a local café. Lots of fun and laughter. I am firmly addicted and look forward to playing until I drop down dead. My coach regales me with tales of people playing tennis into their eighties or even nineties.
A natural next step would be to join a club. Again, London is dotted with tennis clubs. My friend Mr Steerstrait, who has done well in marine insurance, is an upstanding member of a very smart one in Chelsea and he invited me to join.
I visited. It was like going back to the 1930s. It was packed with Miss Joan Hunter Dunns and lithe, handsome stockbrokers with greying temples.
The fees were, sadly, beyond me. So I investigated a more humble establishment nearby and loftily informed them that I was interested in joining. I expected them to thank me heartily for my interest – but it seems that I’m not the only tennis addict in west London. Responding to my enquiry, the club secretary wrote:
‘I’m afraid the very long waiting list of 250 closed owing to its unmanageable length last year – so we are not going to open it up again until at least next April when renewal time starts. Those on the end of the list stand little chance of joining for years. Sorry.’
I felt quite taken aback. Surely an exception could be made in the case of me? Anyway, this all means it’s back to the public courts for this mouse – at least for the next few years.
Again, I thank the municipal authorities for helping this mouse to indulge in the joys of competitive sport.
I have to say, it’s a lot more fun than growing vegetables.
Fraser Harrison argued in a compelling book, Strange Land (1982), that we are all strangers now in the strange land of the countryside.
Even the indigeni feel like tourists or outsiders, he says: ‘The landscape is rapidly becoming unknown as the agricultural areas are stripped of all the features which made the classic English countryside so distinctive and precious.’
There has been some restoration of hedges and tree-planting since 1982, but I have never felt particularly at home in my terraced cottage at the end of our village. Perhaps it takes two or three generations to feel at home in an adopted county – ie one that isn’t your birthplace.
As outsiders, we don’t fit particularly well into the essentially still-feudal character of the village. There are two principal classes – ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’. Then there are people like us, independents, who live on the ‘landing’, so to speak, albeit in an agricultural labourer’s cottage, physically attached to the other agricultural labourers’ cottages. Hence our group is socially ambiguous, especially if we socialise with the folk in the Big House.
And what if there are four Big Houses, as there are within two miles, as the crow flies, around my tiny plot of one acre with its national collection of rank weeds?
In 1997, John Prescott, Labour’s then deputy leader, declared, ‘We are all middle class now.’
It didn’t look like that from my viewpoint. When we first arrived, I went to the saloon bar of the local pub – I had been made to feel unwelcome in the public bar – and attempted, through banter, to establish the pecking order within the local gentry or nouveau riche.
‘Is it simply a case of who’s the richest or the most aristocratic?’ I enquired.
There was much guffawing in the saloon bar, but no consensus as to who was top dog.
A week ago, I noticed on my dog walks that growing things on the verges all the way up to the church had been obliterated.
A ‘lengthman’ must also have filled in the potholes at night because, regular as clockwork, I trudge up that way at all hours of the day to help our Tibetan Spaniel, Merlin, live his best life, as they say in modern parlance.
Who was responsible? The council abandoned the maintenance of this final stretch to the church. Most of the arable farming in these parts is done by contractors at great speed – so fast that a whole field can be sown in the time it takes a villager to go to Waitrose and back.
I begin to see more people working on the verges. Health-and-safety considerations require headphones and goggles for most power tools – so you cannot engage the contractor in conversation as you could if he was doing it by hand with a sickle, riphook or scythe. Middle-class revivalists like me – especially fans of Poldark – are mad about scythes. You can go on courses to learn the art.
The message I’m getting from all this activity is that a very important local person is having a funeral, and it emerges that Mary has been invited to the funeral. That’s fine. They say the more you put into life, the more you get out of it, and Mary works hard at maintaining her relationships.
Two huge, metal marquees have been erected next to the Big House involved. So pervasive is the sense of pulling up our village socks for some serious cap-doffing that even I have been caught up in the fervour. I cut my own front hedge and swept up, for the first time this summer or autumn – having been determined not to, because mild winters mean hedges can go on growing right up until Christmas.
The habit of deferring to the landowning classes is absolutely ingrained, even though the village is no longer inhabited solely by agricultural workers. Big Houses employ the former agricultural labourers as domestic helps, gardeners and even shepherds, who enjoy their private fiefdoms. Our village is no weekender village.
I am still unsure of the social pecking order, but no man is an island, and though I have stepped back from engagement with the Wiltshire dinnerparty scene, Mary reminds me that most of the landowners’ properties contain at least one if not two oil paintings of local landscapes or interiors by me.
If it were not for the patronage of the great and the good, artists too would struggle to make a living.
I have to pinch myself – or Mary pinches me – to remind myself that I actually am an artist.
Whether I am an artist or a servant to the well-heeled is a moot point. Even if I were to choose to be buried in the local churchyard myself, which I don’t, I doubt my demise would cause such a clean-up as marked the sad demise of the occupant of the Big House.
It’s a classic example of neo-feudal peer pressure.
‘These days, cave art is all violence, violence, violence!’
MORISON
I was edgily nervous hosting a soirée recently in my native Dublin. My great fear was that arguments and quarrels would break out among a roomful of people who had very different opinions on all sorts of touchy subjects. There were strong republicans and covert monarchists, pro-Europeans and Eurosceptics, Catholics, Protestants and atheists, and I felt sure voices would be raised in verbal combat.
But no: all was sunny. People got along quite harmoniously, without anyone being dull or bland.
And this is part of my analysis: as we get older, we become nicer. We grow more tolerant. We allow for other people’s strong feelings about any number of issues. We understand that political or social attitudes aren’t just about the politics or the issues: they may be about some psychological experience or emotional attachment. As Bertrand Russell so wisely said about all arguments, ‘Everything is really about something else.’
We are nicer and kinder in our oldie years not just because of the perspective of time but also because, as we attend more funerals of our contemporaries, we realise we are all moving towards the departure lounge. And we don’t want to be remembered as crabby old cranks.
We are also nicer and kinder, I believe, because sexual dynamics are no longer to the fore. We are not, mostly, trying to capture some amour across a crowded room. We are not – mostly – competing with one another for some thrilling date, otherwise possibly known as making a bloody fool of oneself.
And there’s another aspect too, I suspect. The pandemic experience has deprived us of so much real social contact: Zoom and the webinar and the smartphone have reigned over our relationships. This has taught us to value meeting real people again, and real people are different from people
encountered electronically. Not all my party guests were oldies, but I believe the benign attitudes of oldies prompts a warming intergenerational response.
Speaking of monarchists, I politely disagree with those who disparagingly refer to the Nordic countries as having ‘bicycling monarchies’, as if this connotes a less significant institution. The Danes, for example, take their 1,000-year-old monarchy very seriously. Land crossings into Denmark alert travellers to the fact that ‘you are now entering the Kingdom of Denmark’, alongside pictures of Queen Margrethe – now Europe’s longestreigning monarch.
I’m always pleased to see the Monégasques included in major royal events, such as the historic funeral of Her Majesty. No doubt the royal families of Europe all know one another through the trade union of monarchies, but I like to think that an interview I did with the late Princess Grace in 1979 was an indication of why there was such a cordial bond with the Grimaldis.
Grace, formerly of course the exquisite movie star Grace Kelly, said that she found the Queen and her family wonderfully welcoming. ‘And so much less snobbish than the folks in Philadelphia.’ She never forgot that her father, an accomplished athlete and oarsman, had been excluded from Philly’s WASPy top society because he
had worked with his hands in the building trade (and thereby made his fortune). No such snootiness prevailed, it seemed, among the Windsors!
The Queen was, as we know, a deeply Christian woman who exercised the virtue of forgiveness. She demonstrated that when she extended the hand of peace and reconciliation to Martin McGuinness, the IRA leader who had almost certainly played a key role in the assassination of Lord Mountbatten. (Prince Philip, I observed, declined the handshake.)
But Elizabeth II’s Christian clemency was accompanied by a quick and meaningful sense of humour. When McGuinness asked Her Majesty, ‘How are you, Ma’am?’ she swiftly made clear that she knew she might have once been a target for his gunmen. She responded, ‘Still alive!’
Indeed, she outlived him.
In one of Liz Truss’s first interviews as Prime Minister, she gave assurances that she had a very happy relationship with Larry the cat, the permanent feline resident at 10 Downing Street.
Thus, when the Irish Taoiseach, Michéal Martin, visited the Prime Minister in September with the purpose of improving the post-Brexit situation, he bent down to stroke Larry. Alas, he was rather peremptorily rebuffed. Larry strode away decisively.
A correspondent to the Irish Times, Frank Byrne, subsequently explained that there is a skill in caressing a cat. ‘It is totally inappropriate to swoop down from above. This is perceived as a threat.’ The correct approach is to get down on your hunkers to the same level as the pet, and then ‘offer your hand gently’.
Puss will then ‘decide on how things will proceed’. In my experience, it is always the moggie who calls the shots on whether favour is shown.
Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he still shares with his parents…
My office has put on a men’s health event: ‘How often should I see my doctor?’
The answer, for everyone else, was more often; for me, less often.
On the upside, by attending, you got a free blood-pressure check, a key ring in the shape of a pair of testicles and a five-minute speed consultation with a junior doctor.
The speed consultation took place immediately in the office behind a flimsy screen. The consultation was separated from the open office by a millimetresthick dividing screen. There were some mumblings from colleagues, who thought it impersonal and makeshift. I assured them the pop-up clinic nailed the quick afternoon visit to A & E vibe: a swish of a vinyl curtain the only thing between you and two dozen pasty eavesdroppers.
I volunteered to go first. The doctor chose to sit next to me on what our office calls a ‘collaboration bench’ – basically a tiny park bench made out of pink rubber. Despite my very small frame, every time I turned to speak to him, our outer thighs rubbed together.
As a man with diagnosed generalised anxiety disorder, I thought it a bit much to be rubbing thighs with a man who’d been introduced to me only ten minutes earlier as ‘someone with a great interest in monkey flu’.
Monkey flu is now number three on my worry list, just behind ‘Liz Truss’ and ‘price of packet soup’.
I preferred his opening line – ‘How can I help you today?’ – to my regular GP’s ‘What is it now?’
So I felt brave enough to share something that had been increasingly on my mind: ‘Is there something called train lag? Once my train gets past Doncaster, it doesn’t half go at a pace.’
‘Mr Clarke , you’re self-diagnosing,’ the doctor said. ‘You need to tell me your symptoms.’
‘Well, ever since I started commuting, I’ve been tired out. Every day. Just as the train goes through Scunthorpe, I fall into a deep sleep.’
‘I do not think there is anything to cause worry: that seems to be a perfectly natural reaction to Scunthorpe. To control your fears, ask yourself this: do you actually go through different time zones when you commute?’
‘Well, I leave Cleethorpes midmorning, and get to Leeds midafternoon. You think it’s like an AM to PM lag? My limbic system?’
‘I don’t think it’s your limbic system.’
I sensed this junior doctor was uncertain. Maybe he wasn’t up to ‘L’ yet in his medical training book.
Thank goodness he hadn’t been around the previous week, when I had a sudden soreness in my mammary glands. ‘Too fat for jumper’ was my eventual self-diagnosis.
Suddenly, an annoying alarm went off. The doctor beamed with a rather rude smile of relief. As a one-time regular speed dater, I knew my part and jumped off the bench, saying, ‘Nice to meet you.’
But the doctor wouldn’t let me leave
the bench. He said, ‘Mr Clarke, I forgot to tell you – your testicles have dropped.’
‘I should hope so! I am 52, you know,’ I said, standing up to my full 4ft 11in.
‘No. I mean when we sat and our thighs rubbed together, I noticed them shoot out your trousers across the floor.’
‘Are you really sure?’ I asked. ‘I’m no doctor, but I think I would have noticed if…’
Then the penny – unlike my testicles – really did drop and I realised he was on about my key ring.
The doctor said, ‘I think they went under the photocopier. Ah yes, here we are. Amazing how far they can go.’
He popped them in my top shirt pocket, saying, ‘I always keep mine in my top pocket. Easy access when I reach home – no fumbling around.’
As I left, buoyed by the safe retrieval of my free merchandise, I noticed the men queuing outside the partition seemed even more nervous than I was when I went in. Another looked on the verge of tears.
I’d gone first only to allay their fears but they all looked increasingly terrified.
Forget about monkey flu. Had I infected them with train lag?
‘Is this a hill you are really prepared to die on?’ the more woke of my sons-in-law asked me when I told him the subject of this month’s column.
And the answer is yes. On behalf of my brothers or sisters (or are we no longer allowed to say that? Perhaps I should stick with siblings) in education, I am prepared to nail my colours to the mast of grammar, specifically in relation to pronouns.
It is not unusual to read a story of a teacher sacked because he or she (not they, you note) refused to use the pronouns of a student’s choice. One teacher said he would do so, once he had received the parents’ consent; another refused on the grounds of his religion.
While these teachers are being deprived of their right to work thanks to a pronoun, the trans charity Mermaids is being called to account for giving young children chest-binders (again, without parental permission). We are in a terrible muddle.
We should not be. It is understandable that the children are muddled. But somewhere there should be safe, caring people who can deal with this huge rise in gender-dysmorphic children without shouting at cis-gender adults who are also trying to do their best.
We have various types of muddle among our pupils. First, there’s the normal isn’t-it-hell-being-a-teenager angst. Secondly, there’s the I-wish-Iwere-a-boy misery. Thirdly, there’s the I-don’t-really-know-what-I-am-pleasecan-I-have-a-think-about-it? confusion.
Oddly enough, in all my time teaching (although admittedly none of this went on when I was first called to the whiteboard), I have never come across the old-fashioned man-to-woman transgender child.
Statistics back this personal experience. In England in 2018-19, 624 boys were referred as gender dysphoric and 1,740 girls. Over half the referrals were for those aged 14 or under; some for those as young as three years.
Remember Keira Bell, who went from girl to boy back to woman, and sued the
Tavistock in the process of detransitioning. Perhaps many others are, as she was, miserable tomboys searching to make sense of a cruel and confusing world around them.
So here is my position. With the first type of teenager, I employ humour, empathy and strictness and wait for the exam results. With the second, I am more than happy to use the new, male name and the pronoun ‘him’.
I absolutely will not co-operate with the third category. I teach English, remember. I spend hours telling children that the subject and verb should agree, and I am not going to back down on pronouns. I will not say ‘pass them their book’ when it can be avoided.
I get into trouble when I suggest we should use another perfectly good pronoun: it. When people say I am transphobic, I respond that it is they who are transphobic if they think that ‘it’ is an insult. Perhaps it would help the children who are unsure of their gender to give them the safety of a non-specific pronoun while they think out their futures.
Furthermore, because ‘it’ is a singular pronoun, it wouldn’t confuse those of us with an ear for grammar.
Call me a pedant if you want, but don’t call me a transphobe.
There are more than 14,000 known uses for salt.
Salt kills poison ivy, removes rust and cleans bamboo furniture.
The Aztecs produced salt by evaporating their urine. Salt has low toxicity but is fatal in large doses. In ancient China, a traditional way to commit suicide was to eat a pound of salt.
Until 2017, salt production in China was a state monopoly, lasting more than 2,000 years.
In Europe during the Middle Ages salt was so expensive that it was known as ‘white gold’.
Each winter, up to two million tonnes of rock salt are spread on the UK’s roads.
The UK’s salt mines have 140 miles of tunnels – almost as long as the M5.
Less than eight per cent of
the salt produced in the US is made to be eaten.
When the US added iodine to salt in 1924, the collective IQ of Americans jumped by 15 per cent.
It wasn’t until 1937 that salt-makers were able to get all the crystals in table salt the same size.
When Sir Humphry Davy first separated salt into its two chemical elements, sodium and chlorine, in 1807, nobody could think what to
do with either of them.
The Dead Sea is so salty that if you put more salt into it, it won’t dissolve.
French salt in the 18th century contained rotten weeds, dead fish, animal carcasses and putrefied human bodies.
For more on QI, visit qi.com and, on Twitter, @qikipedia
‘A lot of people make that mistake –I’m Supperman’
Seven years ago, when I was first asked to write for The Oldie, I firmly resolved not to complain too much, and I hope I have stuck to this.
There are more than enough moans and groans around without my adding to the load, and there is the Rant column in this magazine for those who wish to let off steam. There are, however, some things that need preaching against.
As enclosed Carmelites, we see very few videos, and this is from choice. We are therefore very careful about what we select.
On the basis of good reviews and a personal recommendation, we watched the award-winning, multi-generational Disney film Encanto, featuring a magical and matriarchal Colombian family.
To be fair, some of the computeranimated special effects were highly enjoyable – such as the crockery that laid the table all by itself (if only) – but saturation point was reached quite quickly. I seethed with fury for two hours.
Never mind the vulgarity; never mind the 1960s colour schemes, with their
overtones of psychedelic hallucination – surely we should have grown out of these by now? Never mind the general ugliness and never mind the rubberylooking, semi-human cast.
What really got me was the shame I felt at the West’s producing such a travesty of what life is about.
The film has been criticised, rightly, for its compliant attitude towards abusive behaviour and for the way in which the wicked grandmother is too quickly forgiven without any reparation being required. But there is something else very much the matter with it.
Its attitude towards life is facile: it is fair enough that magic should be its main
ingredient, but only up to a point. When it came to the conversion of the featured family, I was left thinking that the reform of their lives, supposedly built on ordinary work, was just more of the same enchanted flabbiness.
In 1975, Solzhenitsyn, in his Warning to the West, wrote, ‘I am not a critic of the West; I am a critic of the weakness of the West. I am a critic of a fact we can’t comprehend: how one can lose one’s spiritual strength, one’s willpower, and, possessing freedom, not value it…’
St Paul would have agreed and, I think, been annoyed by the moral limpness of Encanto. ‘You were called, as you know, to liberty; but be careful or this liberty will provide an opening for self-indulgence’ (Galatians 5:13).
He goes on to speak about love that is neither self-indulgent nor sentimental: and the rush of emotional idealism that comes from pleasure-seeking at the expense of all else.
Our freedom makes us responsible before God for the ways in which we live, work and love.
John Shepherd, owner of the Chelsea delicatessen Partridges, gave a eulogy for his brother Sir Richard Shepherd, Tory MP and Maastricht rebel, at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square. The brothers were partners setting up the deli.
John told how Richard was born in Aberdeen and moved in 1943 to Baltimore, where their father worked for Imperial Airways. In 1961, he became an undergraduate at the LSE with Robert Kilroy-Silk and Mick Jagger in his year group. Later he studied politics at the Johns Hopkins School of
Advanced International Studies in Bologna, where he acquired a lifelong affection for Italy.
Then he became a secondary-school teacher and had an ice-cream franchise outside Earl’s Court Underground station. This led to a shop, then eight shops and finally Partridges. He spoke of ‘the business Richard founded in 1968 leading to the creation of Partridges which he opened on this very day 50 years ago in 1972’.
‘Partridges was a significant development in Richard’s life,’ said John, who is now the boss. ‘Opening a delicatessen went against the
conventional wisdom of the day. Delicatessens were closing, not opening. Partridges had new slightly radical ideas like trading later at night seven days a week and selling unusual foods such as olive oil, baklava and taramasalata, which were becoming more popular owing to the boom in foreign travel, and a delivery service using a fleet of at least two bicycles. The shop found its niche and became a success.’
Shepherd’s fellow MP Sir Bill Cash also paid tribute. Shepherd was an occasional contributor and an enthusiastic supporter of The Oldie In his youth he was a gifted cartoonist and there is a plan for a cartoon prize in his memory.
JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOWIt used to be a first principle of childcare that children should be sought out and told to stop whatever they were doing, irrespective of what it was.
The medical profession has become a bit like parents of yore: epidemiology has by now conclusively proved that all pleasurable habits are bad for health. In other words, whatever you do, you must stop it.
For a brief time, there was an exception to this rule, and it concerned alcohol. When you plotted a graph of alcohol consumption against longevity, there resulted in what was called a J-shaped curve.
Those who abstained completely lived rather less long than those who drank a little – a little being, for most doctors, less than they themselves drank. My predecessor on this page, Dr Thomas Stuttaford, was a keen advocate of the benefits of drink in moderation.
It was only when consumption began to climb that drink revealed itself to be the demon that the temperance movement always said it was.
Fortunately, for the scolds of the profession, this loophole for pleasurable indulgence has now been closed.
A huge study conducted on more than 400,000 people has shown that there is no level of drinking at which the risk of high blood pressure does not increase.
The J-ness, if I may so put it, of the J-shaped curve is an artefact brought about by the fact that light and moderate drinkers are likely to lead better lives than others. They eat more vegetables, walk more, have better and more satisfying jobs etc.
When you control for the betterness of their lives – if again I may so put it – and reduce them to the normal levels of human misery and discontent, the salutary effects of alcohol disappear into the mists of non-correlation.
One criticism of the study above is a common one: that it failed to consider all-cause mortality. It does not automatically follow that if a person has higher blood pressure he will live less long. True, he is more likely to die of heart attack or stroke, and to suffer from coronary artery disease than those with lower blood pressures, but Man does not die by heart disease alone. Nature, being inventive, has found other means of polishing us off.
This is what is known as taking a
surrogate endpoint. The object is to lengthen life. High blood pressure is associated with diseases known to be often fatal. Therefore, what causes high blood pressure is assumed to shorten life. This may be so – but it may also not be so.
Alas, this is but a quibble. It is well known that heavy drinking is also closely associated with – if it does not cause outright – practically all cancers.
Between them, cardiovascular disease and cancer account for about a half of all deaths in Britain. About two per cent of deaths in Britain are directly caused by alcohol. It is unlikely that the health benefits of alcohol outweigh the harms.
But health isn’t the only desideratum in life, even if it is natural that doctors should concentrate their attention on it.
The problem is that, while harms to health, or harmful associations, are tangible and measurable, non-health benefits are intangible and unmeasurable, and in any case would be incommensurable with harms even if they were measurable.
This all proves highly advantageous to anyone of a nannying disposition, who delight in others’ pains and condemn pleasures.
Could it be that those who drink lightly or moderately lead healthier lives because they drink lightly and moderately? Heaven protect us from such thoughts! Perhaps light and moderate drinkers have a better attitude to life than abstainers.
I will conclude by quoting from Genius and Disaster by Jeannette Marks, a literary scholar and early American feminist, published in 1925.
Someone had boasted to Dr Marston that he had cured a certain writer of his tendency to alcoholic overindulgence.
‘It is a pity,’ replied Dr Marston. ‘For he has never written a line worth reading since.’
Heavy drinking is bad, but the odd drink improves your quality of life theodore dalrymple
‘Where do you see yourself in five beers?’
SIR: Regarding the Rant in the September issue concerning Paddington wearing a hat in royal presence, I imagine that the writer had not heard the anecdote by the Queen’s horse whisperer, Monty Roberts, where he had apologised for not removing his cowboy hat when speaking to her. She corrected him that this was not required by anyone in uniform and swiftly accorded his outfit the status of ‘uniform’.
It seems likely, following the discussions on royal protocol that would have preceded the audience, that Her late Majesty, with her legendary impish sense of fun, would have given Paddington’s outfit the same status. Hence, I feel that we can remove this concern about the bear’s behaviour.
Charles Pardoe, Dean, Hampshire
SIR: I am with Nicky Haslam (October issue) in admiring the diaries of ‘Chips’ Channon, but ill at ease with his declaration that ‘Chips’ was not a snob. On the contrary, he stood on the highest step of snobbery, declaring several times, ‘I am only happy really with royalty and real royalty at that’ (Vol I p747) and ‘I find I only really get on well with royalty’ (ibid, p726). The declarations are repeated several times in Volumes II and III.
Derek Parker, Bognor Regis
SIR: Like Jenny Bardwell (October issue) I failed my 11-plus exams, just, but my parents, bless them, knew that the new Labour Government in or about 1948 would be abolishing charges for grammar schools. I took an entrance exam for Brockenhurst (Hampshire) County High School and passed. My parents paid for me for one year until the law changed.
I was there until I passed out in all my subjects except Religious Instruction. Malcolm Thomas, Liskeard, Cornwall
SIR: Jenny Bardwell’s brilliant piece on 11-plus failure (October issue) had me instantly transported back to a ferociously hot and stuffy school office in the summer of 1969, where, along with a couple of other gloomy-looking children, I was attempting to jump the 11-plus hurdle for the second time.
Yes, a double helping of selectiveeducation exam misery for me – for I and my chums had been identified as ‘near misses’ at the first attempt and thus deemed worthy of a second bash.
I don’t recall what I answered to questions like ‘Matthew is half as old as Zena will be next year. Simone is 6. Zena is two years older than Simone was last year. How old is Matthew?’ But I like to think I wrote, ‘Can’t you just ask him?’
Needless to say, I failed again. Graham Hooper, London BR7
SIR: I’m very concerned about Virginia Ironside’s advice (Ask Virginia, October issue). If you have been told you need cataract surgery, the optician should refer the matter to your GP: the latter will then request a pre-surgery appointment with a local NHS consultant, usually at the nearest eye hospital or equivalent.
The consultant will then decide what is needed and discuss the risks involved – the vast majority of cataract surgeries are very successful.
The only reason for going private (assuming you can afford to) is if the NHS waiting time is excessive; it is best to use a consultant who works in the NHS.
Best wishes, Bob Maggs, Bristol
SIR: Sister Teresa’s article in the October issue took me back to my London City Mission Sunday school, where we heard the name Zacchaeus as Zacky Ears and sang:
‘Zacky Ears was a very little man and a very little man was he. He climbed up into a sycamore tree for the Saviour he wanted to see, for the Saviour he wanted to see. And when the Saviour came along he looked up to the tree, and said, ‘Now, Zacky Ears, come down, come down, for I’m coming to your house for tea, I’m coming to your house for tea.’
Diane Pearson, Jericho, Oxford for an oldie
SIR: My copy of October’s Oldie coincided with my 90th birthday (not quite as old as the Queen, RIP).
Thank you.
Keep up the good work!
Alec Robinson, Cambridge
‘Still waiting for an ambulance, then?’
SIR: Gyles Brandreth recalls (October issue) the wit of Patrick Cargill. The actor was a regular at a restaurant I worked in in the seventies; he usually came with a small entourage. One evening he complained he had
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.ukdiscovered a small screw in his dinner –probably the result of its working loose in an early microwave.
On receiving the bill, he became a little worked up, protesting that he shouldn’t have to pay as he could have choked. The guest sitting next to him put a hand on his arm and said, ‘Patrick, dear, you’ve never had to pay for a screw in your life.’
Ian Dowding, Herstmonceux, East SussexSIR: I was horrified to read Gyles Brandreth’s article ‘Good books make good fuel’ (October issue), as I realised, at the end, that he meant it – OR DID HE? Was it another of his crass jokes – or does he really intend to burn his vast collection? There are countless thousands of people who would welcome some – even one – as charity shops/ second-hand-booksellers prove.
Obviously his collection is worth a fortune, so why not concentrate on the best offer, Gyles, and divide the undoubtedly huge profits between as many truly deserving causes as you can find?
My sympathies are with Mrs B – life with G must try her patience to the limit.
Beryl Fleming, Worthing, West Sussex
SIR: Gyles Brandreth wrote (October issue) about his schoolboy crush on the strongwoman Joan Rhodes (sadly no relation). Is he aware of the magnificent 1955 painting of Joan Rhodes by Dame Laura Knight? I took a photograph of the painting at the exhibition held earlier this year at MK Gallery. Blonde and beautiful indeed. Yours sincerely, Jeremy Rhodes, Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire
‘Sergeant, I don’t think we’re going to get any more cheese Danishes out of this’
SIR: Please let Gyles Brandreth know that there is at least one taker for his Billy Bunter annuals, here in Towcester. Brian Bollen, Towcester, Northamptonshire
SIR: Probably the most interesting fact missing from ‘Quite Interesting Things about … rain’ (October issue) was that supplied by Spike Milligan in his poem Rain:
There are holes in the sky.
Where the rain gets in.
But they’re ever so small. That’s why the rain is thin. Chris Gorski, Bonchurch, Isle of Wight
SIR: Rental property needs no Government help or interference – none, zero, zilch [ref Town Mouse, October issue]. Just as when Governments legislate on sex, they always get it wrong, so Governments screw it up when they try to be that awful thing, ‘fair’, when they interfere in the rental market.
The competitive market is just so much better at organising between property-owners and renters, and right across the world you will find that where there are rent controls there will be shortages of rental property. This is because all governments put controls on property-owners so as to favour renters – or, in other words, they buy the votes of renters by penalising property-owners at no cost to themselves.
People seem to think they are entitled to rent a house where they were brought up. Wrong. That rents should be set at a level that is affordable. Wrong. It is like saying property-owners should be guaranteed a rental income. No. I would
like to rent a little flat in central London. So what?
Have one-month rental contracts, or leases agreed by both sides. If the renter sees an opportunity to rent another flat that is cheaper and better, he or she can move out. If the landlord finds the renter has trashed the rental, he or she can turf them out.
The market will sort it out without Government interference.
I have no rental property, but I have rented in years past. Personally, I know no landlords.
John Mustoe, Thurleigh, Bedfordshire
SIR: In these testing times, it was a delight to laugh out loud at Sir Les [Patterson] in the October issue of The Oldie. He’s now at the top of my fantasy dinner guests list. So please keep him safe and help him to retain that oh-sowelcome vulgarity which enables us to maintain an alacrity of spirit at all times. I’m off to point Percy at the porcelain.
Alan Purslow, Stokenchurch, Buckinghamshire
SIR: I was saddened to read Mary Kenny’s article (October issue) about her dread of ceasing to drive. Too many of us make unnecessary use of the motor car. I’m told there was a wartime poster asking, ‘Is your journey really necessary?’ Though I am too young to have seen an actual example, I can appreciate the sentiment.
Why should we assume that everyone, from speed-obsessed teenager to doddery pensioner, has a God-given right to drive? Why is driving seen as the default way of getting around?
There are many alternatives, often safer, less costly and more environmentally friendly. All the things we need in the current circumstances.
If you are 60-plus and looking to downsize before retirement, think ahead: how you will get around in 20 years’ time? You might be happy to drive long distances now; at 80 you might need to look for alternatives.
There are plenty: walking for short trips, cycling as a way of getting around, making use of public transport –especially buses – to name but a few. The pensioners’ bus pass is not a generous Government handout; it is a way to keep a vital service running and to wean the general public away from their infatuation with the car.
Mary Hodges, Scorton, Lancashire
‘So it goes.’ That was the catchphrase of the late Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), author of Slaughterhouse-Five, born 100 years ago, on 11th November.
He used the catchphrase in our first exchange of notes in 1998. I’d sent him a schoolgirlish fan letter, and he wrote back asking me if I could do him a small favour. I was living in Seattle, and Vonnegut wondered if I could supply him with one or two bird’s-eye views of the local scenery for a story he was writing.
‘We authors should stick together,’ he added, after apologising profusely for the imposition. Talk about flattering.
Vonnegut never followed up to say whether his story was published, and if so where. But he did later send me three of his books, each effusively autographed, along with a note of thanks. ‘I’ll be sure to call if I’m ever in town,’ he promised.
A few years later, he did call, or at least he wrote. He was appearing at a book event in Spokane, a couple of hundred miles away.
‘At least we’ll be in the same state,’ he said. ‘Sorry I couldn’t make it any closer.’
When the day came, Vonnegut arrived at the university where he was speaking in the passenger seat of an ancient car, driven by a young woman, wearing a Native American costume, who later introduced him on stage.
The great author was then 80. He was
slow on his pins and used a stick but still had an impressive cloud of grey hair.
Cigarette in hand, he hobbled over to our reception committee and looked us up and down. ‘Got any drugs on you?’ he asked us.
Everyone shuffled around a bit uneasily.
Vonnegut remained deadpan. ‘I’d settle for an aspirin,’ he added, which someone produced for him. He was running late, and there was no chance to speak further.
After his speech, which was wryly
funny, Vonnegut circulated round the room, wafting a slipstream of stale fag smoke and beaming affably to the small groups of fans who approached him.
I finally got the chance to introduce myself. Vonnegut looked at me blankly. But, after a moment of reflection, he suddenly leaned in and hugged me.
‘These things are my idea of hell,’ he muttered in my ear, still managing to smile at his young admirers.
Someone interrupted us to ask him what advice he would give to an aspiring novelist.
‘Use a computer,’ he said.
When he left, Vonnegut turned to face the room. Instead of the traditional words of thanks, he abruptly punched his right hand in the air, middle finger extended, the local equivalent of a Harvey Smith V-sign. I think he was being humorous. You never quite knew with Vonnegut, which was part of his charm as a writer.
‘We’ll do this again,’ Vonnegut assured me, as he was driven away. About six months later, he sent me a copy of his novel The Sirens of Titan, inscribed ‘Merry Christmas’ over a deft little self-portrait and his signature – but that was as close as we came.
He died in 2007, at the age of 84. So it goes.
Christopher Sandfordpacked congregation, a band accompanied a gospel choir.
The pastor’s text was: ‘Those that are first shall be last, and those that are last shall be first.’
In January 1953, I was serving aboard a Royal Navy sloop in the West Indies and our home port was Kingston, Jamaica. The golden sands, cricket and calypsos were among its many attractions.
My girlfriend, Paula, was a regular worshipper at the local Baptist church and insisted I accompany her one Sunday when a celebrated faith healer was due to take the service.
On the stage, before a
He held his audience spellbound but then, unfortunately, his gaze fell on me: ‘I see that we have a visitor from the mother country and I want him to know that he is most welcome.’
I fervently prayed that he would move on, but my prayers were not answered.
‘Perhaps this young man would care to say a few words on behalf of his own people.’
There was no escape – so I simply stood and said, ‘I can honestly say that nowhere in the Caribbean have we been
more warmly welcomed that we have been here.’
I sat down to huge and embarrassing applause, but it was no more than the truth.
The choir began to sing ‘Just a closer walk with thee’ and a girl of about 14 was led slowly down the aisle. I was deeply moved by the music and the hopes and wishes of this life-affirming and caring congregation.
The minister placed his hands on the girl’s head and called upon his God to heal her paralysed arm.
She was all the time sobbing while he spoke and in the middle of his prayers, at the height of the singing, as if electrified, she swung round and rushed down the aisle
shouting, ‘God be praised,’ over and over again, as she waved both arms.
I had learned earlier from Paula that her arm had been paralysed since childhood.
I was as sceptical as the next man about miracle cures but, at that moment, I shared in the belief of the congregation that something extraordinary was going to happen, and it did. I knew that I had been witness to an event I would remember for the rest of my life.
By Peter J Holloway, Brighton, East Sussex, who receives £50Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past
IVO DAWNAY
Any study of the Cuban missile crisis cannot avoid concluding that the world was lucky it happened when John F Kennedy was in the White House.
Sixty years on, the fact that we are even alive to read about the days the world teetered on the brink of Armageddon is as a result of the cool decision-making of the charismatic young President. Thanks to his ability to keep his head when all about him were losing theirs, humanity survived. But it was a close-run thing.
Just how close is revealed in Abyss, Max Hastings’s brilliant and jawdropping account. It reads like a thriller, even though we know the outcome. Yet, what amazes most was how randomly the Soviet Union and the US found themselves stumbling into the showdown and, once in it, how both sides staggered through it like blind men in a minefield.
Kennedy does not come out of it totally unscathed. He was a Cuba hawk. And, while planned during the Eisenhower administration, the shambolic Bay of Pigs invasion happened on his watch. Further, the operation provoked the bovine Russian premier, Nikita Krushchev, to hatch his plan to defend Castro with nukes.
Terrible communications – internally on both sides and between the protagonists – run like a rotten seam all through the crisis.
At an early stage, Robert Kennedy, the President’s brother and Attorney General, warned Dobrynin that any attempt by Russian ships to breach the US Navy’s blockade of the island could lead immediately to a hot war. The Russian ambassador’s account of this critical meeting was then encrypted and handed to a bicycle-riding Western Union messenger for cabling to Moscow.
clock counted down, decisions by Krushchev to defuse the tensions took hours to reach the White House as the febrile US military – unaware – clamoured to launch invasion forces. Dr Strangelove, it seems, was hardly fiction.
Terror too surrounded confused command and control protocols that left quite junior officers on both sides unsure whether they were authorised to launch first nuclear strikes that would almost certainly have triggered a general conflagration.
Without any consultation or prior planning with the rest of the Russian leadership or even his own military, it was presented to the Soviet Praesidium as a fait accompli. So much so that while US intelligence finally got wind that the missiles were already on the island –embarrassingly late – it was still long before word reached Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington DC.
‘After he pedalled away with my urgent cable,’ Dobrynin later recalled, ‘we could only pray that he would take it to the office without delay and not stop to chat to some girl.’
In one nail-biting case, a Russian submarine commander was so badly harassed by US ships that he is believed to have come, half-maddened, within an ace of launching a nuclear-tipped torpedo that would have destroyed a large American flotilla as well as himself.GARY WING
In other instances, as the doomsday
Unable to receive signals, he was unclear whether or not war had begun.
So shattering was this to the nerves of the Russian leader that his final agreement to a deal with the US was openly broadcast on Russian radio news – this being the swiftest and securest way to get the news to Washington before an accident occurred.
While the Russians were most dangerous for their slapdash comms, dodgy technology and hopeless chains of command, the Americans were most frightening for the unthinking bellicosity of their military top brass. JFK, RFK and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara aside, almost all the others at ExComm, the White House’s key committee, were gagging for a showdown with Castro.
Ironically, it was Moscow’s knowledge of the mounting pressure on Kennedy for an invasion that broke Krushchev’s nerve when he discovered that a trigger-happy Russian SAM missile battery had shot down a US U-2 reconnaissance pilot – the sole casualty of the crisis. In the meantime, the US’s Strategic Air Command was coolly calculating the loss of 12 million citizens and a dozen major American cities to Soviet nuclear strikes.
However, as Hastings concedes, ‘There was never a purely diplomatic escape route: the threat of American force was indispensable.’ In fact, a secret deal to remove US missiles from Turkey helped swing the outcome – something revealed only in 1989.
In a powerful peroration, the author draws some pertinent conclusions about the current conflagration in Ukraine. ‘The scope for a catastrophic miscalculation is as great now as it was in 1914 Europe or in the 1962 Caribbean,’ he writes, laconically observing of JFK that ‘less than half his successors … could have been relied on to make the same calls’.
Ivo Dawnay was Washington bureau chief for the Sunday Telegraph
It doesn’t take much to pique the interest of Craig Brown.
In the betting book of the Seaforth Highlanders, an 1824 wager is struck by two bored soldiers: ‘Mr Cooper bets Mr Wilson one bottle of port that he drinks with a spoon a bottle of beer while Mr W is eating a penny roll.’
It sets Brown off on a meditation about what to do when there is nothing else to do. Exploring the betting ledger, he finds in the soldiers’ ennui a parallel with the language of Beckett and Chekhov and ‘lightning strikes of mortality, each suddenly illuminating the surrounding frivolity in all its mad urgency’.
There are 120 articles, reviews, bundles of clerihews and literary spoofs in this hugely enjoyable collection. As well as satirising literary styles, Brown is a supreme stylist in his own right with apposite, surprising and laugh-out-loud diversions which keep the themes of his articles spinning along and grabbing our attention.
Some of his human subjects get it in the neck and some are celebrated.
Anyone who shows a taste for their own celebrity gets a chuckled lashing. Tina Brown: ‘She who lives by the zeitgeist must die by the zeitgeist.’ American Vogue editor Diana Vreeland: ‘All those credited with “impeccable taste” just have impeccable bank accounts.’ There’s a dig at Paul Johnson: ‘Ten People Who Met Me.’ Then there’s DJ Jimmy Young in a review of his book: ‘I find myself strangely drawn to discjockey autobiography rather in the way that one is drawn to books about fraudsters or serial killers.’
One subject who emerges from this collection with no sideswipe aimed in his direction is Ronald Searle, perhaps because of his perceived lack of vanity: ‘Searle’s sketches are never selfabsorbed: he is always turning his gaze outwards towards others; even his rare self-portraits look stoical rather than self-pitying.’
Dotted through this book are some odd couplings: Sigmund Freud and Les Dawson, both naturally funny with a po-faced persona; Bruce Springsteen and Ken Dodd, whose shows on stage could
last for over four hours; Donald Trump and Frankie Howerd, ‘whose monologues share the same jerky rhythm, the same tone of faux outrage, the same sense of jeopardy’.
Brown’s investigative whiskers get twitched by people who adopt a pseudonym; he is quick to spot anything rum. The Thorpe/Scott affair was full of characters who ran bogus aliases, one of them an anagram. This develops into a whole page of famous people and their jumbled alter-egos: Oliver Reed aka ‘Erode Liver’; Alec Guinness aka ‘Genuine Class’; and Germaine Greer aka ‘Emerge Angrier’.
The Thorpe case comes in a section of the book called Bad Hats. With top billing in this sequence are John Stonehouse and Alan Clark. The striking similarity in each tale is the author’s lack of censoriousness. He writes wistful accounts of their colourful lives – not exculpatory but acknowledging that (in the case of Clark) ‘posterity forgives such bad behaviour, even relishes it, just so long as its perpetrator keeps it going long enough and then makes his confession sufficiently lively’. Brown also turns up in their stories, like a shimmering Zelig.
There are many gems in this wideranging and always funny book. Each piece is bite-sized but in its entirety it is a cleverly constructed feast. Brown writes well about the subjective nature of history and quotes Paul McCartney: ‘In an earthquake, you get many different versions of what happened by all the people who saw it. And they’re all true.’
Perhaps two pieces that, alone, would make this book worth the price of admission are articles on Kingsley Amis and Simon Gray. Brown relishes the cussedness of Amis; how his tendency for easily provoked irritation generated the plotting of his 1974 novel Ending Up, which he began by compiling a list of
‘It’s the landlord’
45 ‘ways of being annoying’ and then ascribed them to his characters, one of them based on his wife.
Gray, in another beautiful piece, is described as ‘the Nijinsky of irritation’. His stream-of-consciousness diaries are ‘the prose equivalent of a clown speedwriting a unicycle across a high wire’.
One of Brown’s great qualities as a comic writer is his willingness to find other writers funny.
He, too, can be Mr Angry and he turns it to advantage. In the section called Bores, he has a go at those interminable train-guard announcements: ‘Customers wishing to travel on must be in possession of a valid packet of crisps from the buffet. See it, say it, salted.’
India Knight’s Darling is based on The Pursuit of Love (1945), Nancy Mitford’s most popular and cherished satirical novel about the aristocratic Radlett family during the interwar years.
Knight’s updated version of the book is set in 2021 and, in keeping with the structure of the original, the story focuses on the wayward and alluring Linda Radlett, and is narrated by her less glamorous cousin, Fran (Fanny in Mitford’s book).
The Pursuit of Love is a hard act to pastiche. It is beloved by generations of readers (and writers) and is based on Mitford’s own Oxfordshire childhood during a time when fascism hovered over Europe (and would later become much associated with two of the Mitford sisters).
‘The Radletts,’ wrote Mitford in the original, ‘were always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair.’
This mood reflected more than just the excitement of longed-for love affairs and the mourning of beloved pets. Darkness is always present in The Pursuit of Love and it brings an added poignancy to the search for glamour and excitement that drives the Radlett children.
Those who have an attachment to The Pursuit of Love may, like me, be wary of an attempt to update the story, although I am sympathetic to Knight’s desire to introduce the Radletts to a wider audience.
In 2020, The Pursuit of Love was
adapted for television and filmed at Badminton House, where I live. In the run-up to the filming, Emily Mortimer, who directed the programme (and played The Bolter), and I discussed how a modern audience would cope with elements such as Uncle Matthew’s raging bigotry, the childhood ‘violent occurrences’ (beatings) and Linda’s wilful neglect of her child.
For the most part, we agreed that the central themes – coming of age, love, loss and family – were universal, and anything ‘problematic’ would be seen in the context of the times and the autobiographical nature of the story.
Knight’s solution is to cut out the darkness. Uncle Matthew (updated to –gulp – a retired rock star) still has endless pet hates (‘facial hair, chicory, Surrey’) but is ultimately benign. His children may not be allowed an iPhone but his behaviour doesn’t really compare to the menace and thrill of Mitford’s ‘roaring, raging, whacking Papa’.
Linda has a touch of post-natal depression but becomes a dutiful co-parent after her divorce. Her wildly conceived passions for cruel and unsuitable men in her search for romance are closer to the original character, although Knight’s Linda is actually more sympathetic and vulnerable than Mitford’s careless and disconnected protagonist.
Those who know The Pursuit of Love well will find it hard not to be distracted by details lifted directly from the original book. But once Linda leaves Alconleigh, the family home, Knight’s story becomes more her own and her talent for social satire is revealed. Both Linda’s odious husbands are successfully transported into 2021; Tony Kroesig, the flashy son of a rich industrialist, refers to himself as ‘the Kroesigator’ and takes Linda and her family to a fashionable Mayfair restaurant called In My Mouth.
Linda’s second husband, Christian Talbot, is a self-regarding left-wing novelist who tells Linda that she should be ‘atoning for her privilege’.
Other characters also slip comfortably into Knight’s modern setting. Mitford’s Lord Merlin, the Radletts’ glamorous and dissolute neighbour, becomes Knight’s Merlin Berners, a successful fashion designer, whose taste for sado-masochistic outfits and steampunk companions have more than a hint of Andrew Scott in his outrageous portrayal of Merlin for the televised Pursuit of Love.
Davey Warbeck, the health-obsessed husband of Aunt Emily, drinks
kombucha and works on his ‘inner ecology’. Louisa Radlett, Linda’s conventional sister, marries a Scottish toff and becomes an influencer, posting pictures of her children wearing Victorian outfits on Instagram.
Knight’s journalist’s eye for the absurdities of our times is keen and often very funny. She takes well-aimed pokes at rewilding, reality television and earnest readers of the London Review of Books and is enjoyably ribald. When Tony Kroesig explains his infidelity to Linda by saying that his lover, Pixie, needed ‘cheering up’, Linda asks, ‘With your penis?’
Those who have not read The Pursuit of Love may well be delighted by the modern Radletts and their eccentric family and friends. But, while Mitford’s Radlett children were obsessed with sex, death and wickedness, Knight’s Radletts are cosy, fun and unfettered by fear, which makes the abrupt and tragic ending of Knight’s novel feel tonally rather jarring.
In the end, Darling lacks the fury and fight of its predecessor.
The Duchess of Beaufort is author of Chin Up, Girls!: A Book of Women’s Obituaries from the Daily Telegraph
Dinner at the palace of Heliogabalus, Emperor of Rome from 218 to 222 AD, was a casual affair.
As guests reclined on their couches, slaves brought in the first of the 22 courses, announcing the evening’s theme.
The emperor was partial to colourcoordinating his food. Would tonight’s be a blue supper? A green supper? Or, perhaps, a false supper? Heliogabalus had been known to serve his guests ivory and wax disguised as comestibles while he feasted on the real thing.
Not all his guests made it out alive. If a man did not choke on one of the pearls mixed in with his rice, or suffer a heart attack from the sex on offer between every course, then he might still drown in the flood of rose petals let down from the false ceiling in a final piece of macabre theatre.
‘It is hard to know what to make of all this entertainment,’ writes Harry
Sidebottom, an ancient historian and Fellow at Oxford, in his scintillating new biography of the ‘mad’ emperor.
While some of the stories may have ‘an origin in fact’, the juiciest derive from the Augustan History, a notoriously unreliable group of writings on Roman emperors dating from the fourth century. Cassius Dio and Herodian, the other two chief writers on Heliogabalus (also known as Elagabalus), have the advantage of being contemporaneous, but carry problems of their own.
Sidebottom’s intense interrogation of the sources forms a crucial strand of his book. In the opening pages, he asks why it is that an emperor reputed to be every bit as debauched as Caligula and Nero has remained in their shadow for so long.
One possible answer is that the historians who wrote about him are less read than the earlier imperial biographers, Tacitus and Suetonius.
Another is that it can be difficult to place this elusive young emperor in the political chaos of third-century Rome.
Born in about 204 AD, Heliogabalus spent his early years in Rome and the surrounding countryside, before leaving with his father for York in the retinue of Emperor Septimius Severus.
Sidebottom speculates that the young Heliogabalus saw the Libya-born emperor cremated, following his death there in 211 AD. What is clear is that his family’s support of Septimius Severus’s elder son, Caracalla, over his younger son, Geta, initially brought them rich reward. After arranging the death of Geta and, allegedly, thousands of his supporters, Caracalla appointed Heliogabalus’s father commander of the praetorians and the urban cohorts.
Doubts, however, crept in over Heliogabalus’s paternity. As a schoolboy, he was nicknamed Varius as if he were the son of ‘various’ men – a slight on his mother’s virtue. More enterprising individuals whispered that he was actually the son of his cousin Caracalla.
Sidebottom cleverly shows how much gossip derived from racial prejudice.
While Heliogabalus’s family held Roman citizenship, they actually came from Emesa (Homs, Syria), and felt pride in their Syrian-Phoenician identity. Phoenicians, in particular, were routinely written off as sexually promiscuous and cruel in Roman literature.
Heliogabalus was married at least four times, including to a Vestal Virgin, but allegedly also enjoyed sleeping with men.
In his liking for make-up and alternative religion (he worshipped a Syrian sun god, Elagabal, in the form of a
black stone, rather than the traditional Roman pantheon), he sounds like the Prince or David Bowie of his day.
Sidebottom brings him vividly back to life. His prose feels vibrant and effortless but also rewards close reading. Often, he will pose a traditional idea in one sentence, only to debunk it in the next. ‘Sex in ancient Rome was one big orgy,’ he tells us, ‘where you could do anything with anyone. So modern popular culture likes to imagine.’
His bold decision to show his reasoning – almost his workings-out –while weighing up the sources, is vindicated. Far from slowing his narrative down, these passages help to bring the material to life, and sit comfortably with the larger portrait Sidebottom paints of the empire and its social mores in the third century.
Some might wish that he got on to Heliogabalus sooner than he does. Still, the background story to his rise, which features his valiant grandmother, highlights very well some of the emperor’s most serious shortcomings.
Having failed to win over the troops, and shown the senate nothing but contempt, Heliogabalus met a grisly end. Sidebottom captures it perfectly.
Daisy Dunn is a classicist and author of Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
From the masterful pen of Helen Rappaport, chronicler of the tragedy of Russia’s imperial family and of the tumultuous events of 1917, comes the next chapter of Russia’s revolutionary saga – the story of the million Russians who fled the Bolsheviks.
Told in her characteristically engaging style, After the Romanovs focuses on Paris – the playground of the Russian elite before 1917 and, later, the refuge for those lucky enough to have escaped.
Despite its title, the narrative begins at the turn of the 20th century. It is less of a sequel to Rappaport’s previous books than a parallel history of Russia, seen through Parisian eyes.
The part of the book that covers the period before the revolution is the more fascinating – and certainly the less depressing. In the two decades before the
outbreak of the First World War, the universally Francophone Russian aristocracy regarded Paris as an outpost of St Petersburg – closer and more comfortably accessible, indeed, than most of the Russian Empire.
For the ladies, there were outfits to be ordered at Worth, and jewellery at Boucheron, Chaumet and especially Cartier. For the gentlemen, there was the Tournée des Grands Ducs, a whirlwind tour of the finest brothels, cabarets and Gypsy restaurants Europe had to offer.
Russian money kept the tills of the parfumiers, furriers, fine-art dealers and antique emporiums of the City of Light ringing (not quite literally – bills would be discreetly delivered by footmen to customers’ suites at the Ritz).
For most of the previous two centuries, Paris had been the arbiter of Russian taste in everything from dress to architecture. But after 1900, it was Russian artists, dancers and choreographers who increasingly began to set the trends in Paris.
Sergei Diaghilev – who described himself in a letter to his mother as ‘first, a great charlatan, though with brio; secondly, a great charmeur’ – initially took Paris by the proverbial storm, not with his later Ballets Russes but by organising a major exhibition of the best of Russian art, including many pieces cadged from the collection of the Emperor himself.
Fascinatingly, Rappaport points out that ‘ballet had in fact never been Diaghilev’s primary interest’.
Nonetheless, Diaghilev’s first Ballets Russes in 1909 introduced ‘a new direction and style, which proved a veritable revolution in the art of ballet’. Lead dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, with his ‘soaring flights’, elevated the male dancer for the first time to an equal footing with leading ballerinas.
Coco Chanel – who later had an affair with a languid exiled Russian grand duke – was also inspired by the Ballets Russes. Pablo Picasso painted backdrops and married one of its dancers.
Humbler Russian artists, writers
Lucian Freud’s pictures of Tenby Harbour: in a letter to John Craxton and a drawing, both 1944. From Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud, 1939-54 (Thames & Hudson)
and poets also flocked to Paris, drawn by the city’s artistic and political freedom, its bohemian social life and its cheerful cheapness.
‘I found myself in a kind of Russian capital, I was very happy,’ wrote the painter Serge Charcoune, who made Montparnasse his home in 1912. ‘I lived not just in a Russian colony, but practically in Russia itself.’
There were less frivolous expatriates, too – Lenin spent more time in the city than in any other during his years of exile, cycling from the Bibliothèque Nationale to acrimonious meetings where he squabbled with fellow revolutionaries.
Unfortunately for everyone but himself, Lenin left Paris for Zurich – later to triumph in revolutionary Petrograd.
Here the exuberant story of Russians in Paris turns dark and sober. Waves of exiles, the first merely impoverished and the last filthy, starving and desperate after a grim journey via Constantinople, flocked to France.
Rappaport estimates that one million Russians joined the exile, concentrated in Paris because the French government was one of the few to accept them.
Most of these Russians – many of them members of the ‘former classes’ –became destitute and jobless.
Some former officers found work as dustmen (notable for being ‘very elegant and glamorous in their military tunics’).
Others, finding that their only marketable life skills were dancing, riding and driving, worked as taxi drivers – ultimately forming two Russian chauffeurs’ unions with their own newspaper and clubhouse.
Noble ladies found that ‘sewing, millinery, and knitting [proved] to be the quickest, easiest and most immediate route out of poverty’. Twenty-seven fashion houses were established in
Paris by Russian émigrés between 1922 and 1935.
The Russians brought not only nostalgia but a restless, aggressive gloom with them. ‘Every lesrusse [sic] hates all the others – hates them just as fervently as the others hate him,’ recorded the writer Teffi.
In place of a colourful throng of spendthrifts and free spirits, the Russians of Paris had become as joyless as their Communist homeland.
‘We don’t believe in anything, don’t expect anything, don’t want anything… We have died. We feared a Bolshevik death – and have met our death here.’
The best place to watch the Palio di Siena is by the start. For my first time –decades ago – I secured a good vantage point at that spot, by clambering on to a fence that rings the course.
By the time horses finally arrived in the Piazza del Campo, after the two-hour medieval pageant, 50,000 spectators ached for release. As the jockeys embarked on the long, nerve-shredding process of lining up at the start rope, a teenager hauled herself up and, for balance, hugged me tightly from behind.
She began to moan and then, when she could stand the tension no more, to scream an imprecation: ‘Cazzo! Cazzo! Entra! Entra!’ I won’t translate that.
Strange place, Siena. It is a museum city, carefully primped and manicured over the centuries to guard its image of itself as a città ideale untouched by modernity, as painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Simone Martini.
The DNA of its past throbs through the veins of contemporary Sienese, who have the same almond-shaped eyes as the saints of Duccio’s Maestà
The big thing that’s changed is a skyline that in old depictions of the city bristles with towers. Most of these aristocratic status symbols were felled by civic command.
Cucina senese is also much altered. The medieval Sienese ate mainly bread, onion and garlic until funkier flavours arrived from other continents. So their breath reeked as much as their streets.
Tacitus was the first to spot Siena’s stubborn independence. The city still bolshily measures itself against Florence, the historic rival whose defeat at Montaperti in 1260 Siena enjoys remembering. People don’t talk so much about the return fixture nine years later, when Sienese forces were crushed at Colle di Val d’Elsa.
Despite this reverse, the medieval city held out on its own, governed by quasirepublican coalitions – the Twenty-Four, the Thirty-Six, the Fifteen, the Twelve and, most successfully, the Nine who created the Palazzo Pubblico and are memorialised in the nine floor segments of the shell-shaped Campo.
Sienese self-rule ended after four centuries in 1555, when continental macro-politics found it subsumed by Medici Florence as a sub-fief of the Holy Roman Empire. Thus, briefly – and oddly – Siena’s queen was Mary Tudor.
This and other aromatic facts are buried like truffles within Jane Stevenson’s deep and delightful new history of Siena.
Owen Matthews is author of Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War
Who knew that the earliest version of the Romeo and Juliet story was Sienese? In the year before the plague of 1348, Stevenson tells us, there were around 230 hermits in Siena – mostly women. After the plague, its population would not recover until the 20th century.
It’s a jolt also to learn that Pandolfo Petrucci, the city’s one and only dictator, aspired to build an arcade around the rim of the Campo where the Palio is now run. Fortunately, he died.
Oh Siena, as Ultravox almost sang. In Ruskin’s valuation, Siena was worth 50 Florences, and yet Florence gets all the blockbuster shows and the big books, including his own Mornings in Florence
So there should be a space on the shelf of every Tuscanophile for Siena: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval City. Stevenson has composed a sprightly, learned tribute to a city which, in her eyes, is the product of uncelebrated genius.
Built on hills, it required access to water. Brilliant engineers contrived to locate and channel it upwards via underground aqueducts, which were in use until 1914. Hence those beautiful fountains.
The Sienese also found silver in the local hills and flourished in banking until Florence minted the gold florin in 1252. Long before olive oil and wine, the city’s other speciality produce was saints, of which there was once a local shortage.
Stevenson colourfully fleshes out the riveting biographies of, among others, Bernardino of Siena and Catherine of Siena – not that there was much flesh on either: he is always painted with sunken cheeks, and she was anorexic.
There are enlightening chapters on the tiger-striped cathedral and the many masterpieces it houses – and the slow evolution of the Palio from a medieval procession in honour of the Blessed Virgin to a violently factional and ritualistically corrupt horse race, whose abolition is sought every year by animalrights activists.
No wonder Dante called Siena a city of dreamers, before consigning some of them to the Inferno.
Among them were members of the so-called Company of Spendthrifts, who reacted against Franciscan asceticism by blowing their inherited wealth on conspicuous consumption until they went broke.
Read this and you too will have a damned good time.
Jasper Rees is author of Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood
In Perthshire there’s a statue of David Stirling, commemorated as founder of the SAS. According to this deeply researched book, they’ve got the wrong man.
The Phantom Major, an account of Stirling’s wartime achievements, was published in 1958. It described how, following commando training, he formed the SAS as a guerrilla force for raiding behind enemy lines in North Africa, using the LRDG (Long Range Desert Group) as a taxi service.
Hundreds of enemy planes and vehicles were destroyed, many enemy killed, and supply lines disrupted. I found the book in the school library and was enthralled.
It turns out that The Phantom Major was as much fiction as fact. The SAS did those things but David Stirling’s role was less than he claimed. Born into Scottish aristocracy, he left Cambridge without a degree and was set to become part of the upper-class generation characterised by Lloyd George as ‘soft, slack and selfindulgent’. In desperation, his mother sent him ranching in America.
At the same time, a Newtownards grammar-school boy, Blair (Paddy) Mayne, was on his way to sporting glory. He read law at Queen’s University Belfast and was soon playing rugby for Ireland, then touring with the British Lions as an outstanding second-row forward. When war came, he enlisted in the Royal Artillery.
When war came for David Stirling, his excellent family connections – which he was always happy to exploit – eased him into a commission in the Scots Guards.
He was an inadequate officer, disorganised and idle, with no concern for those he led. Willie Whitelaw, who trained with him, described him as ‘quite, quite irresponsible’.
He had, however, great charm and persuasiveness, especially with those of his own background whom he always favoured. He also had imagination, contempt for routine and a desire to distinguish himself.
He got into the newly formed commandos thanks to his eldest brother, Bill, who set up the commando training course. Both were posted to Egypt, where the commandos were generally underemployed. David Stirling wasn’t the first to consider
raiding parties behind enemy lines but he had such good social connections and spent so much time drinking with senior officers in Cairo’s Shepheard’s Hotel that he was able to cadge the required permissions, equipment and men for a force he soon regarded as his own.
This, the fledgling SAS, was formed mainly from David’s commando unit and officered mainly by his drinking and gambling friends, plus anyone he met and took a liking to. It was jobs for the boys.
But they weren’t all clones of David. Paddy Mayne, frustrated by lack of action, also got himself into the commandos. In Egypt, he was no Shepheard’s lounge lizard but spent time with his soldiers, training them hard for their new role.
Bill Stirling, meanwhile, posted to headquarters, was everything his brother wasn’t: responsible, conscientious, self-effacing, effective and organised. He facilitated the founding of the new unit.
When raiding started, David was happy to lead from the front. But it was soon apparent that raids led by him were generally unsuccessful and costly. Those led by Mayne were dramatically successful – he rapidly gained a personal tally of 66 enemy aircraft destroyed on the ground while David Stirling had none. Eventually, Stirling and most of his patrol were captured asleep because Stirling had neglected to post sentries.
One of many fascinations of Mortimer’s book is his tracing of family, regimental, school and social connections among officers of the higher command. Commando training, louche living and the influence of White’s club on officer appointments were much as portrayed in the novels of Evelyn Waugh, who was also there. He regarded David as an amusing wastrel but respected Bill, who fiddled him extra sick leave to finish Brideshead Revisited.
Had David not been a Stirling, he wouldn’t have got away with his indiscipline and self-indulgence. Equally, had he not been a Stirling, he would not have been able to help create the SAS.
Mortimer concludes, ‘Bill Stirling was the intellectual force behind the SAS, and Paddy Mayne the physical force; David Stirling was its salesman.’
They would not have thrived without the multi-skilled LRDG, to which David does less than justice in The Phantom Major. Nor is it coincidence that it wasn’t published while Mayne (1915-55; DSO and three bars) was alive to contradict him.
It’s hard to resist the conclusion of this compelling and authoritative account that Bill and Paddy should be on that plinth in Perthshire – not David.
In the early 1860s, a young Londoner, who loved his city and was worried that it was vanishing before his eyes, took up a relatively newfangled instrument – a camera – to record what was happening in the streets around him.
The photographer’s name was William Strudwick (1834-1910). He photographed the riverside at Lambeth, opposite the fairly new Houses of Parliament, showing Barry and Pugin’s fantasy Tudor creation still flanked by the traffic and industry of a working river: mast- and oar-makers, boatbuilders and Finch’s flour mills.
Lambeth still oozed with the odours of manufactures little changed since the Middle Ages. Strudwick photographed warehouses to which bones were brought by barge and boiled for soap, crushed for fertiliser or picked apart to make combs and knife handles.
And there, astonishingly, was a broken-down old three-storey brick dwelling, known as Guy Fawkes House, which had been leased in 1605 by the mastermind of the Gunpowder Plot, Robert Catesby. It lay on the south bank of the Thames, a ferryman’s fare away from the plotters’ target.
Strudwick knew that change was coming. His panorama of Parliament was taken from one symbol of that change, Lambeth Suspension Bridge, opened in 1862.
That bridge itself was not built to last, its girders soon succumbing to rust in the damp air. It was closed to traffic in 1910, and replaced two decades later by the bridge that still stands today, over which hundreds of thousands trudged in September to see the Queen lying in state.
In 1865, all those houses and businesses on the Thames foreshore were about to be swallowed up by the Albert Embankment, the first in the great programme of grief works undertaken to memorialise the late Prince Consort.
It’s tempting to look at the pictures of what it replaced with regret at the
Historydavid horspoolsweeping-away of livelihoods, homes and businesses that had been largely unaltered for centuries.
But, as Strudwick’s plates show, these were often hard places to live. When the tide came in, as one observer put it, it ‘left a trail of misery behind, and in thousands of low-lying tenements, a damp, noxious, fever-breeding atmosphere’.
Strudwick’s photographs, beautifully restored and reproduced, are among the many treasures in a new book, London: The Great Transformation 1860–1920, by Philip Davies.
Davies’s earlier large-format book (to call it a coffee-table book is to trivialise a work of deeply empathetic scholarship) of archive photographs, Lost London (2009), based on a single source, was a huge success, showing in black and white how much of the capital has been lost, destroyed or succumbed to neglect.
The new book is, if anything, even more impressive, the catch from a ten-year trawl in dozens of photographic archives. The book shows a world city of mounting self-confidence and abiding wretchedness, of coming modernity – tramlines, bridges, underground railways, massive building projects – and teetering antiquity: weatherboarded houses that had survived the Great Fire; great coaching inns which no coach ever stopped at; true bucolic villages with thatched cottages and fenced gardens set by tranquil roads on the edge of the city.
Nearly all of it was for the chop, and many of the photographers knew it. Here are the fruits of the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London, which took 124 plates between 1875 and 1886. Today, that might be the work of an afternoon. But, in the 19th century, the arduous process of taking and developing photographs made doing so a more considered business. William Strudwick had a home-made, portable dark room, a ‘large dark tent or house on wheels …
large enough for me to stand up in’.
The results of all this effort and devotion are often spectacular, sometimes moving, frequently surprising and always intriguing.
But are they history? Yes, unreservedly. Not only do they do one of the historian’s jobs – recording the past – with a fidelity that statistics and descriptions cannot hope to challenge. They often challenge our view of that past, even challenge the words of the photographers themselves.
Take the work of the author and journalist Jack London (1876-1916), author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang, whose immersion in the poorest part of the East End anticipated George Orwell by 30 years.
London photographed as well as wrote about what he saw: doss-houses and alleyways; children scavenging in the snow; a homeless man lying in a doorway. You couldn’t fail to be moved by the pictures, or the words.
Just occasionally, though, you can see how his poetic imagination got the better of him. Of a photograph of homeless men and women seated round a tree in Spitalfields, London writes, ‘On the benches either side arrayed a mass of miserable distorted humanity … leering monstrosities and bestial faces.’
The picture shows something different: worn-out figures sitting in companionable patience, cleanly dressed and, in one case, even smiling at the photographer.
This is the photograph as history – an honest witness to a vanished world.
London: The Great Transformation 1860–1920 (Atlantic, £50) by Philip Davies is out now
The agony of lost London An elegy for the capital’s forgotten gems
The Lambeth foreshore, c 1860PLANT
A new series of sad, funny and intriguing insights from the great and the good
There is such a thing as too much couth.
American humorist S J Perelman (1904-79) explaining why, after several years in London, he was returning to New York
Of one thing I am certain. We are not here in order to have a good time.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Book by Lady Clodagh; Another Book by the same author.
Deborah Devonshire on good book titles, 1998
Emptiness always goes with cleverness… All brains and no intelligence. The smarter, the stupider. Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1997)
You may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, ‘It’s a secret between he and I.’ J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
If I hadn’t got a First, I would never have picked myself up to do much except possibly teach – and teach badly. It was the fairly spurious self-confidence I got from the fluke result, plus the breathing space it gave,
that enabled me to go on doing silly turns, being funny and thus eventually to write.
Alan Bennett on getting a First from Oxford
It was a mistake to pretend that anyone remained unaffected by money, its possession or its lack.
A N Wilson, Dream Children (1998)
Aut tace aut loquere meliora silentio (Either be quiet or say things that are better than silence).
Inscription on Salvator Rosa portrait (1645), National Gallery (below)
The only true aphrodisiac is variety. Norman Douglas (1868-1952)
Than that God’s clockwork jolts Thomas Hardy, Drinking Song
Condemn yourself and you are always believed. Praise yourself and you never are.
Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), Essays
If you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire, you must teach yourself not to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get.
In England, if you like something, you don’t mention it; if you don’t, you do. In America, if you don’t like something, you don’t mention it. What you do like you mention – so the air is full of praise, which is nice.
Quentin Crisp, 1999
Every political argument boils down to this – ‘I am better than you are’; every literary argument to this – ‘I have more taste than you’; every argument about art to this – ‘I have better eyes than you’; every argument about music to this – ‘I have a finer ear than you.’
My £168 window seat on the Avanti train to Manchester was kindly paid for by the producer of Coronation Street, in which I am appearing.
The table was fixed in place. For a person over 70
like me, there’s the choice of climbing on to the aisle seat, then manoeuvring from standing to sitting down in the window seat – or sliding across, after bruising your coccyx on the arm rest.
Surely it would be worth having a regular feature in this magazine on designs
Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk
expressly planned to trip up oldies?
Curiously, once in the same seat, I had a clearer view of the large man in front of me, masturbating. I said to the steward, ‘I see it. I’m saying it – sort it.”
I wore a mask in Manchester Piccadilly Station on Pride Day. The scene included wild drag, extensive flesh exposure, tits out and fancy dress, as well as heaving Manchester City supporters and the cricket crowd. But a middleaged thug picked me to stride up to, put his hand on my face and snarl, ‘Take that f***ing mask off!’
MAUREEN LIPMANNo one else has edited the Telegraph, the Sun and the Times stephen glover
When an unknown politician is promoted to the Cabinet, the Press is generally full of informative profiles. But when a new editor of a major national newspaper is appointed, there tends to be little coverage.
So it was when Tony Gallagher was recently made editor of the Times, considered by many the grandest job in Fleet Street. Omertà ruled. Papers don’t like to display their linen in public, dirty or otherwise. Not, of course, that there is anything remotely unwholesome about Gallagher.
His curriculum vitae is unusual. For one thing, perhaps because he comes from Irish stock, he is a practising Roman Catholic. I believe William Rees-Mogg is the only Times editor of the modern era who also looked to Rome, though in almost all other respects he was as different as it is possible to be from the gritty and driven Tony Gallagher.
The new editor came up the hard way, learning his trade at the Daily Mail, where he worked for 16 years in a variety of jobs. Then he left for the Daily Telegraph, where he was soon made deputy editor and then editor.
He distinguished himself by his handling of leaked information about MPs’ expenses. Instead of publishing it all at once, he cleverly dragged it out for months, giving the paper repeated bites at the same cherry.
After five years as editor, he was sacked for no good reason. A short spell as an apprentice chef was followed by a return to the Mail as a joint deputy.
Then he was hired by Rupert Murdoch as editor of the Sun before transferring to the Times, on an assurance from the media tycoon that he would succeed to the top job when John Witherow finally threw in the towel. This undertaking has been fulfilled.
Gallagher is unique as the only person to have been editor of a red-top
and a broadsheet. As far as I am aware, he is also the only man who has been editor of both the Times and the Daily Telegraph
He takes over a paper in rude health. Largely because of the great success of its digital version, the Times is making decent profits – £34 million being the latest annual figure, which also covers the Sunday Times. This is extraordinary, since during the decades following its acquisition by Murdoch in 1981 the paper lost hundreds of millions of pounds.
Who said that the digital age marked the death of journalism?
The Times is a good newspaper. But I suspect that, in both Murdoch’s and Gallagher’s eyes, it could, and should, be more right-wing. The new editor politically tacks quite far to the right, though he is no great friend of the Tory Party. Expect a slight political re-alignment.
In other circumstances, erstwhile Times columnist Michael Gove might have confidently looked forward to a call to occupy his old stall. He is a favourite of Murdoch’s and may be looking for a well-paid job after stabbing Boris Johnson in the back (for the second time) and making himself persona non grata with Liz Truss. But Gove in his new colours could be considered too left-leaning for Gallagher’s Times.
Tony Gallagher is not the only Fleet Street editor to have cut his teeth at the Daily Mail. Almost every centre-right title has an editor or deputy editor who hails from the same stable.
The Daily Telegraph’s top honcho, Chis Evans, worked for 11 years on the Mail. Ben Taylor, deputy editor at the Sunday Times and probable heir apparent, was on the tabloid for 22 years. James Slack, deputy editor at the Sun and a rising figure in the Murdoch empire, was a reporter on the Mail for many years. The paper’s current editor, Ted Verity, joined the paper in the early 1990s, and never left.
All learned their craft under Paul Dacre. The imperialist Lord Milner had his kindergarten. As did Dacre.
By the way, Fleet Street is still wondering whether his name will be included on Boris Johnson’s final honours list.
Readers of The Oldie may remember the brilliant piece in this magazine in 2012 by Miles Goslett about the BBC’s cover-up of Jimmy Savile’s sexual abuse, and its suppression of a programme about it. No newspaper had dared touch the story. Goslett’s revelations shook the BBC.
So it was disappointing that, in his three-part series on the Beeb, David Dimbleby didn’t make more of the Savile scandal. Although Goslett had been interviewed at length for the programme, none of what he said on the issue was broadcast. Nor did Dimbleby interview Mark Thompson, BBC Director-General at the time.
Thompson is an elusive character. The Mail on Sunday has revealed that in 2005, Lord Spencer, brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, wrote to him. He said he had a dossier about the underhand methods used by Martin Bashir to obtain his infamous interview with Diana. Thompson allegedly didn’t reply. Nor would he recently speak to the Mail on Sunday.
Here is a man who likes to keep his head well below the barricades.
Gove may be looking for a job after stabbing Johnson in the back (for the second time)
On page 32 of this issue, Barry Humphries writes about visiting Paris, only to find the city has lost its charms.
Barry – and I – would much prefer the Paris of 1958. It’s the Paris the London charlady visits in this charming (if a bit clunking) film.
It’s based on the 1958 novel Mrs ’Arris Goes to Paris, by Paul Gallico (1897-1956), the American writer best known for The Snow Goose
Ada Harris (a sympathetically nervy Lesley Manville, a study in restrained emotion) is a war widow, worn down by her dreary cleaning jobs.
Then, one day, she spots a Christian Dior dress belonging to one of her dreadful employers, Lady Dant –brilliantly played by Anna Chancellor, the go-to casting choice for playing entitled, grumpy toffs. She was marvellous as Duckface in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and she’s even better at nasty Sloanes than nice, simpering ones.
So off Mrs Harris goes to Paris to blow her life savings on a dress – only to be patronised by the snotty dragon-lady (Isabelle Huppert) who runs Christian Dior and can’t believe a middle-aged cleaning woman can afford her creations.
Enter the widowed Marquis de Chassagne (an elegant, etiolated Lambert Wilson), whose patronage secures a ringside seat at the Dior catwalk show.
The plot is creaking – you can see the twists coming a mile off. You know Mrs Harris will get her dress in the end.
And the char with a heart character is a walking cliché. She’s treated as a sort of charming idiot savant. Look how she charms a marquis with her simple, Cockney ways! Isn’t it just too
killing that she’s never had caviar before? And has an American writer ever really got a Cockney right without dropping in a bit too much Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins?
But, still, underneath all the fake sentimentality, there is a streak of real, moving sentiment – not least when Mrs Harris herself realises how she’s being patronised by the Marquis. He’s befriended her not because he thinks of her as an equal but because he sees echoes in her of his old matron at school, Mrs Mops, another put-upon member of the classes born to wait on him.
And, even if the arc of the plot is predictable, the idea of an impossibly glamorous dress as the golden fleece of the story is an original one.
How heavenly those 1950s dresses are! This film was done in conjunction with Christian Dior – so the dresses on show are the real deal.
Dior died, aged only 52, of a heart attack, in 1957, the year before Mrs ’Arris
Goes to Paris was published. But he had reached a peak of beauty in his couture in the decade since he’d launched the New Look in 1947.
Was the fashion world ever better than in the 1950s? No hatchet-faced models stomping up and down catwalks in crumpled binbags. No influencers spouting Hallmark-greetingscards platitudes.
In one of the film’s pleasant little subplots, Mrs Harris helps to save the ailing Christian Dior by pushing for mass production of their lines rather than sticking to super-expensive couture. That did happen – all the famous couture houses went downmarket, their profits went up and their clothes went downhill.
And was Paris ever prettier than in the 1950s? In fact, many of the film’s scenes were shot in Budapest – better suited to recreating Paris’s postwar look. Those of us in search of lost Paris should make for Hungary instead.
For anyone who feels (as I do) that modern theatre has become too woke and trendy, the enduring success of An Inspector Calls is a welcome tonic.
Written way back in 1945, in a world just emerging from the Second World War, J B Priestley’s masterpiece is still as pertinent – and popular – as ever.
Much of that popularity is due to the director Stephen Daldry, who chose this well-made, moralistic play for his first production at the National Theatre in 1992. At the time, this was a surprising choice. Daldry was a young, up-andcoming director, and Priestley was widely regarded as rather stuffy and old-fashioned. Daldry’s revival introduced Priestley’s old warhorse to a new audience, and his production became one of the National’s greatest hits.
It’s been revived countless times since then, and this new touring show is merely its latest reincarnation. So how does this one compare with the original, which garnered so many rave reviews?
I’m afraid this revival falls well short of the show it ought to be.
An Inspector Calls is one of the finest dramas of the last century, and even a flawed production such as this one is more rewarding than a better production of a lesser play. Yet my overriding feeling throughout this performance was one of acute frustration – frustration at an overwrought acting style that obscures the oblique nuances of Priestley’s shrewd and subtle script.
My wife shrewdly called it EastEnders acting – it’s perfectly competent, but it blocks out all the light and shade.
Priestley was an ardent socialist, and his play is ostensibly a condemnation of the cruelty of capitalism, but you don’t need to be a lefty to be moved by its central message. Fundamentally, it’s not about politics, but about our moral responsibility for our fellow man.
‘No Man Is an Island’ would be a suitable subtitle. As Priestley wrote, ‘We must stop thinking in terms of property and power, and begin thinking in terms of community and creation.’
Priestley’s play is about a wealthy, self-made man, a factory-owner in a northern town, whose family dinner party is interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious inspector.
This inspector has come to investigate the suicide of a working-class woman who, it transpires, has had dealings with
every member of this complacent, smug family.
As the complicity of these self-entitled characters is revealed, Priestley’s story opens up like a tightly coiled spring. The problem with this production is that this spring uncoils far too quickly. Right from the start, these performers seem too loud, wild and frantic. There’s an operatic intensity about their interactions which doesn’t suit their social class, or the period of the play.
Priestley set his play on the eve of the First World War, and Daldry brought it forward to the 1940s, but the volatile playing style of this production feels anachronistic for either period. It’s the constriction of emotion that gives this play its dramatic tension. Ideally, it should start off pianissimo and build slowly to fortissimo. Instead, it starts off fortissimo and builds from there, so when the play reaches its explosive climax, it tips over into melodrama.
One moment sums it up. The factoryowner’s daughter discovers her fiancé has had an affair with the deceased woman and gives him back his engagement ring. To have her simply hand it back to him would be far more powerful and understated, but no – she hurls it down at his feet.
Individually, there’s not much wrong with any of these performances – it’s more of a collective thing, and it’d be such a simple thing to solve. By the time you read this, I hope this production will have become more restrained.
If it is, I’ll be delighted. For there are many fine things to savour: above all, Ian MacNeil’s expressionistic set (a nightmarish doll’s house of distorted perspectives) and Liam Brennan’s enigmatic, sinister inspector. His
controlled performance deserves a production that isn’t constantly trying to shout him down.
A momentous day, when the Chancellor of the Exchequer made his U-turn over the 45p tax band.
The tin-eared Chancellor was grilled by Nick Robinson on Radio 4. Over on Times Radio, Joan Bakewell and Will Self discussed the calamitous U-turn.
Self uses words like synecdoche and fissiparous, and that only adds to the enjoyment. Bakewell is brilliant. So how dare Amol Rajan complain about the posh accents of privileged RP-speaking presenters?
Mention Rajan’s name among educated over-50s and hear a chorus of disapproval: the glottal-stopping gabbler is a torment to their ears. He recently told an interviewee, ‘You were very fortuitous with the pandemic…’ –meaning fortunate.
Yet the fortuitous Cambridge graduate presumes to assume the helm of University Challenge. What listeners and UC contestants need is clarity, audibility, fluency and the right emphases: not more demotic Estuary tones.
Rajan is the go-to for any new job. He sometimes goes off-piste on Today and reads from a lively obit. But as a Telegraph letter-writer put it, ‘RP is not posh. It is precise, which means anyone can understand it. It makes speech accessible to all, which is the opposite of elitist.’
Audibly accessible voices abound –Evan Davis, Sarah Montague.
And, if it has to be Oxbridge, what about ex-contestants Michael Gove or even Bobby Seagull? I foresee a lot of ‘Could you repeat that question please, Amol?’
We oldies approve of lifelong learning. But what can we learn, honestly, from podcasters in their 20s? Take Kwesia, 24, (‘citygirlinnature’), who explained how she started learning stuff just two years ago: ‘I li’erally used to watch David Attenbwagh, and I’m sat there li’erally, seeing like pandas and stuff, and I was like wow!’ she said. She got rapturous praise on Saturday Live, for showing inner-city black kids the joys of London’s wetlands – wholly admirable – but when the Rev Richard Coles asked her if she’d seen a bittern she was stumped.
Then, on Woman’s Hour, there came Oloni, ‘sex expert to Gen Z’, who grew up in a religious Nigerian family and has a book out called The Big O. Most women never knew or talked about sexual pleasure until now, she declared with ignorant, unread confidence. The Woman’s Hour audience called in to say, ‘Why don’t you young girls just ask your grandmothers?’
And so it goes on: every week, on One Dish, Andi Oliver shrieks and giggles about her Caribbean granny’s cookin’. This is all very woke, pro-ethnic and pro-female but also deeply Londoncentric. Radio 4 listeners inhabit a different land and time.
It comes as a welcome relief to hear from older females not steeped in narcissism and self-congratulation – such as the Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani. She spoke calmly on Sunday Worship about the murder of her brother in the Iranian Revolution, prompting her family’s exile to Britain.
Or Daphne Koller on Jim Al-Khalili’s The Life Scientific. Or The Oldie’s Rachel Johnson, whose LBC Sunday-night phone-in is amiable, yet tough and sharp. Or Emma Barnett, who lately gave the justice minister (Rachel Maclean) a thorough and well-deserved grilling. (To no avail.)
The warm obituaries for The Oldie’s Mavis Nicholson did not quite capture the essence of her interviewing skill, which was to make eye contact and listen. And then persist with her line of enquiry (‘But I’m still wondering…’). We heard it in action in Alan Hall’s series Icon –about the rise of reverence for celebrity – which included Mavis’s steely interview with Liz Taylor. On YouTube, you can also see Liz’s famous violet eyes narrowing.
Before the memories of 2022 fade: the best stories broadcast about the late Queen involved dogs. As David Blunkett stood in line to meet Mr Putin during a
state visit, Blunkett’s dog, Lucy, barked at Putin. Blunkett apologised to HM, who murmured, ‘Your dog has very good taste.’
Sheila Hancock accidentally stood on a corgi. HM: ‘It’s his own fault for being the same colour as the carpet.’
The Walk-In (ITV), a five-part drama based on the plot by a far-right group to kill the MP Rosie Cooper, explores why young men become white supremacists.
The first episode opened with the attempted beheading of Dr Sarandev Bhambra by Zack Davies, who attacked his victim with a machete in the Mold branch of Tesco in 2015, and closed with the assassination of the MP Jo Cox in 2016.
The central characters are Robbie Mullin (Andrew Ellis), an overweight 22-year-old whose best friend is his dog, and Matthew Collins (Stephen Graham), a former member of the BNP and National Front, now employed by the civil-rights group Hope Not Hate.
Robbie’s political awakening begins when, as an electrician’s mate in Cheshire, he is barred from entering a Muslim household containing young women. Why is it assumed that, as an unmarried white male, he is a sexual predator? He contrasts this racism with the story he finds on the internet about Bradford Asians grooming young white teenage girls.
In his next job, as a warehouse worker, he notes that the Muslim employees are given 15 minutes every day to pray, which is longer than the non-Muslims get for their fag breaks. Things don’t seem fair.
He joins a White Man March in Liverpool and is recruited by the banned neo-Nazi group National Action, who begin the business of educating Robbie.
Did he know that there is a cure for cancer which the Jews are keeping from us in order to ensure the success of their pharmaceutical companies? Robbie, whose dad died from cancer, swallows this whole. He agrees to cut off contact with the outside world and commit himself to the race war.
Andrew Ellis is totally believable as the lonely, susceptible Mullen, eating his tea with his sensible sister, sitting in the pub with his lethal new mates, wondering why everything is so crap. Stephen Graham is of course electrifying as Matthew Collins, because Graham is the most charismatic television actor since James Gandolfini.
It doesn’t matter that there’s not much difference between his portrayal of Matthew Collins whose life, since becoming a grass, has been a series of death threats, and that of undercover cop John Corbett, whom Graham played to perfection in Series 5 of Line of Duty, because no one does working-class masculinity better. Even when he is sitting on the sofa with his solid wife and three cute kids, Collins manages to be relaxed, unreachable and as wired as a nuclear device.
Graham is the only Line of Duty star to have survived the end of the six-season series. What happened to the others? Having retired from rooting out bent coppers, Adrian Dunbar, aka Superintendent Ted Hastings, returned to the small screen last month in Ridley, a plodding police procedural, in which he played a retired singing detective. It was apparently Dunbar’s own idea that each of the four episodes should have soft musical interludes in which he breaks into The Mountains of Mourne and Coles Corner in a jazz bar.
Did he never see the Little Britain caricature of that other compulsive crooner Dennis Waterman, where the late, great actor, played by David Walliams as a man the size of Tom Thumb, turns down television roles in which he isn’t allowed to ‘write da feem toon, sing da feem toon’? Dunbar has a good set of pipes on him but, Mother of God, as Hastings would say, this made me hide behind the cushion with embarrassment.
Keeley Hawes, whose flawless performance as DI Lindsay Denton in Line of Duty series 2 lifted the show to a whole new level, has similarly lost the plot. Crossfire, the BBC’s major drama for the autumn, was another howling dog.
Hawes plays Jo, an ex-policewoman on a family holiday in the Canary Islands, who single-handedly mows down a gunman on a killing spree in her hotel.
Jo’s no saint, however, because she’s carrying on with the husband of her best friend, who also happens to be the best friend of her husband. What’s meant to be a complex character study is instead a bunch of clichés in a pair of shorts.
If Ridley is improved when the sound is turned off, Crossfire – three hours of Jo running down corridors with a rifle –is best watched on fast-forward.
The cartouches on the Royal Opera House’s red tableau curtains were empty on the opening night of the revival of David McVicar’s staging of Richard Strauss’s Salome on 9th September.
The gold-embroidered monograms of the old monarch had not yet been replaced by those of the new.
It was a memorable evening, partly because it was the first in the reign of the house’s erstwhile patron, the Prince of Wales, now King, partly because of the unadulterated splendour of the music-making.
There can have been few more compelling performances on the Covent Garden stage these past years than Malin Byström’s Salome. First seen in 2018, her performance is now, if anything, even more theatrically intense. There were gains too from the Covent Garden orchestra’s superb realisation of the vast sweep of Strauss’s lush, dissonant,
endlessly surprising score, expertly led by an internationally regarded, 39-yearold English-born conductor, Alexander Soddy, whose house debut this was.
The revival was doubly interesting since, only weeks before, Byström had sung the role in concert at this year’s Edinburgh Festival. There are those of us who never tire of recalling that halcyon age, 40 and more years ago, when Edinburgh had the funds and the vision to stage operatic productions that rivalled Salzburg’s, despite possessing no bespoke opera house. On this occasion, however, it struck gold with one of its now familiar, cut-price concert versions.
‘A tone-poem for the stage’ is how Strauss described Salome. Which is why it’s useful on occasion to hear it in concert. Such is the role the orchestra plays in articulating Strauss’s response to Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, the bejewelled Symbolist drama, written by Wilde, in French, in Paris in 1891, which is the opera’s source and inspiration.
Edinburgh was able to field the Bergen Philharmonic, Norway’s oldest (and currently finest) orchestra, for whom
opera has become something of a speciality during Edward Gardner’s time as music director. Lucidity of expression was the watchword here, the 95-minute score laid out before us much as a Mahler symphony might be.
In the absence of any staging in the Usher Hall, costuming did the work: the 16-year-old princess graduating from a white party-dress to a blood-red outfit as she re-emerged in the wake of her notorious dance before her stepfather, Herod. The deflowered necrophiliac was possessed now of a compelling eloquence and spiritual calm.
When Thomas Beecham conducted the opera’s long-delayed British première at Covent Garden in 1910, his Salome was the Finnish soprano Aino Ackté, much admired by Strauss. The Sunday Times described her triumphing visually ‘not only by glance and gesture, but by the sensuous curve of bodily movement’. On stage, Byström has that too.
Yet such is her inner command of the role, and that all-important stillness that the greatest interpreters bring to it, that she’s able to characterise
‘I can’t wait to meet him – I was told he is a self-made man’
seen,’ said my daughter, who’s seen the Baz Luhrmann film with Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor – the one this musical spins off from – a million times.
But how would the producers pad out a full West End show when the film had only a dozen or so songs and only one, Come What May, written for the production?
Well, I need not have worried. I stopped scribbling down the hits after I’d got past 25. This isn’t a jukebox musical. It’s a Wurlitzer of all the catchiest pop songs of the past 50 years, from Sympathy for the Devil to Let’s Dance, with Fatboy Slim and Adele all in the mix.
Salome almost as well in concert as she does in the theatre.
Nowadays we can laugh at the lengths to which the Lord Chamberlain – ‘the royal smut-hound’ as Kenneth Tynan called him shortly before his capacity to censor plays was abolished in 1968 –went to keep Wilde’s play and Strauss’s opera from the British stage.
In the same way, we can relish the guile with which Beecham and his largely international cast circumvented most of the provisos with which the permission to perform eventually came.
These days, anything goes. Or does it? A similar tale of censorship, actual or attempted, can be told of Pasolini’s 1975 film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom McVicar’s designer, Es Devlin, freely draws from the film for this Covent Garden staging.
It’s a plausible choice. That – and transferring the action to 1930s Italy, with a fascistic court feasting above and a vast basement below, peopled by kitchen workers, half-naked, drug-raddled prostitutes, and gun-toting guards overseeing the cistern in which the imprisoned and shortly to be decapitated prophet lies.
In any case, it’s not only people such as Earl Spencer, Beecham’s hapless Lord Chamberlain, who’ve wondered at the subject’s fitness for the stage.
Doubts linger to this day. Devoted Straussians, such as Norman Del Mar, in his mighty three-volume study of Strauss’s life and works, and William Mann in his critical study of the operas, gyrate like weathervanes in a force nine gale. They try to reconcile the idea that what is possibly ‘the nastiest opera in existence’ (Mann) is also a blazing masterpiece that merits its place as ‘one of the great monuments of 20th-century
music’ (Mann again).
Not that Strauss cared either way. Informed of the Kaiser’s view that Salome would do the composer great harm, Strauss shrugged and said, ‘Possibly. But it enabled me to build my villa in Garmisch.’
GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSONThis month, I was going to bring you my review of ABBA Voyage with the former Culture Secretary. The date –8th September – had long been nailed in the diary.
That was the immensely sad and heavy night Her late Majesty died. So Nadine Dorries and I were not there, you will be unsurprised to hear, to be dancing queens on that occasion.
And that’s why, after mourning had concluded, I took my daughter to Paris in La Belle Époque – or the closest thing to it: the Moulin Rouge! musical that is rocking London’s West End.
And a right old knees-up it is, too. The Piccadilly Theatre has been Nicky Haslamed into an extravagant, red-andgold bordello set, complete with elephant and turning windmill, spangled with enough light and sparkle to dazzle Blackpool front.
As I sat worrying about the theatre’s looming electricity bill, with my cup of plastic rosé, the show quite literally kicked off with Lady Marmalade, performed by a trio, including a wellupholstered woman and a man in heels and a basque – both black – and then it never stopped. Men in tutus and tails doing the cancan, women in thongs twirling from the ceiling…
‘This is the campest thing I’ve ever
Even though the fun and music never stop, the production keeps the story humming along too – about Satine, the call girl turned showgirl, and her tug of love between the evil Duke and artist Christian.
There are some good lines, too. ‘Sing a dirty song at my funeral,’ Satine tells her boss, the impresario Harold Zidler.
The whole show turns around the tart-with-a-heart who dies at the end on stage – not of ‘old age’, without fuss, like our beloved late Queen, but of consumption.
Standing ovation led to a showstopping finale. At the charity performance I attended, Baz Lurhmann lui-même took a bow.
Consider taking earplugs. But OTT gusto guarantees this production of ‘Moularn’ – as all the actors insist on saying in all its iterations – a long and energetic reign.
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) has become so much an international treasure that it’s easy to forget that, for much of his career, he provoked strong feelings of antipathy as well as admiration.
Almost all the principal Impressionists came from comfortable backgrounds. Cézanne’s banker father was affluent enough for him never to have to rely on the art market for his living. Although he exhibited in the first Impressionist show, and he and Monet lavished praise on each other, he did not stay close to the Impressionists for long, preferring to develop his own artistic philosophy, based on what he himself saw and experienced.
However, in his early period, he was strongly influenced by immediate predecessors, notably Delacroix, and by older masters. I wonder whether he could have seen Goya’s Black Paintings. Were they already in France before their owner, Baron Frédéric d’Erlanger, showed them at the 1878 Exposition Universelle?
Working with a palette knife in what he called his manière couillarde, or ballsy style, the young Cézanne seemed almost to be continuing that series – but in the 1860s. His Murder (Walker Gallery, Liverpool) painted in 1867-70 could be a pendant to Goya’s Duel with Cudgels
For a few happy months in my youth, I lived in a mas on the then outskirts of Aix-en-Provence, with a daily view of the pyramidic flank of Cézanne’s Montagne Sainte-Victoire, which I came to love almost as much as he did. It is the perfect demonstration of how his still lifes are essentially landscapes, and his landscapes still lifes.
This is correctly billed as a ‘once-in-ageneration exhibition’ of paintings, watercolours and drawings by Cézanne. The last major Tate show was in 1954. There are 80 paintings, drawings and watercolours from collections in Europe, Asia and North and South America.
More than 20, including The Basket of Apples c 1893 (Chicago), Mont SainteVictoire 1902-06 (Philadelphia) and Still Life with Milk Pot, Melon and Sugar Bowl 1900-06 (private collection) have not been shown here before. Those numbers suggest that Tate Britain’s habit of over-inflating exhibitions may have been avoided. Still, they have on occasion airbrushed Cézanne’s acute accent in their promotion of this show.
Cézanne gems. From top: Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-06); Still Life with Apples (1893-94); Seated Man (1905-06); The Bather (1885)
We now have a garden-minded King. A gardening King. Charles’s accession to the throne restored treasured memories of the few hours I spent with him (as Prince of Wales) at Highgrove House on a hot July afternoon and early evening in 1990.
The visit had been arranged by Rosemary Verey, who had helped design Highgrove’s Cottage Garden for the Prince.
I was in the midst of writing a book about noteworthy gardens in my native Cotswolds, and Rosemary (famed garden designer and writer) insisted that ‘without Highgrove, a book on Cotswold gardens would be incomplete’.
Published in 1991, Over the Hills from Broadway: Images of Cotswold Gardens, was illustrated by the artist Simon Dorrell, who had accompanied Rosemary and me to Highgrove the previous summer – when the Prince was recovering from an injury after falling from his horse during a charity polo match.
By 1990, the Prince had been at Highgrove for ten years and I already noted signs of maturity among acres poised on the brink of fulfilment.
Many hands played a role in designing individual parts of the garden. Sir Roy Strong helped with the hedges. He had worked up delightful drawings to show how swags, pompoms and Gothick ‘windows’ could be conjured from living plants, to bring movement, decoration and humour to the garden.
Sir Roy’s love of topiary, superbly demonstrated at The Laskett in Herefordshire (now under the auspices of the gardening charity Perennial), in a flurry of droll invention also led to his devising Prince of Wales feathers in topiary for Highgrove’s secluded Rose Garden.
In a Times interview in 1989, the Prince
said one of the reasons he was attracted to the Highgrove estate was ‘the beautiful walled garden’, which he found ‘irresistible’.
Enter the Marchioness of Salisbury (who died, aged 94, in 2016), chronicler of the Queen Mother’s gardens and whose own garden at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire remains among Britain’s finest.
The Prince worked on the layout of the one-acre, quartered, walled garden with Lady Salisbury, resulting in a formal design with four main crossing paths interwoven with secondary paths of mown grass, brick or gravel.
I recall tunnels of birch and hazel sticks clothed in beans and sweet peas, espaliered fruit trees, including medlar, apricots, plums and cherries trained on the walls above beds of unrestrained herbs.
At the kitchen garden’s heart, we paused by the circular pond, where pools of aromatic thyme, marjoram, sage, fennel and rosemary made lacy patterns around a well-placed picket fence, installed to prevent the then infant Princes William and Harry from getting a dousing.
Great contrast to the kitchen garden’s formality was found in the nascent meadow, where Miriam Rothschild, the scientist and entomologist, had reckoned to bring the countryside almost to the house walls.
I recorded what Dame Miriam
‘saucily’ called her Farmers’ Nightmare Mixture – an assortment of corn cockle, corn marigold, cornflower, poppy and sprinklings of wild barley.
Standing there in late-afternoon sunshine, Simon and I were introduced to the young Princes, who buzzed towards us through burnished grasses on their BMX bikes. It was a brief, highly charged family moment – a celebration of horticultural birth and rebirth, blessed by the presence of two excitable small children, seemingly free of future protocol-governed lives.
As Prince of Wales, the new King produced two books on his Gloucestershire garden: The Garden at Highgrove (2000, with Candida Lycett Green) and Highgrove: A Garden Celebrated (2014, with Bunny Guinness).
These, with my own precious memories from many years before, fill my head with impressions of a royal garden unlike any other.
I was surprised to learn that, only a few years ago, a pit was uncovered on the island of Colonsay, filled with vast numbers of hazelnut shells which were dated to around 6000 BC.
I had not associated hazelnut trees with Scotland, and certainly not with windswept Hebridean islands.
Kent is the place where most hazelnuts are grown commercially in this country, the most reliable variety being the Kentish Cob. Cobnuts and filberts are similar types of hazelnut. Kentish Cobs are in fact filberts, meaning that the nuts are of a longer shape than the spherical cobs.
However, most are of a colour that encouraged Petruchio, attempting to seduce Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, to tell her she was ‘as brown in hue / As hazelnuts and sweeter than the kernels’.
The saplings are best planted when dormant, between now and February. They won’t produce nuts for the first couple of years, but the catkins provide some interest in late winter.
Two varieties should be planted next to each other to ensure cross-pollination. Red Filbert produces purple-red foliage in spring and reddish-skinned nuts in autumn (available from Blackmoor Nurseries, Liss).
Nut trees should grow in any freedraining soil and, as long as they are well watered during the first year, need little attention thereafter. If not controlled by pruning, the trees may grow to several metres.
Squirrels and dormice will feast on your nut trees, but they will not have had much of a harvest this year after a summer of drought in England. Spring usually brings a scattering of empty shells on our lawn, from nuts that have been buried over winter.
If squirrels – or some other small mammal, or bird – get to your nuts in summer before you have a chance to pick them, you can still enjoy the colour of the leaves and the catkins. When the tree matures, there will be stakes to be cut, especially from a contorted hazel. These can be used for training climbing beans, making fence panels or fashioning a traditional water-divining rod.
In the light of the sad death of Elizabeth II, it’s appropriate to consider the frugality of royal eating habits at home.
Menus for state banquets may be an opportunity for display (smoked salmon, roast lamb, summer pudding) but, for the generation who waved tiny Union flags from the sidewalks of the Mall at a distant, glittering figure in the Coronation coach, frugality at table was seen as both necessary and admirable.
Breakfast and tea are (or were) the main events in palace and cottage alike, accounting for the national appetite for baking and a lingering distrust of fancy foreign food, unless of colonial origin. Here are three recipes of guaranteed royal provenance. Each is prepared with eggs fresh from foraging hens (fed on a daily boil-up of household scraps), all to be finished (or started) with butter and
cream hand-milked from cows in wildflower meadows humming with bees.
A recipe for what’s also known as Scotch pancakes was sent to President Eisenhower by Her Majesty after a visit to Balmoral in 1959. The original, typed on yellowtinted non-royal paper, is preserved for posterity in the presidential archives.
Enough for 16.
4 teacups plain flour
4 tbsps caster sugar
2 teacups milk
2 whole eggs
2 tsps bicarbonate of soda
3 tsps cream of tartar
3 tbsps melted butter
Beat eggs, sugar and about half the milk together, add flour and mix well together, adding remainder of milk as required, also bicarbonate and cream of tartar. Fold in the melted butter. (The rest is up to you, but cook by ladleful on a hot, lightly greased griddle, as for pancakes.)
An economical supper dish from Mrs Beeton’s heyday, favoured by the Earl of Strathmore, His Majesty’s great-grandfather on the distaff side.
Serves 4.
8 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
2oz butter
2oz flour
½ pint milk
Melt the butter over a low heat. Stir in the flour and cook for a few minutes. Gradually add the milk, stirring continuously with a wooden spoon. When the sauce boils, remove it from the heat and mix with the chopped hard-boiled eggs. Turn the mixture onto a floured board and form
into cutlets. Brush each one with beaten egg and coat with breadcrumbs. Fry gently in hot oil till golden.
Birkhall’s salmon kedgeree Kedgeree was (probably still is) the usual pre-stalking breakfast on Prince Charles’s stalking weekends, previously hosted by his grandmother at her hunting lodge on the Balmoral estate. The main ingredient was a second outing for yesterday’s dinner: poached salmon, fresh from the River Dee. Serves 4.
1lb salmon (tail end is fine)
1 pint milk
8oz long-grain rice
½lb butter
4 chopped hard-boiled eggs
½ pint double cream
Salt and pepper
Poach the salmon in the milk and an equal amount of water. Add salt. When it is done, flake the fish, carefully removing bones. Cook the rice in the liquid in which you have poached the fish. When it is done, rinse it under warm water. Melt the butter in a large saucepan. Add the rinsed rice and mix in the flaked salmon, cream, chopped hard-boiled eggs and a generous screw of black pepper. Warm up slowly and serve.
The greasy spoon has all but disappeared from the West End and the City. There used to be caffs on most streets, banging out bacon sarnies from 6am to 3pm.
The first sandwich bar, Sandy’s, opened in Oxendon Street in 1933. There were always deep queues primed to order from a variety of bowls of gloopy coronation chicken, chicken with bacon and avocado and tuna with sweetcorn. And, for some reason, piles of breaded veal escalope. The servers were mainly Italian, speaking with heavy Neapolitan Cockney accents. ‘Aig mynice? On white or brown? Do you want butter/salt with that, sir? Bit of lettuce?! Bit healthy today, aren’t we?’
Quite a few also had tables, from where you could order a full English ‘at any time of day’, lasagne or pasta of the day. Chips with everything. And piles of condiments in lurid electric-red bottles which expelled sauces of the same colour.
Theirs was the perfect formula for this era of belt-tightening. Yet there are few survivors. The great sadness is the demise of Lorelei and the Star Café, off Dean Street, the former haunt of Richard Ingrams, Paul Foot and Mike Leigh.
Mario Forte, who died in 2014, used to host Oldie editorial lunches on his check tablecloths in the basement. His daughter has transformed it into the London Gin Club.
The current Editor can be found at Frank’s in Great Titchfield Street. Frank does a nice chilli and rice. Bar Bruno, in Wardour Street, will serve you liver and bacon until 9pm. Pollo, in Old Compton Street, the sacred hearth of Saint Martins art students in the ’80s and ’90s, still serves pasta dishes for £9 – but loosen your belt or order one portion for two.
The Oldie advertising team swear by Tongue and Brisket, in Goodge Street, who do a good salt-beef on rye with potatoes; but avoid the cold fish balls. Maison Bertaux was founded in 1871 by the eponymous Communard owner, fresh from the FrancoPrussian war. Michele, the third owner in its history, is now the grande dame of Soho, still proffering the best cakes and fancies, all the better after a pint or two in the Coach & Horses next door.
Chez Antoinette, at the bottom of Covent Garden market, offers French cakes and more: hot and cold tartines –and a delicious croque monsieur for £12.50. It’s expensive, but comes with the accompaniment of an operatic busker. Lina Stores cleverly launched a caff in Greek Street where you can have their home-made pasta for a tenner.
For café society, head to Fischer’s in Marylebone, with its schnitzels and frankfurters. It’s a favourite haunt of The Oldie’s Town Mouse, who imagines he’s stumbled across a fin-de-siècle salon.
Balans, which has two branches in Old Compton Street, is equally elegant and will still serve you Parmesan churros or Korean chicken wings for a tenner each until 5am. And the best scrambled eggs on toast with avocado mash until 5pm.
And my favourite recent discovery in the cheap(ish)-eats sector is the Black Penny in Great Queen Street. They serve the mandatory full English and also hashes of duck and sweet potato. And a bottle of Monastrell for just £27.
You can’t beat fried egg with red wine, as Mario Forte knew.
In 1924, the esoteric philosopher Rudolf Steiner delivered eight lectures on what he called ‘anthroposophic agriculture’.
Later known as ‘biodynamics’, it pre-dates organic farming by about 20 years. None of Steiner’s lectures mentioned vineyards but, his influence on winemaking has been profound.
Despite the bizarre intricacies of the nine ‘preparations’ required – one involves stuffing yarrow blossoms into a red deer’s bladder, putting it in the sun during summer, then burying it over winter and retrieving it in spring, before diluting it at homeopathic levels with ‘dynamised’ water – many winemakers worldwide have adopted Steiner’s doctrines.
In part, this might be seen as a healthy corrective to an over-reliance on chemical fertilisers and pesticides. In Burgundy, for instance, where biodynamics now has strong roots, soils had become so sterile by the late 1980s that one leading microbiologist claimed they contained less life than the sands of the Sahara. Those who merely farm organically, however, would say that their less mystical methods offer the same benefits.
Bordeaux has been slower to adopt biodynamics than Burgundy, partly because Bordelais vineyards tend to be much larger and conversion more onerous. That did not, however, deter Alfred Tesseron at Château Pontet-Canet, the famous fifth-growth estate in Pauillac, from turning his 81 hectares – big, even by Bordeaux standards –completely biodynamic.
His daughter, Justine, now runs the estate, and she showed me around during this year’s harvest. Ten horses, stabled on site, work the vineyards. Their hoofs are gentler on the soil than a tractor’s wheels, and they produce plenty of the dung needed for the preparations.
The scene was Bruegelesque in its rusticity, the grape pickers snipping bunches of perfectly ripe grapes and loading them into baskets, the horses dutifully hauling them towards the winery. Justine is especially proud of her tisanerie, where the biodynamic infusions are concocted from dried yarrow, camomile, valerian, dandelions, nettles, oak bark and horse tail.
I remain, I have to say, sceptical about some of the more outré strictures of biodynamics – there is a (suitable) whiff of manure about them – but the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. And PontetCanet’s wines are superb, with lifted, faintly floral aromas that it is tempting to ascribe to the wild flowers allowed to grow between the rows of vines.
Like its Pauillac neighbour Château Lynch-Bages, Pontet-Canet is an estate that punches well above its fifth-growth weight: the 2012 is already starting to drink beautifully, and the 2019 is a star of the future.
And, to be honest, I would rather drink wine made by a philosophical farmer than by a research chemist.
This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a racy dry white from the high plains around Valladolid; a classic, warming red from the south of France; and a Bordeaux with plenty of cellar age. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.
Verdejo ‘Silga’, Alvarez y Diez, Rueda 2021, offer price £10.50, case price £126.00
Zesty dry white from some of the oldest vines in the region, perfect with shellfish.
Guilhem, Moulin de Gassac, IGP Vin de Pays de l’Hérault 2021, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88 Classic, fruity, generous Languedoc red made from Syrah, Grenache, Mourvèdre and Carignan.
Château Floréal Laguens, Bordeaux Supérieur 2018, offer price £12.99, case price £155.88
Archetypal mature claret at a very friendly price. Savour it with the Sunday roast.
Mixed case price £133.92 – a saving of £32.95 (including free delivery)
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Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk Quote OLDIE to get your special price. Free delivery to UK mainland. For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 5th December 2022.
I was granted the most unexpected privilege recently.
I was invited to speak at the Rankin Club, a monthly gathering of sports enthusiasts in the Herefordshire market town of Leominster. This is as exclusive an operation as you can imagine. Since it was set up in 1980 by local enthusiast John Beaman, every month it has hosted talks from sporting greats. Five members of the 1966 World Cup winning team, seven England cricket captains, six British Lions skippers … the guest list is extraordinary.
‘Michael Holding was here to talk to us recently,’ I was told by the evening’s host, the Daily Mail’s Brian Viner. ‘And Mike Atherton. We’re hoping to get Tyson Fury along soon.’
But on this occasion it was me, invited with my co-author, the BBC’s Phil McNulty, to discuss our book Red on Red, a history of the Manchester United–Liverpool rivalry. As I went into the gently fading Leominster Conservative Club where Rankin evenings are held, my nerves were hardly assuaged when I was confronted by a poster on the noticeboard advertising our chat – decorated with a picture of my namesake Jim White, the shouty former Sky host. The audience thought they were turning up to see someone else entirely.
I needn’t have worried. The 120 or so farmers, tradespeople, doctors, plumbers and a couple of vicars packed into the meeting room were more than kind as they sought their visitors’ opinion about issues around modern football.
But what really astonished me came when I sought a show of hands: how many of the audience, I asked, were looking forward to the World Cup starting at the end of November? Not a single person put their hand up. Not one. Instead, these knowledgeable sports fans shook their heads, tutted and sighed.
‘It’s not right – a World Cup in the winter,’ one of them said.
They are not wrong. World Cups belong in the summer. Remember those TV pictures from the last tournament in 2018? Of huge crowds following matches on outdoor screens, soaking each other in plumes of beer whenever England scored? Not this time. Everyone will be inside, their hands wrapped round a mulled wine. That’s if they watch at all.
I can’t remember a World Cup being so little anticipated. Instead of the usual build-up, we will be spending the weeks leading up to it absorbed by the most packed Premier League programme in
history. Clubs’ having to play three times a week in order to accommodate games around the enforced break in their season means no one will think of the World Cup until it is upon us.
It is bizarre how those in charge of the tournament have so successfully torpedoed their own property. Playing it out of season, in a country that clearly was granted the right to host it only by the assiduous application of brown envelopes … frankly, not even those in charge of the British Treasury could have shot themselves in the foot more accurately.
Not that anyone will mind in Leominster. The Rankin Club will still be in full swing throughout the tournament. And, you never know, they might even persuade the real Jim White to speak.
It’s surely right to mark centenaries.
We’ll doubtless hear much about the birth of the British Broadcasting Company, with John Reith appointed general manager in December 1922.
We’ll also hear something of the 1922 founding of the Swallow Sidecar Company by William Lyons, who went on to produce a range of fast saloons known by the initials SS. By 1945, however, that was felt to have unfortunate connotations and the name was changed to Jaguar.
But we’ll probably hear less about the centenary of the humble Austin 7.
Humble but mighty, conceived and marketed as ‘The Motor for the Millions’ (though it was well into the 1950s before most of the millions could afford cars), it sold 291,000 before production ended in 1939.
It was licensed throughout the industrialised world. The first BMW was a re-badged Austin 7. In France, it was sold as the Rosengart, in the US as the Bantam, and in Australia as, among other names, the Moth, the Comet and the Meteor. Nissan produced it and, in Britain, William Lyons called his coach-built version the Swallow.
You’ll have seen them pottering along on bank holidays, cute metal boxes under ten feet long and just over five feet wide, with tyres about 3½in wide, a maximum speed – on a good day – approaching 52mph and a claimed 43mpg
Austin 7 turns 100
from the little 747cc engine. Some were bodied as convertibles, others as racers – the first Lotus, indeed, was an adapted 7.
They’re a thriving community – there are reckoned to be more than 12,000 worldwide, and some 1,200 recently celebrated their centenary at Moretonin-Marsh. But they were nearly never born at all.
By 1920, the Austin Motor Company was in receivership, saddled with a range of large, expensive cars. Herbert Austin – arguably the father of the British motor industry – was a bristling, square-cut, bowler-hatted engineer renowned for his bad temper and Spartan habits. It was said he could swear for 20 minutes without repeating himself. But he could also draw sophisticated designs in pencil with both hands simultaneously, and he was very determined.
His concept of a small, affordable car was blocked by his directors and creditors. The man running Austin’s Maidstone dealership, one William Rootes, wrote, ‘My dear sir, the public just will not stand for this.’ To which Austin replied, ‘My dear sir, I am educating the public.’
He decided to go it alone, plucking an 18-year-old draughtsman, Stanley Edge, off the factory floor to design the car in the billiard room of his house.
Edge was responsible for the fourcylinder engine, the three-speed gearbox and the clutch assembly, with Austin largely responsible for the overall styling.
He put a lot of his own money into it, cannily patenting many of its innovations and subsequently garnering a royalty of two guineas for every car sold. It sold slowly at first, but then caught on and, within a few years, had saved and transformed the Austin Motor Company.
In retrospect, it seems so obvious. Henry Ford did it in the US with his Model T, albeit a bigger and heavier car, and the government’s new horsepower tax favoured smaller engines.
There were hundreds of thousands of aspirant car owners keen to abandon their cyclecars and motorbikes and travel under cover on four wheels, if only they could afford it.
Yet most people in the industry were against the idea until, thanks to one man’s obstinacy and financial muscle, they saw it working.
What would the equivalent be now?
Is there anyone who could buck the current trend for tooexpensive electric vehicles?
Is there another 18-year-old Edge out there?
The death of any prominent figure, let alone a head of state, inevitably mobilises historians and biographers, who become anxious to see the late person’s archive.
These items can be extremely valuable. You may recall the commotion in 1995 when Winston Churchill’s archive was bought by the Heritage Lottery Fund for about £12m, prompting the possibly harsh joke that the Churchill family had manged to win the lottery without buying a ticket.
Things are different now; think of your own archive. As you are a reader of this column, I bet that a lot of the notes you write and receive are transmitted electronically and locked behind
For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk
Track the progress of any plane as it flies – more than five million watched the Queen’s last flight.
George VI’s death britishpathe.com/video/death-ofking-george-vi-britain-mourns Pathé newsreel about the death of George VI in 1952.
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
passwords. How is your biographer going to cope with that?
Any historian will tell you it’s the informal exchanges and notes that often shed the most piercing light on a person and their views. And that, surely, is what your email, WhatsApp, Facebook messages and the like will comprise.
So, what happens to these electronic notes, not to mention all the photographs stored online, when one dies?
The answer, rather frustratingly, is very unclear. There is no standard procedure or even complete clarity over who actually owns these data and what, if anything, an executor can do with them – even if he or she knows they exist.
If you use a cloud-based email system like Gmail, Yahoo, Apple Mail, Outlook or BT Email, there is a good chance their terms and conditions state that your emails belong to them, not to you. So it’s up to them what happens. Some music download services sell you a licence only to listen to the music while you are alive; there is nothing that can be passed on (unlike a CD or a record).
The options open to your descendants when they’re dealing with your digital archive will depend very much on where
it is. The bigger platforms have finally given this a little thought.
Google offers you the chance to plan ahead by setting up an ‘inactive account manager’. You can tell Google to pass all your data on to up to ten trusted contacts after a ‘period of inactivity’ (a splendid new euphemism for death, by the way).
Google will consider a request from an executor but may not accede to it; it’s in Google’s hands. Next of kin will not be allowed access.
Microsoft has a next-of-kin process team, which will consider any request but won’t give away passwords. Yahoo are fiercer still: once they hear of the death of a user, they delete all content, whatever is there.
Facebook, by contrast, has a fairly sympathetic system: they offer to delete or freeze an account – if frozen, it remains visible only to family and friends, and drops out of search listings.
It’s all a bit of a minefield, and we are all, including the online platforms, feeling our way, somewhat.
If you really want to preserve your digital archive for your biographer, the best way is probably to download it all from time to time (all the platforms allow this) onto a computer of your own, and make sure that somebody knows what you’ve done and how to access it. Otherwise, I really don’t know how the historians of the future will cope.
For my part, it’ll be a good thing if my grumpy emails are deleted after my death, just as I shredded my school reports when I found them preserved in my dear late father’s papers.
‘You used to make me laugh’
Reading them once was bad enough.
Annuities, despite Jane Austen’s endorsement, have not been taken seriously for quite some time because the payouts have been historically low while stock markets were buoyant.
For people deciding how to invest their pension pot, this made drawdown pensions more attractive than annuities – until now. Today, the dynamics are changing and they are changing unexpectedly fast.
In the first nine months of the year, average annuity rates rose by 52 per cent. Broadly, a 65-year-old spending £100,000 on a guaranteed annuity could earn £6,880 a year, compared with £4,520 in January. Meanwhile the outlook for share prices is, to say the least, unsettled.
Annuity rates have gone up because the yield on gilts has improved. As annuity income is paid for the rest of your life, annuity-providers must be
confident they will have the money to meet their commitments. To achieve this, they buy mostly fixed-rate bonds, and especially gilts, which are underwritten by the government and the safest investment they can buy.
The cost of buying each gilt goes up and down. As bank savings are now paying higher interest, investors are likely to sell their gilts, and this shift in appeal reduces their price. Though
‘Have you tried spending time with friends who are worse off?’
gilts are cheaper, they still pay the same fixed interest. So you get a better return: annuity yields are rising.
That aside, the fundamentals of choosing which type of pension to buy stay the same. With drawdown pensions, the value of your pension pot changes with the fluctuations of share prices. The income is not guaranteed but the capital is always yours. With annuities, your income is fixed (though it will be undermined by the effect of
inflation) and the provider keeps your lump sum.
You can buy inflation-proofed annuities, but few people do because they are expensive – you receive about a third less from the outset.
Whether an annuity or drawdown pension would suit you better is a tricky judgement call – but you can do both.
With stock-market-linked pensions, there is a risk you could run short of money. The older you are when you buy
an annuity, the better the rate because the provider will be paying you over fewer years. You could start retirement with a drawdown pension and buy an annuity later or even buy additional annuities every few years.
Anyone whose health or lifestyle indicates a reduced lifespan should apply for an impaired-life annuity, which pays higher rates to compensate for living less long. As well as disclosing the most serious illnesses and smoking, you should also reveal high blood pressure, high cholesterol, being overweight and even drinking too much.
The very best rates are paid to elderly people in poor health, which works in favour of someone entering a care home, as you know there will always be money to pay the fees. Here they are called care annuities or immediate-needs annuities, and whether they turn out to be financially worthwhile depends on the big unknown – how long the person is going to live.
Annuity contracts cannot be cancelled – so take great care before you hand over your money. The government-backed website www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/ pensions-and-retirement/taking-yourpension/compare-annuities is a useful starting point.
The tour is being led by Paul and Dawn Canham, veterans of more than 30 Oldie reader trips. Through family, they know the area extremely well.
In Extremadura you will find the essence of Spain: land of the conquistadors and the birthplace of 20 American countries. Largely untouched by tourism, it boasts some of the best-preserved historical cities in the country, including World Heritage Sites Mérida, Cáceres and Guadalupe, all of which we will be visiting. Its stunning National Parks are home to a plethora of wildlife, including some of Spain’s rarest birds and animals. Instead of hotels, we have chosen the paradors of Placencia and Trujillo (www. parador.es); the latter occupies the former convent of Santa Clara, with its Renaissance cloisters.
Tuesday 2nd May – Arrive in Placencia Depart Gatwick 10.40am with Iberia Express; arrive Madrid 2.10pm. Early-evening guided tour of Placencia.
Wednesday 3rd May – Hervas & Jarandilla de la Vera Tour of Hervas, founded by the Knights Templar, including one of the best-preserved Jewish Quarters in Spain. Lunch in Jarandilla, guided visit to the Monasterio de San Jeronimo de Yuste.
Thursday 4th May – Monfragüe
National Park and Trujillo Depart for Trujillo, birthplace of explorers including Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of Peru and the Incas. En route, visit Monfragüe National Park. Check in to the Parador de Trujillo and enjoy a guided tour of Trujillo.
Friday 5th May – Mérida Guided tour of this fascinating World Heritage Site with some of the finest Roman ruins in Spain, including the Circus Maximus, Teatro Romano, and Trajan’s Arch.
Saturday 6th May – Guadalupe A guided tour of this village of twisting narrow streets and whitewashed houses, famous for its shrine to the Virgin. After lunch, we visit two typical Extremaduran villages, Romangordo and Cabañas del Castillo.
Sunday 7th May – Cáceres Tour of the Medieval and Renaissance old city, its palaces and towers funded by gold sent from the Americas by the conquistadors.
Monday 8th May – Toledo and home Guided tour of Toledo including the Alcázar and Santa Iglesia Catedral. Lunch in Toledo before departure for Madrid Barajas Airport to catch the 6.40pm Iberia Express flight, which arrives at Gatwick at 8pm. Full itinerary at www.theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours
HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 Price per person: £2,450 which includes all meals, wine with meals, transport and entrances. You need to book and pay for your own flights. Single supplement: £300. A non-refundable deposit of £750 will be required, with the full balance due on 1st February 2023. Please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk
Altocirrus, swans white as the tundra they come from.
Their cries multiply. Their bodies crash-land on the water
Star after star after star.
Lynn Wycherley, from Bewick’s Swans Arrive at Ouse Washes
Russians say the Bewick’s swan ‘brings snow on its beak’. Hence forecasts of a ‘white Christmas’ when this winter migrant from Siberia arrived at the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT), Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, on 11th October 2015 –the earliest arrival since one first appeared in 1963. The winter of 2015 proved the second-warmest on record.
If you look up Bewick’s swan (Cygnus bewickii) in Collins Bird Guide, you will find ‘Tundra Swan (Bewick’s Swan) Cygnus columbianus’ – an example of our current fad for national condemnation, because it was the English ornithologist William Yarrell (1784-1856) who first gave the species a name, after an unfamiliar swan was seen in Northumberland.
In 1830, he chose to call it after the Northumbrian wood-engraver Thomas Bewick (1753-1828), also author of the pioneering bird guide, A History of British Birds, thus doubly honouring the county where it was first identified. Cygnus bewickii it shall remain, albeit the Siberian tundra is its home.
In January, this column’s illustrator, Carry Akroyd, drove me to see a wellnamed ‘herd’ of 60 Bewick’s swans grazing in a pasture on the edge of the Fens near her home. ‘You can tell them by their more bendy necks,’ she said, which distinguish them from the resident mute swan and the wild whooper, which winters here from Iceland and Scandinavia.
We then toured the Fenland reserve at
Wenley WWT on the Ouse Washes, seeing a much bigger herd of the larger, less serpentine-necked whoopers.
In 1964, Sir Peter Scott (1909-89), founder of Slimbridge and the WWT, noticed the yellow patch on a Bewick’s swan’s black bill differs in each case.
Fifty-eight years on, the Bewick’s Swan Study remains the only ornithological research project in which a bird is not recognised by a ring. Monitoring 9,000 birds internationally has revealed Bewick’s swans migrate in families and live an average 25 years. The BSS has led to statutory protection internationally of key breeding and wintering sites; nevertheless, in 30 years, the European population of 29,000 has declined by one third – 4,000-5,000 migrate to Britain.
Sacha Dench of the WWT, founder of Conservation Without Borders, in 2016
flew a paramotor (motorised paraglider) to accompany eight transmitter-tagged Bewick’s swans the 4,350 miles from Siberia to England. The Bewick’s swan’s decline is due to power lines, shooting and loss of wetlands – one third of X-rayed birds carry shotgun pellets despite legal protection in the UK (since 1954), Russia (1964) and the European Union (1979). ‘The expedition can’t not have had an impact,’ Sacha Dench says.
Within living memory, Bewick’s swans were only seen here in severe winters, but today it is a regular migrant.
Its stronghold is the Ouse Washes; Slimbridge is its lesser western counterpart. Visitors to Slimbridge can visit Sir Peter’s house and watch wild Bewick’s swans from his sitting-room studio. Thomas Bewick’s telescope is one of its treasures.
Nearly a decade ago, I made my first trip to Crete to research my book Kidnap in Crete, about the 1944 kidnap of the German General Kreipe by the Cretan underground and the Special Operations Executive (including the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor).
I went expecting a holiday island and that was what, at first, I found. In the end, I could not have been more mistaken.
My contact was a distinguished Cretan historian, Constantinos Mamalakis. For our first meeting, he invited me to his house. There he showed me his extensive collection of historical material relating to the Second World War. His archive included an arsenal of live ordnance: hand grenades, submachine guns, 25-pounder shells, pistols and the pièce de résistance, a Vickers machine gun complete with belts of ammunition.
I asked him why he had all this lethal stuff and he answered, ‘We are an island that has been invaded many times.
My great-grandfather had to fight the invader, as did my grandfather and my father. It is very likely that I too will one day have to defend my homeland, and I want to be prepared.’
In that moment I realised that, even today, Crete is a land of tough, fighting people and is, at heart, a true land of heroes.
The island is a place of contrasts: violence and feuding coexist with passionate friendship and generous hospitality. Cretan mountain men have been described as living in a past where a boy becomes a man when he has stolen his first goat, abducted a girl or drawn blood in a family feud.
Crete has been populated since Neolithic times. It is dotted with ancient Iron Age palaces, the biggest and most magnificent of which was excavated at Knossos by Sir Arthur Evans at the beginning of the 20th century. Evans named this culture Minoan, after the mythical King Minos, son of Zeus and the island’s first ruler. Minos founded the Cretan navy and sacrificed boys and girls to the Minotaur, a mythical bull.
Minoans were farmers, and counted bull-leaping among their sports. The civilisation was destroyed by a combination of invasion and the eruption of a volcano on Santorini, one of the most violent cataclysms in the history of the Western world.
In Roman times, the island’s forests were felled to provide wood for the ships of the Mediterranean. When there were no more trees left, the people grew olives and reared sheep and goats on the denuded hillsides.
No animal dangerous to man is to be found on Crete. One legend claims this as a legacy of Hercules, who wanted to make the birthplace of Zeus (said to be Mount Ida) safe for humans.
Crete has been fought over for nearly a thousand years. In the 13th century, the
island was taken over by the Venetians, whose harsh regime triggered a revolution. Crete seized its independence and declared itself a republic. After five years of armed struggle, the Venetians once again ruled the island.
In the 17th century, the Turks took Crete away from the Venetians and it became part of the Ottoman Empire. There followed 200 years of conflict between the Christians and the Muslims.
Any story about Crete will be dominated by a set of four silent, brooding characters – the mountains. They run the length of the land, criss-crossed by steep gorges, watched over by birds of prey, eagles, falcons and kestrels. The highest peaks carry snow all the year round.
Growing on the lower slopes, in the warm, fertile valleys, are rosemary, sage, oregano and thyme, their scents wafting among daisies, poppies, wild orchids and cyclamen, all growing on the hillsides and shaded by chestnuts, oaks, olives, pines, plane trees and tamarisks.
In the west are the White Mountains, containing some of the wildest terrain in Europe. The peaks rise to 8,000ft and have always been a refuge to desperate men fighting the invaders.
To the east of the White Mountains, a low, rolling valley leads to the colossal heights of Mount Ida, whose summit reveals a panorama of the whole of the island. Hidden below its peaks lie the great plateau of Nida and the cave of Zeus, a deep, mournful fissure approached up a steep path and across a terrifying ledge. South-west of Ida stands Kedros, in solemn isolation, and, to the
east of Kedros towers the last of Crete’s great mountain characters, Dikti.
The mountains hide a series of high, upland plains, once only accessible to shepherds on foot. Winter snows often make them impossible to reach. For hundreds of years, bandits and vendettas made moving around the mountains dangerous. The locals went armed and almost every man on the island possessed some sort of weapon, even if it was an ancient and not too reliable gun inherited from a great-grandparent.
To the south-west of the White Mountains, and protected by them, is Sfakia, one of the few places on the island never to have been occupied by a foreign power. Its people are renowned for their ferocious spirit and their hospitality.
One legendary Cretan resistance fighter, Yannis Daskaloyannis, came from Sfakia. In 1771, after a long struggle, he was finally captured, and was then sentenced to be skinned alive inside the city of Heraklion. He is reported to have endured the ordeal in silence. A saying has it that you would rather have brain cancer than get involved in a vendetta with the Sfakians.
After the rise of Hitler, it looked as though the island would once more be invaded, this time by the Germans. One man who tried to prepare the island for its next invasion was an Englishman, John Pendlebury.
In 1929, Pendlebury was appointed curator of the archaeological site at Knossos. He was unconventional, sharp and possessed of a beguilingly playful nature, and a passion for Crete. Over six feet tall, he was a formidable athlete and
could clear hurdles ‘with the speed of a cheetah’. All who met John Pendlebury fell under his spell. His companions were shepherds and mountain villagers. He knew all their dialects and he could drink and walk the legs off any man.
Pendlebury’s home on Crete was the Villa Ariadne, a large, low, square building, constructed of yellow and brown stone, which had for years been the centre of the archaeological work at Knossos.
In the event of a German invasion, Pendlebury planned to make a hideout on the Nida plateau – 5,000ft above sea level, and overlooked by the deep and forbidding cave among whose awesome stalagmites and stalactites, legend has it, the Titan Rhea hid the infant Zeus.
The Germans invaded and Pendlebury was killed in the first days of the battle. The island fell and there followed four years of occupation.
The resistance networks that Pendlebury had set up tormented the Germans for the rest of the war. The islanders paid a high price: in retribution the Germans destroyed villages and executed hundreds of men and women.
But the Cretan spirit was never broken. Today, in the Cretan memory, Pendlebury stands shoulder to shoulder with the people he loved and fought with – the heroes of Crete.
These men and women are what make Crete one of the most interesting and exciting places in Europe to visit.
I can think of no more endearing name than the one given to William Keyte’s pet trout, who ruled the roost in the village of Blockley in Gloucestershire.
An oaken memorial to him –HURRAH – was carved in 1855 by the son of the man who had tamed him. It then stood for some hundred years in the garden of what was to become known as Fish Cottage, famed far and wide.
Umpteen pilgrims would come to pay homage at the trout’s plaque: IN MEMORY OF THE OLD FISH. UNDER THE SOIL THE OLD FISH DO LIE. 20 YEARS HE LIVED AND THEN DID DIE. HE WAS SO TAME, YOU UNDERSTAND, HE WOULD COME AND EAT OUT OF OUR HAND. DIED April the 20th 1855 Aged 20 YEARS
The creature’s owner, William Keyte, was a wheelwright from a local family of funeral directors. That may explain the fine flight of fancy of creating this ennobling little memorial.
In a surviving photograph of our hero, he appears as an upright and
William Keyte’s Victorian memorial to his pet trout stands in a long line of fish tributes, from Martial to Francis BaconLUCINDA LAMBTON The 1855 memorial in Blockley, Gloucestershire
Title page of Isaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, published in 1653. Steel engraving, 1824
emperor calling his fish individually and by name.
Isaak Walton, in The Compleat Angler of 1653, quotes Pliny’s description of Antonia, wife of Drusus. She ‘had a lamprey, at whose gills she hung jewels or earrings and that others have been so tender-hearted as to shed tears at the death of fishes which they have kept and loved’.
Walton wrote too of St Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan who was so far in love with a flower-fish that ‘he would not let him pass without the honour of a long discourse’.
The Roman poet Martial wrote as early as the first century AD of his favourite fish:
For these are sacred fishes that swim here
Who know their sovereign, and will lick his hand…
Nay more, they’ve names, and when they called are, Do to their several owners’ call repair.
distinguished, watch-chained figure in a lofty stovepipe hat and a frock-coat. His wife too is dressed to the nines for the occasion of the all-important photograph. The precious fish was daily fed by Mrs Keyte, otherwise known as Maria Keen, who would regularly treat him to worms with her fingers. Their son, Charles, inscribed the memorial to mark the trout’s demise.
The trout did no great deeds, nor did he change the world for the better or the worse. (As far as I am concerned, though, his very existence has changed my world for as long as I can remember!) During the century that has passed since his death, the old fish has been sung of the world over. I have seen him eulogised in journals appearing as far apart as Pennsylvania, Rhodesia and the Antipodes.
For those who doubt the truth of the Blockley trout, an illustrious company of
obedient fish can be vouched for by a distinguished assembly of people.
Francis Bacon, in his Natural History of 1622, wrote of seeing a carp who would come to him whenever he rang a bell. Then there was Dr Hakewill, who, in his ‘apologie or declaration of the power and providence of God’ of 1627, quoted Pliny, who recorded an
Across the main street of the pretty little village of Blockley, there is a wide lane where the memorial once took pride of place. It was later seen as a somewhat perilous spot. So it was moved under cover and is now safe and sound. You find what can only be described as a shrine – looked after, dearly loved – and what a shrine it is, to be sure!
After a good deal of searching for such a similar delight, I have drawn a complete blank. Blockley stands alone. It is revered throughout the world and should for ever be loved and lauded.
What a triumph and a half it is that a lone Cotswold carp should have garnered worldwide fame in this way. HURRAY!
St Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, was in love with a flower-fish
Gardening expert Roddy Llewellyn talks to Louise Flind about his duet with Petula Clark – and meeting Her Majesty
What was your reaction to the sad news about the Queen?
I met Her Majesty only cursorily, a few times. She had an aura of calm and kindness. I can’t think why, given the media attention at the time. I will miss her.
Is there anything you can’t leave home without?
Marmite, clean socks and underpants, and a straw hat.
Is there something you really miss?
My doggies and my daughters, but we take Miss Daisy to France. When she barks, she goes, ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ and by the time she leaves, she goes, ‘Eu, eu, eu…’
What’s your favourite destination?
I went to Rome in 1960 when my father [Sir Harry Llewellyn, Bt, an Olympic gold medallist in showjumping] was chef d’équipe of the British team for the Olympic Games. I’ve kept the tickets, with Romulus and Remus on.
Were you ever tempted to follow in your father’s footsteps into showjumping?
No. I love and admire horses – but I spent all my time hunting just because the rest of the family did, up until my mid-teens, and then I went off to London.
What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?
Palma, Majorca. There was one hotel on this huge, deserted beach where there were two open sewers and a little hut, where someone sold ice-cold white wine and nutty chocolate.
When I was three, my nanny and I were walking down to the summerhouse and she had in her open hand these tiny little black specs, which were annual aster seeds, and she sprinkled them in the ground. Then, to my amazement, these little shoots
appeared and then flowers – it was magic.
What was Merrist Wood College in Surrey like?
It filled in a lot of the pieces of the jigsaw.
Sometimes in winter, you had 60 tree twigs to identify –you were told to go out into the gardens, find the relevant trees, look at the twigs, and remember which one was which.
Did gardening boom during lockdown and does it continue to?
I think it did, and everything’s becoming so expensive. So I try to produce as much food as I can in my veg garden.
You released an album. Do you still play music?
When I was in the newspapers, I used to get irresistible offers and one of them was to meet Petula Clark. We used to sing in Paris and Madrid, often in French. It was a wonderful experience but I’m not a true musician. I don’t write music.
You were gardening correspondent for the Mail on Sunday. Do you like journalists or avoid them?
There’s the paparazzi and then there are specialist journalists. Being the centre of gossip, I didn’t want anything to do with that – not that I was ever asked.
You worked at the College of Arms. Are you still interested in heraldry?
Yes, to a degree – another thing I’m absolutely fascinated by is philately, and my knees go wobbly when I see a five-shilling red of George VI.
Do you use your baronetcy?
I use my title only in business correspondence, and out of respect for my forebears.
What’s your favourite place in Wales? Monmouthshire, where I was brought up
in the most beautiful Georgian house with views of the Skirrid and the Black Mountains.
What’s your favourite garden in Wales?
Clough Williams-Ellis’s creation of Portmeirion.
Where did you go on your honeymoon?
Patmos. After the glamour of the wedding, to find yourself in Stansted Airport was a bit of a shock.
Do you lie on the beach?
I don’t do sunbathing any more because I’m fair-skinned – I used to give myself a right roasting. But I’ve never been able to achieve a good, deep tan because of my Scandinavian-Welsh blood.
Do you stay in a hotel or apartment?
I never stay in a hotel if I can possibly help it because I’ve got slightly bored with lumpy scrambled eggs.
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?
My first snail – but I love snails.
What’s your favourite food?
My wife, Tania, is very good at her sauces. I grow garlic chives – we found the best sauce for tagliatelle. I like caviar with hard, crumbled egg yolk and sour cream.
Do you have a go at the local language?
I speak French and since we’ve moved to France, I’ve learnt the French for strimmer, hosepipe and wheelbarrow.
What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept in – while being away?
Nanny thought it would be a good idea if I spent the night in a tent. It lasted for two hours.
Roddy Llewellyn is talking about Gardens of Madeira on a Noble Caledonia cruise, 29th April to 6th May 2023
A still, sunny day in autumn is a sweet pill to swallow.
A warm, lowering sun and a mellow, slightly melancholic silence, broken only by the ‘chip’ of a passing woodpecker and the drone of a distant light plane. Time is shortening, the year is turning and the oaks are dripping with pleasingly plump acorns.
This was the scene as I strolled out from Barton-under-Needwood in Staffordshire a few weeks ago.
Beyond the Co-op car park was green pasture and low wooded hills rolling up from the Trent valley; the ordinary beauty and tranquillity of middle England that endure despite pylons and fulfilment centres.
The only blot on autumnal bliss was that my guide was not my preferred paper map but a free app, Go Jauntly. It offers routes with not only written directions but also helpful photographs of stiles and gates at every turning. I take a walk to escape the phone, so I didn’t relish checking it at every turn, but the directions were flawlessly clear, the route well chosen.
I was app-guided because I wanted to participate in Treefest. It’s part of a nationwide research project in which
volunteers record their feelings before and after eight leafy walks in the Midlands. The results will be analysed by Professor Miles Richardson of the University of Derby. He wants to discover whether certain types of woodland or tree-lined areas are more beneficial to wellbeing than others. Oldie-readers are welcome to join the experiment.
Miles, a jovial Midlander who lives locally, joined me on this stroll, the Dunstall Walk, a three-mile round trip that takes in the village of Dunstall and plenty of copses. They are part of the National Forest, a 27-year-old effort to return a woodland mosaic to the deforested former coalfields of the Midlands.
‘The vale of East Staffordshire is not a touristy area but it’s nice in its own kind of way,’ Miles said – and he was right. As the path dived into a young plantation, Miles and I chatted about whether different forests might affect wellbeing differently.
If we’re considering our feelings, this plantation didn’t fill me with joy. But it merged into a much more satisfying, older wood, where jays flashed through a chiaroscuro of tree trunks and forest floor.
There’s a lorryload of scientific research showing the benefits of forests and green spaces to human health. Miles suspects that regimented, relatively nature-free plantations could be less beneficial than ancient woodland. Studies certainly suggest that more biodiverse surroundings are more beneficial to people.
It seems sensible to be able to plan future forests that benefit human health, but my friend the writer Richard Mabey, who wrote a book called Nature Cure, hates this idea. Will health officials police woodlands with heart monitors and call in the chainsaws where pulse rates rise? Nature should not be reduced to a wellspring for our delight, Richard argues; besides, it often remains a source of fear, anxiety and ill health.
Anyway, we emerged from the greens on to pasture where pylons crossed but did not spoil a sweeping view to Dunstall, with its church, old stone school and cricket pitch.
The pylons softly fizzed in the silence, there was baa-ing from a small flock of sheep and then the church bells chimed midday.
We ducked on to another track past an old farm, up a hill and into more woodland. Here was a lovely, wide ride tangled with creeping thistle, crickets, rosebay willowherb, ants, speckled wood butterflies and the menacing dart of an Emperor dragonfly.
We finished with a long, green view across the Trent valley, a big grey warehouse on the horizon prettified by a frame of blood-red hawthorn berries.
At the end, I filled in a quick survey on the app. Was it trees or autumn or exercise or the late-lunch pint in the pub that made me happy?
Taken together, they made a perfect dose.
Free parking in Barton-underNeedwood at DE13 8AF. Treefest, with six ‘research’ walks in Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire, is on the free Go Jauntly app for the rest of this year. www.gojauntly.com/treefest
X is a shared definition. Any unfamiliar words may be found in Chambers 12th edition
State agree to have right for name (6)
5 Building material argument against island (8)
Prison with second offenders (8)
10 Guarantee Cerberus never holds back? (6)
11 Poorly runners might hit this eccentric (3-3-4)
12 Truss’s intractable problem? (4)
13 Construction worker’s requirement to dress down, entertaining a couple of females (8)
16 Pontificate about end of winter showing new growth (6)
17 X’s disturbed dreams, mostly about the origin of life (6)
19 Sinatra’s song about class and stars (5,3)
21 X’s existence with a change of gender (4)
22 X is unable to before a glass (10)
25 Avoid responsibility with firm expression of petulance (3,3)
26 What may be used to describe orbits (8)
27 Crew died, regrettably, for such universal symbols (8)
28 The rest of the day? (6)
2 Such types may give rise to passions (5)
3 Plant disease thus on crown of tulips (5)
4 X may see The Spanish Steps outside (7)
5 X’s fish eaten by A-lister?
Quite the other way round! (7)
6 Large stacks of chalk needed by dressmakers? (7)
7 Scrape by, accepting blunder must be X (9)
8 Sailor and eccentric aunt left a spider (9)
14 X’s not OTT in development of atomic theory (9)
15 Scoff, accepting wound heals is a lie (9)
18 Reading music? (7)
19 Pitmen across Germany are becoming bodyguards (7)
20 The French state finally accepts those who want out (7)
23 X is nothing, as it happens (5)
24 Gather statement from defendant not without denial (5) in lobster claw (5)
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: 16th November 2022 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.
Scare (6)
(7)
(to)
(7)
Shame, remorse
Peanut sauce (5)
To be poorly (3)
The word to precede Admiral is RED. Other reds include squirrel, card, handed, light, carpet, planet
Winner: Fred Peeling, Soham, Cambridgeshire Runners-up: Carolyn Whitehead, Yatton, Somerset; Nora Clewes, Chester, Cheshire
Moron 417 solution: Across: 1 Reverse, 8 Heaven (River Severn), 9 Strokes, 11 Toronto, 12 Fated, 14 Juncture, 16 Graduate, 17 Bored, 20 Thunder, 21 Evasion, 23 Uneven, 24 Twister. Down: 2 Extra, 3 Evoke, 4 See, 5 Secrecy, 6 Avuncular, 7 Snookered, 10 Structure, 12 Forgetful, 13 Treasured, 15 Subdued, 18 Oasis, 19 Erode, 22 Vow.
You’ve left your abode to buy a plant at a local garden centre rather late in the afternoon. There are two nearby centres – we’ll call them Acacia and Bacopa. If you travel to Bacopa first (further away, less efficient centre) and it doesn’t have your desired plant, you won’t have time to go to Acacia. However, if you travel first to Acacia (nearer and quicker service), you’ll still have time to try Bacopa if Acacia doesn’t have your desired plant. It’s a no-brainer – head straight to Acacia, with Bacopa in reserve.
On this month’s deal, West leads out the ace-king of hearts and you ruff – carefully with the six of clubs, retaining the three to reach dummy twice in clubs. Plan the play.
South North-South
South West North East 1
IN COMPETITION No 285 you were invited to write a poem called A Coat Dog hairs and repainting the kitchen attracted some poetic energy, but most competitors chose as their subject the overcoat. Frank Annable’s narrator sank into mud and death on the Western Front: ‘The shell’s percussion brought me here, / no time for fear, just lifted, weightless as a fishing float. / Broken body, uniform, boots and great coat.’ Joe Cushnan was in celebratory mood: ‘I always loved my duffle, / Wooden toggles held by loops, / Simple, no kerfuffle.’ Fay Dickinson remembered an awkward job interview: ‘I suddenly boomeranged backwards / As my coat belt caught on the handle of the door.’ Commiserations to them and to Janet Bettesworth, Ronnie Wood, Keith Baker, D A Prince, Katie Mallett, Peter Hollindale and Paul Elmhirst and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to America’s own Martin Elster.
We could have driven but hiked to the drugstore –
His favourite marmalade.
Dorothy Pope
I saw her trying on a fancy coat
And watched her as she looked with admiration; No one in the shop took any note, She glanced around, showing some hesitation.
Then all at once she quickly stepped away,
Still wearing the garment she was meant to buy.
I knew of course she didn’t mean to pay.
As she walked to the door I caught her eye.
Perhaps she thought I’d try to foil her deed
And call for help as she was running out. Instead I watched to see if she’d succeed
But then I heard a shop assistant shout. They stopped her with the booty that she wore
While I, with my own prize, walked through the door.
Max RossDbl (1) 4
(2) Pass Pass 5
end
(1) Negative, promising four spades.
Raising preemptively to the (ten-card) level of the fit.
You have ten top tricks and need to promote either the ten of spades or the queen of diamonds. You cash the ace of clubs (East discarding a heart) and follow with the king and ten, overtaking with the queen (keeping back that precious three). Should you now lead towards the ten of spades or towards the queen of diamonds?
Consider the consequences of a losing finesse. If you lead to the ten of spades and West wins the jack, it’s goodnight, Vienna (even if East holds the king of diamonds); you’d lose three tricks before you can make 11. However, if you lead towards the queen of diamonds and it loses to West’s king, you can win West’s diamond return in dummy and try a spade to the ten. If this finesse succeeds, you can cash the queen of spades, then lead the precious three of clubs to dummy’s five to cash the ace-king of spades and drop the two diamond losers.
As it happens, a diamond to the queen produces the desired outcome: whether or not East rises with the king, your queen is promoted and you don’t have to dabble in spades.
A diamond to the queen was your trip to Acacia.
ANDREW ROBSONFor a lark – on the bitterest night Spring ever whipped up. You held my hand
The whole way. A skin of ice as slick
As Teflon shellacked the streets and sidewalks.
In a coat as heavy and huge as a house, You led the way. I felt as light As a snowflake, for our bond seemed strong.
Elated we’d made it back alive, We cuddled on the couch, lulled By the whimsies of the wind, our shivers Melting away like frost in May.
Now it’s summer. We laugh no longer. You’re the glaze that glassed the roads, And I’m the heavy coat you bore That bitter night you held my hand.
Unread and daily set aside
To be recycled, His copy of the Times arrives, And I Can no more bear
To cancel it
Than I can part
When Dad died, 40 years ago I found his camel coat.
Tried it on. It swamped me. Hung it up. Somewhere remote.
My 59-year-old Barbour jacket, Unfit to turn out decently, I revisited Dad’s coat – for A posh parade quite recently. It must’ve shrunk. It fits me now.
And I recalled Dad’s tale
Of how he’d seen a coat like this In Dunn & Co’s spring sale…
The ‘Mr Humphries’ eyed him up And called a colleague shortly –‘Oh, Mr Smith – Sir likes this, but… We need it in “Short Portly”.’
Tony Douglass
COMPETITION No 287 Time for the ever-popular bouts-rimés. Take the following words in the order given as the rhymes of the 14 lines of a poem: wood, understood, fir, minister, moon, soon, seen, been, grace, face, gives, lives, breath, death. We still cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your postal address), marked ‘Competition No 287’, by 17th November.
‘This is the last one on your bucket list, Your Majesty’
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QFor various reasons, I’m sure my husband is having the odd transient ischaemic attack –mini-strokes. He’s had a few ‘episodes’ where he feels very peculiar and he can’t speak properly and has a terrible headache. These don’t last longer than about 20 seconds before he’s back to perfectly normal, but they worry me. He’s going to see the doctor next week –but only about an ingrown toenail. He refuses to mention these episodes and won’t let me go with him. I was wondering if I could write to the doctor behind his back. He’d kill me if he found out, of course … so I’m worried.
Maria Osborne, CornwallAI’d certainly write to the doctor and mark it ‘Strictly personal’. If you send it to the surgery by email, there’s less chance of his notes falling to the floor and your husband recognising your handwriting – not that doctors are likely to have such things as paper notes these days. Alternatively, ask the receptionist if you can speak to the doctor. If you explain the situation, you should be able to have a word. I have done this a couple of times and, even though my diagnosis was entirely wrong, it was very useful for the doctor to have the information and, in one case, they got to the bottom of it right away and put things right. Make sure you mark everything ‘IN CONFIDENCE’ as well. And if your husband does find out, which is highly unlikely, you can say you were so worried that you had to do it. By the way, I doubt if you’ll get a reply from the doctor as your husband’s case is strictly confidential, but you could ask for an acknowledgement so you know that your input has been received.
QMy dog died six months ago and I was devastated. So my son bought me a puppy. The problem is that, after three months with it, I find I really don’t like it. It yaps and pees and isn’t at all affectionate – in fact, it seems miserable. Should I give it away? I dread another 15 or so years of this.
Catherine W, HayesAIt sounds to me as if you just weren’t ready to take on a new dog – but I know it’s tricky when someone, particularly your son, actually gives you one as a present. I would try to get it rehoused – but not before you’ve got it properly trained. After this, not only might you become fonder of it yourself, but also it would be a better bet for another person to take on. The sooner you do this, the better – for all of you, including the poor, blameless puppy.
QI’ve employed a lovely woman to clean and iron for me and the family for years. She’s seen my children grow up and is almost part of the family. But now arthritis is preventing her from being able to do much. I’ve been paying her, recently, £60 for four hours a week, and feel very bad about cutting off this essential income completely. What should I do?
M Stephens, LondonAIt depends really on how much you can afford. Could you not pay her £30 a week and employ someone new to work for you for only two hours a week rather than four? Now your children are grown-up, presumably you wouldn’t miss her not doing so many
hours anyway. And perhaps you could do a few more chores yourself – or even let things go. Do you really have to have the bed made immaculately in the mornings? Could you leave some of the vacuuming for an extra few days? Standards could probably be lowered without anyone noticing except you!
QI was a single parent, and my son and I were extremely close all through his childhood until he left for university. But ever since then, he’s been very distant. He’s had a few girlfriends, but he rarely brings them home, and even in the holidays he often goes away with friends or visits his father. I feel bereft and cast aside, and so unhappy. He gets irritated if I give a hint of how I feel, and when he’s at home, he’s quite cool. I feel I’ve lost him for ever.
AI’ve heard a lot of stories like this from single parents of only sons. I’m pretty sure that he’s just separating himself from you for his own sanity. Once he’s created his own identity and doesn’t feel joined at the hip with you, he’ll be back just the same as ever. And if he has his own children, that will also help. Girls don’t seem to feel the same and – this is a gross generalisation – they don’t seem to feel so suffocated by connection with their single mothers. Being the same sex makes them more alike anyway, and they don’t need to strike out on their own to separate themselves from them.
Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.
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