February 2014

‘The Oldie is like being on steroids without the side effects’ GYLES BRANDRETH Pesky charity calls – see Rant page 39

COME TO THE

LOIRE VALLEY February 2014

www.theoldie.co.uk

DOWNHILL ALL THE WAY

CLANGERS MAN SPEAKS SEWELL: ME AND MY DOGS THE CASE OF THE VANISHING VICAR MR HOME FRONT’S BAGPIPE HELL

ISSUE 305

DEDIC ATED TO A BE T TER JO URNE Y

£3.95

WITH THE OLDIE See page 50

BOOKS GARDENING TELLY WINE CARTOONS THEATRE MUSIC CROSSWORDS FILM COOKERY

ISSUE 305 • FEBRUARY

Ed’s letter…

65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG www.theoldie.co.uk Editor Richard Ingrams Assistant editor Sonali Chapman Sub-editor Deborah Asher Art editor Joe Buckley Commissioning editor Jeremy Lewis Administrator & events Hannah Donovan Advertising sales manager Lisa Martin Senior sales executive Azmi Elkholy Sales executive Jack Watts Publisher James Pembroke At large Richard Beatty Our quiet American David Kowitz Sir Alan John Brown EDITORIAL Tel: 020 7436 8801 Fax: 020 7436 8804 e-mail: editorial@theoldie.co.uk

IN KEEPING with Auden’s injunction to ‘honour while we can the vertical man’ we salute in this issue the 85-year-old Peter Firmin who made not only the Clangers and Bagpuss but Basil Brush to boot.

Coincidentally the creator of similarly brilliant masterpieces, our regular columnist Raymond Briggs,

will be celebrating his 80th birthday this month (see December’s Oldie).

We shall be publishing a special tribute to Raymond by Russell Davies in the following issue.

In the meantime we wish him, on behalf of all our readers, a very Happy Birthday.

RICHARD INGRAMS

CONTENTS

SUBSCRIPTIONS & LITERARY LUNCH BOOKINGS Subscriptions tel: 01795 592 893 e-mail: subscriptions@theoldie.co.uk All subscription queries please write to: Oldie Subs, c/o Dovetail Services 800 Guillat Ave, Kent Science Park, Sittingbourne, Kent ME9 8GU Lunch bookings tel: 01795 592 892 e-mail: oldielunches@servicehelpline.co.uk OLDIE BOOKSHOP Tel: 01603 648 140 NEWSSTAND ENQUIRIES e-mail: mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk

14 STILL WITH US: PETER FIRMIN 12 Alice Pitman talks to the Clangers creator

TO THE BATHS 19 GOING Roland Barnes remembers post-war visits

A WILD-GOOSE CHASE 28 ON Walter Ellis’s quest for healthcare in the US

WAR THAT NEVER ENDS 48 THE Andrew Hosken in Baghdad

ADVERTISING For display contact Lisa Martin or Azmi Elkholy on 020 7079 9361or 020 7079 9362 For classified contact Jack Watts on 020 7079 9363 e-mail: advertising@theoldie.co.uk

ABC Primary Figure: 45,118 Subscription rates for 12 issues: UK £39.50; Europe £45; USA/Canada £46; Rest of World £55 The Oldie is published by Oldie Publications Ltd, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG ISSN 0965-2507. Printed in England by Wyndeham Group Distributed by COMAG, Tavistock Road, West Drayton, Middlesex UB7 7QE Tel: 01895 433600 All rights of reproduction are reserved in respect of all articles, drawings, sketches etc. published in The Oldie in all parts of the world. Reproduction or imitation of any of these without the express prior written consent of the publisher is forbidden.

The Oldie is available in audio format for the benefit of blind and partially sighted readers through National Talking Newspapers and Magazines. Tel: 01435 866 102 or visit: www.tnauk.org.uk for further details.

To buy a digital subscription go to http://www.exacteditions.com/theoldie

21 I ONCE MET...

Donald Trelford remembers Sir Robert Mayer

23 WORLD’S WORST DUMPS

Edinburgh is top of the list, says Toby Sculthorp

34 SLEEPING WITH DOGS

Brian Sewell reminisces on a lifetime spent with dogs

51 END OF AN ERA

Brian MacArthur bids farewell to the print newspaper

55 A HARD-KNOCK LIFE Eric George in borstal DATES FOR THE 2014

44 AN ANGLICAN IN IRELAND or via our Oldie App at: http://bit.ly/OldieApp Cover illustration by Steven Appleby

Hugh O’Shaughnessy on the first woman bishop

!

CONFIRMED 24TH –28TH R BE EM PT SE

Me and my dogs: Brian Sewell on page 34

COME ON OUR WRITING COURSE How to write for magazines and newspapers SEE PAGE 66

CONTENTS

FEATURES & REGULARS 7 12 14 16 17 19 20 21 23 24 26 26 27 28 30 32 34 35 37 38 39 39 41 43 44 45 46

48 50 51 53 53 55 56 60 62 64 66 66 87 94

The Old Un’s Diary Still With Us...Peter Firmin Mind the Age Gap Lizzie Enfield Olden Life Who was... the Vanishing Vicar?

Modern Life What is... the Sunday Assembly?

Going to the Baths Roland Barnes Whiteboard Jungle Kate Sawyer I Once Met... Sir Robert Mayer World’s Worst Dumps Edinburgh House Husbandry Giles Wood God… Melanie McDonagh …Mammon Margaret Dibben Fashion Tamasin Doe On a Wild-Goose Chase Walter Ellis Living Hell Jeremy Lewis Dr Stuttaford’s Surgery Appendicitis Sleeping with Dogs Brian Sewell Wilfred De’Ath Off at last?

Superbyw@ys Webster Brief Encounters Nigel Fountain Notes from the Sofa Raymond Briggs Rant Linda Fawke East of Islington Sam Taylor Granny Annexe Virginia Ironside An Anglican in Ireland Hugh O’Shaughnessy Profitable Wonders James Le Fanu Roving Reporter John Sweeney

The War that Never Ends Andrew Hosken Readers’ Event: Loire Valley The End of an Era Brian MacArthur Ed Reardon’s Month Send Us Your Txt A Hard-Knock Life Eric George Readers Write Unwrecked England Candida Lycett Green Out and About Travel James Pettifer in Kurdish Turkey Oldie Literary Lunches Readers’ Event: Writing Course Pedants’ Revolt Dear Mavis Mavis Nicholson

BOOKS

78 79 80 80 81 82 82 83 87

THEATRE Paul Bailey OLDIE MASTERS Philip Athill GARDENING David Wheeler EXPAT Alyson Hilbourne MEMORIAL James Hughes-Onslow GOLF Peter Corrigan HOME FRONT Alice Pitman COOKERY Elisabeth Luard WINE Bill Knott

PLUS 84 86 86 88

CROSSWORDS Antico COMPETITION Tessa Castro SUDOKU CLASSIFIED

67 Andy McSmith on Tony Benn; Virginia Ironside on Vernon Scannell; Peter Lewis on Simon Heffer; Valerie Grove on ‘Her Brilliant Career’; Lucy Lethbridge on John Ruskin; Robin Brodhurst on the Great War; Rachel Redford reviews audiobooks

TELL A FRIEND –

REVIEWS

0845 286 3053

75 76 76 77 78

MUSIC Richard Osborne DVD John McEntee WIRELESS Valerie Grove TELEVISION Richard Ingrams FILM Marcus Berkmann

AMONG THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS a

WALTER ELLIS

BRIAN SEWELL

ROLAND BARNES

was born in Belfast in 1948 and is thus older than he would wish, but younger than he intends to become.

He worked for the Irish Times during the early years of the Troubles, then, after a lengthy stint in Europe, embarked on a Fleet Street career that might have been distinguished had it not ended in failure. He now lives in New York, writes books and navigates his way through the parlous US healthcare system: see page 28.

has been described as Britain’s most famous and controversial art critic. He studied at the Courtauld under the tutelage of Anthony Blunt, worked at Christie’s and now writes regularly for the London Evening Standard. He is the author of three volumes of autobiography, Outsider, Outsider II and, most recently, Sleeping with Dogs, which looks at the central role dogs have played in his life – see page 34.

worked as a psychiatric social worker in mental hospitals and community services, had a spell as an academic and later co-founded a company, Frontline Training, teaching a course called ‘Understanding Mental Illness’ to housing agency staff. He has published poetry and contributed articles to health, social services and housing journals.

See page 19 for his memories of Oldham’s Municipal Baths.

Next issue on sale Wednesday 5th February 2014

FREE SAMPLE COPY OF THE OLDIE

Do you have a friend who would like to see a sample copy of The Oldie? Then tell them to call to request a FREE SAMPLE COPY

SUBSCRIBE NOW GIVE A 12-ISSUE SUBSCRIPTION TO THE OLDIE AND GET TWO FREE BOOKS WORTH £17.98

SEE PAGE 21 FOR DETAILS

OR CALL 01795 592 893 OR VISIT www.theoldie.co.uk February 2014 – THE OLDIE

5

DIARY

The Old Un’s diary All the news that matters. And some that doesn’t Getting away with it?

Peverel, the retirement home management company, is fast becoming the Old Un’s bugbear. Readers will recall that Peverel’s subsidiary, Cirrus Communications Systems, had colluded with other firms between 2005 and 2009 to rig inflated quotes for services such as door entry systems in its retirement homes. The Office of Fair Trading recently delivered a damning ruling on Cirrus Communications Systems and its fake tendering process, which led to residents paying far more than necessary for their services. However, because Peverel notified the OFT of wrongdoing, following a Times investigation, it has not been fined a penny by the OFT or ordered to pay any compensation. By turning itself in, Peverel obtained immunity from financial penalties. The OFT is allowed to fine companies as much as 30 per cent of turnover in serious breaches of competition law. Cirrus’s turnover in 2009 was £14.3m, so it has escaped a potential bill of over £4m. Peverel has agreed to make some repayments, but is calling the money a ‘goodwill payment’ rather than compensation. The overall ‘goodwill’ payments will be around £100,000.

Sir Peter Bottomley, a fierce campaigner on leaseholders’ rights, has now sent an open letter to Janet Entwistle, the chief executive of Peverel, demanding

Ed Davey and Jim Fitzpatrick, MP for Limehouse and Poplar. Andy Davey, who was operations director at Cirrus from 2002 and head of Cirrus from 2007, has since

By turning itself in, Peverel obtained immunity from financial penalties, escaping a potential bill of over £4 million higher compensation to sites cheated in the Cirrus cartel, or acceptance of independent binding mediation. The letter is backed by Energy Secretary

been promoted to Director of Business Excellence for Peverel. Sebastian O’Kelly of Carlex (Campaign Against Retirement Leasehold

Exploitation) says: ‘The OFT and government need to understand how appalled retirement residents, and others, are at this feeble so-called investigation. The leniency deal with Peverel is based on fiction and is an utter disgrace.’

Splitting our Heritage Anyone who cares about historic buildings should be concerned to learn of the Government’s plans for the future of English Heritage. Yet it has taken Loyd Grossman, who is both a saucy television presenter and an American, to go public about the goings-on. As chair of a group called Heritage Alliance, Grossman has publicly described the Culture Department’s handling of the consultation over the future of English Heritage as ‘shoddy’ and ‘insulting’, adding that the consultation affects ‘anyone who has anything to do with listed buildings’. The newly published consultation document reveals that the government want to split English Heritage in two, with one body looking after the organisation’s estate and the other taking on its regulatory role as the Government’s statutory advisor on listed buildings and conservation matters. The historic buildings February 2014 – THE OLDIE

7

ILLUSTRATION BY HEATH

Dunroamin

★ Great Bores of Today ★ No.67 ‘You’ve simply got to meet Melinda she speaks God knows how many languages fluently and is so funny honestly Melinda has you in stitches and you can’t believe what an incredible life she’s had all over the word her husband Tom’s a banker and works in America half the year she’s got something to do with investment funds in Oman or somewhere she sails and plays polo and she’s a wonderful cook we had dinner there last week and she made

the most amazing paella Melinda really is such fun and is marvellous company the children absolutely adore her I’m going to make it my business to bring you two together when she eventually gets back from China where she’s setting up an international conference for heads of the motoring industry or something when she comes back we must all get together you’ll really love her...’ © Fant and Dick

section will retain the name English Heritage, while the conservation watchdog will glory in the title Historic England – a recipe for chaos and confusion in itself. The historic estate is expected to survive on a one-off ‘dowry’ of £85 million and thereafter be self-funding, which seems a highly optimistic plan. The scheme was the brainchild of English Heritage chief executive Simon Thurley, the £163,000-a-year executioner of the much-loved Blue Plaques.

8

THE OLDIE – February 2014

Oldies with one foot in the grave who don’t fancy toughing out eternity under a bunch of wilted flowers in a municipal cemetery, or having their ashes blown who knows where, might find inspiration from the example of Patricia Waters, 81, who recently buried her husband Eddie, 87, in their back garden. The landed gentry have for centuries had private chapels and burial grounds next to their country mansions where they could inter their relatives and favoured gun dogs; Princess Diana was famously buried on an island in an ornamental lake at the Spencer family’s country seat at Althorp in Northamptonshire. But what makes the case of the Waters, both retired teachers, so unusual is that Eddie’s last resting place is in the garden of a semi-detached house in a built-up area of the small Midlands town of Kidderminster. The undertakers who laid Eddie to rest say it is the first time they have buried anyone in a residential property, and it might prove a precedent.

There were inevitably a few bureaucratic considerations to be sorted; burials in gardens were made legal by the Burial Laws Amendment Act of 1880, but the local authorities were contacted to make sure no regional infringements occurred – the proximity of wells, bore holes and standing water is one consideration – and Mrs Waters checked that the neighbours didn’t mind.

It is also a good idea to alert the police to ensure, in the words of the local guidelines for burials on private land, that there is no suspicion of ‘illegal activity’.

Mrs Waters said, ‘People who have spent a lot of time in their gardens sometimes just want to rest in peace

DIARY

JUNE AND GERALD by NAF

Not many dead Important stories you may have missed

amongst their flowers. If people want to keep their beloved with them, why not?’ The undertakers dug the grave, and she conducted the funeral service herself in the presence of about a dozen relatives after the priest fell ill at the last minute.

She hopes she will eventually join Eddie in the garden. She accepts that the presence of a double grave might affect the value of the house – but then that won’t be her worry.

Lamb’s Tales Oldie cartoonist Kathryn Lamb will be having an exhibition of some of her best cartoons from The Oldie, Private Eye and the Spectator at St Hugh’s College, Oxford from January 19th 2014 to

the end of March. All original artwork will be on sale.

Kathryn read English at St Hugh’s from 1979– 1981, drawing for student magazines and submitting cartoons to Private Eye while still at Oxford. She draws the Fattypuffs strip and illustrates the Not Many Dead column (see right) for The Oldie.

For more information on the exhibition, email develop ment.office@st-hughs.ox.ac. uk or ring 01865 274 958.

Scam of the Month Reader Roger Holden sent us his account of a sophisticated scam: ‘Thieves order top-ofthe-range mobile phones in your name, on an expensive two-year contract, using fake

‘Let’s get the mutual loathing out of the way first, shall we?’

bank details. The phone company sends the phones to your home address and you sign for delivery. You open the packages and are confused as you did not order the phones. Five minutes later your phone rings (number withheld), a voice says there has been a delivery made to you by mistake and they are coming to pick the parcel up again. A man comes to collect the phones and takes them away. You are a bit puzzled because it is not the same man as the one who made the delivery. You then realise that you have signed for receipt of £1,000 worth of phones and subsequently handed them over at the door to a complete stranger.’ Fortunately Mr Holden had heard of the scam and did not hand over the phones. ‘It was a near miss.

The scam works because phone companies send out phones without proper checks and the thieves can track the deliveries online and so know exactly when to telephone. The biggest surprise for me in the whole episode was the attitude of the mobile phone company.

I phoned them within minutes of the episode happening, which might have given an opportunity to intercept any other deliveries of multiple mobiles to innocent people.

They refused to transfer me to their fraud and crime department, saying I would

Mystery surrounds what happened to cakes and cold snacks for players and officials that disappeared during a match at Malvern Town Football Club.

Malvern Gazette and Ledbury Reporter The jury could not see the five-inch heels on the knee-length boots beneath Ms Lawson’s skirt.

The Times report on the trial of Nigella Lawson’s former assistants Tiger Not Sighted The Hindu A defendant failed to show up to his scheduled bail hearing at Newport Crown Court on time today because he was locked in a toilet in Wilkinson.

South Wales Argus £25 for published contributions

THE OLDIE APP The Oldie is now available in a digital format for iPhone or iPad. See: http://bit.ly/OldieApp Or for Android via Exactly at: http://bit.ly/exactlyandroid February 2014 – THE OLDIE

9

DIARY

be contacted within five days to resolve my problem. I felt like screaming down the line that it was their problem, not my problem, but felt the restraining influence of my dear wife. The phones are now on their way back, but not until I had taken photographs of the (legitimate) driver and his van.’

when Graham finally updated his register of interests, he also found time to update the register of gifts and hospitalities. This showed that Graham was the guest of St George at the posh Mayor’s Charity Dinner in November.

Trebles all round!

Just fancy that!

Who was what?

1. Eleanor Parker a. The Baroness in The Sound of Music b. Wife of Robert B Parker who inspired his great female detective Sunny Randall c. Australian ornithologist who discovered the extinct Kangaroo Island emu 2. Penn Kimball a. Scientist who built the first sensory deprivation tank b. Journalist who sued the US government for labelling him a security risk c. Prison guard at the infamous 1932 Dartmoor Prison riot who went on to become its governor 3. Baby Jake Matlala a. The world’s shortest boxer and friend of Mandela

Back in April 2013, Hammersmith and Fulham Tory councillor Peter Graham started working for lobbying outfit Four Communications, which has Berkeley Homes on its client list. It took Graham more than eight months to update his register of interests at the town hall. Berkeley Homes is the parent company of St George, the firm behind the Fulham Reach development of luxurious apartments. Despite the fact that many local residents are vociferously opposed to the huge riverside development, it has received the enthusiastic support of the Fulham Reach ward councillor, one Peter Graham. It’s good to see that

The Obituary Game

Spike Milligan (left) and Peter O’Toole at the Oldie of the Year Awards in 2000

b. Bebop trumpeter and heir apparent to Dizzy Gillespie c. Detroit’s first black mayor

Myth-busting Peter O’Toole Peter O’Toole, who has died aged 81, was a devoted fan of The Oldie and a frequent attender at our Oldie Literary Lunches and ‘Oldie of the Year’ occasions at Simpson’sin-the-Strand. He once had Irish stew accidentally poured

What were you doing 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 or 70 years ago?

This month’s £50 prize goes to Heidi Tarr

60

years ago I married a young Army officer in Bournemouth. After seven years as a forces wife, my husband left the Army and we bought an old lodge with a garden bursting with greenery. Our garden stretched along part of the quiet main road which connected the sleepy town of Wokingham with the small village of Bracknell. One week the local paper had a most interesting item. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip would be driving along that road, past our house, on their way to inspect an award-winning housing estate. I could hardly believe it! A date was mentioned and a time. I could barely contain my excitement. On

10

THE OLDIE – February 2014

the day, I put on my best dress and went outside to see where I ought to position myself, expecting that by now a few neighbours would have shown up with flags and flowers. But it was as quiet as ever. Perhaps they were all at work, I thought. I stood on the grass verge looking up and down that empty road. I was overcome with shame: I stood there as the personification of no respect; I had let down the Royal couple. There was only me waiting, feeling guilty. At last, in the distance, a limousine appeared with the Queen and Prince Philip, straight out of a fairy story. I didn’t dare to lift an arm in greeting as it quietly drove past. It was all left to me and I failed. Back in the house I cried my eyes out.

over him by a waiter. Our Memorial correspondent James Hughes-Onslow leaped to the rescue. The following day, Simpson’s rang to apologise, and offered him a free meal. ‘Why would I want to go back there?’ he said. ‘I’d be too scared.’

The obituaries have mostly fallen back on the tabloid cliché ‘hell-raiser’ to describe O’Toole. It was a point raised by our own Mavis Nicholson in an interview in July 1996: O’T: Oh what a bore that is, what a bore!

Mavis: Do you think you were one?

O’T: What I think we were doing was looking for a kind of paradise. We weren’t looking for a hell.

Mavis: You had to give up booze, I read.

O’T: That’s another myth.

No, I chose to. Didn’t like the effect on me any more. But to the chaps and girls who get it right, rock on, I say.

According to Candida Lycett Green, The Oldie’s Unwrecked England columnist, O’Toole ‘rocked on’ himself. She remembers ‘escaping to the pub once after an Oldie lunch, where we laughed and flirted til 9pm. He didn’t want to leave the pub, but his daughter

DIARY

– who was scouring old haunts looking for him – found him and ordered him home.’

THAMSANQA JANTJIE

Rowan Williams at one of The Oldie’s December literary lunches

A taxing issue Vodafone is well known for not paying tax in the UK, but at least it is handing out money to shareholders – £51 billion no less. The windfall comes from selling its stake in the American company Verizon for £79 billion, one of the biggest corporate deals the world has ever seen. But while Vodafone knows how to avoid tax, and won’t be paying any to the UK Treasury this time either, shareholders are not so lucky.

Many will face tax bills unless they make the right choice about how they receive the payment.

Time is running out and Vodafone shareholders who have

★★★★★ OLDIE EXCLUSIVE ★★★★★ GYLES BRANDRETH TICKET OFFER

GYLES BRANDRETH is inviting Oldie readers to a special performance of his sell-out show, Looking for Happiness, on Saturday May 10th at the Leicester Square Theatre. When Brandreth set out to find the seven secrets of happiness, he started in Las Vegas and ended up in the psychiatrist’s chair. What he discovered about who gets to be happy and how, plus other useful lessons picked up along the way, from Frank Sinatra and the Queen among others, provides the essence of a unique one-man show that should make you laugh, and could change your life. Tickets are £35 and include a free glass of wine during the interval plus the opportunity to meet Gyles Brandreth after the show.

Either go online at www.leicestersquaretheatre.com and type in the code ‘Oldie offer’, or call 08448 733 433 and quote ‘Oldie offer’.

not responded to the information pack sent out before Christmas should look it out now.

Festive literary lunches With two events in the space of a week, December is The Oldie’s bumper literary lunch month of the year. This year’s festive guests included Rowan Williams on God and spirituality, and Robert Peston, who described the way we’ve been running the global economy as ‘pretty odd’. David Kynaston, talking about Modernity Britain, gave us a snapshot of modern British history, and Brian Sewell recounted a life spent with dogs (see page 34).

The lunch crowd erupted in laughter when speaker Gyles Brandreth commented, ‘How lovely it is to be here and what a relief it is to see so many delightful, warm, generous faces: I work at the BBC so many of my friends have been arrested. I’m actually tagged myself… but that is entirely for domestic reasons.’

Terry Wogan read out some less than effusive – but rather funny – Radio 2 fan mail: ‘I should make it clear at the outset that I don’t listen to your programme from choice: it’s just that I give my son and his 18-year-old daughter a lift to school every morning and they refuse to listen to Radio 4, I refuse to listen to Radio 1; consequently we listen to Radio 2, thereby ensuring that no one is happy.’

CHUMPFILE

December’s Oldie included an interview with Nicholas Parsons on celebrating his ninetieth year. ‘How lucky I am still to be working,’ Parsons told our interviewer as he discussed his work as a presenter on Radio 4’s Just a Minute and his Edinburgh Festival show. An eagle-eyed Oldie reader pointed out one job that Parsons didn’t bring up in our interview; his recent voiceover for the well-known payday money lender Wonga.

The company, which has been attacked for its high interest rates, promotes easyaccess cash. Gillian Guy, chief executive of Citizens Advice Bureaux, has asked celebrities to stop lending their star power to promote lenders such as Wonga. ‘Up and down the country, bureaux are helping people who are swamped with debt after a small, short-term loan ballooned into a longterm financial nightmare.’

★ Mandela signing fiasco 100% ★ Self-described schizophrenic 95% ★ Visions of angels 97% ★ Part of necklace murder gang? 83% ★ Moon face and bald pate 99% ★ Crazy name 90% ★ Violent episodes 93%

ATTENTION SUBSCRIBERS!

We have now improved our digital version of The Oldie. Digital versions will provide access to back issues.

HOW TO ACCESS ALL THIS Step 1: Go to www.theoldie.co.uk Step 2: Click on ‘subscribers Log in’ in the top right-hand corner Step 3: Click on ‘Back Issues’ option Step 4: Enter your ‘WebID’* (which is the 8-digit alphanumeric IDEAL FOR code that is printed above your OVERSEAS AN name and address on the D POORLYcarrier sheet which covers SIGHTED your magazine SUBSCRIBERS Step 5: Enter your email address Step 6: Enter a password

* IF YOU HAVE THROWN YOUR CARRIER SHEET AWAY call +44 (0)1795 592 893 for your subscriber ID. Lines are open from 8.00am to 8.00pm (GMT) Monday to Friday. Or email your request to oldie@servicehelpline.co.uk remembering to clearly state your name and address

This month’s contributors include: Mira Bar-Hillel, Martin Stote, Stephen Heath and Margaret Dibben The diary is edited by Sarah Shannon. Please send any contributions to her, care of: The Old Un’s Diary, The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG, or email diary@theoldie.co.uk Obit Game answer: Answers: 1, a.

2, b. 3, a.

PHOTOGRAPHS OF OLDIE LUNCHES BY NEIL SPENCE: WWW.NEILSPENCEPHOTOGRAPHY.COM

Parsons’ displeasure

February 2014

– THE OLDIE

11

Still With Us

PETER FIRMIN Alice Pitman met the artist and puppet maker, co-creator of the Pogles, Noggin

I

N 1958 Peter Firmin was a lecturer at the Central School of Art and Design when he was approached by ‘a rather posh gentleman who said he was looking for someone to illustrate a television story’.

The gentleman was Oliver Postgate, a stage manager at Associated-Rediffusion. Unimpressed by the quality of children’s television at the time, he had come up with his own creation, Alexander the Mouse (who sets out to find his roots and discovers a royal lineage).

Cartoonist John Glashan was originally hired to illustrate the stories, but the two men didn’t get on, both having very strong ideas about how the mice should look. Oliver was told if he didn’t want Glashan he would have to find his own artist.

‘I was a bit snobby about television in those days,’ chortles Peter. ‘We didn’t own one – and I thought it was coming down in the world to be a TV artist.

But I needed the money, so I said I’d do it.’

What should have been a six-week job became a hugely successful partnership.

They went on to form Smallfilms and for the next three decades crafted some

12

THE OLDIE – February 2014

Clockwise from left: Peter and his wife Joan; Noggin the Nog; Basil Brush; the Clangers; Ivor the Engine with Jones the Steam and Idris the Dragon; Bagpuss

of the best-loved children’s television of all time. Oliver wrote the script and narrated and Peter illustrated the characters and made the puppets. Their programmes became so deeply embedded in the psyche of generations of British children that the faces of young- and middle-aged adults light up with delight at the mention of Pogles’ Wood, Noggin the Nog or The Clangers.

P

eter and I are having coffee by a blazing woodburning stove in the cosy front room at his farmhouse in Blean, Kent where he and his wife Joan have lived for the last fifty or so years. My dog (whom Peter has kindly invited in from the car) and his Jack Russell, Tiny Tim, make each other’s acquaintance as Peter relates how he and Joan met. ‘We were both at the same art college. One day we went to a wallpaper exhibition together and on the bus on the way I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.’ Within two weeks they were engaged. They went on to have six daughters and celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary last year

PhotograpHs COURTESY OF Toby Melville/PA Archive/Press Association Images, PETER FIRMINN AND ALICE PITMAN

the Nog and the Clangers, to talk about his relationship with Oliver Postgate, television then and now – and the forthcoming Clangers revival

FIDDLESTICKS AND FLAPDOODLE!

with a big marquee in the garden. ‘I presented Joan with an engagement ring as the first time round the ring turned out to be a mourning ring!’

A gentle and modest man, Peter – a youthful 85 – seems to delight in the artistic achievements of his daughters more than in his own. An impressively eclectic mix of their prints and hand-painted china decorates the farmhouse (his daughter Hannah did the jacket illustrations for Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series). En-route to the bathroom, I spy one of Peter’s most famous creations, Bagpuss ‘the saggy old cloth cat’, on a chair in a back room. (In 1999 Bagpuss came top of a BBC poll as the nation’s favourite children’s programme of all time.)

Although he and Oliver Postgate (who died in 2008) were equal partners, Peter was very much the unsung hero of the two. Oliver deservedly received much acclaim for devising, scripting and narrating their animation masterpieces, yet the characters would never have proved as appealing without Peter’s creative and imaginative input.

Was it an amicable working partnership?

‘Oh Oliver was lovely to work with. I had no problems with him at all. We always got on. I mean we had arguments from time to time, but we always respected each other’s point of view. And yet we were very different. Oliver was from a very intellectual family [his grandfather was the Labour politician George Lansbury, his father a journalist and writer]. They were a very literary family whereas mine were largely craftsmen.

We had the complete works of Dickens and that was about it [it was Cruickshank’s Dickens illustrations that made Essex boy Peter want to be an illustrator]. But Oliver and I just clicked, mainly because our tastes were so similar.’

O

ne of the things they agreed on was the parlous state of children’s television in those early years.

‘We didn’t like television talking down to children, or making the characters look cute. We were against that whole idea of trying to find out what children liked. Oliver always had this thing where he didn’t care what children liked. He did what he felt was right and the children either had to like it or not.’

Of all their creations, Peter is most proud of Nog. The story was inspired by the Noggin the Nog Norse chessmen in the British Museum. ‘I wrote the original saga, but it didn’t come to anything. Oliver had seen these chessmen and also thought they were fantastic little characters. He looked at what I’d written and said “Why don’t we try this for the BBC?”’ He added more characters, injected his own brand of wit, and the BBC commissioned it. ‘Between that and Ivor the Engine we were quite busy for some time. We did everything: annuals, books, comics – once you’ve got things on television it all takes off.’

Aside from his work with Oliver, Peter created Basil Brush, the subversive upper-class fox. Peter modelled Basil on the film star Terry-Thomas, even incorporating the distinctive gap between his two upper front teeth, and he made the first puppet using a real fox tail. Basil was voiced by Ivan Owen until Owen’s death in 2000. ‘Ivan was originally an actor, though not a very successful one. He had a rather neurotic and weird persona that was absolutely perfect for Basil. I was merely Basil’s dentist and tailor,’ he adds with a laugh.

After lunch at a nearby pub, Peter shows me round the large, rather chilly barn next to his farmhouse where all the Smallfilm productions were made. (‘Come on, dogs,’ he calls, ‘the Clangers are waiting!’) The place is an Aladdin’s cave of

Of all their creations, Peter is most proud of Noggin the Nog. The story was inspired by the Norse chessmen in the British Museum TV memorabilia and artistic endeavour: original Ivor the Engine illustrations here, a drawer full of Peter’s charming landscape and sailing prints there (a tall-ship enthusiast, he sailed across the Baltic in 2009). And perhaps the jewel in the crown: a box containing the original Clangers (famously knitted by Joan from vibrant pink wool). They are still sporting their groovy little 1969 waistcoats inspired by the ones Twiggy wore: ‘Joan sewed them on her new zigzag sewing machine.’

Peter stands Major Clanger, the Soup Dragon and the Iron Chicken (made from Meccano) on the same work table where they were filmed on

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

13

Oliver’s single-frame camera all those years ago. His enthusiasm and affection for these small creatures is evident.

What does Peter make of the Clangers revival (52 episodes, due for transmission on CBeebies and the American kids channel Sprout in 2015)?

Won’t its soul be lost without Postgate’s soft, melodic narration?

‘Yes, in a way that’s very true,’ agrees Peter. ‘But Dan [Oliver’s son, who is involved in the venture] is a very good writer himself. He’s also an illustrator... he’s done some very nice children’s books.’

They haven’t yet decided who will take Oliver’s place. People like Michael Palin and Bill Bailey have been suggested.

Peter is not all that keen on Stephen Fry: ‘He’s too powerful...’

D

espite his loyalty to the project, I detect faint bewilderment at the amount of time and expense that has gone into making it. ‘When you think it took us a few hundred to make an episode of The Clangers and if we wanted to introduce a new character, I’d spend a day or two making it from what I could find lying around in the barn...’ (which explains why the Spaceman who landed on the Clangers’ small rocky planet collected his rock samples in a wicker basket). ‘Whereas now they might say, well you can’t have that character because it will cost another five thousand.

And then there are so many people to go through, experts, and what have you...’

Perhaps this accounts for the enduring appeal of The Clangers, Noggin the Nog and co. That these unique creations should spring from a rather bonkers English cottage industry in a converted cowshed in Kent is incredibly endearing in an age of big money and flashy production. Oliver and Peter made something from nothing, using their ingenuity, with not a focus group or committee in sight. Their stories may seem slow-paced by today’s standards, but it’s perhaps this very simplicity that proves so reassuring in a world where young children are increasingly bombarded with frenetic animation.

What does Peter think was the key to their success? He puts the Clangers back in their box and considers for a moment.

‘Well, Oliver and I kept on going, just coming up with new ideas. We did what pleased us.’

We leave the barn and return to the farmhouse, where Joan is waiting by the fireside with a fresh pot of coffee.

14

THE OLDIE – February 2014

Lizzie Enfield ‘WHAT SORT OF a name is that?’ is a phrase used by my mother when she hears about anyone called anything unusual.

Often their names are not that unusual, it’s just that Mum is still rooted in the past, when people were called Susan and Dennis. Or sometimes it’s because she has simply misheard what was actually said.

My daughter was once talking about her friend Esther but my mother thought she said something else.

‘Asda?’ she asked, outraged that anyone would name their child after a supermarket. ‘What sort of a name is that?’

‘Not Asda. Esther.’ Daughter tried to correct her but she was having none of it.

‘It’s not fair to saddle your child with a name like that.’

‘Aldi’s a lovely name for boy,’ I say, mainly to wind her up...

I once wrote a piece about how your name affected your personality.

A psychologist had spent a few years researching this and concluded that it varied, depending on… your personality.

I discovered a couple of people who had chosen names for their children which they hoped would attract freebies. There was the Martin family who’d named their daughter Remy – they got a bottle. Had they had a son they’d have called him Aston and hoped for better things.

My husband’s surname is Perrin. We could have called one of daughters Leanne and got a bottle too, but to be honest, we’re not that keen on Worcestershire sauce.

Apprentice participant Katie Hopkins recently found herself at the centre of a storm when she professed a disliking for ‘lower-class’ names and said she would not let her children play with others with names like Chardonnay or Tyler.

I am old enough to play with whoever I like, whatever their names, but not always without a comment from my parents.

‘My friend Byron...’ I begin to tell my parents, but I don’t get very far.

I was going to tell them that he cooks for and owns a restaurant in Brighton called Indian Summer, that his parents escaped from Burma in a handmade wooden aeroplane and his business

partner made prosthetic limbs before he turned his hand to cooking – it’s a good story and a nice restaurant. I get interrupted before I get as far as the great escape from Burma.

‘Byron!’ my mother says, indignantly.

‘Is that his first name?’

‘I expect he was named after Lord Byron.’ My father is fan of the poet.

‘Yes, but that’s a surname,’ says Mum. ‘It’s a very common first name in America,’ I tell her.

‘Well it would be, wouldn’t it?’ she says.

I like choosing names for characters in my books. Proper oldies need names like Gladys, Beryl, Cyril or Norman. I have a friend called Norman. He says people who have not met him tend to assume he’s ten or twenty years older than he actually is, albeit he calls himself Norm the way younger Jeremys call themselves Jez. A friend recently had a baby and when she told her mother its name, she replied ‘What sort of name is that for a baby?’ She thought it was too old and too immutable for someone so young, and that the baby needed a name which could change through life. Elizabeth is a good name on that score. I always think of Lizzie as being a child’s name and wonder if I should at some point morph into an Elizabeth, which might lend me a little more gravitas. But having come this far without much, it’s unlikely to strike now, so I’ve stuck with the name for a small girl with pigtails.

My daughter, Kitty, finds the opposite to be true.

‘How come the only other Kittys we ever come across are people’s incredibly ancient old aunts?’ she asks.

‘Possibly because you were named after an aunt,’ I say.

‘Better than being named after a horse.’

My parents were stuck for inspiration by the time they got to me. My older sister was having riding lessons on a horse called Elizabeth when I was born.

Sometimes people with poor hearing think I was named after a whore, however unlikely that seems.

It’s almost as unlikely as naming your child after a supermarket.

ANYTHING FOR LOVE

Olden life

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF Rogers Photo Archive / Keystone Media

Who was… the Vanishing Vicar?

On 19TH November 1956 the boot of a small car was flung open, and there, in a foetal position with his Homburg at his feet, lay the Rev Philip St John Wilson Ross, of Woodford in Cheshire.

As he clambered out he told a pack of journalists, ‘It’s finished. The game’s up.

Now you can all go to hell.’

Four weeks later he was found guilty at the Consistory Court in Chester of abandoning his living ‘in such circumstances as to deceive all whom it might concern into believing that he was dead’, and of committing habitual adultery. He was deprived of his living and unfrocked, and fined £50 at Liverpool Magistrates’ Court for using a parishioner’s birth certificate to apply for a passport. He had also signed a photograph of himself as a likeness of Sydney Davies, a high-living denizen of Knightsbridge.

How had a much-respected vicar, a wartime army chaplain who once castigated me for failing to remember my catechism, come to worldwide notoriety and shame?

In the early morning of 12th August 1955 his wife Eileen found his clothes on the beach at Rhiw in Wales. The couple were on their summer holiday, and the vicar had failed to return from his habitual early morning swim. Mrs Ross assumed her husband had been washed out to sea. A search was mounted, but after three days there was still no sign of the missing vicar.

The parishioners of Woodford held a memorial service, planted a garden in his memory, and raised £600 towards buying a house for his devoted widow.

Life insurance of £1,800 was paid, and the church granted Mrs Ross a pension.

In October 1956 he was sighted in a hotel in Switzerland, and the following day an actress told the press that a man

16

THE OLDIE – February 2014

The vicar’s squeeze, Mrs Kathleen Ryall

living near her in Knightsbridge was the missing vicar. A young woman called Wendy Ryall then confirmed that Mr Ross was indeed alive. ‘He is with my mother,’ she said. The vicar and her 52-year-old mother, Kathleen Ryall, the wealthy owner of a Manchester engineering firm and one of his parishioners, had fallen in love while arranging her husband’s funeral. For six months before his disappearance, Mr Ross had been driven by Mrs Ryall’s chauffeur to visit her every day, and had talked of ‘getting away from everything’ with her.

Apparently the vicar had walked through the sea so as to leave no footprints before picking up clothes hidden

at the end of the beach. He had then telephoned Mrs Ryall, begging her to join him in London.

Mr Ross became known around the world as ‘the Vanishing Vicar’. Woodford was besieged by journalists – as was the Hotel Continental in Montreux, where the couple were staying. When news reached them that their secret was out they made a hurried getaway. Mr Ross rang their housekeeper in England to tell her to burn his diary, but their photograph album fell into the clutches of journalists and snaps of the couple’s time together rolled off the presses. Mrs Ryall returned by car to England without Mr Ross. ‘He has the face of a saint,’ she sobbed to the Daily Mirror.

Mrs Ryall collapsed and was taken to a London nursing home after claiming ‘He is the only man I’ll ever love.’ ‘We still love him dearly,’ Mrs Ross retaliated.

‘Doubly-beloved’, as Time magazine put it, Mr Ross flew back to London and went into hiding in the Oxfordshire countryside. But the press were waiting for him as he tried to escape in a friend’s car boot. He was discovered when the car stalled, and his humiliation was complete.

Mrs Ryall died four years later. She had continued to share her life with Mr Ross in a mews house in Paddington, and in her will she left him the lease of the house together with £10,000. He was not at her funeral, but at their country home in Suffolk, a wooden bungalow in the 11-acre grounds of a burnt-out former manor house. He hoped to open a caravan park and become a chicken farmer. ‘Chickens are the thing,’ he said.

He died there in 1976. robin houston

‘These are his faults, in no particular order...’

c o m e to g ethe r !

Modern life

What is… the Sunday Assembly?

A church that is not a church, open to a ‘godless congregation’ that does not necessarily believe in Heaven or Hell, the Sunday Assembly gathers twice a month in order to offer the feelgood community aspect of religion to non-believers.

Starting out at a 200-seat former church in North London in January 2013, its founders, comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, didn’t know what to expect. The first assembly was packed to the rafters (people were even sitting in the aisles) and now the Sunday Assembly has not only expanded to Conway Hall in Central London but has also gone national.

Jones and Evans lead the alternative ‘secular service’ (how often do you hear a sermon that says there’s definitely no afterlife?) and those who gather listen to uplifting talks on such subjects as developing an ‘attitude to gratitude’.

A band with a guitar and flute leads the congregation in joyous clapping and songs by Stevie Wonder and Queen.

Readings include passages from Alice In Wonderland and presentations cover secular topics such as antimatter theory. There is a moment to greet your neighbour and sit in thoughtful silence.

Each Assembly has a theme, like ‘beginnings’ or ‘wonder’, chosen in order to prove that atheists can have an opinion on either. The message is to ‘live better, help often and wonder more’ and the mission is to show atheists the social good many churches do, such as working with community projects.

The doors are open to anyone: disillusioned former believers and nostalgic atheists as well as the simply curious, and the atmosphere is jovial thanks to the boho, easygoing, youngish crowd. ‘It is part foot-stomping show, part atheist church, all celebration of life,’ explains the bearded Jones, who has

‘I like that one’

always suspected that he is not the only one to regret that his lack of faith excluded him from a church-style community.

In the last census, the number of people declaring themselves to be of ‘no religion’ in England and Wales increased to 14.1 million, making England and Wales two of the most unreligious nations in the Western world. No wonder then that the assemblies have captured the zeitgeist of the modern age.

The idea of people who are not religious but want to maintain a sense of community is not entirely new. In the late nineteenth century ‘ethical unions’ were founded in response to the growing atheism of the times. These unions also concentrated on good works and community, but eventually petered out.

More recently the popular philosopher Alain de Botton has been writing and talking about his Manifesto for Atheists, a list of ten virtues including resilience and humour. He came up with the idea in response to a growing sense that

being virtuous has become a ‘strange and depressing notion’. He argues for a new breed of therapists to take the place of priests and believes atheism should have its own churches. But he says it should never be called a church because ‘“atheism” isn’t an ideology around which anyone could gather’. So far, the Sunday Assembly seems to be proving de Botton wrong on that last point.

There are those who worry that the assemblies might turn cultish, revolving around one hairy, charismatic leader, but to Jones there is nothing remotely cultish about these godless gatherings. ‘I get very excited about things,’ he explains, ‘and want to share that with people.’

In the meantime, a few members of the London congregation have started talking about setting up a school guided

by Sunday Assembly principles, raising the possibility, as Jones notes, ‘of Christians one day lying about being atheists to get their children into school’. sonia zhuravlyova

Sanderson Jones leads the sing-song at a Sunday Assembly

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

17

F E AT U R E

GOING TO THE BATHS Roland Barnes remembers post-war visits to the Municipal Baths in Oldham Illustrated by Peter Bailey

I

n the post-war years I used to visit the Municipal Baths and Washhouse on Heron Street in Oldham, which contained a row of slipper baths. These gave me the kind of privacy impossible from a stand-up wash in a zinc bath by the fireside, with grandma bumbling in and out.

But keeping clean was a complicated business.

To gain admission the bather had to pay at a turnstile, passage of which gave access to a long corridor with numbered cubicles down one side; along with the cubicle key came a bath towel and a piece of soap. Inside was a large cast-iron bath with water spout but no taps, the water itself delivered by an attendant with a large spanner who turned it on and off by manipulating a set of valves located on the wall outside. If, once undressed, the customer found the water temperature not to his liking, he had to call out in a loud voice, ‘Hot water for number five please’. On a busy night with all the cubicles occupied, there was constant calling for the attendant and audible grumbling and cursing when hot water failed to flow.

Getting the right temperature could take some time, especially on Fridays, which was universal bath night.

Friday was also a popular night in the swimming pool, where youths from houses without hot water spruced themselves up for the weekend. There I taught myself to swim by pushing off from the sandstone steps in the shallow end until I reached the other side without touching the bottom. As soon as I could swim freely about the pool, my presence provided the opportunity for a gang of older children to throw me into the deep end, though they were considerate enough to watch me come up gasping for air before struggling for the safety of the steps.

The plunge was always freezing cold, the only relief a domestic-sized hot water bath at one end of the changing cubicles where shivering boys, lips turned blue with cold, huddled together to keep warm. Changes of water were

infrequent as this operation depended on the efforts of the same overworked man with the spanner who ran the slipper baths, and it was always at best only lukewarm. Little boys were never left in peace for long as some youthful joker would inevitably poke his finger into the stew and cry out ‘Shit!’, which cleared the bath instantly, providing the opportunity for the youth and his mates to climb in. It worked every time. On their way out at closing time, these same youths purchased a pennyworth of Brylcreem from the dispensing machine in the foyer and preened themselves in the mottled mirror on the wall alongside it, leaving cleaner and smarter than when they came in.

Adults in working-class communities didn’t go swimming in those days, not even at the seaside. We only ever saw two men without their clothes on. One was the father of a girl of our age called Nellie from Top o’ th’ Green. An extroverted ex-seaman, he entertained us by walking around the pool on his hands and flexing his tattooed biceps for us to admire before toppling gracefully into the water. We didn’t get the chance to see women in swimsuits because the municipal pools were strictly segregated.

Mixed bathing was not introduced to Oldham Central Baths until the summer of 1952, and then only for three days a week.

It was Friday night when ‘Pop’ Holloway came for his swim.

Pop Holloway was a ruddy-faced middle-aged man, habitually dressed in tweed jacket and cavalry twill trousers. Without clothes he was a short bloke with blotchy skin, a pot belly and thin legs who came for a swim just before closing time, although he didn’t appear to spend much time in the water.

When we were towelling ourselves dry beside the curtained cubicles on the poolside, he hovered about talking to boys he knew. With everyone fully dressed and ready to go, we swarmed round him in the hope of being taken to the chip shop next to the Smut Inn, where he bought threepenny bags of chips for a chosen few. What would we make of him today?

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

19

the f a c t s o f li f e

Whiteboard jungle KAte Sawyer

When a lesson on Romeo and Juliet turned into a lesson on life

Illustrated by PETER BAILEY

S

he was sitting up straight, huge blue eyes looking directly at me, drinking in every important word I had to say about Tybalt. And then she spoke. ‘Miss, why do people have to be so selfish and cruel?’ and her big eyes filled with tears. For some reason I was really shocked.

Not so much because she wasn’t thinking about Tybalt – that’s a daily problem, after all – but because it seemed to be such a direct and personal appeal.

My own eyes filled with tears and I rushed to reassure her that there were good people in the world. The class was completely silent. It’s a girls only, year eleven class, absolutely full of angst as they come to their GCSEs, worried about their decisions for next year, about their lives in general.

We learned her story. It was all about some boy who had done her wrong in the classic old way. With her best friend. An old story, but new to her, and therein lay its power.

We dropped all discussion of Tybalt.

Twenty girls and one woman discussed love, relationships and men, and had Ofsted walked in I would have been dead in the water. Or would I? Certainly we were miles from the Learning Objective so proudly displayed on the board. No progress had been made in the analysis of how Lurhmann had depicted Tybalt in his adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.

(Because we don’t analyse the play anymore, we analyse a film adaptation thereof.) The Learning Objective was forgotten, Shakespeare was forgotten, but a real discussion was had. We used words which would have had me

20

THE OLDIE – February 2014

collecting my P45 in short order. Words like Right and Wrong and Self-respect.

I did not tell them they shouldn’t sleep with their boyfriends at fifteen, I just asked them to think about the issues around it. I did not stick with what we are meant to teach them – condoms, STDs, pregnancies. They know all that, have had it dinned into them since before they hit puberty. We talked about how they viewed boys, and how they thought boys viewed girls. We talked about how they imagined their mothers at their ages, and whether they would like to imagine their mothers behaving as some of their friends do now.

Of course I did not ask any personal questions at all, but I was amazed at how much they volunteered. The big problem a lot of them encounter (as I had suspected) is that while they might hold off on losing their virginity, once gone many of them seem to think of sex as some sort of a free-for-all. ‘I’ve

started so I’ll finish,’ as the old quizmaster used to say. And the girls that are already putting it about (to use an old-fashioned and clearly not very admiring phrase) are in many cases putting more pressure on the other girls than the boys themselves.

Having run the PSHE programme for years, I know how hard it is to deliver proper, thoughtful sex education.

Too many teachers shy away from it, and prefer lesson plans which come with slides of diseased penises to those which involve open discussions.

Personally, I would rather have a conversation about the emotional side than demonstrate the use of condoms on blue plastic penises. But schools really should put into place some sort of emotional and psychological education, even if it means taking willing teachers out of their speciality for a day or two.

At the end of the lesson, I heard words that made me feel that even if I had been sacked, it would have been worth it.

‘Thank you, Miss, that was brilliant. English is the only subject where we ever learn anything about life,’ said one of the girls.

Of course the point of most great literature is that it deals with the human condition; we had a wonderful conversation about the validity of love at first sight after the opening of Romeo and Juliet, and Of Mice and Men offered so many ways into thinking about right and wrong and prejudice and human relationships. Perhaps the fact that we do help children think about ‘Life’ should be recognised more overtly.

We send them out with their clutch of GCSEs, but where are we sending them?

Out to begin their lives.

GIVE

Sir Robert Mayer DONALD TRELFORD was astonished by the great age of the musician, businessman and philanthropist

PHOTOGRAPHY © GETTY IMAGES

J

ust over thirty years ago, I received a surprise invitation to a dinner at the Athenaeum. The surprise was that I hadn’t met my host before. He was Sir Robert Mayer, a tiny figure then aged 99, who had been a great patron of music, having started Concerts for Children before the Second World War and Youth and Music after it. I never knew why he invited me, except that I had recently become Editor of the Observer.

His other guest was Robert Armstrong, later Sir and now a lord, who became Cabinet Secretary in the Thatcher years.

The dinner was given by a secret Fleet Street club whose proceedings, by convention, were never reported and therefore attracted guest speakers of an unusually high calibre, presumably because they felt safe from the dreaded media. The speaker that night was Prince Philip, who made some remarks about the dangers of uncontrolled immigration which stuck me as uncontentious, but would doubtless be regarded these days as politically incorrect.

To make conversation, I asked Sir Robert: ‘You know so much about music you must be able to say who was the greatest composer – one of the three great Bs or the great M?’ He replied:

‘Well I’d have to say Brahms, wouldn’t I?’ I was surprised and asked him why. His reply was disconcerting: ‘Because he was the only one I ever met.’ He explained: ‘I was studying music at the Mannheim Conservatoire. The winner of the student piano competition played for Brahms and the runner-up sat next to him. I didn’t win,’ he said defensively, ‘because I was so short my feet couldn’t reach the pedals, but I did sit next to him.’ Later I checked the dates: Brahms died in 1897, when Mayer would have been 18.

Rather dazed by this, I turned to the topic of the evening: immigration. ‘You must have been an immigrant yourself, Sir Robert. When did you first come to this country?’ ‘1899,’ he said, which silenced me for a while until I countered with a slightly jokey follow-up: ‘So which side did you fight on in the First World War – Germany or Britain?’ ‘First World War, old boy?’ he replied in a puzzled tone. ‘Much too old to fight in the First World War.’ There I was, sitting in a London club, talking to a man who went back a century. I said to him: ‘You must have been remarkably fit all your life, to be still running around and dining out at your age.’ ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘I’ve never been well. I had two heart attacks in my sixties. That was my crisis.

Everybody has a crisis at some time in their life: if you conquer it, they seem to forget about you. Have you had your crisis yet?’

The following year he sent me an autobiographical pamphlet entitled My First Hundred Years. I used to have lunch with him occasionally after that at his luxurious flat near Portland Place, where I noticed that the first entry in his visitors’ book was Bela Bartok, dated 1922. Because of his great age and apparent frailty, I didn’t like to stay long at these lunches, assuming he needed a nap in the afternoons. I needn’t have worried. Once I stood waiting at the lift and heard him bustling up behind me, on his way to the Metal Exchange in the City, where he had made his fortune and tried to visit every day. He married again at the age of 101 and lived to be 105.

(OR TAKE OUT) A 12-ISSUE

SUBSCRIPTION TO

FOR £39.50* and we’ll give you FREE copies of BOTH the 2014 Pick of The Oldie AND the new Oldie Book of Cartoons worth £17.98

SIMPLY CALL 01795 592 893 QUOTING SP02/2014 OR GO ONLINE AT www.subscribeonline.co.uk/OLD *UK price. T&Cs apply – see online for details.

The Oldie is published 13 times a year meaning a 12-issue subscription runs for 48 weeks. We reserve the right to substitute the free books with a suitable alternative should stocks run out.

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

21

Edinburgh

I

t’s a long, slow climb up the exit ramp from the gloom of Waverley Station, and as you emerge blinking into the grey Caledonian daylight the first thing you hear every single bloody time you arrive is the same motheaten, tartan-clad piper puffing and wheezing his way through ‘Scotland the Brave’. Welcome to Edinburgh – once christened the ‘Athens of the North’, but now condemned as one of the biggest tourist traps in the northern hemisphere.

The asthmatic drone of the most horrendous musical instrument ever invented echoes around the city’s granite buildings as you make your way to what has become the spiritual heart of the capital. The Royal Mile – once hailed

by Daniel Defoe as the ‘largest, longest and finest street for buildings in the world’ – is now home to dozens upon dozens of shops and emporia flogging some of the tackiest and vilest souvenirs on the planet.

Edinburgh’s tourist racket shamelessly trades on the nation’s ‘noble Highland tradition’. No matter that the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper revealed the whole Highland heritage business to be an almighty fraud perpetrated by a couple of Victorian fantasists, nothing must be allowed to detract from the city’s great money-making machine. So roll up for the great tartan tat rip-off, from the full Six Nations kilt set (complete with sporran and matching baseball cap) through to the Fraser tartan splitcrotch women’s knickers. Or there are those other mainstays of the Scottish economy – astronomically priced single malts and twee tins of shortbread. And if you have ‘a wee dram’ too many – why not go mad and treat yourself to a Rod Stewart ginger fright wig as worn by all the extras in Mel Gibson’s preposterous Braveheart?

While Edinburgh cashes in on its romanticised past it always seems to make an almighty cock-up of the present.

Architect Enric Miralles’s Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood has been dubbed a ‘magnificent mess… an indecipherable jumble of forms’ by Building magazine. It came in ten times over budget and even after it opened it suffered from collapsing beams and a leaky roof. Today disrespectful pigeons continue to cast their verdict all over the exterior – a verdict shared by the vast majority of Edinburgh’s citizens. An even bigger financial fiasco is the city’s tram link, hopelessly behind schedule and forecast to cost over £1 billion – the most expensive transport project per mile in the world. Some even predict that when the trams do start running it will be at a loss that could bankrupt the city. The comparison to (modern) Athens does seem apt at this juncture.

If all this was just a little local difficulty we could turn a blind eye. But Edinburgh – along with the City of London and Wall Street – is largely responsible for the nation’s current financial mess. From its St Andrew Square headquarters, Fred Goodwin ran RBS in a deluded bid for world domination. It ended up with the UK taxpayer forking out £45 billion to save the bank (and the rest of the economy) from going under. Just over the road in The Mound, further reckless lending by the senior management of HBOS has cost us a further £30 billion. That most vile of racial stereotypes – the tightfisted Scotsman – turned out to be wide of the mark.

By all means vote for independence (and good luck with that) – but a word of advice. Over on the Clyde there’s a city with a fine tradition of industry, ingenuity and entrepreneurship that helped to build the world’s greatest empire. Make Glasgow the capital. Edinburgh is history.

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

23

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY: © REX/DESIGN PICS INC

With its tourist tat and mindboggling metropolitan mismanagement, the Scottish capital is a prime candidate for dump status says TOBY SCULTHORP

D E P E N D E N C Y C U LT U R E

House Husbandry with Giles Wood In which Mr Wood views the natural world through the prism of socio-economic theory

A

ccording to breed notes our Tibetan spaniel may live up to fifteen years.

For me that represents a further three years of canine servitude because Mary, in a moment of madness, took the decision to up the dog-sitting rate paid to the village urchin from a justmanageable five pounds per day to an unsustainable ten.

This own goal has had severe knockon effects. Mary may want me to join her in London, but faced with the stark choice of seeing £70 per week go into the pocket of another villager or performing the dog-sitting chore myself, I will have to leave Mary to gallivant alone.

Luckily I have a well-stocked library, fresh supplies of windfall logs, and game from the village sportsman on a somewhat onerous ‘pluck one get one free’ basis to sustain me through these periods of economic house arrest.

Nor is life dull when the modest parcel of rough land attached to my hovel can be used as an open-air laboratory for the study of the laws of nature.

24

THE OLDIE – February 2014

An early experiment to force an ash tree to grow horizontally by attaching ‘Charles Atlas’ dumbbells to the leading shoot proved an exercise in futility, and the following spring I saw the tree had outwitted me by sprouting multiple vertical shoots.

Meanwhile years of recycling the contents of Hoover bags into the compost heap illustrate the law of unintended consequences since, ten years after the children stopped playing with them, I continue to find Lego blocks in the vegetable garden. For these and other reasons I have a new mission statement with regard to both rough land and garden – ‘relinquish control’.

In this I have been partly inspired by Natural Gardening guru Peter Harper.

His advice to stop mowing has already delivered results in the form of rock-hard dock seeds, only crackable by the thicknecked bullfinch with its hook-shaped beak. Resembling miniature pink parrots, a flock of them feast on the seeds near the kitchen window.

Other laws of nature which have intrigued me include the perennial

garden mystery of why some plants, like teasels and burdock, are self-supporters, while others, like delphiniums, keel over.

Why do my sunflowers need staking to stay upright while serried ranks of them stand unsupported over many miles of southern France? Some of my plants even seem to collapse as I approach them, as though sensing support is on its way. Is there a chilling lesson to be learnt from my ‘Kiftsgate’ climbing rose, which recently strangled to death its perfectly healthy apple-tree host?

The chief conclusion of my field observations has been that, like humans, plants and animals will also submit to dependency culture. If the opportunity to lean on other plants is taken, over time a type of spontaneous mutation takes place and the plant becomes unable to stand unsupported.

And since I stopped feeding the sparrows they have deserted our garden for a dwelling at the other end of the village where feeders are replenished all year round. Fortunately the wary bullfinches are too shy of such proximity to humans to join the deserters, but no sparrow will go back to berries and grubs once it has tasted Swoop, just as I will not go back to Maxwell House instant now I have tasted Arabica beans.

Sparrows boosted by artificial feeding are less lean, have a slower reaction time and are slower to take off than their unfed colleagues. It seems obvious that benefits and subsidies distort and corrupt natural bird behaviour, leaving them more vulnerable to predators like magpies, but I am unable to test this theory because I don’t think free-range sparrows exist any more.

And why has the dog, perfectly capable of charging down the staircase on its own if someone knocks at the door, begun cringing at the top of it in all other circumstances, as though it can only get down if I carry it?

This is dependency culture, both inside and outside the cottage.

the v i r g i n m a r t y r

God...

by Melanie McDonagh

Writing life insurance policies in trust saves time and tax. When you die your executors do not have to wait for probate because the proceeds fall outside your estate. This means the money is quickly paid to the beneficiaries and, being outside your estate, it is not subject to inheritance tax which it otherwise would be. Insurance companies supply the form to sign, and you can do this even years after you bought the policy – although once done, you cannot change your mind.

Your only other decision is to choose the trustees. The person whose life is insured is automatically a trustee and this is the legal minimum. Sensibly there should be at least one more and preferably another three. If life goes according to plan, when the policyholder dies, the trustees sign the necessary paperwork and the insurance company pays up.

Life, though, does not always go to plan, as Andrew Bull found out. He had bought a life insurance policy for his wife in 1979 and put it in trust for their three children. He nominated four trustees, all within the family – him and his wife, plus her brother and sister-in-law.

26

THE OLDIE – February 2014

Catherine (or Katherine – take your pick) of Alexandria, virgin martyr, is an improbable movie heroine, which hasn’t stopped Michael Redwood from making a film about her. It’s a big deal in terms of cast, starring the late Peter O’Toole, Edward Fox, Joss Ackland and Steven Berkoff, but frankly, the saint has to be the most unlikely film icon since, well, Hypatia, the female mathematician, also from Alexandria, played by Rachel Weisz in the film Agora.

Actually, the two women – the saint and the mathematician – aren’t dissimilar types, though Hypatia’s basis in history is rather more assured than Catherine’s. (In fact, one academic has suggested that Catherine was invented as a means of trumping the pagan cult of Hypatia.) For what it’s worth, the earliest life of Catherine was written in the mid-ninth century; Catherine herself died in the early fourth. Yet the cult of St Catherine is likely to have predated the discovery, in around 800 AD, of what were believed to be her remains at the monastery now named after her in Sinai.

The question of historicity is a little

tedious. There were young women among the Christians martyred in the persecutions of Diocletian, and if their stories were turned into a composite, with additional spectacular elements, well, fair enough. It’s possible there was a virgin martyr on whom her story hung, and no particular reason why she shouldn’t have been called Catherine.

Virgin martyrs did exist – notably St Agnes in the fourth century, the Roman girl martyr – but the accounts of their martyrdom were undoubtedly upgraded to meet the needs of the story and the moral it sought to draw.

Apart from the fabulous wheel in her martyrdom, the saint’s distinctive attribute was her learning. She was beautiful and well-connected – the story wouldn’t really work otherwise – and saw off a succession of pagan philosophers who tried to argue her out of Christianity.

This pitting of a young woman against worldly wisdom had an enormous appeal to mediaeval piety. The theme of the martyr stories was simple: in an encounter between worldly strength and frail humanity, God can trump power

The children are now adults and the Bulls want to cash in the policy and spend the money. Mr Bull reckons that, as he took out the policy in the first place and has paid all the premiums since, he and his wife should be able to decide what to do with the policy. Unfortunately they can’t.

newer ones. This makes it more difficult to replace a missing trustee, says Zurich, but it is still possible. The downside is that a solicitor must approve the decision and prepare a new deed which, obviously, costs money. With Zurich life insurance policies taken out less than thirty years ago, the company can provide the deed free of charge. Some more recent trusts even allow the policyholder to get rid of a trustee against the trustee’s wishes.

Zurich has written to Mr Bull explaining the position.

A more common problem is that one of the trustees, or perhaps all of them, predecease the policyholder, and in this situation the rules are different. The proceeds of the policy will be paid out on maturity provided at least one trustee is still alive. If all the trustees have died, the executors of the last to die become the trustees, or they can appoint someone else, but the money cannot be paid out until probate has been granted.

Mr Bull’s story, though, has an unexpectedly happy ending: he finally managed to contact his ex-sister-in-law and she has agreed to sign the release document.

Life insurance policies in trust are not part of your estate and so are not subject to inheritance tax All four trustees must go along with their plans and must sign an agreement form. This is where the Bulls hit a snag.

Mrs Bull’s brother divorced his wife twenty years ago. She has remarried and changed her surname. They do not know where she lives and, even if they could contact her, they cannot be certain that she would co-operate.

At this point, Mammon asked Zurich, which now runs the policy, for help.

Zurich discovered that the Bulls have an old-style policy which is less flexible than

...and

mammon

by Margaret Dibben Got a complaint about a financial •institution?

Perhaps Margaret Dibben can help. Write to Mammon, The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG or email mammon@theoldie.co.uk

Fashion With Tamasin Doe Cash for clobber DO YOU HAVE a glamorous Fifties Castle Howard Ballets Russes collection. ballgown or funky Seventies trouser suit In 2003 Taylor set up her own auction languishing at the back of your wardrobe house and created a focal point for the and no grateful granddaughter to pass it apex of the business. Her catalogues on to? If so, it could turn out to be a nice read like a V&A exhibition, the last one earner. A flurry of recent auctions has featuring gowns from Charles Worth, served as a reminder in these financially regarded as the first couturier, and chilly times that old clothes can also be Alexander McQueen’s thrilling swana nest egg. song collection before his death in 2010.

Over the past twenty years the prefix These were exceptional lots, ones that ‘vintage’ has become so much a part few, if any of us could find in our attics. of fashion’s vernacular that it is now There may, however, be delights with less routinely applied to brand-new clothes known labels in them that have become that have the look of old ones. The real surprisingly valuable. Each decade has business, however, is in mining the its own list of sought-after designers. The dustiest corners of the Seventies, for example, country in search of the naturally includes the work originals. The voluptuous of Bill Gibb, Ossie Clark black taffeta dress worn and Yves Saint Laurent, but by the then Lady Diana Gina Fratini, John Bates Spencer on her official and Jean Varon are also debut to the Royal Opera worth digging out. One House was discovered in way to find out the current a bin liner in the garage value of a designer’s work of its co-designer, David is by browsing the online Emanuel. It was thought auction website, eBay. It to have been lost, but reaches millions of buyers happily for him it wasn’t and is a good indicator of because it sold in 2010 for what collectors and fans of £192,000. The extensive vintage fashion are looking collection of outfits worn by Diana Spencer in the taffeta for. The experience may dress bought for £192,000 even embolden you to try a the late Princess of Wales has become a market worth by a Chile museum spot of selling yourself, in millions of pounds – but which case I’d be remiss if even if you strip out the connection, their I didn’t include a note of caution: unless intrinsic value has increased hugely in you’re entirely au fait with the system, recent years.

I wouldn’t advise you to flog a muchThat famous black dress was sold by loved Hermès bag, even if it appears to Kerry Taylor, the premier auctioneer of be worth thousands of pounds. There antique and vintage fashion in London. are pitfalls for the unwary, most notably She said at the time that it was the buyers who will receive high-value goods most exciting moment of her career – it and then welsh. certainly consolidated the appreciation of A better starting point for the silk as an art commodity. Taylor herself beginner is a local auction house that has had no small part in developing conducts specialist costume sales. the market for vintage fashion. She Unless, of course, you have found an distinguished herself as one of country’s undiscovered Diana in your wardrobe, in youngest auctioneers when she took up which case Kerry Taylor will be only too her Sotheby’s gavel aged just 21. It was pleased to help. there that she re-established costume and textile sales, including the Duke and • Kerry Taylor Auctions, 249 Long Lane, Duchess of Windsor collection and the London SE1 4PR; 020 8676 4600 February 2014 – THE OLDIE

27

PHOTO COURTESY OF: ANWAR HUSSEIN/ANWAR HUSSEIN/EMPICS ENTERTAINMENT

and, in this case, not just secular power but male intellectual authority.

The account of Catherine in the prodigiously popular compilation of saints’ stories in the thirteenth-century Golden Legend is interesting in attributing to her the intellectual formation of, well, a thirteenth-century cleric: ‘Standing at the temple entrance, she argued at length with the emperor by syllogistic reasoning as well as by allegory and metaphor, logical and mystical inference.’ Attagirl.

It’s interesting that one of the most important of the martyr saints, one of the most visible and distinctive of the figures represented in iconography, is that of a female philosopher saint. It wasn’t the only visible representation of female learning in churches, though: one of the most common in the later Middle Ages was that of St Anne teaching the Virgin to read.

The function of the virgin martyrs, as Eamon Duffy points out in The Stripping of the Altars, was not as exemplars so much as sources of succour to their devotees.

Still, as an example of spiritual girl power, Catherine is as good as you get.

On a wild-goose chase: My sad search for affordable healthcare in America Money is much more important than health and well-being, if walter ellis’s experience of the American healthcare system is anything to go by Illustrated by Martin Honeysett

M

y first visit to a US doctor’s office, in the late summer of 2001, was like one of those unfunny Radio 4 sitcoms. My American wife and I had moved from London to Rhode Island and in order to complete my application for permanent resident’s status I needed a clean bill of health.

The physician to whom I was referred, a Hispanic gentleman with an uncertain command of English, ran his stethoscope over me, asked a number of rudimentary questions and ticked a series of boxes. It took me longer to pay the $500 fee and complete the paperwork than it did for him to pronounce me fit for purpose.

Some weeks later, the immigration service informed me that the ‘doctor’ who had examined me was in fact a fraudster, who had since been arrested. I must now visit another practice and pay out a second $500. My protest, that I was being charged for their mistake, went unheeded. It was apparently up to me to ensure that the quack they sent me to was the genuine article.

Physician number two was a busy man, who delegated a nurse to draw my blood and carry out other basic checks. One of the tests was for tuberculosis. She applied a patch to my arm and told me to report back three days later. When I did so, I was told that I had TB and faced an uncertain future, ending, quite possibly, in my premature death.

28

THE OLDIE – February 2014

Alarmed, I asked the doctor what happened now. Well, he said, for a start I would probably be returned to the UK, as the United States did not permit immigrants with a notifiable disease to remain in the country. In the meantime, he said, I would have to undergo an extensive – and expensive – series of tests.

Only after these tests showed me to be healthy and well did the doctor reveal the truth behind the mistaken diagnosis.

Apparently the nurse had measured the swelling beneath my TB patch with an inch ruler, not a metric gauge, thus getting its extent wildly wrong.

Time passed and I moved to New York, where my wife had found work as a college lecturer. Having obtained insurance through her employer, I registered with a practice in Brooklyn and arranged for a check-up.

The doctor, thick-set and evasive, ordered the inevitable blood work, unhooked his stethoscope and went through a brief list of questions. More boxes were ticked. It didn’t take long. On the way out I remarked that my heel was sore. ‘Stand up against that wall,’ he instructed, ‘and raise your foot.’ I did so. ‘You need to walk more,’ he said, twisting my foot around, ‘and take anti-inflammatories if it doesn’t improve.’

A month later, I got the bill. The insurance company paid for the check-up (the results of which I never discovered), but the $250 for my ‘podiatric examination’ was down to me.

BLOOD WORK FROM A STONE

months already expired. But would my insurer have paid the Outraged, I hobbled straight back to the surgery, only to find bills for anything that had happened to me during the missing that the doc had scarpered, ahead of his creditors, and the quarter? I inquired. Er, no, came the sheepish reply. practice had closed.

This Fall, with the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, Up to this point, aged 54, I had at least been in reasonable finally up and running, I applied to join the much-vaunted New shape. But two events now conspired against me. On holiday York state insurance scheme. After four hours of trying, I was in France, I was run off the road by a pair of ageing boy racers, finally able to register my logon name and password. I was not, neither of whom stopped. My heart started thumping and however, able to negotiate cover as the system was hopelessly my hands shook. I visited the local doctor, who told me I was overwhelmed with applications. I rang the helpline, pressing suffering from atrial fibrillation, a condition in which the heart 1 for English, 4 to make a personal inquiry and 2 to obtain the goes berserk, probably due to shock. Next day, I was admitted number of a qualified broker. to hospital in Rennes, where, after extensive tests, I was given Unfortunately, when I rang the number provided it was out electro-cardioversion (a process a bit like ironing) by one of France’s top heart specialists and presented with a bill for 2,500 of service. My second attempt resulted in my being put through to a perinatal clinic. On the third and last occasion, a regulation euros. ‘Your American insurer will pay for this,’ I was told.

Yeah, right. Back in New York, I went to my latest doctor seeking recorded voice informed me that there was no one available to a review of my condition. I was referred to a nearby cardiologist, help me at this time. ‘Please try later.’

President Obama has apologised for the shambles of his who arranged a series of stress tests, including one described, somewhat disturbingly, as ‘nuclear’. On the due day, I turned up healthcare roll-out – effortlessly achieved in spite of the fact that the Administration had three years in which to perfect the and was worked over by an elderly technician from Kazakhstan, necessary software. No doubt, Republicans permitting, the who scanned my chest before covering me with electrodes and situation will improve and I will end up with something. Or despatching me across the hall for my atomic experience. not. The trouble is, I’m almost past caring.

After a long wait, a burly doctor, who looked like an angry But here, as we say in America, is the kicker. I turned 65 last Ernest Borgnine, came in. He prodded my chart instead of my September and should by rights be covered by Medicare, the chest. ‘Your insurance company has rejected the nuclear test,’ federal scheme aimed at ensuring basic healthcare for the elderly. he said. ‘This has been a complete waste of my time.’ Then Alas, it transpires that though I have been paying in since 2001, he stomped off, scowling, leaving me sitting there until I was I will not be eligible until I have a total of 40 ‘credits’. At present rescued by the babushka, who told me to get dressed. Back in I have 28 and cannot expect to benefit until I hit 70. In that case, reception, I explained what had happened. ‘We’ll be in touch,’ the receptionist said. They never were. But the bill came to $2,000, some two A burly doctor, who looked like an angry Ernest Borgnine, thirds of which, after a lengthy correspondence, was reluctantly paid by my insurer. came in. ‘Your insurance company has rejected the nuclear The following year, I came down with test,’ he said. ‘This has been a complete waste of my time’ gout. I thought I would pass out or die, whichever was the less agonising. My physician was unsympathetic. She didn’t even look at my feet.

I told the official passing on this melancholy news, I wish to All she wanted to discuss was my heart and why I hadn’t comrequest a rebate of my twelve years worth of contributions so pleted the scheduled tests. I explained. that I can organise my own private health insurance.

‘I see,’ was all she said.

‘A rebate?’ he echoed, his voice rising, as if I were Oliver ‘But I’m here about my gout,’ I said. ‘I’m in serious pain.’

Twist asking for more.

‘Oh that! Try drinking less and change your diet.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So that I can buy my own healthcare.’

That’s when he started to laugh. he last time I sought medical help in America was in the spring of 2012, when, again through my wife, I at last had pretty decent cover. The doctor in this case was a pleasant and efficient African-American woman, who prodded and poked at me for an hour or so before arranging for me to have the inevitable blood work done. Sadly, not long after, my wife changed jobs and my insurance ran out, so I was unable to keep my follow-up appointments, which would have set me back some $2,000.

Eventually, under spousal pressure, I organised a package that, while costing me a modest $200 a month, obliged me to pay $250 up front every time I went to the doctor’s. But even this didn’t work out. The cheque I made out went inexplicably astray (though the money certainly left my bank account), so that I was legally in default. The broker who rang to explain this told me that I should send a second cheque to cover not only the period remaining but the three

T

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

29

Jeremy Lewis

LIVING HELL

Gripes and grumbles from The Oldie’s resident sage

30

THE OLDIE – February 2014

told) are competent to run any business, applying the principles preached by management consultants to publishing houses, railways companies, hospitals or chicken farms, and readily moving from one to another. Unlike the old lags who have spent their lives in a particular trade or profession, they know nothing about the business into which they have been parachuted, and to make up for this they summon meetings at which they can spout jargon, and conceal their ignorance by consulting computer print-outs.

Many of life’s great pleasures come about by chance rather than design

P

oor Rebecca Adlington admits to being wounded by the unkind remarks ‘trollers’ make about her looks on Twitter. Why does anyone bother to read these things? We all know that the ‘social media’ are haunted by what used to be known as the ‘green ink’ brigade – sour, envious and malevolent inadequates who long to become public figures themselves by wounding those who are more talented or more interesting than they will ever be. Far wiser to avert the gaze.

M

any of life’s great pleasures come about by chance rather than design – books stumbled across in dusty secondhand bookshops, poems discovered in obscure anthologies, odd snippets of scandal or information gleaned by leafing through reference books or the day’s paper. I worry that browsing may become a thing of the past, and I blame the computer. Many of us buy our books, new or second-hand, through the internet, seduced by price and ease of delivery; but although Amazon will refer one to similar books, or books by the same author, this is essentially a linear and logical progression, lacking the serendipitous element associated with that threatened species, the bookshop, new or second-hand.

I enjoy looking people up in Who’s Who and the DNB, and although doing so online is miraculously quick, it’s almost too efficient for the reader’s good. Once again, one is referred to references to other members of the family, or colleagues and friends, or even to people with the same surname or date of birth; what one lacks – and will lack for ever if such publications end up exclusively online – are the random delights of thumbing through a reference book, of following up entirely unexpected subjects and lines of enquiry. The same applies to reading a newspaper online: items no longer catch one’s eye while flipping through the pages over the breakfast table.

And if, one day, the great Oxford anthologies of verse are no longer available in paper form, how many poets will languish online, unread and undiscovered by new generations of readers looking up Byron but overlooking the wonderful Thomas Hood? Does the internet lead to a narrowing rather than a broadening of knowledge? (Discuss.)

JEREMY LEWIS ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID STOTEN

A

ccording to a recent report, the average office worker can expect to spend 9,000 hours of his or her working life in meetings, half of which are a complete waste of time. I’ve always detested meetings, and regarded them with deep suspicion: partly because they provide bores and egomaniacs with a venue in which to hold forth ad nauseam while clutching their lapels; and partly because, if publishing firms and literary magazines are anything to go by, the best firms are run by benevolent despots, impatient of bogus democracy and barking out orders left and right.

I blame the proliferation of meetings on two things: office technology and the rise of the professional manager.

Years ago, when office computers were in their infancy, a great deal of nonsense was spoken about the ‘paperfree office’. In fact computers – and photocopiers – spew out mountains of redundant bumph, providing bores and windbags with the perfect excuse to hold yet another meeting to discuss their self-evident revelations. When, towards the end of the war, Nikolaus Pevsner suggested the Buildings of England series to Allen Lane of Penguin Books, Lane unscrewed his fountain pen, did some quick calculations in the margin of that day’s Times, and agreed to go ahead; and during my early years in publishing, nimble-footed practitioners like André Deutsch worked in exactly the same way.

Everything changed with the arrival of the computer. Consultations were held; forms were filled in, and the figures fed into a computer; another meeting was held, more often than not coming to the same conclusions that an old-fashioned practitioner would have reached via the back of an envelope.

The rise of the professional manager has been another contributory factor.

Professional managers (or so we are

Dr Stuttaford’s surgery Your medical queries answered by our resident doctor

Diagnosing appendicitis Not always a textbook case...

Two readers have asked me about their attacks of appendicitis. Could incorrect initial diagnoses have resulted, as both believe, in peritonitis?

Do missed diagnoses of appendicitis occur frequently? Are the difficulties of diagnosing greater than most people think?

Although appendicitis is the most common cause of acute abdominal pain it can sometimes be difficult to diagnose. If not diagnosed early the appendix may become so inflamed and swollen that it perforates and oozes pus into the peritoneal cavity. In other cases it swells so much that it ruptures. In either event the patient is in trouble and the opportunity for immediate curative surgery is lost. At worst the patient may suffer a life-threatening generalised infection. At best the infected appendix may be ‘walled off’, isolated by adjacent tissues. If so, antibiotic therapy and good nursing may render the condition quiescent and surgery is possible later.

Forty years ago in my Norfolk family practice, any call for a visit, day or night, weekday or weekend, that mentioned abdominal pain was responded to immediately. A night call would see me, suited and in collar and tie, at a patient’s bedside within half an hour.

A detailed, even pernickety, account of the patient’s troubles would be taken.

Although I would naturally be most interested in the abdomen, the patient would also be checked from head to foot. The physical examination we had learned so assiduously as junior hospital doctors would be carried out just as carefully in a rural council house, cottage or old rectory as it would have been in hospital. The now standard hospital pathology or radiology tests were not then immediately available in rural practice. The patient’s life depended on the analysis of the doctor’s examination and every aspect of symptoms collated by the GP from the account by the patient and anyone else in the house. Little

32

THE OLDIE – February 2014

wonder that if I decided a patient didn’t have appendicitis, sleep thereafter was impossible. My anxiety was only relieved once I had visited the patient before morning surgery next day.

Patients lucky enough to have typical signs and symptoms make early diagnosis so easy that any subsequent gratitude seems undeserved. However there are less common presentations, and all but the most cautious and pessimistic doctors can be caught out. The presentation of appendicitis is easily confused with many other conditions, including acute diverticulitis, especially in older patients, salpingitis (infection and inflammation of the fallopian tubes) or ectopic pregnancy.

Appendicitis, especially if the appendix lies in the pelvis, may mimic gastroenteritis, making the diagnosis difficult in babies and young children or their elderly grandparents. In some cases the proximity of an inflamed appendix to the adjacent bowel may result in the inflammation affecting the bladder, thereby producing urinary tract symptoms. Little wonder, but no excuses, that with such a list of other causes of lower abdominal pain the diagnosis of appendicitis is sometimes missed. Only when doctors bear in mind

that any lower abdominal pain could be appendicitis will a missed diagnosis become a rarity.

Classically the first hint of trouble is central abdominal pain felt above the belly button. Patients are likely to have lost their appetite and to feel sick.

They may have vomited once or twice, but persistent vomiting is unusual in appendicitis. They may have diarrhoea or constipation. Later, the pain worsens and shifts down to the right lower abdomen. Patients may notice that they have abdominal tenderness centred on ‘McBurney’s point’, half way between the umbilicus and the middle of the groin. That pain may be exacerbated by walking, coughing or by a doctor suddenly lifting the examining hand from this point – this sign is known as rebound tenderness.

A patient with appendicitis looks ill, often flushed, with a raised pulse and a temperature. The tongue may be coated and breath foetid. On pressing the left lower abdomen the patient feels pain on the right side. Diagnostic problems tend to occur when the appendix is hidden behind the large bowel or if the abdominal organs are shielded by a plump tummy or pregnancy. McBurney’s point may not then be as sensitive, but the appendix can still be palpated by rectal examination.

Those who remember the preantibiotic and pre-modern anaesthesia era of the 1930s are astounded by the current low mortality from appendicitis, but even twenty years ago 500 people died annually from it. Research shows a continuing but disappointingly slow reduction in the death rate.

Late diagnosis may be related to the end of routine home visits and easy and rapid access to GP surgeries, or a change in traditional practice. Increasingly practices rely on triage by staff other than doctors – sometimes with no clinical experience. Forty years ago things were very different.

doing it. So I wrote a little book about their adoration and other things.

It’s astonishing how sexual dogs can be, particularly male dogs. I remember that I had a close friend called Joe McCrindle who was the publisher of the Transatlantic Review, and he had a dog called Bruce. Joe had a party one evening for some rather distinguished American authors, and Bruce was loose, in more senses than one, now I think about it. One of the American authoresses – a very stout woman – had brought her dog with her and the dog was called Miss Parsley. Miss Parsley sat in her lap all evening and then Bruce became a bit boisterous and stuck his big Labrador head up this woman’s skirt, and she pushed him away saying ‘Oh Bruce! What are you doing?’ Someone said, ‘He’s looking for Miss Parsley.’

Anyone who’s had a dog will have had at least one embarrassing experience of that kind. But dogs embody all seven of the virtues and only two of the vices – those are lust and gluttony, which as we

Sleeping with Dogs

BRIAN SEWELL At The Oldie’s December literary lunch, BRIAN SEWELL explained why he is so drawn to canine friends

T

he one thing you can say about my memoir Outsider is that I was absolutely honest. There seemed no point in not being honest; the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So I’m not entirely displeased though I do blush sheepishly when people say, ‘I’ve read your book’. They tend to whisper it as though they too are slightly ashamed and embarrassed that they may even have enjoyed it. The bad thing about my book is that there was very little about my dogs, and they have been my companions all my life, at least since I was about three or four. And the dogs are with me still – not all of them, just two – but the

34

THE OLDIE – February 2014

memory of them is very close and very comforting and very occasionally weepy: it’s more or less exactly a year since I entombed my Alsatian, Winckelmann. Forgive me as I put my tongue between my teeth and stop crying. I felt I owed the dogs something.

I had largely left them out of the book and they had been so important.

They had been such loyal companions; such devoted, unquestioning, adoring companions, and there’s nothing that pleases a man more than being adored, even if it is a dumb animal

There’s nothing that pleases a man more than being adored, even if it is a dumb animal doing it all share them must be forgiven, I think.

The best thing about dogs is what they don’t do: they don’t shout at the television screen when Fiona Bruce appears; they don’t shout at Alan Yentob. They don’t lament the doings of Saatchi and Serota; they don’t worry about Tate Modern and Tate Britain; they don’t worry about the awful exhibitions that we’ve had this year.

They show no concern for these things.

They don’t talk about French philosophers. So it’s in what dogs don’t do that we should perhaps most value them.

But I press the point that life, for some of us, is not worth living without a dog. Those of you who don’t understand this curious relationship should make some attempt to do so. Because what a dog does, I think, is our last remaining link with ancient history. The dog and the man, or the dog and the woman, the dog and its owner, they are sort of representative of what we were tens of thousands

SEE A MAN ABOUT A DOG

So, this is goodbye

of years ago when we were closer to nature and more understanding about the environment and our lives were not intellectual occasions like this, but devoted to hunting and gathering and making life tolerable for ourselves. My dogs have made my life tolerable. There have been events which have been in many ways deeply unpleasant. But always there is the dog. Such solace in a dog. To touch it, for it to touch you. Feel it’s cold nose, to stroke its head. To realise you’re with something that is totally uncritical, which loves you dearly whatever you look like first thing in the morning. It has no criticism of its owner.

It is the most wonderful thing in the world to live with something which has no malice whatsoever towards you. Get a dog! All of you. Go to a dogs’ home and get a dog for Christmas, and keep it!

Brian Sewell’s Sleeping with Dogs: A Peripheral Autobiography is published

by Quartet (£12.50 HB)

I AM MOVING to France next month.

I shall miss: British television, which is a whole lot better than French TV; the English country pub, of which there is no equivalent in France; the British sense of humour, ironic but not unkind. The French have only their rather sterile ‘wit’.

Here is a list of what I shall not miss: 1. The ludicrous concept of ‘Care in the Community’ for the mentally disturbed, which simply does not work. As things stand, you are quite likely to be stabbed on a tube station platform by a deranged paranoid schizophrenic who should rightly be held in secure accommodation.

2. The equally absurd concept of a ‘multicultural’ Britain. It is my observation that people of ‘ethnic’ origin often form themselves into ghettos from which white people are excluded.

3. The British Police Force, which lies so repeatedly. During my recent ordeal at the hands of Operation Yewtree, they lied to me about not giving my name to the Press (in fact, they had already supplied it); about the length of time I would be held on bail, which eventually turned into four and a half months; that they would return all my possessions (which they had removed without a warrant), including the manuscript of my memoirs. In fact, they held onto the chapter on sex – obviously.

4. Teachers. My friend, the late Auberon Waugh, always said that whenever you meet an architect, you should hit him.

(He was referring to the desecration of the London skyline.) Well, I feel the

same about the teaching profession who are now paid quite a lot of money for not doing their job properly. They get ludicrously long holidays (up to 18 weeks a year) and take ‘sickies’ as days off whenever they can. They also go on strike. No wonder that educational levels have fallen to an all-time low.

5. The NHS. Don’t get me started. Overpaid doctors keep us waiting, on average, forty minutes to see them. I hate sitting in their gloomy, disease-ridden waiting rooms.

6. Traffic problems. The dominance of this country by motor car drivers, who have now been joined by dangerous, irresponsible cyclists, is appalling. Where I live, in a suburb of Cambridge, I have twice been run over by cyclists riding on the pavement without lights.

7. The railway system. Don’t get me started again. Most mornings, I turn up at Cambridge station to find the dreaded words ‘Bus Replacement Service’. They always claim that the bus journey takes no longer than the train, but it adds, on average, an hour to my journey, as well as being uncomfortable. As for the exorbitant fares… Well, they are much lower in France and in the rest of Europe.

8. The British weather. OK, I know this is an old complaint. It is raining cats and dogs outside as I write this – ‘comme une vache qui pisse’, so the French say. But their rain, though wet, is clean and soft.

Fresh fields and pastures new!

Farewell, sceptred isle that I used to love so much!

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

35

ILLUSTRATION BY STEVE WAY

Me and my dogs: Brian Sewell and Jack (main picture); Winckelmann (below left); Trollop (above); Ginny (below)

Get out the bunting: low-lifer WILFRED DE’ATH is leaving Blighty for France

D A M A G E L I M I TAT I O N

Private lives?

Superbyways: your guide to digital life, by Webster I’VE COME TO a rather unsatisfactory conclusion: privacy is dead, having been scuppered by the internet. What’s more, it’s like virginity – once it’s gone, you can’t get it back.

We are all used to the idea that confidential matters should be just that: confidential. That more or less worked in a world which used paper and filing cabinets, because storing, retrieving and using the information was laborious and time-consuming. Thousands of people have always had legitimate access to your records; it’s just that hitherto, using that information has been slow and awkward.

Now that it’s computerised and often online, it’s easy. If your bank wants to know which of its customers have spent money in Waterstones, it’s there at the touch of a button. Twenty years ago, making such a list would have been a herculean task.

So even if banks, doctors, HMRC and the rest don’t store any more about you than they used to (which I doubt), it’s now very much easier for anyone with access to interrogate the data. I call that an erosion of privacy.

On top of that is the gigantic growth in access to what is already in the public domain, coupled with the highly detailed trail we leave whenever we are online.

Have you ever been mentioned on a website, perhaps by your university, a club you belong to or a committee you

are on? Then it’s all out there, waiting to be harvested. In a few minutes any internet searcher who knows what they are doing can uncover a preposterous amount of information about you – your employment history, address, phone numbers, relatives, age, hobbies and much more. That’s an erosion of privacy.

Much of this information will have crept online without you realising, put there by others; references to you on websites, emails, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all the other sites that exist to encourage people to bung things online. The facts may not amount to much on their own, but aggregate it all and you build up quite a picture of a person. That’s an erosion of privacy.

Ultimately, complete privacy online does not exist. Even if you cloak yourself with encryption and anonymity, everything you do online is recorded somewhere, and it is becoming increasingly easy to work backwards; in other words, by analysing what you are doing anonymously, it may be possible to link your anonymous and public profiles and uncover who you are. That’s an erosion of privacy.

So my theory is that privacy never really existed, it’s just that until now, collating all the available information has been difficult; now it’s easy and becoming easier. So what can be done about it?

Webster’s webwatch For Webster’s latest top tips, visit his blog at www.theoldie.co.uk www.thesaurus.com This is an excellent thesaurus. The site has recently been much improved and has a number of cunning features – for example, you can filter results by length or complexity.

It also offers antonyms and related words. www.wellcomelibrary.org/moh This shows Londoners’ health from 1848 to 1972 through Medical Office of Health reports.

Start by browsing the fascinating ‘Health of London Timeline’ which shows how well a website can be used to provide information.

er ster ebst Web As Askk W I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems. Go to www.webstersblog.co.uk/ask or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk You can’t hide; one elderly chap told me firmly that he wasn’t ‘on the internet’ as he had never used a computer or looked at a website. In a couple of minutes I showed him how much I could find on him; he was astonished and asked me to remove it all from cyberspace; unfortunately that’s not how it works.

I think the answer is simply to be aware of the situation and act sensibly.

Don’t post comments on websites if you don’t want them repeated elsewhere; if a website publishes details about you, make sure you are comfortable with it.

If not, ask them to take it down – most respectable sites will do so happily, although in my experience the least co-operative are newspapers and the like.

Like it or not, privacy is dead, with no hope of renaissance.

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

37

Brief encounters NIGEL FOUNTAIN looks at the lives of others

I

go down Bond Street most days: it is dull, swanky shops and traffic.

This morning I am passing Chanel and Dior when I hear a man with a megaphone, orating.

The man’s bicycle is propped up outside Louis Vuitton. Distracted potential consumers, slightly nervous, are glancing at him. ‘As I recall,’ I tell Danny Shine when we next meet, ‘you were saying something about “you people all being useless parasites with nothing better to do”.’

He is, very faintly, exasperated. ‘The sort of thing I speak about…’ he pauses, and begins, ‘“This is a message for all you rich people out there. If you go into one of these shops here they will treat you really nicely and make out you are really important even if you’re a boring obnoxious little bitch. And when you leave the shop they’ll speak to each other and say how disgusting you are. But when you are there, don’t worry, they’ll treat you like gold, as long as you’ve got money to pay for things. If you are feeling a bit down, pop into one of these shops and they’ll all get on their knees and worship you...”

‘I might have said,’ he concludes, ‘something like that.’

That was indeed, more or less, what he said, I tell him. I had suggested an interview when he was in mid-flow, and he had enquired if I was a policeman. Did I look like a policeman? I asked. We agreed that I did not. It hadn’t been easy to track him down subsequently – and he was busy, he apologised. Name your venue, I said.

‘Park Lane Hotel in Piccadilly?’

‘Are you going to shout at everybody going in?’ I ask. No, no, he says, not at all.

38

THE OLDIE – February 2014

Danny Shine was born in Hendon in 1967, the second of five children. ‘I was the naughty one,’ he says. ‘I have always been the naughty one.’ His parents were Orthodox Jewish, his father a solicitor – and a cantor – and his late mother a teacher. He went to Carmel College in Oxfordshire where he felt isolated because he wasn’t one of the cool guys.

Then he studied the Talmud in Israel for three years. ‘My parents were really keen on it. For them, being Orthodox was the most important thing in their lives. I really liked it. I can think now of a lot of better ways of spending three years, but it has helped me because of words and how important they are in terms of how they have power over us.’ He then took a computing degree at UMIST in Manchester.

‘I thought computing might be vaguely interesting,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t.’

The Park Lane has a splendid, slightly faded art deco ballroom-foyer with Tilly Losch-lookalikes etched on luminescent silvery walls. Danny Shine had texted that he would be a bit late, so I had strolled around – a luncheon here, a wedding reception there. Then he arrives, good-looking, dark-haired, in a builders-style fluorescent jacket. We sit amidst neon and fluted pillars.

He met his wife at UMIST; she is Orthodox and runs a charity, and they have three children. ‘She is very intelligent, from an establishment background – her parents are really quite disappointed that she married someone like me.’ A loony shouting through a megaphone, I suggest. ‘They would rather,’ he says, ‘have had a doctor.’

When he was younger, he had done everything that everyone else was doing. Worked in insurance, sold pharmaceuticals (a ‘sinful’ job, he now believes). But certainties started unfolding, he questioned things, went to a therapist, joined some cults, talked to some ‘guru-types’, took a course, began to see things differently. ‘When people challenged my beliefs I would get embarrassed, angry, frustrated,’ he says. ‘Somehow my unconscious mind had seen conversation as a threat. If I had been trained to think in a more healthy way, I would have welcomed any challenge to my beliefs, to widen my understanding, and be open to new ways of looking at things.’ His path took in Speaker’s Corner – ‘diabolical these days’ – with a sign saying ‘Everything’s OK’ on one side and ‘Don’t Believe In Anyone Including Me’ on the other. The megaphone meant he moved on to other public places, and to run-ins with the police.

Alongside insurance, pharmaceuticals and the passing of certainty, there was another occupation. ‘I was singing at other people’s weddings, bar-mitzvahs, doing pop, Jewish music, klezmer, contemporary...’

The penny drops. You, I say, are doing the wedding here, today. ‘Yes,’ he says.

‘I am providing the music.’ A classic form of an institutionalised chattel relationship, I say. ‘Yes, absolutely!’ he says.

You will not be making a speech? I ask.

‘No, I won’t. It’s a living, I enjoy doing it.

I’ve got an amazing life in terms of work, only a few hours a week, and it’s hardly work. I run a band, I sing, it’s fabulous.’

rant

Old age adage Written and illustrated by RAYMOND BRIGGS ALMOST ALL OLDIES know the old adage: ‘Three things happen in old age: 1. you lose interest in sex; 2. your family drifts apart; 3. you lose touch with old friends. And these are just the three main advantages.’

However cynical this may sound, all are true. Number One does provide relief, particularly if there had been any wickedness ‘on the side’. The lies, the deception, the alibis... all very tiresome, I should think. Don’t know how people manage it.

Perhaps I should give it a try before it’s too late..? Oh yes, sorry, it is too late; I forgot.

Family drifts apart? Well, that’s inevitable.

A friend of mine, same age as I am, has five sons and daughters, now in their forties, all living in distant parts of the world. This is a mixed blessing, as with increasing old age, you will often need them. ‘Hi, Luke, it’s Dad. I need a bit of help getting to the bathroom at night... sorry to bother you...

I know Zimbabwe is quite a way off, but any chance of you popping over?’

Luckily, I have no descendants to call on, so I will have to soldier bravely on alone. Being lifelong self-employed should be a help, of course.

Number Three is the worst, but it does happen. For years I’ve been trying to think why. Lack of energy must be the main cause. Go down the pub in the late evening? Er... no thanks, not now... bit tired, was going to have an early night.

Drive twelve miles to meet for a coffee?

Well, another day perhaps? Hope to see you soon... sorry I’ve been out of touch

but things are a bit difficult here at the moment... I’ll give you a ring... next week, perhaps... when I get the chance.

But do not despair! Another bunch of chums will soon come rolling in to keep you company. All with funny names. Dear old CREEKY NEES, American by the sound of him, then there’s A. KINBAK, most oldies know him well. CHILL BLANES calls regularly. Odd names they’ve all got.

ARTHUR RITUS and RUE MATTIZUM, French possibly, are both fairly regular visitors. But then comes the heavy mob: PA KINSONS stays a long time, gets you jumping about, or makes you sit nice and still, then there’s AL ZEIMERS and his pal D. MENSHER. And, of course, there’s always dear old D. PRESHUN, who will frequently be dropping in for a chat about ‘life’.

Oh ho! What a cheery note to end on.

But never mind, Christmas is coming!

Oh, no it isn’t, sorry. It’s been and gone.

But I’ve just had a more profound thought: SELF DOUBT They say that in old age you lose touch with old friends.

ILLUSTRATION BY TOM PLANT

Notes from the sofa

AS I WAS preparing dinner recently, a young man phoned me. He represented a well-known charity, one to whom I contribute monthly. He thanked me for my generosity. ‘You’re welcome,’ I said, tucking the phone under my chin as I took a dish out of the oven. Do I have enough information, he wondered, about the work the charity was doing? Yes, I do.

They email me regularly. Nevertheless, he found the need to tell me more.

After several minutes of pointless chitchat – I was monosyllabic by this time – he suggested that perhaps I would like to increase my contribution to nearly twice its current amount. No, I said, it would stay as it was. I’d only set up the donation a few months earlier. Naively, I assumed our conversation would end.

It didn’t. He launched into how much the charity depends on people like me, how their programme would be so reduced without our help, how grateful they are – and would I be okay with a smaller increase in my monthly donation? No, I would not.

Had my previous refusal been ambiguous?

I swore quietly as the vegetables boiled over.

‘I am busy and you are beginning to annoy me,’ I said, ‘although I’m sure that isn’t your intention.’ He apologised and said he’d leave it there, but didn’t. He had a script to follow and was determined to complete it. Did he expect persistence at an inconvenient time to give results?

Eventually I got rid of him. The meal just about survived.

I complained to a friend who works for the charity in question. She has asked that my name be removed from their telephone contact list, something anyone can request if they receive such irritating phone calls. Let’s see if it works. If it doesn’t, charity will begin at home.

LINDA FAWKE

But maybe, in old age it is old friends who lose touch with you?

Now, that’s a bit more cheery, isn’t it?

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

39

East of Islington

The unusual life of Sam Taylor and friends

An open audition?

Piano Pete and Trixy both got more than they bargained for after a dinner à deux

T

rixy’s email was straight to the point: ‘I can offer you an audition on Weds 27th at 7pm. Please do let me know if you are able to make it as I have a waiting list.’ Piano Pete was keen, but confused.

Was it a date or was it an audition? Or was it, as one friend suggested, an audition for a date? Clearly his mission, if he should decide to take it, was to find out.

They had met the previous week at an arts charity gala thrown by a Russian billionaire and his wife who wanted Piano Pete to play for them at a party in Moscow.

Quite what they wanted him to play was unclear, but he wasn’t precious – his last performance had been to provide musical support for a singing teddy bear act.

Trixy was also Russian and, handily for Pete, keen on supporting struggling artists. In fact, she was also an artist herself, although she really didn’t ‘do’ labels. ‘One week I might be an abstract painter,’ she said, ‘and the next week I am a folk singer.’

Piano Pete said that her dexterity was impressive, although Bob Dylan also liked to paint, so it wasn’t exactly a first.

Still, she was a lot better looking than Dylan (even in the early years) and there was no way he could have have worn a skin-tight cat suit with the same appeal.

Her email also demanded that he come equipped with some subjects for discussion. ‘I like to learn something new every day,’ she added. ‘I don’t want to get Brain Fog.’ Piano Pete didn’t know what Brain Fog was, but obviously he didn’t want to get it either. What he did want to get, however, was a cream to cure the rash that had suddenly appeared on his back and right thigh – but there wasn’t time. He couldn’t risk being late.

Trixy had chosen the restaurant. It was candlelit (a good sign) and mediumpriced (a relief). Piano Pete had checked his bank balance that morning and, as long as she didn’t insist on champagne,

he might even be able to pay his share of the bill. In his back pocket he had some crib notes on Chinese watercolours and the latest Indian sitar players – although the only one anyone ever cared about was Ravi Shankar.

They ordered. Shifting himself on his chair in order to discreetly scratch his back, Piano Pete complimented her on her striking red silk mini-dress. It turned out it was her birthday. ‘I had no idea,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I would have got you a gift.’ She said that it wasn’t necessary; besides, she knew what she wanted. ‘I am 37 and I want to have a baby.’ Pete was a little taken aback, but asked if it might be all right if they finished their meal first.

Ignoring his attempts at humour, Trixy said she had set aside her birthday week for finding a ‘co-parent’. Over the following seven nights she was

considering seven different options.

He was Mr Tuesday. Her standards were very high and he really didn’t fulfil her usual criteria, but she had made an exception for him on account of the fact that he was a musician. Piano Pete said he was flattered. When would the contestants find out their results? She said that she planned to contact the winner in the next couple of weeks and then they could start practising.

Piano Pete spent the next few days in a semi-delirious state, partly to do with the excitement of the evening but also because the rash turned out to be scabies. He sent Trixy several texts asking how the auditions were going, but there was radio silence. Finally, after his fourth enquiry, Trixy texted back. ‘You lost. But thank you for your interest and for giving me scabies for my birthday.’

February 2014 – THE OLDIE 41

Virginia Ironside Period piece

their miniskirts, jobs, affluence, and easy access to contraception, drugs and rock’n’roll, must have seemed like a different species. Everyone wanted to know about them. ‘What does “fab” mean?’ they used to ask. ‘Why do young men want to wear their hair so long?’

‘Who are the Who?’ So when I got the letter I got my book out of the drawer, bunged it off and bingo, it was published. It was called Chelsea Bird and it featured one of the first bed scenes between unmarried young people. A magazine called New Society even wrote an article about it. The fact that the bed scene consisted of the sentences ‘He fumbled with my bra.

I hoped this wasn’t going to be a two-hour job’ didn’t seem to matter. It was new, it was shocking and the lifestyle was, to most older people, incomprehensible.

My jacket photograph was taken by the very scary Jeffrey Bernard who, I remember, sneered when I offered him a cigarette which, for some inexplicable reason, seemed to have turned from my usual trendy Woody into a hopelessly unfashionable Craven ‘A’. He left the photo session without saying goodbye.

I suppose, when I think back, he was just as terrified of me as I was of him.

The book caused a minor sensation.

I was interviewed and photographed

by leering snappers who set me at the top of a ladder and photographed my legs. There was a glut of us young authoresses, including my friend Annabel Dilke with Rule Three: Pretend to be Nice and Andrea Newman with Three Go. Into Two Won’t Go My publishers have now brought the book out on Kindle. But before they launched it a rather nervous young editor rang. ‘Would you like to check it over first?’ she said. ‘There may be some things that, in the present climate, you might want to change.’

And I must say that even I, not particularly politically correct, was shocked to see how many times the words ‘spade’, ‘Jew’, ‘queer’, and even, horror of horrors, ‘common’ were sprinkled through the text. (Curious, isn’t it, how unmentionable words change?

In the Fifties, Evelyn Home, the agony aunt at Woman magazine, was told she couldn’t use the word ‘menstruation’ or ‘bottom’ – not even as in ‘bottom of the garden’ or ‘bottom of the saucepan’.)

I’ve taken the shocking words out, and there it is. I’m slightly horrified to find there is a naivety and a total heartlessness about it that can only belong to the young who, selfishly, have no idea how other people – like my grandparents, for instance, who were cruelly mocked – might have felt when they were pinned to the page. Still, it’s a period piece and, years later, I find it rather a good insight into how the mind of a ‘young person’ actually works.

• Virginia is appearing in her one-woman show at the Swindon Arts Centre in March

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR ROBINS

I

was eighteen in 1962 when I started writing my first book. I’d go to art school during the day, go out in the evening and, when I came home to Chelsea, I’d get out my Woody Woodbines, start typing on an old portable typewriter and hope my dad didn’t catch me smoking. When I’d finished, I put it in a drawer.

To be honest the plot was pretty thin. It centred on a young art student in the early Sixties living at home with her father, and it was all about her adventures in the King’s Road. No prize for guessing whether it was semi-autobiographical or not.

I had no idea how a book was published. Luckily, though, I’d sent an amusing piece (my first ever) to About Town, a very chic and groovy magazine.

The features editor – then Michael Parkinson – accepted it and once it came out I got a letter from a mysterious company called Secker & Warburg. Had I, they wanted to know, ever thought of writing a book?

The reason they wanted to know was because a young debutante, Charlotte Bingham, had just had a huge success with a book about her hilarious adventures on the deb scene called Coronet Among The Weeds. Naturally enough they were dying to get on the bandwagon and find their own ‘young person’. And I was that young person.

To a generation which had just come out of the war – a generation raised on ration books and blackouts, who’d lived through what Cyril Connolly called the ‘drab decade’ – young people, with

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

43

RIGHT ON REV

An Anglican in IRELAND The Church of Ireland recently ordained its first woman bishop, an important milestone in a long and complicated history, writes HUGH O’SHAUGHNESSY – but there are still many problems to overcome

PHOTO COURTESY OF MICHAEL DEBETS / DEMOTIX/DEMOTIX/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES

I

n her fifties and married to a Church of Ireland vicar, Pat Storey, the smiling bespectacled blonde mother of Carolyn and Luke, both in their twenties, was elected in September 2013 the new Bishop of Meath and Kildare in the Church of Ireland. She is the first woman bishop ever of the Anglican communion, English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish, in the British Isles. ‘I count it an enormous privilege to begin a new phase of my ministry with the people of Meath and Kildare,’ she declared.

Sadly Pat’s trouble will be that she won’t have many people to minister to in a communion which is suffering pains of contraction longer and more acute even than those of the Catholic church, beset (according to the Vatican itself) by clerical pederasty and gross episcopal negligence. The C of I, which uses the Book of Common Prayer, claims 130,000 members in the Republic of Ireland, with about twice as many in the six counties of Northern Ireland.

Once the fief of the Englishspeaking moneyed ascendency, the Church of Ireland is the palest shadow of what it once was when the British government, Henry VIII’s Protestant religion and the Archbishop of Canterbury were supposedly supreme in church and state in Ireland. Though the vast majority of Irish people remained Catholics and rejected the organisation set up by Henry, King of England and Ireland, his heirs and successors, London decreed until well into the 19th century that they had to pay tithes to support Protestantism.

My family came originally from Kilmacduagh in the west of Ireland, and the situation there illustrates today’s problems for the Church of Ireland.

Its bishop, Trevor Russell Williams, has the jurisdiction not only over the

44

THE OLDIE – February 2014

diocese of Kilmacduagh but also seven others – Limerick, Ardfert, Aghadoe, Killaloe, Kilfenora, Clonfert and Emly.

The church at Kilmacduagh was founded as a monastery in the seventh century by St Colman, and in 1132 it became a cathedral, standing now in the Catholic diocese of Galway and Kilmacduagh, which claims 119,000 members

Pat Storey is the first woman bishop ever of the Anglican communion, English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish, in the British Isles in 38 parishes. Patrick Fallon, the last bishop of the Catholic Kilmacduagh diocese before it was amalgamated with Galway, died in 1879.

In case the Vikings come pillaging again, as they did in the 13th century, half a millennium after its foundation the old round tower can still offer

us shelter – as long as we’ve got a stout ladder. Security measures a thousand years ago meant that the door protecting the stairs to the upper room was built seven metres above ground and, like the much more modern 12thcentury tower at Pisa, it does lean a bit.

The cathedral hasn’t got much of a roof left. But, roofed or roofless, it has stood a millennium and a half: the walls and ruined windows look good for another 1,500 years, bearing as they do the illustrious name of O’Shaughnessy, carved by the dextrous hands of loving masons over the centuries.

Kilmacduagh became a Protestant diocese – while remaining a Catholic one – in 1625, a time of particular religious confusion in Ireland, typified

by Miler Magrath. Born in 1522, he went to Rome, became a Franciscan friar and a Catholic priest and was appointed the Bishop of Down and Connor by the Pope. For nine years he was a Catholic and a Protestant bishop simultaneously, until the Vatican excommunicated him for heresy in 1580. The Anglicans admired his subtlety and made him Bishop of Clogher and then Archbishop of Cashel. He married Amy O’Meara, a Tipperary woman who gave him eight children. He controlled at least thirty parishes and their livings and he gave 27 to his sons Turlough, Redmond, Bryan and Mark, not forgetting the daughters. He liked a glass of the hard stuff, married a second time after Amy’s death, and died a centenarian in 1622.

But, before I forget, how do you address a blonde lady bishop whose turn it is to buy you a drink in an Irish pub?

Left: the Revd Pat Storey with her husband before her service of consecration as bishop, Dublin, November 2013

fadsfadfsdafdsa

RIBBIT RIBBIT

Profitable Wonders

by James Le Fanu

Fabulous Frogs

T

and terrestrial is apparent too in its mode of reproduction. he frog with its damp skin, bulging eyes, long Starting out as a tadpole with gills and tail, it is both physically chin and spindly legs is not perhaps the most and anatomically a fish before going through the series of obviously appealing of God’s creatures. ‘Be kind and tender to the frog,’ wrote Hilaire Belloc, ‘and metamorphoses to acquire the necessary attributes of lungs and limbs that will transform it, as an adult, into an air-breathing do not call him names, as “Slimy skin” or “Pollyamphibian. This is no trivial matter, but the variety of means wog”, or likewise “Ugly James”.’ But life as an by which, with apparent care and forethought, they ensure the amphibian is vastly more challenging than it might appear and survival of their progeny through this process of transition rank these distinctive features are each an ingenious response to the amongst the most astonishing of biological phenomena. substantial difficulties posed by moving between the two very different physical habitats of land and water.

Those prominent bulging eyes, for example, act as a pair of periscopes, providing a wide field of vision while allowing the rest of the body to be completely submerged in water, where the frog is less vulnerable to the attentions of its (many) potential predators. Their seemingly disproportionate size is also relevant to their further (unique) auxiliary function of This takes two main forms. The first, epitomised by the facilitating swallowing – dropping through a gap at the base of Japanese species Rhacophorus schlegelii, involves building them the eye socket to assist in pushing food down the throat. a safe haven. The male and female tunnel through the damp As for that slimy damp skin, this, as many will know, is a necessity for regulating the stability of the core temperature on earth a few inches above water level at the edge of a ditch or which the complexities of the frog’s internal metabolism depends. stream to create a small chamber. They then block the entrance through which they have come and, when completely enclosed The core temperature of cold-blooded amphibians is fairly in their smooth-walled retreat, the female produces a froth of constant when in water, being close to their own and varying slime and air bubbles within which she lays her eggs. These by only a few degrees. But step on to dry land and the frog are duly fertilised by her partner. They then exit by a different is immediately exposed to widely fluctuating temperatures route, this time tunnelling down obliquely to below the water throughout the day. The frog, for whom a warm summer’s day line, leaving their offspring behind to mature in the marital verges on the tropical, must struggle constantly to keep cool – hence its wet glistening skin, whose copious glandular secretions home. When in due course the eggs hatch and the tadpoles emerge, they escape the safety of their allow it to lose heat by evaporation. nursery by the same route as their parThose characteristic long, spindly but ents, slithering down, assisted by those powerful legs and large webbed feet are slimy secretions, into the stream below. undoubtedly the frog’s most striking and This solicitude is apparent too in a glorious achievement, both propelling it rather different way when the parents act speedily through the water and allowing as nurses for their brood, carrying about it to leap prodigious distances, up to forty the fertilised eggs affixed, in the case times its body length – the champion of the midwife toad Alytes obstetricans, jumper being a two-inch-long species by gelatinous strips to its legs and from South Africa recorded as jumping a abdomen. The Brazilian Pipa americana staggering twelve feet in a single bound. provides a safe hatching ground for its This jumping prowess, unparalleled young by placing them on its back, over in the animal kingdom, vastly exceeds which it grows a protective layer of skin. the power its muscles can generate – a Meanwhile the Australian Rheobatrachus conundrum only recently clarified by silus swallows its fertilised eggs, which physiologist Henry Astley of Brown will mature in its stomach before University who, with the aid of highemerging through its mouth six weeks speed cineradiology, has demonstrated later as fully formed froglets. There are, how the preliminary stretching of an needless to say, many more examples. elastic tendon around the ankle and its Every animal draws attention in its own subsequent recoil permits the frog to way to the strangeness and wonder of life (literally) catapult itself into the air.

‘You need to liven yourself up, young man...

– but perhaps, one might think, the frog The frog’s ingenuity in reconciling Amphetamines seemed to hit the spot even more than most. the very different demands of the aquatic when I was your age’

The frog’s ingenuity in reconciling the very different demands of the aquatic and terrestrial is apparent in reproduction

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

45

RELIGION: A BROAD CHURCH?

John Sweeney

ROVING REPORT ER

I claim therefore I am The Scientologists have moved a step closer to their holy grail – amid deafening Treasury silence THE RULING BY the Supreme Court designating the Church of Scientology’s ‘chapel’ in London a place of meeting for religious worship, allowing two young Scientologists to get married there, helps the late L Ron Hubbard’s movement towards its long-time goal of religious recognition in England. I wish the couple, Louisa Hodkin and her fiancé, Alessandro Calcioli, well, but it does seem odd that m’learned friends for HM Treasury did not challenge the Church’s own opinion of itself as a religion.

The dog that didn’t howl his head off in the middle of the night is to be found in paragraph 15 of the noble lords’ ruling, which notes the evidence of a Scientology minister, Mrs Laura Wilks: ‘She has conducted many congregational services in its chapel. In her statutory declaration she gives an account of the history, beliefs and practices of Scientology. Her evidence was not challenged and so may be taken as accurate for present purposes.’

Why was her evidence not challenged?

Are the lawyers for HM Treasury unaware of allegations about the Church’s dark side? The Treasury, whose lawyers attended the hearing, declined to comment, but suggested I contact two other government departments.

Scientology’s founder, pulp sci-fi hack L Ron Hubbard, was a confidence trickster out to make money. In The Creation of Human Ability, L Ron wrote of Scientology: ‘It is not a psycho-therapy nor a religion.’ Later, he changed his hymn tune: ‘I await your reaction on the religion angle. In my opinion, we couldn’t get worse public opinion than we have had or have less customers with what we’ve got to sell. A religious charter would be necessary in Pennsylvania or NJ to make it stick.

But I sure could make it stick.’ Note the key word: ‘customers.’

In October 1962 L Ron set out the policy: ‘Scientology 1970 is being planned on a

46

THE OLDIE – February 2014

religious organization basis throughout the world. This will not upset in any way the usual activities of any organization. It is entirely a matter for accountants and solicitors.’ How very religious…

In the 21st century everyone has a right to believe in anything they want to believe in. That includes Scientologists, and I will defend that right for them, too. But I make a distinction between a belief system and a religion, which is granted tax breaks and, broadly, a degree of respect from society as a whole. In return, a religion should benefit the public, be open to all and honest about what it believes in. Go to a church and they will tell you about Jesus; a mosque, Mohammed; a synagogue, marry a nice Jewish girl… But walk into a Church of Scientology and they will not tell you that at Operating Thetan Level III you learn about Lord Xenu, a space alien Satan who 75 million years ago massacred space aliens in volcanoes with H-bombs.

The Church’s secret belief is that all humanity’s ills are caused because we are infected by the souls of the dead pesky space aliens – and sharing this secret may kill you. (I’ve been doing that since 2007 and am, as yet, undead.)

I know seven ex-members of the Church who would happily spell out L Ron Hubbard and his ‘Hubbard Electrometer’ which determines whether tomatoes experience pain, 1968

what they think of the Church and its self-appointed ‘Pope’, David Miscavige, Tom Cruise’s best man.

Take ex-Scientologist Marc Headley, whose book Blown for Good tells the story of his fifteen years in the Church. After he and his wife ‘blew’ (left), they sued the Church for breaking US labour laws. They lost, in part because Scientology is officially recognised as a religion in the US. Marc is demonised by the Church as a hater.

He says: ‘Scientology is the North Korea of belief systems, and David Miscavige is their Kim Jong-un. Unless there is some radical coup in the world of Scientology, they will continue as a cult masquerading as a religion operating like a business.’

No major publisher dared take on my book, The Church Of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology but despite a threat from libel lawyers Carter-Ruck it’s sold 12,000 copies in a year. In it, I recount what happened to me after we investigated the Church for BBC’s Panorama.

I was spied on by the Church’s private investigators in America and Britain and lied to by the Church’s spokesmen.

Just because something asserts that it is a religion, it does not follow that it is.

Supreme Court Judge Lord Wilson made the same point in legalese: ‘I acknowledge, however, that the issue, which one might describe in shorthand as that of self-certification, is not free from difficulty.’

A self-certified religion could be a multi-billion-pound corporation, a brainwashing cult or a mafia – or, according to Scientology’s critics, all three rolled into one. The Church disputes that and says that I am a psychotic, a liar and a bigot. One Church blogger says ‘John Sweeney is genuinely evil’.

Perhaps as far as HM Treasury’s lawyers were concerned, when I lost my temper with the Church’s spokesman, Tommy Davis – I apologised then, I apologise now – I wasn’t shouting loud enough.

the war that never e andrew hosken visited Baghdad for BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight and discovered the terrible extent of the unrelenting conflict between Sunnis and Shias

M

ohamed Al Shabhandar is both an easy man to track down and a difficult chap to talk to, for reasons everyone understands. Most days he can be found in his café in the heart of Baghdad’s famous book market in AlMutanabbi Street. You can see him in his short rounded taqiyah cap, perched high on a stool by the front door settling the accounts of his customers, and beside him on the wall you will see the photographs of his slaughtered family.

Most Iraqis know the Al Shabhandar café, which was opened in 1924, a decade or so before Mr Al Shabhandar was born – apparently by one of his uncles. Anyone who is anyone has sat amidst the hubbub of writers and academics and drunk sweet tea from the café’s tulip-shaped glasses. In one corner stands an old gramophone and the walls are covered with black-

48

THE OLDIE – February 2014

and-white photos of the old kings and heroes of Iraq. But its sense of stolid permanence is an illusion. In March 2007 it was destroyed by an enormous car bomb which killed 68 people including Mr Al Shabhandar’s four sons and a grandson. A grief consumed Mrs Al Shabhandar and she died a month afterwards. He related this horror story in a perfunctory growl and with a middle-distance gaze which suggests someone still in a state of shock.

‘You may congratulate me on rebuilding my business,’ he said. ‘But you see, I now have four widows and eleven orphans to support.’

In the last year, more than fifty cafés have been bombed, including 25 in Baghdad alone. Along with markets, schools, religious festivals and funerals, cafés and restaurants have proved to be easy targets for the hotchpotch of insurgents who have murdered nearly 8,000 people in Iraq since January 2013, and threaten to plunge the

Above: Baghdad overlooking the Tigris Above right: everyday life in Al Shabhandar café. Bottom left: Hamza and Hassan Jasim, aged 7 and 5, who survived a recent Baghdad car bomb unscathed. Four other people died and their father Mohammed was badly injured. Bottom right: café owner Mohamed Al Shabhandar

country into a civil war between the Shia majority and Sunni minority.

Baghdad is the frontline. This is where you will hear of the mass casualty ‘spectaculars’ involving 20 to 30 car bombs in a day. But you will not find the population of five million in a complete funk, keeping away from public places. There is a sense of abnormal normality in a country where no one and nowhere is safe. I found the markets teeming with life and cafés doing a roaring trade. ‘Believe me,’ an Iraqi BBC colleague told me before I arrived, ‘you’re going to see a big city just getting on with its business.’

F E AT U R E

r ends

following the occasional spectacular.

Usually little clue is given as to who or why – often because the hapless security forces in Iraq seem just as clueless.

Many politicians enjoy the high security of the Green Zone or live abroad with their families. All too often the violence is lazily dismissed as ‘sectarian’ but much of it is being perpetrated by both Shia and Sunni jihadists in attempts to stoke up sectarianism.

The weapon of choice for ISIS is the car bomb, which delivers mass casualties, albeit very expensively. One Iraqi security consultant told me, ‘they use this pricey plastic explosive called C4.

Each car can cost $150,000 to $200,000.

A spectacular with twenty or so car bombs can cost $3–$4 million.’ The cost is why many politicians and security experts here suspect ISIS of receiving outside funding from Islamist groups in

In the last year, more than fifty cafés have been bombed, including 25 in Baghdad. They are easy targets for the hotchpotch of insurgents who have murdered 8,000 people At first, I felt a sense of internal cowering, thinking every parked car could be a vehicle bomb and every person I imagined was behaving suspiciously was a suicide bomber. But then, gradually, you start to rationalise the odds. The chances of your number ‘being up’ in this most macabre of lotteries is still remote, but then hundreds of people die in Iraq each week in the most sudden and horrible ways believing the same thing.

Much of what happens in Iraq goes unreported except as a news bulletin

The most prominent and most murderous of these is the al-Qaeda franchised organisation, the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), which also fights across the western border in the Syrian civil war. Increasingly, these predominantly Sunni jihadists see both countries as part and parcel of the same conflict and hope to conquer them for the international caliphate they dream of establishing across the Muslim world.

In both cases, their enemies, Bashar alAssad of Syria and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki, are Shia leaders.

Saudi Arabia and possibly elsewhere.

Domestic Sunni and Shia militias are also involved in the attacks, mainly in close quarter assassinations and IEDs, and are also suspected of receiving funds from other countries in the region.

‘The fault line in our society is between Shia and Sunni,’ one former Iraqi diplomat told me. ‘There’s no use blaming the invasion or America for that. It is our problem.’ The current upsurge started last April following the massacre by the Iraqi army of around fifty Sunni demonstrators at al Hawija, north of Baghdad.

Apparently helpless to prevent most attacks, Iraq’s interior ministry has started to rubbish casualty figures released by its own police force, but few people believe government claims of winning the war against the insurgents. In fact most expect the violence to increase as the country approaches crucial elections in April, in this war without apparent end.

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

49

Left to right: Château de Chenonceau, Bourges Cathedral and Château d’Azay-le-Rideau

Château de Noizay

Below: Bill Knott (left) and Huon Mallalieu

invites you to experience

The Châteaux and Gastronomy of the Loire Valley with Huon Mallalieu and Bill Knott

STRICTLY LIMITED TO 20 PEOPLE

3rd October – 10th October 2014 FOLLOWING OUR sell-out trips to Italy in April and June, we have put together a tour of the Loire Valley, the soul of La Douce France. No other region in France has such a happy combination of history, food and wine, and we have chosen to go at the time of the vendange. Based in the heart of the Loire Valley, we will be visiting all the nearby famous sites but at a quiet time of year. So you can look forward to guided tours of Chenonceaux, Azay-le-Rideau, Tours, Chambord and Valençay, as well as a trip to Bourges to see the splendours of the cathedral.

OUR HOTEL We will be staying at Château de Noizay (www.chateaudenoizay.com), a very sumptuous 16th-century château which has been a member of the Relais and Châteaux association since 1992. Situated just 20 minutes from Tours this beautiful château has 19 bedrooms and a swimming pool. Maintaining our house party ethos, we will have breakfast and dinner in our own private dining room where we will sample the cuisine of renowned chef, Frédéric Collin.

OUR GUIDES Huon Mallalieu, a veteran of Oldie trips, will be guiding you through the history and architecture of the region, while The Oldie’s wine correspondent and expert chef, Bill Knott, will be sharing with us the delights of the local wineries, markets and restaurants. James Pembroke, publisher of The Oldie, will be the tour leader and baggage handler.

BETTER BY RAIL Many of you have told us how sick you are of airports, so we will be catching the train from St Pancras to Tours via Paris, where we will transfer to Gare Montparnasse by minibus. The total journey time is just five hours, but you can stretch your legs and gaze at the passing scenery. Guests are also welcome to make their own travel arrangements if they want to drive or stay on in Paris.

ITINERARY Please email editorial@theoldie.co.uk for a full itinerary FRIDAY 3rd OCTOBER

THURSDAY 9th OCTOBER

11.30am: depart on Eurostar at St Pancras; 2.47pm: arrive Gare du Nord; minibuses to Montparnasse; 4.15pm: depart Montparnasse; 5.30pm: arrive at Tours station; coach to Château de Noizay (20 minutes away); 7pm: welcome drinks and brief talks by Huon and Bill; 8pm: dinner at the Château

Cheverny and Amboise

SATURDAY 4th OCTOBER Tours and Chenonceaux

SUNDAY 5th OCTOBER Bourges market and cathedral

MONDAY 6th OCTOBER Chambord and river trip

TUESDAY 7th OCTOBER Villandry and Azay-le-Rideau

WEDNESDAY 8th OCTOBER Montrésor, winery and Valençay

FRIDAY 10th OCTOBER Depart after breakfast for Tours and last-minute shopping;

12pm: depart from Tours station; 1.15pm: arrive Montparnasse; minibuses to Gare du Nord; Opportunity for quick lunch at the famous Brasserie Terminus Nord; 3.07pm: depart for London; 4.40pm: arrive at St Pancras

PRICE: £1,750 per person (NO SINGLE SUPPLEMENT!) For further enquiries please call James Pembroke on 020 7436 8801 or email him at publisher@theoldie.co.uk TO RESERVE A PLACE, please send a deposit for £500 (made payable to Oldie Publications) to James Pembroke, The Oldie, 65 Newman St, London, W1T 3EG.

• Includes everything apart from aperitifs • Trains to and from London to Tours

and connecting minibus (£100 per head discount for those who make their own way to and from the Château) • All transport during the week

• Half board at Château de Noizay • Six meals out in restaurants • All wine and soft drinks at meals • Entrances to all châteaux and museums • All guides

T H E D I G I TA L A G E

The end of an era brian macarthur bids farewell to the print newspaper...

I

have been in love with newspapers since the age of twelve, more than sixty years ago, when I decided that I wanted to be E W Swanton or Neville Cardus (as if) and work for the Manchester Guardian, which was read by all our teachers. I wrote for my local weekly when still at school and financed my last year at university by writing for the Yorkshire Post for a penny halfpenny a line. One month I made £26. Since then I’ve worked for six national newspapers. For nearly twenty years I wrote ‘Paper Round’, a weekly column celebrating the joy of newspapers. Newspapers printed on dead trees have been my life. Indeed, dozens of papers recording great events – general elections, deaths of presidents and princesses, births of children and grandchildren – litter the attic, no doubt awaiting the grandchildren’s dustbins.

For many years during my career as a journalist I took every national newspaper and read or scanned them all as the first pleasure and – today’s young journalists please note – duty of the day. So it wasn’t a surprise when one of my oldest journalist friends called me a traitor after I cancelled my last print newspaper. I had put off the decision for months. I felt a loyalty not only to traditional newspapers but also to my newsagent who travelled seven miles a day to deliver my papers by 7 am. But I am now convinced that the 500-year Gutenberg era is over and that we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the print newspaper.

The FT, the Guardian and the Daily Mail with Mail Online, the newspaper website with the world’s highest traffic, are the trailblazers. Changing editions for north, south, east and west and updating the news at 10 pm, midnight and 2 am is dead, says the FT’s editor Lionel Barber. Instead in 2014 the FT will publish a single global print newspaper which will explain the most important issues of the day. There will

be a ‘minimal’ staff at night. The print FT will no longer be a ‘news’ paper.

No more that long stretch until 2 am checking with hospitals and police stations and following up rivals’ scoops or waking angry politicians from their sleep. Updating news will be done 24 hours-a-day online.

The switch to digital newspapers is accelerating. Online sales of the FT and the Times are booming. FT.com has 340,000 subscribers, compared

Newsrooms are busier than ever as the new generation of digital journalists do tweets and threads, videos and blogs as well as stories with a daily print sale of 241,000. The Times sells 520,000 across both print and online.

The oldie generation of journalists will mourn the passing of hot metal and linotype machines, the hum of the composing room and the rumble of

‘I got six months, suspended’

the presses which shook the building when the first edition went to press. At lunchtime they look sadly around the modern newsroom as journalists eat their tuna sandwiches at their desks with a bottle of water instead of meeting contacts or gossiping in the pub. But newsrooms are busier than ever as the new generation of digital journalists do tweets and threads, videos and blogs as well as stories and features.

I now take four newspapers a day on my iPad – the Times, Guardian, Telegraph and Mail, each costing about £12 a month – and on my reckoning saving me about £1,000 a year. If I can’t sleep I can download them before 6 am. They are easy to handle and the iPad mini fits into a coat pocket.

They have videos of news stories and cavalcades of pictures as well as intriguing gimmicks – Daily Mail Plus, for instance, has 360-degree pictures and daily archive film footage (as I write, of Gandhi and Charlie Chaplin in the East End).

Managements are now investing heavily in digital. Only one in three of the Guardian’s online readers are in Britain and it now has the sort of offices in America and Australia that it once had in Manchester. Digital seems to be good news for journalists – the number of FT journalists has increased to more than 650 and the Daily Mail iPad edition employs a staff of 80 editors, subs, designers, developers and technologists. Digital newspapers are also cheaper to produce – managements don’t have to buy so much newsprint or use so many lorries and so much petrol to get their papers delivered to newsagents. And it’s very good news for trees.

Newspapers are entering a new era in which they will be read by many more readers and attract audiences across the world – Mail Online had a staggering 150 million browsers last October.

Welcome to the brave new world.

It’s not as frightening as you think.

February 2013 – THE OLDIE

51

ED REARDON’S

MONTH

Broadsides from the Bard of Berkhamsted

I AM A GREAT ADMIRER of the late Tony Hancock, of his writers Galton and Simpson, and in particular of the line they gave him in The Blood Donor in reply to being asked if he was a doctor: ‘I never really bothered.’ This is a perspective on life with which I find myself increasingly in sympathy as another year girds its loins and yet again I seem to have failed to merit consideration for some of the higher-profile posts recently on offer, be it Governor of the Bank of England, a regional police commissioner or, most inexplicably of all, guest editor of the Today programme. The philosophical question remains: would things have been any different if I’d exerted myself a little more ‘back in the day’, as the few remaining disc-jockeys not lending their talents to prison radio still say?

HAD ED REARDON ever risen to the corporate heights, I like to think I would have resisted attaching my name to the claptrap put out by the CEO of G4S when offering to repay huge sums of government money claimed for electronically tagging non-existent or even dead miscreants: ‘This is an important step in setting this matter straight and restoring the trust which has been earned by our many thousands of committed and hard-working employees over many years. The way this contract was managed was not consistent with our values or our approach to dealing with customers.’

Every abject cliché worth a hundred million pounds or so, and another example of the redundant verbosity overwhelming every aspect of life, from endless announcements from the driver that the train is being held at a red light to warnings about flash photography preceding every other news item. I did suggest to the BBC that the

speakers embedded in the piazza at New Broadcasting House could be put to public-spirited use by apologising for its latest gaffes in fifty different languages, but as yet have received no grateful reply.

ACCORDING TO the calendar from the garage down the road, Groundhog Day will soon be upon us, followed hard on its heels by Valentine’s Day and Mardi Gras. These anniversaries, together with Halloween, passed uncelebrated until the arrival of commercial radio forty years ago with its acres of air-time to fill, and long before Twitter and texts from the twelve-year-old ignocracy (a link on Radio 3 the other morning consisted of a tweet from the mother of a toddler who apparently loved Bach. Cue Bach).

And since on-line retailers joined the fray, every day that isn’t Black Friday is Cyber Monday or Mega Thursday, when my office suppliers will supply two office chairs for the price of one.

My own particular Black Friday will probably come on January 31st, followed by a Day of Rage when I realise that once again I have incurred a fine of £100 by forgetting to file my tax returns. I am even now composing my letter of defence, blaming as is fashionable the last Labour government. Alternatively I might take a leaf out of the G4S mea culpa manual and admit to being dead.

SEND US YOUR TXT Got something to say?

Text your comment, followed by your name and where you live to

07563 969088

● A thousand thank-yous to the gentleman in M&S who told me the time when my watch had stopped.

Dorothea, Chorleywood ● My watch is always set to be ten minutes fast so I have time to spare and as such I am seldom late.

Imran, Norwood ● Don’t throw away used tea bags. They are a useful moth repellent.

Corin, Neasden ● Wrong, Corin. The tannin in tea actually attracts moths. If you don’t want to buy a moth repellent use hair spray.

Michelle, Barnet ● The best moth repellent is a cup of vinegar added to your wash. My grandmother swore by it.

Madge, Hamsey Green ● Moths are God’s creatures, just like everyone else. It is not their fault they eat our clothes.

Patrick (Rev), Sanderstead ● For sale: complete set London Telephone Directories 1952 (L–R cover missing). Collector’s item. £44.

Rodney, Penge ● Electric blankets illegal from 2016. Brussels strikes again.

Chris, Litton ● And about time, too, Chris. Have you any idea how many fires are caused each year by faulty wiring? My brother is a fireman. He’ll tell you it runs into thousands.

Monty, Hendon ● Young people today would be a lot healthier if they took a bedtime drink of Ovaltine or Horlicks like we did as children.

Betty, Whipps Cross

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

53

HER MAJESTY’S PLEASURE

A HARD-KNOCK life ERIC GEORGE remembers life as a borstal boy in the mid-Fifties

PHOTO COURTESY OF REX/DAVID HARTLEY

T

wenty-seven years before the borstal system was finally abolished in 1982, I served over a year’s sentence at Huntercombe Borstal in Oxfordshire. In some ways it resembled a public school. The officers were known as housemasters, rather than warders, and during the last three months of a sentence some prisoners would be appointed house prefects: along with the housemasters, they were expected to maintain law and order. Two of the buildings on the campus were known as Oxford and Cambridge House. They contained unlocked rooms in which the prisoners slept, as well as large recreational halls and shower and toilet facilities.

The day started with a brisk run to the end of a driveway roughly half a mile long, followed by fifteen minutes of HM Prison Huntercombe in 2001 vigorous physical exercise on the spot before returning to get governor, picking stones alongside him in the belief that he dressed and make one’s way to the dining-hall for breakfast. too was a sinner and had to make reparation.

When work was finished for the day, each inmate remained On other occasions, an offender might be confined to the in his room for one hour without speaking to anyone. This ‘wing’ in the punishment block for one or two days. Apart from ‘silent hour’ was meant to be a time for reflection. two half-hour exercise periods a day, he would remain locked Newly arrived prisoners were allocated to work in the in a room with only a book for company. Few of the young building or painting workshop, the gardens or the kitchens, and expected to learn skills which would help them on release. men were avid readers, so this was regarded as a particularly The work could be hard at times. I remember picking carrots tedious punishment. It was not unknown for Sir Almeric to spend several hours in solitude in an adjoining room. with freezing fingers from a snow-covered field in the winter Huntercombe was an ‘open’ institution. A walk over the main of 1955. Back then there was no drugs scene, and tobacco field or down the drive was all it took to escape. A few lads tried was the major currency. The ‘Daddies’ were the ‘hard men’ their luck, but they were soon recaptured. who wouldn’t shrink from bullying The prisoners were a motley bunch. and throwing their weight around; ‘Old At times the governor Most were petty offenders who had Joes’ were the hapless victims, who prostrated himself in front ‘graduated’ from the probation system or sometimes paid for protection with of the altar and, in a voice approved schools. But one inmate was to tobacco, cash and, occasionally, sex. become notorious. Sean Bourke, known The governor of Huntercombe was trembling with emotion, as ‘Paddy’, made national headlines Sir Almeric Rich. A deeply religious begged forgiveness when he helped the spy George Blake to man, he led the Church of England escape from Wormwood Scrubs. service on Sundays in the Nissen hut It took a long time to become ‘respectable’ citizens after that served as a chapel. At times he prostrated himself in front being discharged from Huntercombe. Employers were of the altar in prayer and, in a voice trembling with emotion, reluctant to employ ex-borstal boys except in the most menial begged forgiveness for his sins. The first time I saw this I jobs. It was only by being economical with the truth that we found it amusing, yet somehow disturbing. I also remember became employable in decent jobs. When I finally retired it him occasionally queuing up to get his lunch and eating it was as a Senior Nurse Teacher with a master’s degree in the with the rest of us, which wasn’t popular with the prisoners.

Philosophy of Healthcare. A friend whom I’d first met on One of our punishments was stone-picking, which remand in Wormwood Scrubs became a local government involved standing in the main field, regardless of the officer, and was a magistrate for a number of years. weather, with a bucket in one hand, under the eye of a I don’t know whether borstals were more effective watchful guard. Once the bucket had been filled, the guard deterrents than the Youth Custody Centres that superseded emptied its contents some distance away, after which the them, but I do know that Huntercombe played an important transgressor began to refill it. This could go on all day. The part in turning my own life around. offending youth might be joined for an hour or two by the February 2014 – THE OLDIE

55

Readers write Dressing up the past

SIR: As one of the ‘over-zealous National Trust employees’ described by Jeremy Lewis (Living Hell, December Oldie) I have to say how sorry I am that his visit to Blickling was spoiled by my colleagues ‘imparting unwanted information’.

In my role as Day Organiser for my fellow volunteers at Lyme Park, on the edge of the Peak District, I always stress how important it is not to say too much to house visitors. I point out that, by the visitor’s appearance and demeanour, it is usually possible to ascertain whether he/she wishes to be addressed or would rather stroll around the house without our intervention.

Mr Lewis may not like what is happening at Blickling, but the National Trust has to move forward. We have to ensure that succeeding generations inherit our interest in preservation and conservation of historic buildings and therefore if we dress up and engage with those visitors who wish to participate in reliving our heritage, this can only be a good thing.

Nicholas Bostin, Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire

A trail of litter

SIR: When Richard Ingrams highlighted the way BBC News is used to promote other BBC programmes (Television, December issue), he dealt with the trailing of Crimewatch. There is a much more glaring example, repeated without fail every week. Whenever there is a Panorama, the one o’clock and six o’clock television bulletins that day carry a trail for the item masquerading as a news story. A few weeks ago Panorama dealt with the problem of litter on the streets.

This is a perfectly proper subject for a current affairs programme to tackle but it is hardly news. That did not prevent the inclusion of the subject in the earlier news bulletins that day with a trail ahead to Panorama. Did this important piece of news appear in the ten o’clock news after Panorama had been broadcast?

Of course not.

Keith Clement, Northwood, Middlesex

56

THE OLDIE – February 2014

‘It’s a meerkat thumbscrew... what d’ya think?... is that cool or what?’

A vicar writes

SIR: Valerie Grove was right to rebuke Reith lecturer Grayson Perry for equating onanism with masturbation (Wireless, December Oldie).

The sin of Onan was practising coitus interruptus to evade his obligation to preserve his deceased brother’s family line and subsequently claim his dead brother’s lands for himself (Genesis 38: 8–10). For this attempt to extinguish his brother’s name from the ongoing life of Israel, God struck Onan dead on the spot, a penalty not attached to the other practice mentioned.

Rev. David Ashforth, Leyburn

A patient writes

SIR: After I read an article in the Guardian headed ‘Nursing cuts putting NHS patients at risk says new study’ I thought ‘I know what this is about’. You see, recently, at the age of 87, I had a hip replacement operation. The operation was a great success and I am so grateful to the wonderful surgeon and doctors.

And the ancillary staff – ambulance people, physiotherapists etc – were all outstanding. However my stay on the ward was purgatory and by the time I returned home my immune system was

so low that I had to take antibiotics for two nasty infections. While in hospital I found that a few of the nurses seemed to be too busy to care. I tried to keep a low profile and not be a nuisance, but that did not help. One night I needed to use the lavatory. I got up quietly and made my way there and back with a walking aid. However, on the way back a nurse came charging out and said ‘Do YOU know what time it is? It’s 2am!’

I did not reply, but wondered what was I supposed to do anyway? I think that a few of the nurses were so rushed that they were ‘burnt out’.

There was some kindness, such as nurses bringing me extra blankets and tucking me in when I was cold. But several times I got ‘ticked off’ by nurses for no reason, as though I was a naughty child. For instance, one kind health assistant loaned me a pillow slip to cover my eyes so I could get some sleep, but when, on another night, I asked a senior nurse if I could borrow one as I could not sleep, she snapped, ‘If you were really tired you could sleep’ – so no pillow slip, and no sleep that night. Yet this was the same nurse who, soon after my operation, had kindly asked me ‘Would you like some stronger painkillers?’

I believe that any more cutbacks in nursing staff would prove disastrous.

If you have to be admitted to hospital, remember to take a sleeping mask and ear-plugs with you – and don’t be old!

Barbara MacArthur, Cardiff

FAT T Y PU FFS

Murder of the innocents

SIR: Jeremy Lewis (Living Hell, November) and Denis Ryan (Letters, December) are quite right about Bryn Terfel and others murdering innocent songs with silly arrangements. They will not be surprised to know that this has been going on for a long time. I have a recording of Owen Brannigan on which he ruins ‘Keep Your Feet Still, Geordie, Hinny!’ with a quite outrageous accompaniment in an attempt to liven up a traditional Geordie song which should have been sung gently and simply.

Dr Robert Close, Norwich

Old geyser remembered

SIR: Re the article on the Blue Lagoon, Iceland in the December magazine, I served in the RAF in Iceland in 1944–45.

We heard of the Blue Lagoon and on our recreation days a party of us would drive there in an RAF wagon, strip off and jump into the steamy pool. There was never anybody else there and we really enjoyed the experience.

Sixty-five years later my wife and I enjoyed a seven-day holiday in Iceland paid for by a scheme called Heroes Return, sponsored by the National Lottery. Reykjavik had certainly changed, and was now a modern city. I couldn’t find the site of our old camp of Nissen huts. The Blue Lagoon was now a huge hotel and spa complex, this time full of bikini-clad Icelandic ladies. The great geyser erupted about twice a day – in 1944 it erupted once an hour.

F M P Woodruff, Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex

If you can’t find it in yourself to mention some of our wonderful locations or you are stuck for space ‘the North’ would have sufficed.

Brian White, Lancashire.

Another pedant writes

SIR: Your correspondent writing on the subject of lines in the sand could not be more foolish (Pedants’ Revolt, January Oldie). The Line in the Sand was drawn

by Colonel Travis at the Alamo, and those who volunteered to stay and fight crossed over. The tide does not reach that area of Texas. The usage means that a decision must be made.

Brian Robinson, Brentwood, Essex

Mystery museum identified

SIR: Christine Janis wrote in the letters column of the October issue asking for further details of the York museum exhibiting ‘animal fakes’ she visited many years ago. I am certain that she was referring to the museum created by my late friend Alan Robertson which

he named ‘Professor Copperthwaite’s Cabinet of Curios’. He opened this ‘museum’ in 1979 or 1980 in Grape Lane, York – one of York’s most attractive old streets. I am good friends with his widow, Margaret, whose son has more information on the fictitious Professor Copperthwaite.

John L Craven, Nether Poppleton, York

Alexandrian defence

SIR: Someone called Norman Deplume wrote an utterly useless guide to Alexandria (World’s Worst Dumps, Go Away travel supplement, January). Most of his/her easily made, cheap, derogatory comments about litter, beggars, secret policemen etc could apply to most of Egypt.

I quite liked the new library where, among other delights, we discovered the exquisite lithographs of 19thcentury Egypt by David Roberts. Go to the impressive 15th-century Citadel of Qaitbey (not mentioned) and you have a marvellous panoramic view back over the Corniche and the fishing boats in

☞ continues over the page

Gone south

SIR: My wife and I look forward to your magazine dropping through our letterbox. The contents are most refreshing and thought-provoking. This is a Northerner’s way of saying we enjoy the originality and diversity of opinion.

I do however get a little tired of your subtle bias towards ‘the South’.

That subtlety was discarded in your January Old Un’s diary item referring to HS2 as the rail link ‘from London to Birmingham and BEYOND’. We don’t live in ‘beyond’. We are real people and we live in real towns, cities and villages.

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

57

LETTERS

the harbour. Having just checked my holiday snaps, I can’t see how the Roman amphitheatre justifies being dismissed as ‘desultory and unimpressive’; presumably it is deemed not big enough.

Other high points for us were the really excellent National Museum, housed in a beautifully restored Italianate villa, and the Roman catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa which are also not mentioned and were presumably thought not worth visiting. If the writer had used his/her real name we would know to disregard any future efforts.

Roger Powell, Wootton Bassett,Wilts PS Josceline Dimbleby’s Burma article was superb.

Great Scott

SIR: I entirely endorse Mike Duddridge’s sentiments regarding the generosity of the Norwegians in commemorating Captain Scott (January letters). However, he has several facts wrong in his letter.

There is no village on the Bergen – Oslo railway line called Hardanger. The village in question is Finse which is, at a height of 1,222 metres, the highest point on the line. It is close to the Hardangerjokulen Glacier, where Scott and his men trained before their ill-fated attempt to reach the South Pole. There is no statue of Scott – instead there is a stone obelisk with the names of Scott and the other men lost inscribed on it.

Philip Leckie, via email PS How the Norwegian railway company NSB manages to keep trains running through the snow, day in and day out, at 4,000 feet, just south of the Arctic Circle, is another matter – but one from which the UK train companies and Network Rail could learn a great deal.

little with the AA – they did ‘reward’ me with free Home Start recently, but the inflationary increases in annual payments have swallowed that up.

I shall now treat breakdown cover like any other form of insurance and shop around each year unashamedly. I suggest that others do the same – then these big companies will get the message.

David Andrew, Shropshire

McFrankenstein

SIR: Reading James Le Fanu on ‘the origin of life’ (December Oldie) reminded me that many years ago I heard a radio programme called, I seem to remember, The Thunder and Lightning Man. It related how an experiment was made to create life with a mixture of rocks, water, amino acids etc inside an aptly named ‘vivarium’. The vivarium was linked to a tall conductor outside the laboratory, and lightning was used to fire up the cocktail.

Some form of life did emerge with the discovery of an organism inside, but it disappeared and was presumed to have crawled out and away. The experimenter, a Scot, did exist. I looked him up in an old encyclopaedia but have long forgotten his name.

It was suggested that the experiment inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, since she wrote the novel shortly afterwards, placing the event in the early 19th century.

The BBC are unable to help me with details.

Do any readers recall the broadcast?

Martin Day, Gozo, Malta

The longevity of film scores

SIR: Richard Osborne, whose articles make such welcome reading, writes appreciatively of the Italian composer Nino Rota in the January Oldie. I hope he will not mind me mentioning The Legend of the Glass Mountain, one of Rota’s best known lighter compositions, but missing from Osborne’s chosen examples. This was the ersatz piano concerto composed for the 1949 British film The Glass Mountain which, tosh though it was, attracted huge queues. Cleverly produced to suit the skills and popularity of the actors Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray, it was Nino Rota’s music which gave it some class and caught the public’s fancy.

The Legend of the Glass Mountain eventually joined Warsaw Concerto, Cornish Rhapsody and The Dream of Olwen as music long outliving the British films for which they were written.

Guy Thomas, London SW13

Flowers gets one over

SIR: I am sure that few will disagree with your classification of Rev. Paul Flowers as a ‘top chump’ (Old Un’s Diary, January). It may also be worth remarking that his escapades demonstrate that we oldies are well able to match the younger generation in relation to greed, lust and general bad behaviour, and that we can perhaps even outdo them when it comes to hypocrisy.

Roger Davis, Orton Wistow, Peterborough

Breakdown advice

SIR: This year I gave up my 30-year AA membership in protest at the long series of premium hikes higher than inflation, and the huge discounts only available to new members. Loyalty counts for very

58

THE OLDIE – February 2014

‘Some day all this will be yours’

LONDON LANDMARK

Unwrecked England 66 Portland Place, London Candida Lycett Green

O

ur youngest grandson wants to be an architect. Living in a village in the country as he does, he has seldom been to London and is still at an age to be awed by St Paul’s Cathedral and the Shard. But of all the buildings I would like him to visit, 66 Portland Place, the headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects, would be high on the list. It is the opposite of flashy, and very pleasing. The front steps are my favourite in London: they have the shallowest of risers and rounded ends.

I always look forward to going there because it is a spirit-lifting building.

I love its calmness as you enter, the simplicity of its public spaces together with the richness of its craftsmanship.

In 1931 the RIBA committee set an open competition to build their head-

60

THE OLDIE – February 2014

quarters on a newly acquired site. The recent recession meant there was little work around, and as a result 3,600 schemes were put forward by 400 architects. The brief – to build a meeting room to seat 400, a council room to seat sixty, exhibition galleries, a banqueting room to seat 400, a library, committee rooms and

The building combines architecture and art in the old tradition, something that hasn’t happened for decades offices – was accompanied by a recommendation that the building should be ‘held by the present and future generations of architects and the general public to be an example of the best work of our time.’ The generation of the day was fairly dismissive of the winning design.

George Grey Wornum was charming, elegant, capable and a modernist of the non-progressive kind. He had served from 1914–18 with the Artists’ Rifles and the Durham Light Infantry and had been badly wounded on the Somme, losing an eye.

His building echoed the spare, restrained elegance of Stockholm’s town hall, which he had visited two years before. Built of shining white Portland stone, two freestanding columns flanked the front door, topped by statuesque figures sculpted

by Bainbridge Copnall. Lord Howard de Walden, who had sold the 999-year lease to the RIBA, demanded that they be taken down. Wornum asked him to explain why, and he said that he didn’t really understand art. They remained, as did the figure of Architectural Aspiration carved above the central window.

Another reason why I love this building is because it combines architecture and art in the old tradition, something that hasn’t happened for decades.

The interior of No 66 is a homage to British craftsmanship, from the great bronze doors covered with images of London buildings to the etched glass of the bannister up the dark blue marble stairs. The Henry Florence Hall, one of my favourite rooms in London, has wide stone columns between the floorto-ceiling windows, which are incised with a series of carvings depicting ‘Man and his Building Throughout the Ages’.

Wornum’s American artist wife Miriam played a vital role in all the interior design.

Portland Place was bound to have its detractors, particularly when it was listed Grade 1 in 1970. British architects were doing their worst at the time and Alison Smithson told the Evening Standard that the building was lousy and should be dynamited. A letter to the RIBA Journal summed up the feeling widely held by the profession: ‘As long as the RIBA stays behind that façade in Portland Place, it must inevitably be associated with the pretentiousness of archaic symbolism.’ In other words buildings should be unadorned.

Today the place still serves its purpose as beautifully and quietly as it always did.

I can’t recommend a visit too highly. You can dine in the glorious Henry Florence Hall (a well kept secret among regulars), or rub shoulders with black-suited architects in the classy bookshop.

I’m glad they chose Wornum.

RIBA Restaurant and Bar: 020 7631 0467

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF © Janet Hall / RIBA Library Photographs Collection

Façade of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 66 Portland Place, London

Out and About From ladies-only rambling to the world’s most beautiful restaurant – with some money-saving tips thrown in for good measure Women who walk

The latest offering in the specialist holidays market is for breaks without any men. Tour company Ramblers Worldwide are introducing walking holidays for ladies only. Managing Director Kathy Cook says, ‘Women-only holidays were introduced because of demand. Women have told us they enjoy the camaraderie in a ladies-only group.’

The gentle all-female adventures include a week in the Lake District with Nordic walking and dips in Lake Buttermere, ambling through the Appenines between Italian cookery classes, and sauntering around the gardens of the French Riviera.

With no men to accompany them, we hope the ladies travel light, taking advice from their Victorian forerunner Emily Lowe who traversed Europe with her mother. She famously boasted, ‘We two ladies... have found out and will maintain that ladies alone get on in travelling much better than with gentlemen... The only use of a gentleman in travelling is to look after the luggage, and we take care to have no luggage.’

• www.ramblersholidays.co.uk; tel 01707 33 11 33

Dea Birkett

Travel insurance for oldies

I had a pleasant surprise recently regarding travel insurance. As I am in my late sixties, have made a previous claim and take medication for blood pressure and high cholesterol, I approached the annual renewal with trepidation. The annual ‘premium grade’ policy for worldwide cover (including USA and Canada) with no exceptions or restrictions cost £244 with Avanti. There was minimal hassle and, according to my research, this was the lowest price – an insurer I had used before (InsureandGo) wanted £560 for the same cover. One anomaly however was that an online Avanti quote had added a further £140 for my ‘conditions’, but the website asked me to ring the office. When I did so, and repeated the details I’d already entered online, the very helpful customer services assistant deleted the £140 as

62

THE OLDIE – February 2014

she said she was allowed to deem those conditions insignificant. Avanti, you have my vote.

PS: I have no connections with Avanti except as a customer and a previous claimant (my claim was settled quickly and without query).

• www.avantitravelinsurance.co.uk; tel 0800 222 9141

Lloyd Brown

building programme after the 1900 Paris Exhibition. Don’t worry about catching a train, just stare skywards at the 41 enormous wall paintings of faraway places – Arles, Villefranche, Monaco, Algiers – all designed by fin de siècle artists. It’s not cheap: 31 euros for their steak tartare, but well worth it for Gigi fans who want to escape for an hour or two.

• www.le-train-bleu.com; tel +33 1 43 43 09 06

James Pembroke I am 91 and have insured my car with Churchill for several years. They were the cheapest I could find. For travel I insure with Age UK. They were cheaper than that offered by the travel firm, which in any event only went up to eighty years old.

• www.ageuk.org.uk; tel 0800 389 4852

Penny Carmichael

Fantasy brasserie

If you are in Paris and want to have lunch in the most beautiful restaurant in the world, head for the recently restored Train Bleu in the Gare de Lyon.

Situated centrally on the right bank, the station is only 500 yards from the Place de la Bastille and the buffet restaurant is right inside. A Belle Epoque fantasy, it was opened in 1901 as part of the

Two bums, three seats

I have a tip to enable two people who are travelling together to acquire an extra seat on a long haul flight without paying for it. If you are travelling economy on a plane with a central section of three seats (such as a Boeing 767), it’s possible to book the two outer seats and end up with the seat between you as a spare.

This often won’t work if you try to do it online or at the check-in desk at the airport. The thing to do is to go to one of the ‘automated pillars’ before having your luggage weighed. There, one is allowed to book the two aisle seats. If the plane is full, someone may end up sitting between you, but if that happens, one of you can offer your seat and the person will be delighted to change seats to get an aisle seat. But unless that happens, each of you has an aisle seat plus an extra seat between you, avoiding the need to clamber over someone in order to visit the loo.

This has worked for my husband and me every time but one. It was shown to us by a member of staff at Heathrow Terminal 5, so must be an acceptable way of doing things.

Margaret Gilman

Readers’ contributions wanted

Le Train Bleu: no ordinary station buffet

Send your travel tips or stories by post to Out and About, The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London, W1T 3EG, by fax to 020 7436 8804, or by email to editorial@theoldie.co.uk with ‘Out and About’ in the subject line.

Maximum 300 words £50 paid for all contributions printed

To the caravanserai TRAVEL TALES

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY © Tibor Bognar / Alamy

With its internal tensions and proximity to regional troublespots, the city of Diyarbakir in Kurdish Turkey may not look like an obvious tourist destination – but it is well worth a visit says James Pettifer

W

ith its ten graceful arches, the Ottoman bridge in Diyarbakir, the million-strong ‘capital’ of Kurdish Turkey, is known as the ‘Ten-eyed Bridge’. Below it, the muddy water of the Tigris rushes southwards towards the border with Syria and what local people still call Mesopotamia, the vast flat expanses of maize and sunflower growing on the reclaimed desert.

On the bridge sits an old man playing the zurna. The music is said to improve the fertility of the wedding couple walking across the bridge in full

64

THE OLDIE – February 2014

traditional dress. It is a soft moment in a hard uncompromising landscape, rocky and often treeless – a pretty hawk-featured girl with dark curls against a fragment of the Anatolian plateau. Behind the music is an echo of history – the massed ranks of hundreds of zurna players who marched at the front of the Ottoman army. The noise so terrified the opposition that at times they ran away before a shot was fired.

But here and now, the piercing wail of this simple horn heralds only the wish for a child.

As the couple fold themselves into a relative’s car, a dingy armoured police vehicle trundles past with a water cannon on top. It does not look

particularly impressive for this kind of hardware, but it is, nevertheless, the Turkish state in action. For Diyarbakir is a frontier town, an Alamo, as it has been, in various guises, for thousands of years. The war with the Kurds is technically over but an armed truce has taken its place. The population of Diyarbakir has exploded, with hundreds of thousands of displaced peasants trying to make a new life among the magnificent historic buildings and vast and intimidating black basalt walls.

Or has the war ended? When I was there the top television news story was that fourteen PKK (militant Kurdish) guerrillas had escaped from prison.

KURDISH TURKEY

Left: the Hasan Pasa Hani, a sixteenthcentury caravanserai in Diyarbakir Below: a local playing the zurna

Heading for their comrades in the Musguneyi mountains to the north east, they had dug a tunnel – with the cut barbed wire and a hole under the fence, it looked like a World War Two film.

I

s this really a place for business visits or a holiday? It might seem not. But there is another way of looking at it. Unlike many of its neighbouring countries, Turkey works well. The buses are better than in Italy, the food is very good if you like Middle Eastern cuisine, there is wine (red, drinkable, made mostly by the Syriac Orthodox minority) and raki and hard stuff in the diminishing number of state-licensed liquor shops. Kurdish people are very pro-British as a result of the war in Iraq – perhaps unusual these days, but nonetheless useful to the visitor, as many speak some English having done civilian work in Iraqi Kurdistan, only a few hours’ drive east.

Internal flights from Istanbul are efficient and easy, but where do you stay? There are soulless modern hotels in the new suburbs, but so long as you can manage some steps (not many, but a bit steep and with nothing wimpish like a handrail) there is really only one choice for those wishing to explore the Old Town with its churches, mosques and historic edifices from every period.

Diyarbakir started as Roman Amida and Syriac Amid, and the walls you see now began with Justinian, but the site has been inhabited since the thirteenth century BC, and was once part of the Assyrian Empire. Given that you come to the city to soak up history, it’s best to stay in a converted Ottoman han (caravanserai) like the magnificent Hotel Grand Kervansaray, a massive structure that has been in continuous use as a hotel since 1523. It shares its black basalt with the rest of the city, and has a fierce fortress quality (well, it’s Diyarbakir, isn’t it?).

In the han, where at one time hundreds of camels would have been tethered below your room, life moves around the sprawling open courtyards – geometric, mathematical lines of white limestone set in the basalt, severe and extraordinarily beautiful.

As dusk approaches, the starlings quarrel on the roof. It is not a model

of hotel management, but it’s clean and bug-free, there’s a nice swimming pool and the cell-like rooms with their low ceilings and small square windows might be in a mediaeval monastery.

The hotel’s main business seems to be huge Kurdish weddings, so wonderful live music often drifts across the courtyard as you go to sleep. It reminds you that the mountains, with their uncompromising codes of love and revenge, are not far away. Like many places here there is no bar, but many Kurds drink alcohol in private and no one minds your duty free.

I

f you are not on a tour, venturing out needs a little prior planning.

A tour is probably the best idea if you are a first-time visitor to eastern Turkey, but it is not essential – the hotels have plenty of bright young people with cars who speak English, and hire rates are not expensive.

is endemic and Diyarbakir people are notoriously good at it, at least according to urban mythology throughout Turkey. You don’t wander round at night, as William Dalrymple observed in From the Holy Mountain – but there is nothing to do then anyway.

The most famous mosque, the eleventh-century Great Mosque built by the Seljuk Sultan Malik Shah, is open to visitors but much of it is covered in scaffolding as part of the Ankara government’s restoration programme.

It was a centre for the dissemination of ancient Greek medical knowledge after the Arab conquest of the city in 639 AD, and its thousand-year-old hospital still survives. The finest Christian monument is the Syriac Orthodox Church of Our Lady that was built as a pagan temple in the first century.

Most of what you see now dates from the fifth century, after Christianity had been a radical movement in the pagan

Avoid the modern hotels in the new suburbs and stay in a converted Ottoman han in the Old Town, with its churches, mosques and historic edifices A fixer is a good idea anyway, as the Old Town is a labyrinth and some of its unmissable sights are hidden in narrow back streets and alleyways.

Serious crime is low, apart from political killings, but pickpocketing

Empire. The building is well looked after with money from the big Syriac diaspora. The congregation is very small, although vigorous, after the war and persecution drove many Syriac believers into exile.

Conditions for Christians in the city are now calm. The old Armenian Orthodox church of Saint Giragos, which I had last seen in ruins when researching my book The Turkish Labyrinth in the early 1990s, has been rebuilt. But church security is tight and it is only a few hours drive to the border with war-torn Syria.

Locals take all this for granted, and Diyarbakir runs on adrenalin. There has always been conflict in and around this area but the Kurds, the Turks and the minorities are tough, resilient people and they find ways to cope, even in the worst periods.

With its brooding dark atmosphere and the longest walls after the Great Wall of China, this city is unique.

There is so much history. Just pass through one of the massive gatehouses in the walls and let it wash over you, like the sea.

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

65

In association with

Literary Lunches AT SIMPSON’S-IN-THE-STRAND

TUESDAY 11TH FebrUARY 2014 ★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★

ARTEMIS COOPER The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron edited the final volume of Leigh Fermor’s travel trilogy which was incomplete when he died.

SPECIAL PRICE

£50

MARGARET MACMILLAN The War That Ended Peace Historian Margaret MacMillan’s new book explores the road to the catastrophic conflict which killed millions.

RACHEL COOKE Her Brilliant Career A collection of ‘brief lives’ covering ten of the Fifties’ most remarkable women, including Muriel and Betty Box from the film industry and cookery writer Patience Gray.

TUESDAY 11TH MARCH 2014

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★ JOHN JULIUS NORWICH Darling Monster When John Julius was ten years old he was evacuated to Canada to escape the Blitz. Darling Monster is a collection of Lady Diana Cooper’s letters to her young son.

‘This book is a rich fruitcake, stuffed with delicious and surprising plums’ – Jane Ridley, Literary Review.

PRINCESS MICHAEL OF KENT The Queen of Four Kingdoms Princess Michael of Kent’s latest book is a novel based on the true story of Yolande of Aragon’s marriage to the Duke of Anjou, a marriage which formed an alliance between the warring kingdoms.

PETER LEWIS Rogues’ Gallery

TUESDAY 8TH APRIL 2014

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★ DOUGLAS HURD Disraeli or The Two Lives

Rogues’ Gallery is a journey through the past halfcentury, charting the ups and downs of leading writers and actors, thinkers, entertainers, gurus, politicians and public non-conformists. ‘A jewel of a book, frequently hilarious and constantly surprising’ – Mail on Sunday.

Former Foreign Secretary Lord Hurd’s new book looks at Disraeli the man versus the politician. Disraeli was a gambler and a dandy but also a devoted servant and favourite Prime Minister of the Queen, a dichotomy which characterised his political career. ‘Gripping, succinct, lethal and always entertaining’ – Matthew Parris, The Times.

CHRISTOPHER MATTHEW The Man Who Dropped the Le Creuset On His Toe and Other Bourgeois Mishaps Christopher Matthew follows up the huge success of Now We Are Sixty with a collection of mordant and witty cautionary verses about the British bourgeoisie and its foibles and failings.

ROGER BANNISTER Twin Tracks: The Autobiography Sir Roger Bannister is best-known for running the fourminute mile in 1954. In this frank memoir, he tells, for the first time, the full story of his sporting achievements and of his professional life as a distinguished doctor and neurologist once his athletic career drew to a close.

STRICTLY LIMITED TO 22 PEOPLE

ldie Literary Lunches TO BOOK CALL THE LITERARY LUNCH HOTLINE ON 01795 592 892 OR EMAIL: oldielunches@servicehelpline.co.uk TICKET PRICE: £62 for a three-course lunch including wine or soft drinks ★ Fish and vegetarian options available upon advance request ★ Meet the speakers from 12 noon; lunch at 1 pm

2014 DATES

May 20th ★ June 24th ★ July 22nd ★ August 19th September 9th ★ October 14th ★ November 11th December 9th ★ December 16th

How to Write for Magazines and Newspapers Wednesday 12th March 2014, The Hogarth Room, East India Club, 16 St James’s Square, London SW1

THE OLDIE, unique in its policy of encouraging readers and nonprofessionals to write for the magazine, has reassembled a crack team of experienced journalists and editors who will take you through exercises in the various aspects of writing for magazines and newspapers, under the leadership of Jeremy Lewis. There will also be a free-for-all question-and-answer session chaired by the editor, Richard Ingrams.

★★★★★★★★★ TIMETABLE ★★★★★★★★★ 9.15 Coffee 9.30 Welcome by Jeremy Lewis 9.45–11.15 Workshop One: Melanie McFadyean on interviewing 11.15 Tea/coffee break 11.30–1pm Workshop Two: Mark Ellen on how to write a review 1–1.45 Buffet lunch

1.45–2.30 Question-and-answer session with Richard Ingrams, Jeremy Lewis, and Rebecca de Saintonge of LifeLines Press 2.30–4pm Workshop Three: Rosie Boycott on travel 4–4.15 Tea/coffee break 4.15–5.45 Workshop Four: Jeremy Lewis on ‘Do’s and Don’ts’

PRICE: £175 per person including all the above and VAT Please make cheques payable to Oldie Publications Ltd. If you have any queries, please call Hannah Donovan on 020 7436 8801 or write to her at: The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG

B OO K S Labour pains Andy Mcsmith

A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine: The Last Diaries

by Tony Benn edited by Ruth Winstone Hutchinson £20 Oldie price £17 (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

Poignant is the word. A chronicle kept by an old man who fends off loneliness and regret by staying involved.

‘My dear brother was killed sixty-four years ago,’ one entry begins. ‘Dave rang me and we had a word about it. He would have been eighty-six, if he’d lived.’

The only other activity Tony Benn recorded on that day was that he rang a 79-year-old widow whom he knew from his time as MP for Bristol South East, the seat he lost in 1983. He served another seventeen years in Parliament as MP for Chesterfield but ‘the Bristol connection has lasted much longer than the Chesterfield connection.’

published entries were jotted down in 1940, when he was fifteen. The serious stuff began in 1963, with the election of a Labour government in prospect. For most of the twenty years that followed, Benn was a household name, living in the eye of a political storm, whose diary entries were full of vignettes about what the great and powerful were up to.

In this, the ninth volume – and according to the title page, the last – he records his pleasure when the fourteen people who make up ‘the entire leadership of the Stop the War movement’ hold a surprise lunch in his honour at the local Pizza Express. The following day, he was so whacked that he slept for ten hours and still felt tired.

But though his body has aged and his political contacts are not what they were, the mind is as alive as ever and the old obsessions still haunt him. He followed the MPs’ expenses scandal in horror, suspecting that the hand of ‘the powerful’ lay behind it: ‘The hatred of MPs that is being stimulated [is] in a way a hatred of the democratic process, which the powerful have always hated,’ he reckoned.

The state of the Labour Party is another source of near despair. Party discipline has sucked the life out of the old party, he fears, turning it into a docile fan club for leaders for whom he has scant esteem, such as Gordon Brown. On 29th May 2008 he wrote: ‘I really ought to report

☞ continues over the page

ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERT GEARY

The state of the Labour Party is another source of near despair. Party discipline has sucked life out of the old party, Benn fears Another entry begins: ‘I lay in bed this morning and thought: if I die this morning, what a wonderful way to go.’

Some political figures, such as Alan Clark or Henry ‘Chips’ Channon are remembered for no other reason than that they wrote intriguing diaries full of political gossip and scandal. This volume is the polar opposite of theirs: scandal-free and gossip-free, it will be read for no other reason than that its author is Tony Benn.

With nine volumes of diaries spanning seven decades, Benn has been one of the great chroniclers of contemporary British politics. His first February 2014 – THE OLDIE 67

BOOKS

that the Labour Party is bankrupt… there is a possibility that the life of the Labour Party will end this year. I’m putting it rather dramatically, but the Labour Party, founded in 1906, may end…’

His pessimism about prospects of the kind of socialism once known in popular language as Bennism is in no way mitigated by the behaviour of people in little groups to the left of Labour.

He can foresee that George Galloway’s Respect Party will fall apart because of ‘the capacity for the left sectarians to split and split and split again.’

But amid the tribulations of ageing and the political angst there are flashes of joy – for example when he learns that his eighteen-year-old granddaughter Emily has been selected as a parliamentary candidate by the same Labour Party that he believes is near death. This so delighted him that he rang everyone in the Benn family, and Ruth Winstone, who has helped him over the decades in preparing his diaries for publication. ‘I’m just over the moon!’ he wrote.

More good news is to be found in the fifteen-page afterword, entitled ‘Life After Diaries’ – ‘I supported Ed Miliband from the beginning of the campaign to succeed Gordon Brown. He had worked in my office for a time, doing work experience as a fifteen-year-old… He was a brilliant boy, and he is brilliant man.’

How the success of the young makes an old man happy.

POETS’ CORNER Nettles

by Vernon Scannell

My son aged three fell in the nettle bed.

‘Bed’ seemed a curious name for those green spears, That regiment of spite behind the shed: It was no place for rest. With sobs and tears The boy came seeking comfort and I saw White blisters beaded on his tender skin.

We soothed him till his pain was not so raw.

At last he offered us a watery grin, And then I took my billhook, honed the blade And went outside and slashed in fury with it Till not a nettle in that fierce parade Stood upright any more. And then I lit A funeral pyre to burn the fallen dead, But in two weeks the busy sun and rain Had called up tall recruits behind the shed: My son would often feel sharp wounds again.

Chosen by Virginia Ironside 68

THE OLDIE – February 2014

Out of the shade VIRGINIA IRONSIDE

Walking Wounded: The Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell

by James Andrew Taylor OUP £25 Oldie price £21.50 (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

IN THE SIXTIES and Seventies, Vernon Scannell was seen as a major figure in the world of poetry. Yet nearing his death he wrote that he felt he’d been allotted a place ‘in the shades with the other minor figures. Maybe that’s what I deserve – yet I can’t help thinking my stuff is better than, say, McGough, Patten and Wendy Cope to name only a few. Oh well.’

It was a lot better. And this excellent biography will perhaps reinstate one of the most respected poets of the Second World War to his rightful place in the canon.

If anyone’s heard of Scannell these days it’s often because, unusually for a poet, he trained as a boxer. But in an interview on Desert Island Discs he wondered why anyone thought it odd.

‘The view of the poet as a cissy, or a zany eccentric, is one which seems to have been born towards the end of the nineteenth century; before that time it would have been incomprehensible.’

He was born in Skegness in 1922 to the most unsympathetic parents you could imagine. His mother was cold and bad-tempered, always siding with his father, a not very successful commercial photographer, who periodically beat Vernon and his brother with a leather strap that hung permanently as a warning by the door. It was only when Vernon was old enough to throw a punch at him that his father stopped the beatings. Unsurprisingly, Vernon ran away from home when he was fifteen to join the army.

He deserted more than five times – never in the face of the enemy, but simply because he couldn’t bear it.

He was particularly horrified when he saw his fellow soldiers looting the bodies of their dead comrades. He was court-martialled and at one point was sentenced to time in a psychiatric hospital (as a result of telling his superiors that he absconded only because he wanted to be a poet). Eventually he was released from prison to take part in the D-day landings. He deserted again.

Many of his war poems are about the

torment of his perceived cowardice; in particular, ‘Walking Wounded’ is ‘drenched in humanity’, as the critic John Carey put it.

One of the problems in Vernon’s life was that he had, as they say, no problems with women. They flocked to him, despite the fact that often this literate, friendly and sensitive man would stagger home drunk from the pub aflame with irrational jealousy and beat his women till they bled. Today his behaviour would be put down to post-traumatic stress disorder. But the women always stayed and loved him till the end, and he was a kind and loving father to his four children. Indeed, when one of his babies came back from hospital ill after his birth, Vernon cared for him day and night until he died.

After the war he spent his time writing stories for the BBC, together with numerous poems, novels and autobiographies. But poetry was his life.

He was scrupulous in replying to every correspondent and giving advice, and passionate about instilling a love of the genre in schoolchildren.

He loathed the Liverpool pop poets – ‘They are not only inferior poets but what they produce is the antithesis of poetry.’

He also despised the ‘nonsensical gibberish’ of J H Prynne. He often quoted T S Eliot’s ‘No vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.’

At the end of his life he wrote ‘I have a nasty feeling I must reconcile myself to becoming one of those poor old crocks I used to feel sorry for as they limped or shuffled or bow-leggedly staggered their way round the streets.’ And yet some of his poems on old age and dying are among his best.

This book inspires the reader to go back and look at all his poetry over again.

Vernon Scannell

BOOKS

Dream on PETER LEWIS

High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain

by Simon Heffer Random House £30 Oldie price £25.50 (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

To think Victorian used to mean to think Dickens and the blacking factory, Scrooge and poor Bob Cratchit, Oliver and the workhouse, Squeers and Dotheboys Hall, Fagin and thieves’ kitchens, not to mention Pecksniff and hypocrisy. What a gulf between Victorians then and now! The revival of respect began with John Betjeman’s redemption of St Pancras et al, and grew with a new affection for the railways bequeathed by Brunel and his fellow engineers, and the great sewers of Bazalgette. Even the pre-Raphaelites were allowed back in the fold. With the publication of Simon Heffer’s two-andthree-quarter-pound magnum opus the pendulum has fully swung. The view he offers us is of peak after peak of capitalist benevolence and moral rectitude.

Dr Arnold of Rugby leads the pack, breeding clean young (Christian) Englishmen, followed by John Stuart Mill and liberty (though not for women), Gladstone’s principled politics (unlike Disraeli’s opportunism which actually gave more men the vote) and dozens more British worthies. Above all we pay homage to ‘the towering example of the age’ HRH Prince Albert – statesman, man of action, philanthropist, guide and inspirer of the Great Exhibition – whose only fault was that he was not English.

A quarter of the book is given to Albert, his earnest lobbying and the struggle to build a memorial worthy of this secular saint – that gilded, gothic shrine like a one-man cathedral at which we used to snigger, God forgive us.

The chief Victorian virtues were their religious faith, though undermined in some sad cases by Darwin, and their wholesale philanthropy. Between 1840 and 1880 the lot of the poor worker was much improved, though it started from a level of horrific Hogarthian barbarity that Heffer describes in the blackest terms. All thanks to ‘a sense of disinterested moral purpose among politicians and intellectuals’ such as

Wells Cathedral Library, constructed over the cloister in the mid-15th century.

From The Library: A World History, a detailed study of more than eighty libraries throughout the world by architectural historian James Campbell with photographs by Will Pryce (Thames & Hudson, £48).

Oldie price £40.80 (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

Shaftesbury, Peabody, Barnardo, Booth, Salt of Saltaire and the charity pioneers such as the richest woman and biggest benefactress in Britain, Angela BurdettCoutts, echoed by other cheering angels like Florence Nightingale and Octavia Hill. Best of all, this was done by individual conscience without the interference of government. ‘Private philanthropy laid the foundations of the welfare state.’ The famous ‘trickle-down effect’ of rising prosperity is seen here at its best.

This massive work of scholarship, founded on acres of sources, is an impressive and readable new take on a revolutionary period of English history.

But it has a subtext. Underneath, we sense the poverty of the Low Minds of present-day politicians, stifling the individual British genius with state incompetence and interfering regulation. The way we’re going we will never match Victorian enterprise and belief in progress. Though Heffer is candid enough to admit that by the end of his period there was still a goodish way to go. Boys were still suffocating up chimneys in the 1870s because

some employers managed to dodge the Factory Acts, and city streets were still abounding in prostitutes despite the personal efforts of Gladstone, Dickens and Miss Burdett-Coutts.

Was Dickens being grossly unfair to his fellow Victorians? Soaring aloft on the hydrogen of Heffer’s Panglossian rhetoric, one has to admit that deep down inside them there was Good, such Good. Well, inside some of them, especially the richest. He has done admirably to remind us of the progress made. By 1880 most men had the vote (except for agricultural labourers), universal schooling was available (though neither compulsory nor free), women were no longer the property of their husbands and some were getting educated (but the idea of giving them votes was unthinkable, even to Gladstone). As for the labourers in Mr Gradgrind’s Coketown, they had rudimentary unions but no voice or party in Parliament.

Up to a point I found it a comforting read. And then – as one used to write at the end of penning youthful fantasies – I woke up.

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

69

BOOKS

The mould-breakers VALERIE GROVE

Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke Virago £18.99 Oldie price £16.50 (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

What a treat to read this exhumation of the 1950s by Rachel Cooke, who was inspired by an Ercol sideboard bought on eBay. Though born too late (1969) to experience it, she bridles at the masculist tone of a decade usually characterised by housewives, its history written by men, its literature dominated by ‘intolerable’ characters like Amis’s Lucky Jim and Osborne’s Jimmy Porter.

Having unearthed many mould-breaking women ‘who make you want to cheer’, she filtered out the more familiar names and presents ten wonderfully peculiar, pioneering women with decided views, distinctive garb, unconventional pursuits and (often) unhappy children.

Nancy Spain was the dominant female journalist then, the equivalent of Godfrey Winn for ego (when her memoir came out in 1956, she reviewed herself in the Express). I knew she’d died in a plane crash headed for the Grand National with her lover, ‘Jonnie’, Joan Werner Laurie, editor of She. But I never knew Nancy had a son (by the childless Margery Allingham’s spouse) nor that she was a lover of Marlene Dietrich, nor that she and Jonnie shared a ménage à trois with Sheila Van Damm, intrepid rally driver, who ran the Windmill Theatre.

Apart from this Sapphic trio, women’s lives then as now were steered by their choices of men. Muriel Box was chronically betrayed by ghastly Sydney Box (brother of Betty; the Box family dominated British films) but later found a good man in Gerald Gardiner QC. Similarly, behind Margery Fish, the gardening writer, Cooke uncovers an odious husband named Walter, former editor of the Daily Mail, who preferred lawns ‘as neatly trimmed as his moustache’, quite unlike Mrs Fish’s taste. Her classic We Made A Garden told of the wonderfully spontaneous, jungular cottage garden she created at their Somerset manor house, East Lambrook, after he died: out went Walter’s ‘shouty dahlias’ as she broke free of ‘an exhaustingly deferential relationship’ and

70

THE OLDIE – February 2014

Margery Fish

gardened with disordered abandon, with hardy cranesbill (geraniums), hellebores, penstemons, cyclamen, hostas. Her Euphorbia ‘Lambrook Gold’ remains a staple of our gardens today, and her house is still visitable, veiled in wisteria.

These are splendid women, vividly drawn. Sinewy, sunburnt, witchy, chainsmoking Patience Gray issued her ‘Delphic pronouncements’ in her book Plats du Jour, predating Elizabeth David.

Wild-haired and wide-eyed, she preferred to live hand to mouth on the isle of Naxos, sans electricity or running water, with a man named Norman. Poverty, she believed, ‘gave the good things of life their proper significance’. Jacquetta Hawkes’s wildly popular book A Land helped to make archaeology fashionable in 1951. Delving in the J B Priestley archive at Bradford University, Cooke found the love letters between Hawkes and Priestley: she queenly and elegant, he stout, balding, froggy, and threatening her with pretty young girls surrounding him in Hollywood. Their lovemaking, as Hawkes wrote in A Quest of Love (‘I became an adulteress to the sound of Mozart,’ she wrote), took place anywhere, including the box of a provincial theatre.

The architect Alison Smithson’s visible legacy, as half of the Smithsons,

consists in concrete New Brutalist buildings such as Robin Hood Gardens estate in Tower Hamlets, vandalised and hellish from day one. (Architects still protect it from demolition.) Alison was convinced of their brilliance, prickly, short-tempered, self-righteous. Yet Cooke generously discerns the steely integrity that drove the Smithsons, who worked from home in marital solidarity, on hard chairs with no cushions. Just as congenially married, but vastly successful too, was Rose Heilbron, pioneer QC, defending murderers and villains. ‘Another victory for 36-year-old petite, dark-haired Miss Heilbron,’ the Daily Mail would typically report, ‘wearing only a trace of deep crimson lipstick.’ The legal world could not cope with anyone so popular – and so female.

Its men-only dinners excluded her even when she was a judge.

Thank you, Rachel Cooke: for finding, and judiciously commenting on, these women insouciant of feminism and strangers to guilt (which ‘had not yet been invented’); for succinct scenesetting of the 1950s with phrases like ‘Cue mambo on the juke-box’; and for never once using the dread word ‘feisty’.

• Rachel Cooke will be speaking at our Literary Lunch on 11th February. See page 66 for details

BOOKS

Taking sides LUCY LETHBRIDGE

Marriage of Inconvenience

by Robert Brownell Pallas Athene, £24.99 Oldie price £21.50 (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

Poor John Ruskin: a man of so many achievements, yet doomed to be forever associated with female pubic hair. Art historian, critic, artist and social thinker, Ruskin has become, in some circles, an embodiment of snigger-worthy Victorian prudishness, the man who could not consummate his marriage because he found his wife Effie’s body so distasteful.

The sad drama of the Ruskin marriage has been reprised many times by biographers – most of the evidence hinging on the petitions presented by both parties as grounds for nullity. Both wrote that Ruskin had found aspects of his wife unattractive on their wedding night: neither of them went into specifics – the pubic hair theory was advanced later (the gist of it being that Ruskin, having been acquainted with the female form through statues and paintings, was appalled by the real thing) but it is the one that has stuck in the popular imagination.

Robert Brownell is on a singleminded mission to put the record straight. He has trawled the records in his efforts to get at the truth – and this 600-page book makes a convincing, if somewhat exhausting, case for Ruskin’s defence. It is his view that Ruskin has been traduced; that he was the victim in the marriage, not Effie, and that their union was unconsummated because Ruskin knew it was a mistake but had been pushed into it by his wife’s bankrupted family, the Grays; he did not rule out consummation but thought that they should wait for six years to get to know each other.

The Ruskins and the Grays had known each other since Effie and John were children. Effie’s visits to the austere and high-minded Ruskins prompted John’s first attraction; he was 29 and she 19. Ruskin’s autobiography Praeterita describes a wealthy but puritanical childhood, all his mother’s energies channelled into the formation of her only child’s moral character and formidable intellect. Effie’s chief preoccupation was clothes. She enjoyed making her socially awkward admirer jealous: she was, he

‘And you, sir – how do you feel about the world ending?’

wrote, ‘a very sufficient and entire man trap’. It is hard to imagine a couple more wholly unsuited to each other.

Brownell loathes Effie – he depicts her as coquettish and silly, quoting Mrs Gaskell’s description of her as ‘very pretty, very clever and very vain’.

She was good-looking in the Victorian style, with a long-nosed, oval face and sloping shoulders – though Brownell notes with relish that she suffered from

Effie Gray

bad teeth, painful feet and insomnia.

The blaze of his bare light-bulb on her thin personality is sometimes too much to bear. What is well recorded is that she was an accomplished flirt whose behaviour with Austrian soldiers in Venice finally prompted Ruskin to look for a way out of his marriage. He chose his friend John Everett Millais as the dupe who would release him – provoking him into a relationship with Effie that would prove the catalyst in divorce. In Brownell’s account Millais is the perfect man for the job because being both dim and romantic he was easily caught. He and Effie made a happy marriage and had eight children.

Marriage of Inconvenience jumps around a bit: one moment we are in Ruskin’s childhood home in Herne Hill; the next the great man is getting married, with barely a mention of his years at Oxford or the publication of Modern Painters, which made his name. But it is not Brownell’s purpose to deal with the well-known facts but to disinter a scandal and shake the dust off it. With the film Effie Gray due out this year – in which Ruskin is again cast as the bewhiskered prude of legend and his wife as a childlike victim of patriarchal repression – this can only be welcomed.

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

71

BOOKS

Audiobooks

Christian chivalry

RACHEL REDFORD

ROBIN BRODHURST

I Am Malala

Public Schools and the Great War

by Anthony Seldon and David Walsh

Malala Yousafzai Read by Archie Panjabi

Oldie price £21.50 (+p&p). Call 01603 648 140 to order

Pen & Sword £25

Orion, 9hrs 53m unabridged, CDs £18.99, download from www.audible.co.uk £24.99

Malala’s miraculous recovery after being shot in the head by a Taliban gunman has been headline news. With a prologue read by Malala herself, this is her story from first speaking out against the Taliban’s savagery in her native Swat Valley to the life of her uprooted family in Birmingham. Her dedication to her fight to allow girls an education is inspirational, and the bond with her equally highly principled father who shaped her is truly remarkable.

The Goldfinch Donna Tartt Read by David Pittu Hachette Audio, 32hrs 23mins unabridged, download from www.audible.co.uk £16.62

When his mother is killed by a bomb in a Manhattan art gallery 13-year-old Theo is thrust into a maelstrom. This 32-hour-long audiobook is crammed with life, from astoundingly real characters and detailed analyses of art and antique furniture to drugs and gangster action. A shorter novel would have been more powerful, but even so, it’s worth it for Theo’s early years, the kaleidoscope of places and the narrator’s brilliant performance.

OUR UNDERSTANDING of the First World War is still dominated by what might be called the ‘Oh, What a Lovely Blackadder War!’ interpretation. Lions lead by donkeys is a myth that is difficult to shake, even though the saying was first used in the Crimean War, and was purloined by Alan Clark for his book The Donkeys. The image of public school officers leading their men over the top in operations planned by more senior public school officers is cherished by many teachers of English when dealing with ‘war poetry’. According to Professor Brian Bond, it ‘tells us more about the 1960s than about World War I’, yet it remains fixed in the public psyche.

Seldon and Walsh, both public school masters, place the appalling losses that the public schools suffered in a wider context. Starting with the simple fact that whereas some 11 per cent of those who fought were to die, the figure for public schoolboys was over 18 per cent, they repeatedly emphasise that the values inculcated in the public schools of the early twentieth century were those of leadership and sacrifice. The Great War is an inescapable presence in the public schools, felt in memorial halls and chapels, statues and plaques. At

Winchester boys walk every day through the War Cloister on their way to lessons.

Herbert Baker’s superb and moving memorial reflects the Winchester headmaster’s wish that ‘public schools carry on as a direct inheritance, in peace or in war, the traditions of Christian Chivalry.’

The effect of almost daily losses was felt in every school, whether public school or not, and no doubt similar books could be written about many state schools. But the public schools have archives which have been superbly exploited in this volume, yielding letters, photos and figures that reflect both the agony of soldiers at the front and the different but no less acute agony of those who were left behind. The agony of headmasters and housemasters learning of the loss of those they had cherished in the years before 1914 is heart-rending.

None more so than George Howson of Gresham’s, who knew almost every old boy that died in the war. The headmaster since 1903, he died in 1919 – a victim of the war as ‘surely as if he had fallen at the front’.

Seldon and Walsh include public schools from the Dominions, and their analysis of the effect of the war on a generation of schools is deep and well thought through. They look at the impact on the schools in the 1920s and 1930s as well as making a comparison with the role of housemasters and headmasters in World War II, who were quite likely to have been veterans of the Great War. Their book is not only an inspiring piece of social history, but a deeply felt work of piety.

Saints of the Shadow Bible Ian Rankin Read by James Macpherson Orion, 10hrs 51mins unabridged, CDs £25, download from www.audible.co.uk £21.87

Following changes to Scotland’s double jeopardy law, Rebus comes out of retirement again to solve an old case.

Were the Eighties police investigators, including Rebus himself, who swore on the Scots law book (the ‘shadow bible’) to cover up their corruption, saints or sinners? With the independence referendum looming, times are changing and Rebus’s allegiance to his old team is tested. James Macpherson’s narration and Rankin’s prose go together like Burke and Hare.

76 72

THE THEOLDIE OLDIE– –October February 2013 2014

‘Oh, yes – retro marriages are all the rage these days!’

REVIEWS

MU S I C

richard osborne

Returning from the Wexford Festival last October, I took down from the shelves Bernard Levin’s travel classic Conducted Tour. Levin had been a lover of music festivals ever since, as a slip of a lad of 19, he’d visited the very first Edinburgh Festival in 1947. The city was dirty and the natives hostile but such were the riches to be experienced he barely noticed.

The cue for Conducted Tour came in 1980 when BBC Radio invited him to spend a year on the music festival trail. Having been similarly addicted at a similar age, I was familiar with his itinerary. But two festivals had always eluded me: Florence and Wexford – taking time off in May or October in the years of getting and spending was well nigh impossible.

Levin, who by the early 1960s was a celebrated journalist of no fixed schedule, first visited Wexford in 1967.

Returning to London ‘groggy with joy’, he made it his mission to tell the world that ‘three days of unparalleled delight are to be had in the bottom right-hand corner of Ireland every year in late autumn’. They still are.

The festival was founded in 1951 by Wexford GP Dr Tom Walsh, with a little help from the ubiquitous Compton Mackenzie. The Rose of Castille by Wexford-raised Michael Balfe was its very first opera, staged in the ramshackle Theatre Royal, to whose walls thousands of paper chrysanthemums had been attached to cover the cracks. ‘What opera resembles a railway line?’ asks the sporting journalist Lenehan in Joyce’s Ulysses. ‘The rows of cast steel.’

The Irish love song, yet Ireland

has never managed to sustain a viable opera company. Hence the bafflement of Dubliners at the sight of the world beating a path to a modest theatre hidden away in a narrow terraced Georgian street in an abandoned fishing port eighty miles south. ‘Excellence, married to qualities of endurance and continuity rare in Irish cultural history’ is the explanation proffered by local-born writer and Wexford habitué Colm Tóibín.

The festival’s selling point these past sixty years has been the intimacy of its atmosphere and the rarity of its operas Its excellence is rewarded. Only the fabled Abbey Theatre receives a more generous subsidy. And there’s also the small matter of the Irish government stumping up most of the €33m needed to eviscerate and rebuild the Theatre Royal.

That was in 2005, which was just as well.

By the time the fine new house opened in 2008, the much vaunted Celtic Tiger was lying supine with its legs in the air.

The festival’s selling-point these past sixty years has been the intimacy of its atmosphere and the rarity of its

‘I recommend the fish again, sir’

operas. It helps that the natives are friendly. You can barely pass a soul in the street without being greeted with some richly turned phrase. (‘I observed your mishap,’ confided the waiter to Mrs Music as he replaced the knife which had mysteriously flown from her plate.) As Levin insisted, ‘Wexford is not so much a festival as a party.’ Which is why it’s easy to miss attendant events, so closely are they woven into the fabric of the festival’s communal life.

In the early days, many of the operas were less rare than they seemed.

This was a time when Dr Tom could call his friends in Milan and dig out masterworks of the Italian ottocento which previous generations had crudely consigned to history. Such opportunities are long gone, which is where the acumen of David Agler, Wexford’s innovative and highly successful artistic director since 2005, comes into play.

Nino Rota’s The Florentine Straw Hat, last year’s opera buffa highlight, is no rarity in Italy; it’s merely we bone-headed AngloSaxons who’ve persistently overlooked it. As for the Massenet double-bill, mainstream opera houses don’t like one-acters, so here were rare outings for Thérèse and La Navarraise. (The latter may be a shameless rip-off of Carmen and Cavalleria rusticana but, my goodness, it packs a punch.)

And then there was Jacopo Foroni’s grand, severe and occasionally inflammatory Cristina, regina di Svezia, written for Stockholm’s Mindre Theatre in 1849. Folk as different as Strindberg and Greta Garbo have been fascinated by the life of this bookish queen who betrayed her country by abdicating and becoming a Catholic convert, but Foroni – dead at 33 and unknown to most music dictionaries – got there first. This was a real rarity, vintage Wexford.

I shall provide details of the 2014 season in next month’s Oldie festivals guide. Meanwhile I remain envious of the lady from Boston Massachusetts who whenever she travels to Wexford books to see every opera twice. To judge by last year’s offerings, it’s a wise precaution.

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

75

REVIEWS

DVD

john m c entee Travels with Keith Floyd

Photo: AAD/EMPICS Entertainment

Delta, 6-disc set, 6 hours 35 minutes

Despite a rackety life punctuated by four failed marriages, bankruptcy and multiple business failures, Keith Floyd, Wellington Old Boy, former junior reporter and army officer, managed to write 25 cookery books and present 19 TV series featuring his trademark mix of travelogue, banter, drinking and cookery.

This set features three of these series – Far Flung Floyd, Floyd Around the Med and Floyd Uncorked – and the saddest aspect of these splendid examples of his craft is that Floyd, so full of vitality and mischief, is no longer with us. He died suddenly in 2009 of a heart attack aged 65 as he sat down to watch a Channel 4 documentary of his life and career. His sudden demise was an excellent career move: he had just finished his ghosted autobiography Stirred But Not Shaken.

The book became a best seller.

His programmes are the epitome of gonzo TV, with wine destined for the pot drunk instead by the presenter. But he was a brilliant cook, as demonstrated in these quixotic performances, and a refreshing departure from the prissy, controlled style of Delia and Nigella.

Addressing the crew as often as the camera, Keith gets palpably squiffy.

But he never loses track of the food he is preparing – at speed and with considerable flamboyance. The cookery content is copper-bottomed stuff. Never

76

THE OLDIE – February 2014

refined, but still good. He walks and spouts and sprinkles seasoning, drinking wine at an heroic pace from Morocco to Southern India. In the Loire episode he stands behind a food-laden table in the grounds of a grand house, pots simmering with a variety of local dishes from trout and rabbit to sausage. Talking incessantly to camera, he pours a glass of whatever suits the particular dish.

It seems that any bottle that comes into reach is emptied into the bubbling pans.

Then we see him cycling away from his alcohol-drenched feast, declaring: ‘I am on my bicycle because it allows me to burn off calories.’ I am sure even the cameramen laughed when Keith descended from his bike and declared: ‘Is that enough, lads? God I am knackered.’

It is this sharing that is one of his more endearing qualities. When things go wrong he is honest about it. But he takes his cooking seriously. In Far Flung Floyd he appears in Malacca, Malaysia, and confesses that he has been experimenting with various spices and seasonings with a coffee blender in his hotel bedroom in an effort to produce the perfect curry. After all his nocturnal mixing he found exactly the flavour he wanted at a local stall.

The pleasure of these DVDs is their variety. Floyd pops up in a smorgasbord of exotic locations, making a fiendishly hot curry in Southern India, a paella in Marbella or a wine-swamped tagine in Marrakesh. His encounters in Spain’s posh Puerto Banus in Floyd Around the Med are hilarious as he mocks the bling and vulgarity of local hoi polloi. But at the heart of each programme is the food, and there is nothing sloppy or amateurish about the dishes he produces. In West Malaysia he speaks with sophistication of the local prawn and pineapple dish. In Malacca his curry is splendid. And wherever he is he slurps and dribbles and laughs at his own shortcomings. If the late Peter Langan had made food programmes they might have been as anarchic as Keith’s – but Floyd’s cooking is more varied and breathtaking than the Irishman’s.

He may now be slurping the celestial vino, but four years after his death he is very much alive in this collection of his best work, with fine recipes gleaned from local knowledge and garnished with his undoubted talent with food. Sit back with a large glass of something red and rich or white and chilled and enter the sadly lost world of Keith Floyd. Enjoy!

WI R E L E SS valerie grove

This is what can happen if you enjoy a song on Clive Anderson’s Loose Ends on Radio 4 on Saturday evening, and want to hear it again.

For nearly half a century I’ve been a loyal customer of the old Midland Bank (now HSBC) in Fleet Street, where my father banked. A caring sort of bank: there was even a manager called Colin Care.

I would write to him if my chequebook failed to arrive, and heads would roll.

Since banking got dehumanised there is no Mr Care. But the vigilance goes on. A few weeks ago, just days after I had activated a new Visa card, HSBC wrote asking me to call urgently on a fraud protection matter. Tentatively, I did. A young man asked me about a certain purchase. ‘What is your name?’

I asked warily, before answering. He said his name was Rao. I asked how he spelled it. ‘R-A-O.’ ‘And where are you speaking from, Rao?’ ‘From India.’ ‘Oh.’ He then asked again if I had downloaded something digital from Amazon, for about £3 on 9th November. Download?

Digital? Moi? I said no, certainly not, not I! This seemed to be the right answer, but it meant, he said, that he would have to cancel my card. They suspected it had been cloned. I said the card was new, I’d only had it a week, it had never left my wallet. So he checked that the other recent purchases were mine –

‘Jennings, here, has keeled over and died to make room for a younger board member’

REVIEWS

hairdresser, yes; costly cashmere coat for a poverty-stricken daughter, yes; and (stupidly) skinny jeans in LK Bennett’s sale, yes (bad buy, they’re already in the charity shop). But it was that £3 download that clinched it. They would have to cancel my card. And they did.

It would be five to six working days before my new card arrived. Two more days passed, and my Visa statement came, including that contentious item.

‘November 9th. Amazon marketplace digital download: 89p.’ Eighty-nine pee?

Clang! The truth dawned... Download.

Amazon. Visa. Yes! It was me after all.

I looked in my Things To Do Today pad and there it was, on 9th November: ‘d/l Lizzo, Loose Ends.’

The culprit was Clive Anderson, who (unlike his predecessor Ned Sherrin) plays such original music on Loose Ends that afterwards I often click on a link to the group. On that night he had ‘Lizzo’ in the studio singing her track, ‘Batches ’n Cookies’. ‘I got mah batches ’n cookies, got mah batches ’n cookies, got mah batches ’n cookies, got mah batches ’n cookies,’ she sings, about four thousand times. It’s banal, repetitive, moronic, I suppose, but – like the first time I heard Eminem’s ‘I Got High’ – I got earwigged by it. I had to hear it again.

So I downloaded it. Because I can! And it did cost only 89p. I watched the video that accompanied it, showing a young black guy being slathered in cream, surrounded by energetic black ladies with large buttocks and bosoms, singing about their blessed batches ’n cookies. And because it was late on a Saturday night I forgot about it, and denied having done it, and landed myself with a cancelled credit card because it was so out of character!

My new card arrived. I activated it, foolishly: I should have ’fessed up to HSBC, then they could have ‘removed the marker’ from the old card. Instead, when I rang HSBC to say it was my purchase after all, they said if I wished to, I could contact Amazon and repay the 89p. But I shan’t. Given the amount they don’t pay in British taxes I think Amazon can absorb that loss. But I am left pondering what goes on in the minds of Rao and his colleagues, scrutinising every item we purchase by credit card.

They obviously decided that a 67-yearold grandmother might indeed be mad enough to buy ill-fitting skinny jeans in the King’s Road, but would surely never, never sit up late on a Saturday night downloading a rap track by Lizzo.

TELEVISION RICHARD INGRAMS

Veteran journalist and biographer John Pearson spoke at our Literary Lunch in March 2002 about his book on the Kray brothers, The Cult of Violence. Over lunch he told me he had no great ideas for a next book, and I remember suggesting to him as an interesting subject the group of bizarre right-ring gamblers who frequented London’s Clermont Club in the Sixties and Seventies and who included zookeeper John Aspinall, financier James Goldsmith and the nanny-murderer Lord Lucan. Pearson’s brilliant book, published three years later in 2005, didn’t have the success it deserved. So it was a good idea on somebody’s part to adapt it as a two-part TV series with an actor playing John Pearson investigating the Lucan story.

Since the 1974 murder of Sandra Rivett, who Lucan mistook for his intended victim, his wife Veronica, there has been a string of TV programmes about the story, most of them devoted to speculation about what happened to Lucan after he disappeared following the murder.

Like so many murder mysteries the details, the clues, came out in dribs and

drabs, and the final definitive solution of the Lucan mystery has yet to be revealed, though it will be one day soon now the man himself is almost certainly dead.

Members of the Lucan circle were always suspiciously unanimous in announcing to the press that Lucan had ‘done the decent thing’ and committed suicide, leaving cynics like me convinced that he must be still alive. It was a view confirmed by constant sightings, most of them emanating from Mozambique and South Africa. Most recently an unnamed woman, who once worked as secretary for John Aspinall, told the BBC how he and his friend James Goldsmith had asked her to make travel arrangements for Lucan’s children to fly to Africa so that he could see, but not make contact with them.

John Pearson ignored the evidence pointing to South Africa and instead relied on what he was told by Susan Maxwell-Scott, the last person known to have seen Lucan before his disappearance: that he had been murdered by criminals entrusted by Aspinall to get him out of the country.

This made an anti-climactic end to the ITV film, the first part of which, leading up to the murder, had been promising.

Rory Kinnear was a wooden, irascible Lucan and Catherine McCormack highly convincing as his put-upon wife. Former Dr Who-man Christopher Eccleston was miscast as the sinister figure of John Aspinall (Dr Zoo?). We missed the weird, grotesque atmosphere of the inward-looking world of the gamblers which Pearson described so vividly, and too much of the script was taken out of newspaper interviews.

Rory Kinnear and Catherine McCormack in Lucan February 2014 – THE OLDIE

77

REVIEWS

FILM

MARCUS BERKMANN

Mary Poppins – ludicrously sentimental and Disneyfied – was the first film I ever saw in the cinema, when I was four. I only have to type the words ‘Feed The Birds’ and I well up.

Saving Mr Banks (PG) is about the making of Mary Poppins, about Walt Disney’s determination to persuade P L Travers to sell him the film rights, and her stubborn refusal to do so.

Emma Thompson plays her with a brutal perm and a series of severe twinsets. Tom Hanks is all twinkly charm as Walt, who calls her ‘Pam’ while she calls him ‘Mr Disney’. (Except for one marvellous moment when she loses her rag and yells ‘Disney!’) She has come over to Hollywood to hear the scriptwriter’s ideas and the Sherman brothers’ tunes, and she hates them all.

Mary Poppins is her creation and isn’t going to be vulgarised by the creator of Mickey Mouse. Interspersed with all this knockabout fun are scenes from Mrs Travers’ childhood in Australia.

Colin Farrell is her charming, alcoholic father, Ruth Wilson with her glorious curly eyebrows plays her put-upon mother, and through these scenes

we come to understand just what Mary Poppins and the Banks family mean to her. In fact, we couldn’t fail to understand it, as the point is hammered home with as little subtlety as anything in the original film.

In real life Mrs Travers is said to have loathed the film of Mary Poppins, but that’s not the ending we are going to see here. Not for the first time, though, a questionable premise and a compromised execution are dignified by terrific performances. I think Hanks gets better and better. Thompson is magnificent. She looks her age, or even a little older in this film, and we love her for it. Paul Giamatti has a nice turn as Mrs Travers’ driver, making a lot out of very little as he often does. I started blubbing within two minutes of the film starting, didn’t stop all the way through, and was still dabbing my eyes at the bus stop twenty minutes later.

Nebraska (15) is the latest from Alexander Payne, who made About Schmidt and Sideways. Shot in blackand-white, it’s the tale of an old geezer (Bruce Dern) who thinks he has won a million dollars and is determined to get to Lincoln, Nebraska, to collect his prize.

There is no prize, of course, but his long-suffering son Will Forte takes him anyway. It’s a lovely, perfectly weighted film, alternately sad and hilarious, and often both at the same time. It also boasts a wondrous performance from June Squibb as the old geezer’s straighttalking wife, who gives him hell but loves him anyway. And then gives him more hell. It’s a marriage you believe in, for some reason.

Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson in Saving Mr Banks

78

THE OLDIE – February 2014

T H E AT R E PAUL BAILEY

About forty years ago I was privileged to see John Barton’s production of Richard II at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon, in which Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson played Richard and Bolingbroke on alternate nights. They were both, in their different ways, magnificent, although Richardson was slightly too effeminate as the ineffectual king and Pasco not wily enough as his scheming usurper.

Pasco had a natural gift for all things melancholy and Richardson seemed to have a direct line to wickedness. When Pasco was on the throne and Richardson rallying his troops, the total effect was shattering. And, dear God, did they know how to speak the verse.

Gregory Doran’s interpretation of the same play, again for the RSC, is currently at the Barbican Centre. David Tennant, in the title role, gives an assured and intelligent performance, but he is not helped by the actors posturing as Bushy, Bagot and Green, his devoted followers, who would have been more at home in La Cage aux Folles. Tennant has elected to flute his lines, as if he is in a state of constant surprise as the tragedy unfolds.

I admired him, but without being moved by his self-inflicted fate. Nigel Lindsay’s Bolingbroke is stolid and wooden, exhibiting scarcely a hint of the guile that compels him towards kingship. It is left to Michael Pennington, as John of Gaunt, and Oliver Ford Davies, a vacillating Duke of York, to remind us that Shakespeare makes demands on actors that have to be met with confidence and aplomb. This Richard II opens with three choristers, who aren’t pitch perfect, singing at Gloucester’s funeral. Their plainsong goes on and on, to such an extent that the impatient and eager theatregoer falls to wondering when the drama will actually begin.

A couple of years ago, Michael Grandage directed this most poetic of Shakespeare’s history plays at the Donmar Warehouse. His Richard, Eddie

REVIEWS

OLDIE MASTERS

A Guide to Neglected Artists No. 151 Brian Stonehouse MBE (1918–1998)

‘You’re not funny, Frobisher, and you’re not clever.

Have you considered going into politics or media?’

Redmayne, lacked Tennant’s befuddled authority, but he was impressive when it came to being petulant. The Duke of York then was Ron Cook, who presented him as the consummate politico, a wheeler-dealer with a blighted conscience, a Peter Mandelson in possession of a soul. It is Cook’s York that I prefer, not least because he made it painfully clear that even the best men are capable of shifting sides to their own desperate advantage.

Grandage and Cook are reunited in Henry V at the Noël Coward Theatre.

Cook plays Pistol, a part that has attracted every hammy actor in history. In Cook’s capable hands, the preposterous braggart is now a recognisable human being, a man who has to put on a necessary show to prove his worth. Here is lovely, clever acting. Grandage, unlike Doran, has a gift for censorship, cutting those scenes that now seem dated and irrelevant.

Richard II lasts a wearying three hours, whereas Henry V ends, mercifully, in the nick of time.

Grandage has chosen to eschew jingoism, which I believe is a mistake.

The Chorus should be a lyrical rabblerouser, but Ashley Zhanghaza, who doubles as Boy, has been encouraged to break up the lines as if to comment on their eerie patriotism. He wears a T-shirt with a Union Jack in both parts, as if he were a time traveller commenting on the evils of warmongering and colonialism.

This is far too politically correct and condescending for my taste.

Jude Law as Henry is appropriately weather-beaten and discontented as the leader of a ragged army fighting in a hated country. He looks and sounds like a true soldier of the gruff and down-to-earth kind. The single drawback is that his voice has not been designed for eloquence, so that listening to him for a couple of hours is not an inspiriting experience.

Fashion drawing Pencil and watercolour. Circa 1970. Provenance: Artist’s Estate

Brian Stonehouse had two remarkable careers. Best known during the 1950s, 60s and 70s as one of New York’s most soughtafter fashion illustrators – he worked mostly for Vogue – before photography finally took over, he had also been a courageous SOE wireless operator during the war.

Parachuted into France in 1942 he spent from July to October transmitting until he was picked up by the French police.

Having spent ten months in solitary in Fresnes prison, where he was told he was to be executed as a spy, he was then sent to a series of concentration camps: Saarbrücken, Mauthausen, Natzweiler and eventually Dachau. The portraits he made there of and for German officers saved his life; when he was called as a witness at the War Trials his artist’s eye and memory helped identify those same men.

From Abbott and Holder, 30 Museum Street, London WC1A 1LH Telephone: 020 7637 3981 Fax: 020 7631 0575 Email: gallery@abbottandholder.co.uk Website: www.abbottandholder.co.uk

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

79

REVIEWS

GARDENING DAVID WHEELER

Abies koreana in the author’s garden

Coniferous confusion. That’s what I call it. I’m pretty good at identifying deciduous (broad-leafed) trees – when they’re in leaf! – but I score miserably low marks when it comes to naming the cone-bearers, despite their prominence at this time of the year.

That said, I value them increasingly.

By keeping an eye on their subtle differences and trying hard to recognise individual merits, I am beginning to furnish neglected parts of the garden with plants of supreme winter interest.

For a long while the most covetable of them was Abies koreana, a Korean fir, famous for its improbable violet-purple cones seen in nurserymen’s catalogues.

It’s a small-growing tree with none of the towering ambition of, say, the ubiquitous leylandii. Mine has grown eight feet tall in a dozen years and did, indeed, begin to set those fabled bright cones when still quite a youngster. They were – almost – as colourful as the tantalising sales blurb that trumpet the tree’s merits. Two smaller varieties, ‘Compact Dwarf’ and ‘Piccolo’, are even slower growing and ultimately undemanding of much space.

‘Silberlocke’ is in no hurry either, and has the advantage of upward-twisted needles that reveal ghostly white undersides.

For smaller gardens or for prominent places I’m fond of junipers. The species

80

THE OLDIE – February 2014

and their myriad varieties occupy twelve pages in my Hillier Manual of Trees and Shrubs, proving the breeders’ lust for ever more new kinds and the plants’ own abilities to mutate. My preference is for glaucous-hued junipers (a tendency to blueness is one of this species’ particular delights) and seen beside the full fiery glow of a maple’s red and orange autumn tints, it raises the gardener’s spirits to new levels. Among the Chinese junipers I’d single out ‘Blue Alps’ and, for its even smaller footprint, ‘Columnaris Glauca’, dating from 1905.

Junipers to avoid – apart from the crass variegated kinds (indeed the crass variegated and so-called golden kinds of all conifers) – are those that spread widely with alarming speed. They might look innocent enough in their pots at the garden centre but when set free (all too often too close to a path) several forms of Juniperus communis bring tears before bedtime or, rather, before the decade is out. So before adopting one, or the likes of those labelled ‘Prostrata’ or ‘Horizontalis’, make sure you have the space for it to expand and fully develop its natural contours without need of savage butchery – they might require ten or fifteen feet in each direction.

In a new scheme out in the arboretum I have a group (a quiver?) of nine sentinel-like Juniperus scopulorum ‘Blue Arrow’, expected to reach a height of twelve feet though not exceeding more than two in width.

Among my cherished ‘blues’ is slow-growing medium-sized Picea pungens ‘Hoopsii’, the Colorado blue spruce and the upright well-tempered Cupressus arizonica ‘Blue Ice’, which can be grown freeform or clipped into a dense pyramid. Richard Bitner, that great American authority on conifers, describes it as ‘frosty blue-gray [with] showy red-brown stems’. Ah, and its bunches of nutty rolled-up globose cones… It’s a cracker whichever way you choose to grow it and just one whiff of its scale-like foliage transports the mind to far-off wild places or, in my case, to childhood (even further away), for my father must have planted an aromatic cypress in our Cotswold garden during the 1950s.

There is much to be wary about with conifers – permanent shade-casting density, coarse and sometimes rapid growth – so please take advice before diving in. Adrian Bloom’s Gardening with Conifers (2001) is god-sent.

E X P AT

alyson hilbourne

Tokyo, Japan It is sumo season in Tokyo. As with many things in Japan, activities have a fixed time of year. Outdoor swimming pools close at the beginning of September regardless of the temperature. And for two weeks in January, May and September there is a sumo tournament at the Ryogoku Kokugikan stadium in Tokyo.

We made our first visit last year with a friend who took his Japanese wife and his mother-in-law. The stadium was large. Suspended over the central dohyo or ring was a roof like that of a Shinto shrine. Around the dohyo were ‘boxes’ – areas delineated by a small barrier where patrons sat on cushions on the floor. Luckily we had booked the cheaper balcony seats. On chairs. Ringside was reserved for judges and cameramen.

Good insurance is a must because more than one large wrestler went tumbling down from the dohyo onto the audience.

The tournament began early with the junior wrestlers – younger but not necessarily smaller. We only watched the final session, for wrestlers in the top division. The fighting was preceded by a ceremony, much of it linked to ancient

One for the mother-in-law?

Shinto traditions. In two groups called east and west, and wearing striking silk aprons, the wrestlers paraded round the ring, rather like a beauty pageant. When they retreated a small army of sweepers brushed the sandy surface of the dohyo, paying particular attention to the outer side of the straw circle that marked the ring – competitors lose if they step outside the circle.

The wrestlers re-entered the stadium a couple of bouts before their own and sat on cushions to await their fight. They were now wearing just their mawashi – the length of fabric worn like a giant nappy. Hanging from the front were silk fronds, which were pushed aside for the actual fight.

A chant resonated round the arena before each competing pair climbed onto the dohyo. They made a show of clapping and stamping their legs. I thought this was a warm-up, but apparently it was to scare evil spirits from the ring. Each wrestler went to his corner and was handed a ladle of water to drink. They took a handful of salt, which was thrown into the ring before they stepped back in. Some also scattered salt around themselves, believing it prevented injury.

The competitors faced each other on parallel white markers, crouched and tried to stare each other out. They broke apart several times accompanied by much body slapping and foot stomping.

They threw more salt before re-entering the ring. Eventually the referee indicated that the bout should commence and they crouched and charged at each other.

The matches were disappointingly short. One fellow sidestepped his opponent who fell flat on his face and was out in less than three seconds. Other bouts lasted only a little longer, with the loser either planting some body part on the ground (other than the flat of his feet) or falling out of the circle.

As the matches progressed the audience became more involved. Favourites who won were warmly applauded. The mixed crowd of families, students, couples and office groups were obviously enjoying themselves. A group of young girls sitting near us cheered and whistled loudly for particular wrestlers. Sumo groupies.

As we left I hoped our friend had earned a good many Brownie points with his mother-in-law – I couldn’t help thinking that my own mother-in-law would have preferred a large bunch of flowers. Maybe it wasn’t the season for flowers in Tokyo.

MEMORIAL

james hughes-onslow

Lord Campbell of Alloway (1917–2013)

HER Majesty’s former Chief Inspector of Prisons Lord Ramsbotham read a poem at the memorial service for Lord Campbell of Alloway in St Margaret’s Westminster. Entitled ‘Escapade’, it was taken from Colditz Cameo, Alan Campbell’s 1946 collection: ‘The wall runs low, the wire lies taut / The way with ample dangers fraught,’ Lord Ramsbotham began. ‘A pipe – a pack – a purple coat / A rope to reach the guarded moat, / Some friends to cheer me on my way / An early start to gain a day / And night would fall before they knew / “Das Lager” held just one too few.’

Dr Peter Elvy, former vicar at Chelsea Old Church, told how Campbell, captured at Dunkirk, had languished for five years in PoW camps at Tittmoning, Spangenberg and Colditz and had tried to escape from all of them. ‘“We were serving,” he said, “an indeterminate life sentence only to be commuted by escape or armed intervention.” And he wrote of a third possibility – “mass execution in the closing hours of the war.”

‘Alan’s human frailty had been tested from the outset,’ said Dr Elvy. ‘The march from Dunkirk was horrible, and not improved by the reception in Trier. He had many bad experiences as a guest of the Reich and about some of them he would not speak. His prison poetry reveals his pain.’ A graduate, a

barrister and an officer, he was ‘most of all a normal and horribly frustrated young man in solitary. He was not always an easy man. He could explode like a volcano. Sometimes he just wanted to be free and would let us know in no uncertain terms that he needed to escape.

‘At home he preferred a rolled-up great coat to a pillow. He told me once of his “recurrent dreams, the nightmares of failed escapes, long spells of solitary in a cold damp cell with a tiny bar grating.”

After ninety-six years, Alan is young again. The demons have died in him. No more crawling through airless tunnels.

No more nightmares of failed escape.’

Campbell, who had been called to the Bar in 1939, defended a number of his fellow prisoners in German courts martial, saving many of them from execution. Following liberation, he specialised in labour law, advising successive governments in the years of troubled industrial relations. Lord Strathclyde, former Leader of the House of Lords, said that Campbell’s efforts to reform labour law caught the eye of Margaret Thatcher, who made him a life peer in 1981: ‘Alan Campbell quite quickly proved his independence of mind and spirit,’ said Strathclyde. ‘Day after day he took on Labour’s stalwart academic lawyers, Lords McCarthy and Wedderburn, who turned every debate into a seminar on the principles of modern employment law. Alan had a temper and could occasionally fly into a rage if you tried to curb his sometimes lengthy interventions.

‘Alan was independent and tough as old boots. His attendance record over 32 years was extraordinary. Alan Campbell was a private man, a poet and a romantic.

He had an unmistakable voice and nearly illegible handwriting. He gave great inspiration to many when, at the age of 94 he remarried. Alan and Dorothea may have had only two years of marriage together but these were years that gave both of them a great deal of happiness.

I shall miss him and the House of Lords has lost a man of great integrity, independence of mind and courtesy.’

Lord Palmer read from Revelation: ‘I John saw a new heaven and a new earth,’ and George Ensor, Campbell’s grandson, read Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar’. Hymns included ‘I Vow to Thee, my Country’, ‘Jerusalem the Golden’ and ‘Thine be the Glory’. The choir sang Parry’s anthem ‘My Soul There is a Country Far Beyond the Stars’.

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

81

Photo courtesy of: Andrew Parsons/PA Wire/Press Association Images

REVIEWS

REVIEWS

GOLF

PHOTO: Mark J. Terrill/AP/Press Association Images

peter corrigan

Tiger Woods and I don’t have much in common apart from the fact that we both play golf and have a burning ambition in 2014. He desperately wants to win a major title – the last one he won was in 2008 – and I am desperate to break 100 in a medal, which I haven’t done for a dozen years.

His chances of achieving his target would probably be regarded as considerably better than mine. He is, after all, the current No 1 in the world rankings. If the rankings went down that far, I would be many millions below him, because as a 28 handicapper I occupy the lowest rung in the game. Indeed, there are many courses where I wouldn’t be welcome for fear of the damage I could do to the place.

But it is one of the many strengths of golf that it involves a wider and more diverse set of participants than any other game. There are, of course, bad players in every sport, but if I was hopeless at football, rugby or cricket no team would pick me and I’d have to give it up; my age of 78 might also count against me. Yet hopeless golfers – or hackers, as we are rudely known – are positively encouraged to keep on playing because the sport needs our financial input.

What helps to keep us interested is the handicap system which is far superior to that of any other sport and enables us to gain the odd victory against superior opposition. I could even, theoretically, play against Tiger. Indeed, if he gave me five shots a hole I’d happily play him for a quid.

Returning to our ambitions, I wouldn’t totally write off my breaking that 100 before Tiger gets another major. My swing is improving in the winter league, and I have enrolled my six-year-old grandson into our junior section, providing a very strong incentive to delaying my first defeat to him. Apart from the scale of it all, the main difference between me and Tiger is that all I have to conquer is my own

82

THE OLDIE – February 2014

deficiencies – he has to beat off the strongest challenge ever to the big titles.

In the past 150 years or so, every golfing generation has been dominated by a handful of players capable of wiping the floor with lesser challengers. Two large hands wouldn’t be big enough to contain the heartiest competitors among the present lot.

For any sports fan 2014 is particularly inviting, what with the World Cup in Brazil enriching an already crowded calendar. But no game promises more than golf, thanks to an unprecedented number of high-quality contenders for the increasing number of lucrative championships around the world.

Woods: desperate to win a major title

Even for non-golfers the prospect of seeing Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy battling for the top prizes is exciting, but both were overshadowed by Henrik Stenson, the Swede who won £10 million in two high-profile events towards the end of the year. Stenson was voted European Golfer of the Year by the Association of Golf Writers and has immense potential.

Then we have the four major winners from last year, Adam Scott of Australia, England’s Justin Rose, the veteran Phil Mickelson and the late developer Jason Dufner, all of whom represent a genuine threat whenever they turn up.

Added to those are the Ryder Cup darling Ian Poulter, who is always hovering, as are Luke Donald, Graeme McDowell, my favourite Lee Westwood and sundry others who can’t be ignored in this assessment of the worthies ready to pounce.

Five years ago, before scandal interrupted his world dominance, Tiger was a towering presence, but while he has been climbing back towards the top, the number of rivals who find him intimidating has been steadily decreasing. It may be tougher for him than it is going to be for me.

H O M E FR O N T ALICE PITMAN

ONE of the (few) benefits of being married to a TV hack like Mr Home Front is that he occasionally returns with some interesting insider gossip.

In the past few months there have been revelations about the ongoing police enquiry into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann (a waste of public money), the goings on at the Lawson/ Saatchi household (very sad) and the name of a former Tory cabinet minister under investigation for unspeakable acts in the past. It all adds to the spice of life, particularly for the dear Aged P, who is bored out of her mind in a rehabilitation hospital in Tolworth and relishes the sort of stuff that she can’t get hold of in the national press.

But when Mr HF announced recently that he had it on very good authority that Ed Miliband’s Desert Island Discs selection had been chosen by his advisers, both the elderly patient and I were more annoyed than intrigued. I know that we shouldn’t be surprised that almost everything about most politicians is a carefully fabricated facade, but some things should be sacred. And DID is one of those institutions. If you cannot trust someone to tell the truth about their choice of music, then why should you trust them on any other issue?

I’ve been listening to the DID archive on my iPod while walking the dog and have come to the conclusion that the reason why this simple, old-fashioned format has endured is because it appeals to our inherent nosiness. It is very satisfying sneering at, or applauding, the musical choices of others. One of the only pleasures of going to a dinner party these days is idly perusing the host’s CD and book collection. I can never remember a single topic of dinnertable conversation, but I can usually remember the music that accompanied it (non-stop Leonard Cohen at one cheery soirée). Also, Desert Island Discs nearly always manages to gently reveal the essence of a person (though I do

REVIEWS

wish they would stop featuring boring scientists). Artifice and pretension are exposed, or admiration confirmed.

Sometimes it can force us to re-evaluate our little prejudices and we are left cutting them a little slack (e.g. I ended up quite liking the appalling Russell Brand... I don’t suppose it’s his fault he was born with a monstrous ego).

Sadly this was not the case with Alex Salmond, a man lauded on all sides as a masterful tactician. Five out of his eight discs were predictably Scottish, which made him come across as a ‘little Scotlander’ rather than some great statesman. If I was a Scot I am not sure I would like my leader to possess such parochial and ghastly musical tastes (assuming they are genuine). And if the Laird of Brigadoon threw them in to cynically curry favour with the electorate then that is even worse. As the Proclaimers’ ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)’ resounded in my headphones, I said to the dog: ‘And I bet his book is the complete works of Robert Burns.’ It was.

Former mod Alan Johnson MP was a different kettle of fish. I believed every one of his choices (less obvious Beatles, Bowie etc). He also came across as honest and nice (which is possibly the reason why he has never aspired to be Prime Minister). Enoch Powell, who featured in 1989, was really weird, but at least he was authentically weird.

His musical tastes were terrifyingly predictable – tons of Wagner– but you believed they were his choices and that he didn’t care whether he was liked or loathed. I was interested that James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher both chose Bob Newhart’s ‘Introducing Tobacco to Civilization’. Another of her choices was Irene Dunne singing ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ (a suitable soundtrack to her departure from No. 10 twelve years later).

I cringe every time I think of fun kinda guy ‘Dave’ Cameron including Benny Hill’s ‘Ernie’. And Ed Miliband (purportedly) choosing Robbie Williams’s ‘Angels’ to show his sensitive side made me feel ill.

One of the things that has kept the Aged P going throughout her long hospital incarceration is thinking up what her desert island discs might be. The last time I visited, A Children’s Overture by Roger Quilter was on the list... oh, and Rachmaninov’s 2nd Symphony. Her luxury would be a constant supply of gin and her book, Who’s Who: ‘People telling lies about themselves,

Good news for those who’ve turned down the central heating and slipped into an extra set of long johns: the robust cooking of the French bourgeoisie is back in favour. The French continue to eat regionally and well, and culinary chauvinism is nowhere more firmly embedded than in the south. This was evident during shore-leave taken on last November’s cruise up the Rhône in the company of a merry gang of Oldie readers. On board were art and architecture expert Huon Mallalieu, and The Oldie’s wine columnist Bill Knott, a man with the nose of a truffle-hound for a menu-du-jour, expertise of which I was happy to take advantage. I can report that in Arles and Avignon, mother’s home cooking is alive and well.

For the real thing, look no further than Grub Street’s handsome reprint of Lulu’s Provençal Table (£16.99), in which Madame Lulu Peyraud of the Domaine Tempier vineyard shares her ancestral knowledge with the great Richard Olney (he of the Time-Life cooking series). Alice Waters of Chez Panisse – and you don’t get higher up the food-chain than that – provides a foreword with the recommendation from personal experience that Lulu’s cooking is ‘often earthy, always delicious, and always appropriate to the moment.’

The moment, it seems, delivers not only earthiness but longevity: members of the Still-on-the-Planet Club will be encouraged to hear that Madame Peyraud has just celebrated her 96th birthday.

• 2 lb Swiss chard (a large bundle) • 3 tablespoons olive oil • 2 tablespoons butter • 1 garlic head, cloves crushed and peeled • salt and freshly ground pepper • 2 teaspoons plain flour • scant ½ pint full cream milk • 2–3 tablespoons coarsely grated dry breadcrumbs Slip the fine membrane off the outer surface of the monkfish fillet (if it hasn’t been removed), place on a china plate, salt lightly, sprinkle with fennel seeds, cover with another plate and reserve.

Separate the green parts of the chard from the thick ribs and stalks. Reserve the greens. Trim the stalks and ribs, cut into large dice, rinse and cook in boiling salted water in a roomy pan for 10 minutes. Add the reserved greens and stir with a wooden spoon till the water returns to the boil. Allow a few seconds for the leaves to soften, then empty the pan into a colander and refresh beneath cold running water. Squeeze the mass of chard repeatedly in both hands to form a firm ball. Chop, slicing thin, then give the ball a quarter turn and slice thin again.

In a heavy sauté pan over mediumlow heat, warm 2 tablespoons of olive oil and most of the butter. Add the crushed garlic and, when the air is filled with the scent but before it begins to colour, add the chard, salt and pepper. Stir regularly with a wooden spoon for 10 minutes or until the chard has lost all superficial moisture. Sprinkle over the flour, stir well, and begin to add the milk, a little at a time, over some 20 minutes, stirring and waiting until the chard absorbs each addition before adding more.

Preheat the oven to 190C/375F/gas5.

Process the chard mix rapidly to form a coarse purée. Pour into a buttered gratin dish. Drain the fish, pat it dry and place it on top of the purée. Sprinkle the surface with the grated breadcrumbs, dribble with olive oil crisscross fashion, and bake for 30 minutes until the fish is firm and the breadcrumbs crisp and golden.

Gratin de lotte et blettes Lulu’s gratin of Swiss chard (blettes) stands alone without the fish but serves as a bed for any firm-fleshed fish fillets, though monkfish (lotte) is particularly suitable.

If you don’t use fish, finish the dish with a handful of diced croutons fried crisp in olive oil just before serving. Serves 4.

• 2 lb monkfish fillets or any firm fleshed fish (e.g. cod, halibut, salmon) • 1 teaspoon fennel seeds

‘...and here’s a coupon for 50p off your next fine’

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD

February 2014 – THE OLDIE

83

Genius crossword 305 by Antico Five-letter entries form, in clue order, two chains; in each of these, each successive word contains four letters of the previous word and one new letter. The first and last words of the first chain form another name for the 16A; the name of one of its leading exponents, born 100 years ago this February, is formed by the first and last words of the second chain. Each clue comprises a definition part and a hidden consecutive jumble of the answer’s letters including one extra letter; the extras spell definitions of the remaining words in the chains.

Across

4 Monster using rod excessively (4) 6 Detail personal request (4) 10 Stop if needing bite (3) 11 Plant eater got far weaker (7) 12 Fabulous bird also circling (3) 13 Favour basic English language (7) 14 Declined steady education (7) 18 Torpid leader soon lost hope (9) 22 Accept latter range of colours (7) 24 Postal system trial is ambitious (7) 25 Guys approach spot (3) 26 Determination while on service (7) 27 Stolid, learning poorly (3) 28 Fear advocate’s challenge (4) 29 Autocrat halts reform (4)

Down

1 Intransigent men did show fixed attitude (7) 2 Corrupt case, pulling punches (9) 3 Search in whole port (7) 5 Stupid error deceiver arranged again (9) 8 Forbid a race around idyllic place (7) 9 Most successful plaster (6) 16 Controls beginner has set spinning (9) 17 Zealots in riotous detachment (9) 18 Overthrown figurehead does protest (7) 19 Also-ran started behind (6) 20 Posture not mitigating agony (7) 21 Recall image of astronomer (7)

Entries to: ‘Crossword 305’ by post (The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG), email (editorial@theoldie.co.uk) or fax (020 7436 8804) by 21st February 2014. First prize is the latest edition of the Chambers Dictionary and a cheque for £25. Two runners-up will receive cheques for £15.

Name...................................................................................................................

Address............................................................................................................... .............................................................................................................................

Moron crossword 305 Across

1 Edward ______, pioneer of vaccination (6) 4 ‘____ la France’, patriotic expression (4) 7 Racket (3) 8 World traveller (12) 9 Beverage (3) 10 Delight (4) 11 Refinement (8) 13 Strong shoe (6) 15 US state (6) 17 Ideas person (8) 21 Cried (4) 22 Guided (3) 23 Information (12) 24 Shaft (3) 25 Undemanding (4) 26 Except if (6)

Down

1 Neck vein (7) 2 Loop with running knot (5) 3 Perform (7) 4 Stringed instrument (5) 5 Profound (7) 6 Choose (5) 7 Dreary (4) 12 Desire (3) 13 Wager (3) 14 Prison guards (7) 15 Eight-sided figure (7) 16 Subjugate (7) 18 Depend (5) 19 Pass along (5) 20 Indolently (4) 21 Flinch (5)

Moron 303 solution Across: 1 Spare, 4 Shoulder, 8 Livery [Special delivery], 13 Incidence, 14 All-powerful, 15 Reload, 16 Veneer, 17 Picasso, 19 Personification, 21 Sloth, 22 Star, 23 Dislodged, 25 Bosom, 27 Martini, 29 Extra, 31 Wheedle, 33 Argot, 35 Republics, 37 Miff, 39 Trier, 40 Broad-mindedness, 41 Anguish, 42 Hussar, 44 Arrest, 46 Invigilator, 47 Aristotle, 48 Yorker, 49 Academic, 50 Rhyme. Down: 1 Stirrups, 2 Accelerator, 3 Endeavour, 4 Sane, 5 Obese, 6 Leaves a lot to be desired, 7 Enlarging, 9 Inexcusable, 10 Effusions, 11 Yellowhammer, 12 Coupon, 18 Kindlier, 20 Issue, 24 Downside, 26 Impartiality, 28 Intermingle, 30 Alibi, 32 Differently, 34 Goingover, 36 Prophetic, 37 Moderator, 38 As it were, 40 Behold, 43 Alarm, 45 Zinc.

84

THE OLDIE – February 2014

Genius 303 – solution

The thematic quotation, from A Visit From St Nicholas (a work in VERSE, referring to THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS, by CLEMENT CLARKE MOORE), was ‘NOT A CREATURE WAS STIRRING, NOT EVEN A MOUSE’. The first five words formed a cryptic indication of SANTA (the VISITOR in the poem), WORE and CURATE (defined by SPORTED and CLERIC). UNEQUAL was defined by ‘not even’, and a BLACK EYE could be colloquially termed ‘a mouse’.

Prizewinners: First prize: Christina Casement, Petersfield; Runners-up: Chris Gimblett, Dorchester-onThames; Charles Curran, Ingleton

CHIRP CHIRP

The Oldie Competition

by Tessa Castro

IN COMPETITION NO 171, having noticed that Victoria Station was now on Twitter, I invited you to sketch a day in the life of this typical railway terminus in not more than six tweets.

I think the notion of tweeting frightened off most competitors. Possibly the Royal Mail also hid a stash of entries. In the event not many got through. John Whitworth wrote regular little stanzas, more haikus than tweets, and much nicer. His early day at Victoria began: ‘An empty train to Dollis Hill / Is trundling off. The air is still. / Two lovers kiss.’

David Shields was also pleasantly lyrical, concluding: ‘Any complaints? Please tweet them now, / We’ll add them to our casebook. / Compliments? Then be the first / To like us – please! – on facebook.’

Katie Mallett’s last tweet of the day (perhaps from Manchester Victoria, considering the mention of Chester) read: ‘Last train in from Chester has body on board. Gentleman dead some two hours.

Ambulance, police. Aaargh! We wanna go home.’ But where can you go when you’ve already reached the terminus?

Commiserations to these and any caught in transit, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the Victorious bonus prize of a Chamber’s Biographical Dictionary going to Chris O’Carroll for his only too convincing-looking tweets.

As of this morning, @NetworkRailVIC is happy to report that our Twitter followers outnumber our severe travel delays. #positivespin

SUD|OLD|KU Each row, column and box must contain the numbers 1 to 9.

Each number can only appear once in a row, column or box.

(Solution next month.)

Last month’s solution:

@concernedmusicfan Passengers who witness security personnel assaulting buskers are requested not to intervene. #showbizisbrutal If you are here to catch @GatwickExpress, we are contractually obligated to congratulate you on your choice. #heathrowsux @50shadesofrage Sorry @WHSmithcouk does not stock your pornography of choice. You still have to pay for vandalising the toilets. #submit @americantourist No, this is not the station where @harrypotter catches the train for @hogwarts. #readthebloodybooks Although we applaud your commitment to personal hygiene, we regret that showers are no longer available in the station. #putyourclotheson.

Chris O’Carroll No kip. Noise, vans, all those papers. Bloody flopouts! Platform 3 deep in Metro by 7. Coffee-slops, croissant crumbs. Wot! no cleaners?

Ouch! Scrubber scouring my face off. Obesity + stilettos = amateur acupuncture. That chewing gum rasper! Can’t wait for Xmas.

Signal failure, Clapham. Croydon cut off. At last! There IS a God! Pigeons his fault, though: filthy ploppers. And burgers. Cigarettes?

Croydon reconnected to civilised world. Delete earlier belief in God. Why, this is Hell nor am I out of it. Coming, going: repeat ad infinitum.

Only Latin-tweeting station in London? Eheu fugaces; abuntur anni. Also a shopping venue!

Too grand for :-) The old Queen didn’t do smileys.

Puke somewhere else, losers. Don’t you know what time it is? Some of us get up early.

Bet you’re from Croydon. Wait till tomorrow’s signal failure!

D A Prince

9h07. Passengers are advised that the train now standing at Platform 12 has not yet arrived.

10h23. Passengers are advised that the train expected on Platform 12 will be arriving on Platform 7.

10h24. Passengers are advised that Platform 7 is closed for refurbishment until September 2014.

13h46. Passengers are advised that the train announced for Platform 7 will be arriving on Platform 15.

15h51. Passengers are advised that due to snow on all lines into Victoria, the train expected on Platform 15 has been diverted to Waterloo and will depart at 18h37.

18h38. Passengers are advised that anyone who does not have access to Twitter has now missed the train, and should try to negotiate a good deal with a taxi-driver.

Brian Allgar London Victoria@NetworkRailVIC Trains, trains, trains. Smelly passengers. Drunks. I count them all out and I count them all back, up and down the bloody track.

StephenFry@narcissus001 In my young day we’d have said you’re a poet and you don’t know it. Then, if you’ll excuse my supple wit, everyone knew their station.

London Victoria@NetworkRailVIC Yes, well thanks for nothing. Here! Someone’s dropping litter. A crisp bag. They hire these security muppets and they all disappear.

StephenFry@narcissus001 ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ as Juvenal has it, though of course the idea harks back to what Socrates says in Plato’s Republic.

London Victoria@NetworkRailVIC Yeah, right. Tell you what. I used to have the Golden Arrow, classic boat train. And a news and cartoon theatre. It’s all franchises now.

London Victoria@NetworkRailVIC. The Twittersphere’s gone quiet. Am I glad or sorry?

Nah, just resigned. Same old same old, being the still centre of a turning world.

Basil Ransome-Davies COMPETITION NO 173 So it’s back to dear old verse, and time for this year’s bouts-rimés. A poem of 16 lines, please, using as rhymes these words in order: trader, seas, nadir, these, haggard, hurled, staggered, world, tarnished, away, garnished, they, eaten regard, sweeten, nard.

Entries to ‘Competition No 173’ by post (The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG), fax (020 7436 8804) or email (comps@theoldie.co.uk) by 7th February 2014.

86

THE OLDIE – February 2014

Bill Knott

on wine

Cork or cap? I know which camp I’m in

D

uring the past couple of weeks, I have come across five wines that were undrinkable: two of the bottles in a tasting for a restaurant’s wine list, a vintage Champagne at a rather swanky event, a claret (what the great Horace Rumpole might have called ‘Château Thames Embankment’) from my local off-licence, and a rather good bottle of Barbera that I took to a dinner party.

They were all, to a greater or lesser degree, corked: in other words, infected with a taint from the cork (technically 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, or TCA for short) that made these wines distinctly malodorous. It is a smell akin to an elderly dishcloth, or perhaps a damp cardboard box in a mouldy cellar.

I requested replacement samples from the restaurant’s wine merchant, asked for another glass of Champagne from a better bottle, and took the cooking claret back to the chap at the shop. I had bought the Barbera from a wine merchant in Alba, Piemonte, so returning it that evening was somewhat impractical.

I should say that this is an unusually high rate of duff wines, and I do – selflessly – try a lot of wines in the course of an average fortnight, but even so, it is infuriating.

It used to be worse: a decade ago it seemed to be affecting one in 20 bottles; now, it is more like one in 50. However, if you were, say, in the tailoring business and between two and five per cent of your suits fell apart at the seams, you would be out of business pretty quickly.

How, then, do wine producers get away with it? Mostly because many consumers, while they may be disappointed with the wine and resolve not to buy it again, simply don’t know that it is corked: even when the TCA smell is quite faint, the wine is invariably ‘short’; in other words, the flavour disappears unusually quickly from the palate.

Increasingly, the solution to the problem is to replace corks with screw

caps. Once the preserve of cheap wines, now even high-priced wines are bottled with screw caps, especially in the New World: New Zealand has the highest average export price of any wineproducing nation, and more than 90 per cent of Kiwi wines have aluminium screw caps.

Cork is fighting back, though. The forests in which cork trees grow, mainly in Portugal and Spain, are home to various species that would, so the cork producers tell us, become endangered should the world abandon corks in wine bottles, although ‘Drink bad wine and save the Iberian imperial eagle!’ never seemed much of a rallying cry to me.

More important is consumer resistance to screw caps, especially from emerging markets in the Far East, where the ritual of opening a bottle is as important as its contents; and, it must be said, the scrunching noise as one twists a screw cap is hardly as evocative as the triumphant ‘plop’ of pulling a cork.

And the debate still rages as to whether wines destined for long ageing are better with cork, which allows a tiny amount of oxygen into the wine, or in aluminium, which forms an airtight seal (although some now feature minute holes to mimic cork).

Since the vast majority of the world’s wines are meant to be drunk within a year or two, I am firmly in the screw-cap camp; however, in the war between cork and aluminium don’t expect closure anytime soon.

P E D A N T S ’ R E V O LT A TRIO OF long-standing irritations, still in use, still as annoying as ever: • waggling-fingered air ‘apostrophes’ • pursed ‘won’t tell’ lips sealed by zip mimes • the sing-song arched-eyebrowed rhetorical ‘Hello?’, insolently and aggressively used as an argument enforcer To practitioners of the above trio: they have had a good run, so please can you now give them a rest? Hello?

RON STREET COULD THE Trade Descriptions Act be used to stop banks describing the services they offer as ‘products’? Banks have never produced anything, and it is high time that they were preventing from trying to hoodwink us into thinking that they do.

PETER WATTS DURING A RECENT interview on Radio 4 something was referred to as having become ‘problematised’. Perhaps the saddest thing is that my iPad actually recognises the word.

RICHARD HOLLOWAY THE LONDON Underground now has an irritating announcement admonishing ‘customers’ (passengers) not to run or rush for the train because it provides a ‘regular’ service. While the service may well be regular, what passengers really want is a ‘frequent’ service.

MIKE RICKETTS FROM THE NewcastleGateshead (sic) tourist information ‘Pocket Guide’: ‘NewcastleGateshead is relatively unique in having two cathedrals.’

HAZEL TOWNESEND BBC TV licence advertisement: ‘Average people move eight times.’ There is no such thing as an average person: on average people move eight times.

ROY WALLIS

‘Dad left home when I was three.

He just never got very far’

Email infuriating jargon, tired clichés and other bugbears to editorial@theoldie.co.uk with ‘Pedant’ in the subject line, fax to 020 7436 8804 or post to Oldie Pedants, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG February 2014 – THE OLDIE

87

Dear Mavis…

Mavis Nicholson

Elsie’s beautiful dilemma

DEAR MAVIS, My three children all wish me to live with them. I am 84, and though increasingly infirm I still wish to live in my own home. They are happy about this and supportive, and visit as often as their circumstances allow and shop for me etc. But I notice a little flicker on the face of the others if I speak of one of them with whom I could live if it became necessary to have more help.

Actually I would probably be quite happy in a home of the best kind with other inmates with whom I could play bridge, scrabble and chess. But they have all sworn never to put me into a home.

ELSIE E.

THIS IS A beautiful dilemma, Elsie. All your children want to look after you in your last days? You must have scored ten out of ten as a mother. I don’t think many of us could claim that. And I can see why you might not want to go to any of them, though you love them all dearly.

You could sell up and become a gypsy, living with each of them for part of the year. Too messy, I suppose? Or toss for which of them you’ll go to – too shallow?

Settle for what you really want, which sounds like finding a comfy home and playing games to your heart’s content – and enjoy loads of visits: you to them and they to you. How to explain it? Clear the guilt that they feel about putting you into a home – there’s no shame in that if it is a good one and one you have chosen.

Convince them you’d feel fine this way – after all you are part of a generation of women used to a much more independent way of life. Be sure to convince them you are chuffed that they all wanted you, but it is far too difficult a choice for you to be able to make! Good luck, Elsie.

we needed medical advice we saw the same doctor and over the years he came to know us as individuals, not just as medical cases.

He knew the family dynamics – that my father was having problems at work, that my feckless brother was a constant source of anxiety to us and so on. When he retired his receptionist made a farewell party for his patients. Many were very emotional, not because they were losing a good doctor but because they were losing a good friend.

Nowadays most GPs work as a team in group practices. There may be several partners, a couple of part-time associates as well as nurses and others. Urgent cases are seen the same day by a team member but if one chooses to see a particular GP there is often a three-week wait. This means that the doctors know little about their patients’ backgrounds.

All they know is what the patient presents with and what appears on the computer screen.

JULIA

DEAR JULIA, I get a lot of comments like yours. Oldies living on their own who have to use two sticks for walking complain that they are being asked to attend the surgery as there are no home visits – or very few. It can be very difficult for them. Villagers where I live tell me that their former doctor would walk across a snowy field to check on elderly people whom he knew were living on their own and were snowbound, and he would do that without being asked. He’d know all about them and their families, and he’d stay and chat, knowing they might be on their own for hours at a stretch.

DEAR MAVIS, What has happened to the doctor/patient relationship? When I was a girl our family doctor was single-handed, a practice now frowned on by many as being inefficient and potentially dangerous. When

94

THE OLDIE – February 2014

The government seems to be aware that something must be done about this and wants every elderly patient to be assigned to a single doctor who would be in charge of their wellbeing at all times.

Makes sense to me.

On another health-related topic, deafness/ hearing loss has drawn more letters than any other subject. I’ll stop dwelling on it soon, but you’re still making helpful points...

DEAR MAVIS, I wish people would stop referring to ‘deaf aids’. Like most people with hearing loss I can hear, but without clarity.

Many people can see but without clarity and need the help of a gadget. This is never referred to as ‘seeing aid’ or, even worse, ‘blind aid’. I do wonder why there is such a difference. Seeing aids cannot be concealed and there is a thriving and lucrative industry making designer ‘seeing aids’. How I wish that I could celebrate my hearing needs with some dignified gadget. Perhaps therein lies the reluctance of so many to seek the help they desperately need with hearing problems.

We need a major culture shift!

ALEXANDER PETTIGREW

DEAR ALEXANDER, I agree. A lot of people used to hate having to wear specs but they have come out of the closet. Maybe designers should bring hearing aids out into the open, fashionable limelight.

DEAR MAVIS, With energy prices so high everywhere, your readers might be interested in an energy-saving tip. When I discovered that the radiators stayed hot for half an hour after the heating was turned off, I had a timer clock (with half-hour segments) attached to the boiler. Now the heating starts at 6am and runs for one to two hours. After that, it turns itself off every other half hour, saving approximately one third of my gas.

NATASHA, SPAIN Write to Dear Mavis,

‘George Smiley, I presume’

The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG or email: dearmavis@theoldie.co.uk